"To Generalize Is To Be An Idiot"

If "nothing people do is natural" makes up 60% of PoMo, this Second Commandment might be estimated at 30%, leaving 10% to be filed under "miscellaneous." As I've said, the quotation is from William Blake, who anticipated a great many PoMo attitudes, if not exactly the doctrines, or an uncouth vocabulary item like "detotalizing."

In expounding this one, I have to distance myself from the PoMos a bit, since I don't agree with it the way they seem to take it and will succumb to the temptation of suggesting a better way. Blake, I'm pretty sure, saw the joke side of issuing a generalization against making generalizations and didn't seriously invite us to accept both sides of a flat contradiction. The PoMo account of "totalizing" is more doubtful. The problem is, so to speak, that "subtotalizing" is fine, since PoMo is far from being a radically individualist doctrine, but "totalizing" altogether, adding up everything and not less than everything, is an abomination. PoMos are partial to partiality in a way that seems to me to challenge logic.

Perhaps the best way of taking Blake's maxim, then, is as morality rather than as logic -- although I admit this is my distinction not the PoMos'. What they detest about "totalizing" is clear enough and detestable indeed, namely the lying (or self-deceived) way the word "everybody" is often used or implied: "This is science, everybody should believe it," or "This is liberalism, it should be everybody's politics," and so on and so forth, when a minimum of analysis makes clear at once how many people don't count, or don't count fully, in this supposed "everybody." If we leave idiotic generalization at that, as a matter of OUGHT rather than IS, fine, but the PoMos undoubtedly go further and leap to the conclusion that any sentence with the word "everybody" in it can only be a lie. This step is far from obvious, and if they've proved it somewhere, I have never even heard a rumor about where the passage is. I don't think there is a proof, I think they've just mentally confounded their empirical objections to foundationalism with their moral objections to totalizing as if they were all the same thing. Both sets of objections are valid separately, but the way they are run together is not. If I'm wrong, it would be the case that totalizing involves making some assumption about the naturalness of human doings in one of the senses already discussed. Presumably it would be a matter of definition (4), "based on a built-in essence." Concretely, then, the claim would be that to say "everybody" is automatically to appeal to an antecedent misconception of "universal and essential human nature" or the like. No doubt the word "everybody" can be used like that, but does it have to be? Surely not. Surely there can be an "everybody" that makes no initial assumptions and is arrived at after the fact by counting and not by predefining.

What I am trying to defend, what I think PoMo deplorably weak on, is democracy. To put the extreme, but not logically impossible, case: if we all (every single human being) explicitly agree to X, who is it, exactly, that will tell us that our claim about "everybody agrees to X" has to be a lie or a self- deception?

I fear some of the more gung-ho PoMos might try, by an argument in High Gibberish of which the English translation would run "Not only is every sentence with the word 'everybody' in it a lie, so is every sentence containing the word 'agree.'" The despisers of PoMo are always trying to show that it is "nihilistic," that it annihilates itself by self-contradiction. This move almost always means the despisers don't understand what they're talking about, but in this case the line they would draw is in fact there: we simply can't seriously attend to people who ask us to agree that genuine agreement is always impossible.

To summarize: if you go along with Blake's maxim at all, you may still choose how far to go, either the shorter distance with me that objects morally to idiotic generalizations that make a lie out of the word "everybody," or all the way with the professional PoMos to the point of thinking factually rather than morally that "everybody" simply cannot ever be anything but a lie and therefore an idiocy.