When a culture abandons the pursuit of objective excellence, it doesn’t simply become more inclusive of wider ranges of thinkingโit becomes incapable of discernment.
Over the past three decades, we’ve witnessed a striking decline in literary quality (I don’t think this is terribly controversial–there are many indicators). I submit that this decline correlates directly with the ascendancy of postmodern thinking in academia and publishing. The culprit isn’t difficult to identify: when “good is merely a perspective” driven by an esoteric “System of Thought” becomes the operative philosophy, the distinction between mediocrity and mastery dissolves.
The Death of Standards
The postmodern project, at its core, represents a philosophical surrender. Rather than wrestle with the philosophical inconsistencies in Naturalism, then Realism, then Modernism, the postmodernists decided that solving these problems was impossible because truth itself was merely projected by dominant Systems of Thought. This was a pretentious error.
By denying that there can be such a thing as “true good” in art, postmodernism hasn’t liberated us at all from oppressive standardsโrather, it has left us defenseless against the tide of trivial and insupportable newly-born standards. When every text is merely another perspective, when every voice carries equal weight regardless of craft or vision, the result is predictable: the market floods with work that previous generations would have recognized immediately as unserious. Walk into any major bookstore today and survey the literary fiction section. You’ll find novels praised to the heavens by prestigious review outlets that lack basic narrative coherence, that substitute cleverness for wisdom, that mistake the transgressive for the profound. This isn’t an accident of taste. It’s the logical outcome of a system that has lost the vocabularyโand the courageโto say that some work is simply better than other work.
Academia’s Capitulation
The academy, which once served as a guardian of literary standards, has become their primary subverter. English departments that once trained students to recognize excellence now teach them to deconstruct it. Now a literary PhD dissertation can be generated by an AI, and it is happening all over.
Close readingโthat patient attention to how language achieves its effectsโhas given way to reading for power dynamics, for representations of identity, for the political implications of competing Systems of Thought. These approaches aren’t completely without value, but when they become the dominant approaches, literature ceases to be evaluated as literature. At that point, it becomes far easier to deconstruct the physical words on a page into representations that reflect whatever system the professional academic rewards. I’ve been occasionally surprised on the literary side of X to find academics who have creatively deconstructed religious works into polemics about post-industrial society and other fashionable concerns. The result? Entire generations of writers emerge from MFA programs unable to distinguish between craft and ideology, between a sentence that sings and one that merely signals. They’ve been taught that traditional notions of beauty, structure, and moral seriousness are suspectโtools of cultural hegemony rather than hard-won insights into what makes language live on the page.
Publishing’s Moral Vacancy
The publishing industry, always responsive to cultural currents, has enthusiastically embraced the postmodern turn. Editors who might once have rejected a manuscript for technical deficiencies now celebrate those same deficiencies as formally innovative. Marketing departments that once sought to identify lasting work now scramble to ride waves of social media enthusiasm, no matter how shallow. Consider how contemporary publishing determines what’s worthy of publication. Increasingly, the question isn’t “Is this excellent?” but “Does this fill a slot in our diversity portfolio?” or “Will this generate the right kind of attention on Twitter?” These aren’t questions about literary merit. They’re questions about market positioning and cultural opticsโand while both have their place in business decisions, when they crowd out questions of quality entirely, literature suffers. When there is no gate on the process for quality and excellenceโeven in the absence of political biasโthe bottom line becomes the only motivator.
The Evidence Is in the Reading
The proof of this decline doesn’t require theoretical argumentationโit requires only that we read. Pick up a celebrated novel from 2020 and set it beside one from 1950. The difference in linguistic precision, in structural sophistication, in moral and intellectual seriousness is often startling. This isn’t nostalgia speaking. It’s the recognition that when a culture ceases to believe in excellence, it ceases to produce it. The postmodern response to this observation is predictable: “You’re merely privileging one aesthetic over another. Who are you to say Hemingway is better than [insert trendy contemporary author]?” But this response itself reveals the problem. It treats evaluation as an arbitrary exercise in power rather than a learned skill requiring attention, knowledge, and intellectual humility. It assumes that because perfect objectivity is impossible, all judgments are equally subjectiveโa logical leap that would be laughable in any other field.
Recently, I was discussing books with an adult reading enthusiast who had discovered a new passion for H. Rider Haggard. His books are exciting “lost world” adventures written during the late 1800s, and the writing was considered accessible to young children of that era. My friend was surprised that young boys were drawn to these books in the past, because even the average adult reader would find the writing challenging today. There are scores of examples like this of what we have lost by losing our way regarding excellence in literature.
What We’ve Lost
When we abandon the pursuit of objective literary standards, we lose more than just the ability to distinguish good books from bad ones. We lose the cultural infrastructure that allowed great writers to develop. George Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoevskyโthese writers emerged in cultures that, whatever their other failings, took literature seriously as a vehicle for truth. They wrote for audiences that expected not just to be entertained or validated, but to be challenged, elevated, transformed. Today’s literary culture, by contrast, often seems content with books that function as mere mirrorsโreflecting readers’ existing beliefs back to them, confirming what they already think about the world. This isn’t literature’s highest calling. It’s literature’s unflinching surrender.
The Way Forward
The path forward requires recovering what postmodernism has taught us to abandon: the courage to discriminate between truth and falsehood, the willingness to say that some work achieves what other work only attempts. This doesn’t mean returning to a narrow canon or dismissing new voices, but rather means insisting that new voices, like old ones, be held to standards of excellence rather than given passes based on novelty or identity. Editors should be willing to reject manuscripts that fail to meet high literary standards, regardless of their political or cultural appeal. Critics need to be willing to write honest reviews rather than promotional copy. It means readers willing to demand more than what’s merely current or trendy. Most importantly, it means recovering the belief that drove the greatest writers of the past: that literature matters precisely because it can access truth, beauty, and moral wisdomโnot perfectly, not infallibly, but genuinely.
When we believe there’s a “true good” worth pursuing in art, we create the conditions for excellence. When we don’t, we get what we have now: a literary landscape cluttered with forgettable cash generators, while genuine talent goes unrecognized because we’ve lost the language to recognize it. The decline of contemporary literature isn’t a mystery. It’s the inevitable result of ideas taken to their logical conclusion. Postmodernism promised liberation from the struggle to define truth and beauty; it delivered mediocrity. The question is whether we have the cultural courage to admit it.
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