Asked to define sin, Barack Obama replied that sin is "being out of alignment with my values." Statements such as this have caused many people to wonder whether Obama has a God complex or is hopelessly arrogant. For the record, sin isn't being out of alignment with your own values (if it were, Hannibal Lecter wouldn't be a sinner because his values hold that it's OK to eat people) nor is it being out of alignment with Obama's — unless he really is our Savior.There is, however, a third possibility. Obama is a postmodernist.
An explosive fad in the 1980s, postmodernism was and is an enormous intellectual hustle in which left-wing intellectuals take crowbars and pick axes to anything having to do with the civilizational Mount Rushmore of Dead White European Males."PoMos" hold that there is no such thing as capital-T "Truth." There are only lower-case "truths." Our traditional understandings of right and wrong, true and false, are really just ways for those Pernicious Pale Patriarchs to keep the Coalition of the Oppressed in their place. In the PoMo's telling, reality is "socially constructed." And so the PoMos seek to tear down everything that "privileges" the powerful over the powerless and to replace it with new truths more to their liking.
Hence the deep dishonesty of postmodernism.
-- Jonah Goldberg, playing the hand they dealt him, over at USA Today.
Your post "Getting Serious about our political maturity" is a fairly good example of postmodernism, actually - because if you did believe in absolutes (for example "Adultery is wrong, monogamy is good") then of course Gingrich, Clinton and McCain would be on one side and Obama on another.
ReplyDeleteBut as a good postmodernist, your flexible standards are based, not on critical thinking and logic, but on your own feelings... whatever you feel like is the "truth" (at least until the political winds shift again).
In fact, the Right's full-throated embrace of postmodernism (or least its operative principles) has been one of the most remarkable , deep-seated and so far widely under-reported developments of the last 10 years.
To make it simple for you: if there is no truth, then whoever shouts the loudest and is able to summon up the strongest emotional punch, wins - logic and consistency be damned.
THAT'S postmodernism - and this blog is a great example of it.
If you think being married excuses Obama's attachment to communism then you're screwier than I thought. And your insistence on grouping McCain in with Gingrich and Clinton, when his own ex-wife says you shouldn't, just proves you don't care about anything approaching truth but are insisting on having it your way no matter what. And, if that's so, then why should anyone listen to you?
ReplyDeleteYou're not a fair broker.
BTW:
ReplyDeleteI was asked to look into the McCain issue. I did - looking for evidence to slam him with - and it wasn't there.
What's your problem?
this isn't going to happen very often, given my distrust for the Right, but I am with you 100% regarding postmodernism, Crack Emcee.
ReplyDeleteI studied it at Uni and I thought it sucked. Genuine poets (like me, for instance) are passed over for worthless hacks who can put some theory behind the shit they produce in order to con the critics and academics into thinking that they're where it's at. It's very frustrating and I deplore postmodernism as a result.
It's not just me either. I was at the Royal Show and found myself bemused at two paintings. The commendation was for a finely detailed work that showed years of training and skill. The winning blue ribbon entry was something a dog could have vomited onto the canvas. That's PM for you.
Wow: Berko and I agree on something.
ReplyDeleteWill wonders never cease.