To whatever degree he may have desacralized the world, the man who has made his choice in favor of a profane life never succeeds in completely doing away with religious behavior.
~ Mircea Eliade
Even as I type, postmodernism crumbles under its own unhealthy weight.
Last year, free speech proponent Jordan Peterson said in an interview that communist principles had been spread in the western world under the umbrella ideology of postmodernism back in the 70s. Through its Marxist approach, the movement held the notion that truth and knowledge were entirely subjective social constructs and began to change societal values and beliefs so as to fit this premise. How did all the obscure social tinkering surface? In a wave of Identity Politics, Peterson claims.
Whether Dr. Peterson's argument is valid or not, the interview does get you thinking; both about the current dominant ideology of postmodernism itself and its resultant identity politics; indeed the very concept of identity as it occurs today.
Postmodernism is not easy to define, and perhaps that's where most of the trouble starts. It is distrustful of the theory that it is in itself, and espouses subjectivity to a point that any one definition attributed to it could easily be substituted for another. The broad, and most agreed upon definition, however, is that it has its roots somewhere in the later stages of the 20th century, and is characterised by skepticism, subjectivism, a distrust of reason and a sensitivity to ideology in political and economic powers.
Leaving aside Peterson's take on the matter, postmodernism came about as a natural evolution of modernism, the latter of which was primarily driven by an existential disillusionment with Victorian ideals of morality and social conventions-- and which, if one considers Peterson's argument, created a detour from the erstwhile political trust in Monarchy as a form of government after the first world war and left a window of opportunity for Marxist thought to take root. In a way, the contemporary postmodernist ideology only took this approach further with its radical discarding of any social constructs, theories and objectivity to the point of the present day rejection of reason.
One social construct that postmodernism abhors comes in the form of religion. To be more specific, organised religion and objective morality, both over which a debate has been raging for years; science finds itself in a conundrum similar to that of the chicken-egg kind. We simply do not know whether organised religion led to objective morality or whether it were the other way round.
In light of the above, one would imagine that postmodernism would have, ironically, been a philosophy characterised by rational thought. This was what most of us would have expected. The reality was just the opposite.
In Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, the author describes how modern society is based solely on the profane and leaves no room for religion or spirituality, or what we may more broadly call 'sacred'. One could say that Eliade was right in this regard, and that postmodernism discarded what was held sacred about life in both a religious and a widely spiritual sense.
Or did it?
We can now drag Peterson's identity politics into the argument. A prominent fallout of postmodernist ideology is the social justice movement, which is driven by a staunch ethical motivation of equality and compassion for identities that they believe are 'oppressed'. Which is all well and good until you hold those ethics far too sacred and rigid as social justice warriors do and silence any opposition to your perspective. The irony is that the sensitivity toward this SJW ethical framework is remarkably similar to that toward religious ideals of the past. Today's society simply substituted the experience we would call God with another unassuming and strange sacred image. It reaffirmed the existence of 'gap' in human psyche that the god model previously fit.
In the past, human nature was characterised by a need for the sacred. This entity would not necessarily be the conventional image of a male god-head or the rarer sacred feminine, but could be attributed to a higher, omnipresent power that was inherent in every object. From a spatial interpretation, the sacred space has now become decisively abstract. It is now mental rather than physical. However, it is missing the the essential element of evolution and change. Its rigidity mirrors that of the most despicable part of old religion: the precept of self preservation.
Today, in this age, we have come too far to turn back to a conventional god-- it's a little like not being able to unsee a random assemblage of dots that form an image. Even the new age movement has been limping to give way to the radical atheism's deification of scientific fact.
We might have put aside childish and wishful notions of a traditional god-like entity and discarded the idea of a 'divine purpose' in life, but that hasn't stopped us from filling in a psychological gap and meeting our need for Purpose elsewhere.
We have only substituted the fairy tales with sanctified Identity, a tendency to prioritise emotions over facts, and a code of Marxist ethics.
Whether Dr. Peterson's argument is valid or not, the interview does get you thinking; both about the current dominant ideology of postmodernism itself and its resultant identity politics; indeed the very concept of identity as it occurs today.
Postmodernism is not easy to define, and perhaps that's where most of the trouble starts. It is distrustful of the theory that it is in itself, and espouses subjectivity to a point that any one definition attributed to it could easily be substituted for another. The broad, and most agreed upon definition, however, is that it has its roots somewhere in the later stages of the 20th century, and is characterised by skepticism, subjectivism, a distrust of reason and a sensitivity to ideology in political and economic powers.
Leaving aside Peterson's take on the matter, postmodernism came about as a natural evolution of modernism, the latter of which was primarily driven by an existential disillusionment with Victorian ideals of morality and social conventions-- and which, if one considers Peterson's argument, created a detour from the erstwhile political trust in Monarchy as a form of government after the first world war and left a window of opportunity for Marxist thought to take root. In a way, the contemporary postmodernist ideology only took this approach further with its radical discarding of any social constructs, theories and objectivity to the point of the present day rejection of reason.
One social construct that postmodernism abhors comes in the form of religion. To be more specific, organised religion and objective morality, both over which a debate has been raging for years; science finds itself in a conundrum similar to that of the chicken-egg kind. We simply do not know whether organised religion led to objective morality or whether it were the other way round.
In light of the above, one would imagine that postmodernism would have, ironically, been a philosophy characterised by rational thought. This was what most of us would have expected. The reality was just the opposite.
In Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, the author describes how modern society is based solely on the profane and leaves no room for religion or spirituality, or what we may more broadly call 'sacred'. One could say that Eliade was right in this regard, and that postmodernism discarded what was held sacred about life in both a religious and a widely spiritual sense.
Or did it?
We can now drag Peterson's identity politics into the argument. A prominent fallout of postmodernist ideology is the social justice movement, which is driven by a staunch ethical motivation of equality and compassion for identities that they believe are 'oppressed'. Which is all well and good until you hold those ethics far too sacred and rigid as social justice warriors do and silence any opposition to your perspective. The irony is that the sensitivity toward this SJW ethical framework is remarkably similar to that toward religious ideals of the past. Today's society simply substituted the experience we would call God with another unassuming and strange sacred image. It reaffirmed the existence of 'gap' in human psyche that the god model previously fit.
In the past, human nature was characterised by a need for the sacred. This entity would not necessarily be the conventional image of a male god-head or the rarer sacred feminine, but could be attributed to a higher, omnipresent power that was inherent in every object. From a spatial interpretation, the sacred space has now become decisively abstract. It is now mental rather than physical. However, it is missing the the essential element of evolution and change. Its rigidity mirrors that of the most despicable part of old religion: the precept of self preservation.
Today, in this age, we have come too far to turn back to a conventional god-- it's a little like not being able to unsee a random assemblage of dots that form an image. Even the new age movement has been limping to give way to the radical atheism's deification of scientific fact.
We might have put aside childish and wishful notions of a traditional god-like entity and discarded the idea of a 'divine purpose' in life, but that hasn't stopped us from filling in a psychological gap and meeting our need for Purpose elsewhere.
We have only substituted the fairy tales with sanctified Identity, a tendency to prioritise emotions over facts, and a code of Marxist ethics.
Loved this :) Your content is so well researched, I felt like I was reading one of T.S Eliot' papers.
ReplyDeleteThank you!
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