Meaning or Just the Sense of It? Finding Significance in a Postmodern Word
A rambling essay
It’s a constant refrainer these days. Well, it’s really important to have a sense of meaning. Critics will hedge their criticisms with the concession that what they oppose offers this “sense.” Your politics, religion, hobby, interest, etc. may be baseless, stupid, and/or harmful, but at least bestows you with The Holy Sense, the pinnacle of all feeling.
Consider the following statements:
“The artwork gives me a sense of meaning.”
“The artwork is meaningful.”
These statements are profoundly different because they locate meaning in entirely different things. #1 indicates that my experience of the artwork is what has meaning while #2 conveys that the artwork itself has meaning.
This distinction makes a big difference. If #2 is true, then you can experience the artwork wrong. In other words, if the artwork itself has meaning and you fail to experience it as meaningful, that’s on you and not the artwork. If #1 is true, there is no such implication. If meaning is but a feeling we feel while experiencing a thing, and not a property of that thing, then my experience of the artwork as meaningful has no bearing on the rightness or wrongness of your experience of it.
You may feel an instinctive negative reaction towards the objectivist connotations of #2. Who’s to say what is and is not truly meaningful? Who are you to tell me I’m experiencing something wrong? Isn’t everyone’s experience equally valid?
This response derives from our society’s postmodern condition. A society is postmodern when it has (1) real cultural diversity, meaning it houses cultures that fundamentally disagree about what is worth living for and how to live for it, and (2) no socially agreed upon method for determining which culture is right about what.
Living in a postmodern society is challenging because of how many completely different yet ostensibly equally valid answers there are to the same questions. Postmodern societies create postmodern subjects, people who internalize irreconcilable fragments of different cultures. Since internalized culture guides behavior, the postmodern self is one replete with uncertainty and hypocrisy. One cannot act out heterogenous cultures without betraying himself. The postmodern self is marked, therefore, by suffocating inconsistency.
Generally speaking, democratic societies grapple with postmodernity by striving to develop culturally pluralist legal and political systems. Rather than hierarchize the inhabitant cultures and risk politically legitimizing cultural prejudices, they try to fashion themselves into pluralist societies, ones in which citizens who live for fundamentally different things can coexist peacefully. (Culturally homogenous societies have no reason to strive for pluralism because they aren’t experiencing the violent consequences of cross-cultural disagreement.)
Political systems (i.e., formal and informal codes of conduct enforced by the state) and mass culture (i.e., socially dominant ideology) race each other. When one moves ahead, it challenges the other to keep up. Culturally pluralist political systems have cultural correlates in culturally pluralist and culturally inclusivist ideologies. Although these terms are frequently used interchangeably, it’s useful to draw a conceptual difference between a commitment to “cultural pluralism” and one to “cultural inclusivity.” The cultural pluralist thinks a specific culture is right (or best), but supports peaceful multicultural coexistence out of a liberal belief in universal human dignity. The cultural inclusivist holds that all cultures are equally right and supports peaceful multicultural coexistence for that reason.
Whether or not you found Statement #2 above (“The artwork is meaningful.”) objectionable likely depends on whether you lean towards cultural pluralism or cultural inclusivism. While they may refrain from articulating this out of a sense of politeness, those who lean towards cultural pluralism think you can experience something wrong. Traditionally religious people – Christians, Muslims, Hindus, etc. – tend to lean in the culturally pluralist direction because they believe their culture is metaphysically (i.e., super-naturally or super-socially) justified. Untraditionally religious people – identitarians or “the woke” – lean towards cultural inclusivism because they believe (1) that it is impossible to justify that one culture is better than another and/or (2) that hierarchizing cultures results in more suffering than flourishing over time. (For contrast, die hard socialists, fascists, theocrats, and racial supremacists uphold the tenets of cultural supremacism because of their utilitarian belief that their preferred political system maximizes their culture’s highest good – economic equality, nationalism, allegiance to The Holy, and racial essence, respectively.)
I intentionally employ the language of “leaning” rather than conceptualizing these cultural (ideological) biases as identities (e.g., “You’re either a pluralist or an inclusivist”) because of my sense that the vast majority of us cosmopolitan westerners hold both pluralist and inclusivist beliefs. We are, after all, fragmented postmodern subjects.
Those who lean towards pluralism usually experience a pluralism-inclusivism tension when they strongly disagree with a cultural other but want to remain “polite” (in quotes because cultural beliefs determine what we find to be polite). It is in these moments that they ask themselves, Should I even expect this culturally different person to ever agree with me? When those who lean towards pluralism experience this tension too often or severely, they start to give up trying to reason with cultural others and become increasingly susceptible to cultural supremacism. You see this in the politics of the populist right, especially in Hungary right now, and in the Twitter feeds of rabid anti-wokeness crusaders like James Lindsay, Christopher Rufo, and Candace Owens.
Those who lean in the inclusivist direction typically experience the pluralism-inclusivism tension when they confront a cultural belief they regard as “obviously wrong/harmful” (in quotes because cultural beliefs determine what we find to be wrong/harmful). In the midst of such confrontations they ask themselves, How can I modify or reframe this problematic cultural belief to be or appear less wrong/harmful without disrespecting its origin culture too much? As with the inverse group, when those who lean towards inclusivism experience this tension too often or severely, they veer towards cultural supremacism.
This variation of cultural supremacism looks quite different than the one common to the former group, however. Rather than highlighting a single culture as right (or best), it criticizes multiple cultures as wrong (or worse). What is explicit in the former is implicit in the latter. This type of cultural supremacism is less obvious and therefore more pernicious because the culture from which the applied standards of wrongness/harmfulness are derived goes unstated. Which culture leads someone to argue the Spanish and French languages ought to be reconstituted because their linguistic systems are deeply gendered? Which culture leads someone to insist that white passing people consider the ways in which they benefit from and perpetuate social systems of white supremacy? The mysterious culture doesn’t really have a name unless you count the opaque and semantically overloaded “wokeness.” As the philosopher Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, this culture’s ambiguity grants it and its (overwhelmingly socioculturally and/or economically influential) purveyors a surplus power: the power of existing as nothing. You can’t criticize what isn’t there (i.e., what isn’t socially acknowledged, named, or categorized). It is because the operant culture goes unspecified that those caught in the authoritarian allure of this form of supremacism are typically much less aware than the first group that they’re drifting towards cultural tyranny.
Now, let’s review the two statements again:
“The artwork gives me a sense of meaning.”
“The artwork is meaningful.”
What does your preference say about you? About your cultural biases? About how you’ll likely be tempted towards authoritarianism?
The postmodern crisis of meaning isn’t confined to the individual. It’s simultaneously a personal, sociocultural, and political quandary with global implications. Best of luck navigating it.