Posted on 11/07/2015 12:54:57 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
".......It is here where the modern Left made its transition away from communism into a postmodern existentialism. Dr. Hicks strongly argues that postmodernism is rooted in the Counter Enlightenment movement featuring German superstars such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. According to Hicks, postmodernism favors subjectivity over objectivity, the inadequacy of language to communicate over reason and truth, various collective multicultural groupings over individual identity and autonomy, willpower over realistic experience rooted in rational analysis, communalism and solidarity over individualism in values, markets and politics, and finally, suspicion, if not hostility, toward science and technology.
As such, the postmodern critique of capitalism has replaced the original Marxian critique of capitalism. The universalism of Marxian socialism has been exchanged with identity politics mixed in with an inverse racism that emphasizes white guilt in particular over its colonial and capitalist sins. International communism thus was converted into a multicultural form of modern fascism that accentuates cultural dissimilarities. Such sentiments also stand very opposed to the classical American melting pot based on the universal values of the Judeo-Christian tradition......."
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Good article.
Then why is everyone still expected to believe in evolution?
In one of my grad courses we learned about Manichaeanism, and the way I understood it, that wasn't light that spattered down but something else, and it went into green vegetables (mostly cucumbers).
Maybe I misunderstood.
Here is where we disagree. While it might seem useful to understand evil in order to bring people to light (of which I have certainly done my share), it is better to understand the light, and let it so shine before men. So instead of researching the failures of their philosophy, I research the misunderstood aspects of Torah, and teach from its manifestations in both politics and science. Manifest evidence works best.
I respectfully differ from the author's philosophical jump straight to Heidegger. What actually led to the bizarre trek toward Postmodernism was a major philosophical change promulgated by the Frankfurt School (circa 1923) in which class signifiers were no longer strictly economic, but could include such things as race, sex, ethnicity, etc, etc. The principal descriptor there is in terms of power relationships, clarified quite a bit later (circa 1950s) by the post-structuralist Michael Foucault (who, incidentally, denied that he was a postmodernist). It was a change anticipated by Marx himself, who furiously condemned it because he could see where it would lead. For Marx the only significant class signifier was economic. All else was false class consciousness.
Where it led was straight back to radical individualism, in which a single individual's membership in multiple classes thwarted his or her ability to advance class interests because they inevitably ended up (as they have) conflicting. That is, again in Marxian terms, a fatal internal contradiction. If one's individual identity subsumes membership in such classes as black, male, bourgeois, and Yankee fans, then the advancement of one's political interest finds itself torn between the various class interests. In fact, this is a fair working description of the real world, and the reason that the true repository of political rights resides within the individual, not in the collective. In short, as soon as class signifier becomes anything but economic, the whole collective edifice comes crashing down, as it has.
This has real-world consequences in the transformation of power relationships in the post-Communist world from Party straight to the weird Mafia seen in Russia and the heavily crony capitalism in China. Marx was wrong: the State did not wither away, it merely morphed to an openly criminal organization from a covert one. Communism never was anything more than Strong Men and their little fiefdoms. That is the New Class that Djilas mocked.
Good points.
The fact that the Democratic Party uses grievance group pandering to attract members is understood; once inside, the hardcore are like the Borg - interconnected and united - who understand their role to influence and control. They’ve become influential in media, politics and education in order to replenish and advance their agenda.
Membership seems to dwindle or remain flat, or it hibernates until triggered, while their power and influence has expanded - which appears to have contributed to the class divide and their need to blame it on free market capitalism and not on their interference and influence to co-op it.
In certain ages the Lord called forth His prophets. In other times of great darkness He raised up His heresy hunters such as Irenaeus and Augustine since as jewelers and great artists know, Light shines brightest against the dark.
.... Or, as Stalin put it, who gets to do the choosing.
My guess is, post-rational, post-modernist, post-American catamitic supermen like ..... <fanfare> Guess Who? Tan catamites and baggy old harridans.
Do I have to draw you a picture, or are you blind yet?
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