Postmodernism Was Dead on Arrival – What’s Next?

Free will

Recent trends in college enrollment are telling a story. Conservative Christian and traditional Catholic colleges are experiencing growth in an industry that is otherwise withering. The woke education trajectory descends into a bottomless abyss.  Sooner or later the simple fact that their postmodernist mode of operation is simply logically indefensible was bound to have an impact.

The anticlimactic triumph of postmodernism in academic circles was clearly the triumph of emotion over substance and the subjective over the objective. However, the winds are changing. To understand those changing winds we need to discuss just what, exactly, postmodernism is. And that’s just it: it’s not exactly anything.

The modern era is that period of history stretching roughly from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. The following era, the one in which we are living, academia has dubbed the postmodern era. Postmodernism is a pseudo-philosophy that grew up in the latter half of the twentieth century, achieving some prominence in academic circles sometime in the 1970s.

Its primary expression is the intellectual murk of French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), although its roots certainly go back much further. For example, in his book St. Thomas Aquinas (1933), Chesterton points out,

The new psychologists, who are almost eagerly at war with reason, never tire of telling us that the very terms we use are colored by our subconsciousness, with something we meant to exclude from our consciousness.

The foundation of Derrida and ilk’s anti-philosophy is an attack on all existing knowledge by attacking the speaker’s or writer’s intended use of words. All human thought—indeed, logic—is built on words. One can easily see that if mathematicians were to question the validity of numbers, mathematics would cease to exist.

Postmodernists, by casting dispersion on the word usage of all those who predate their so-called postmodernist era, are able to extrapolate what they see as an enlightened view from all past history, art, and literature. They claim, quite truthfully, that everyone writes and speaks with some bias, and they paint all pre-postmodern eras as entirely patriarchal and hierarchical. Classical philosophy, the Church Fathers, the Scholastics, the Renaissance, the so-called Enlightenment, the Judeo-Christian tradition—all must be reevaluated by them using their metrics. Of course, we are expected to believe that they are entirely free of bias.

Derrida called his method deconstruction, though he refused to recognize it as a method because he saw methodology itself as flawed and ultimately corruptible by language. Similarly, he refused to define the term deconstruction claiming that it is necessarily complicated and difficult to explain since it actively criticizes the very language needed to explain it.

Sigh. Really? One hardly knows whether to laugh or cry.

Derrida’s goal was to somehow satisfy his own delusion that there was no such thing as objective reality; that is, nothing that could be known with certainty. What stood squarely in his path was the science of metaphysics, which is nothing more than the recognition of that which exists, a means of being able to communicate with someone else concerning sensible reality.

Below is the opening excerpt from an article titled “Postmodernism” from the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.

Uhm…what? You’re kidding, right? Note that the postmodernist’s end game is not to gain ground in the search for truth, but simply to “destabilize” all that has gone before—their end game is the destabilization of civilization. Postmodernism is anti-epistemological; that is, it is opposed to definitive truth—you know, the silly old notion that anything can actually be known—so let’s just stop defining terms so that, you know, we won’t waste time engaging in conversation.

The postmodernist supposition that its devotees are the cusp of a benign present-day enlightenment is ludicrously unprovable and excruciatingly narcissistic. It is not difficult to see that language, without definition—like numerals without a position on the number line—is a formless blob and a tool of deception.

Deconstructionism is the critical-historical method on LSD. Postmodernists insist that they are not rewriting history; they are correcting it. The ancients, the medievals, and the moderns could not see beyond their own perspectives and accepted the perspectives of those from the past at face value. But the postmodernist, freed from the weight of patriarchal, hierarchical, dogmatic structure, sees the world anew and sets the record straight.

The postmodernist’s methodology is essentially that of brainwashing. The first step in brainwashing anyone is to destroy his support structure—to cast doubt on all that is dear to him. When one’s support structure is undermined one becomes very vulnerable to suggestion, especially if convinced that said support structure has been essentially evil or, at least, fickle or opportunistic. That accomplished, aligning one’s self with some new enlightenment eases the conscience, removing culpability for the past sins of one’s ancestry.

In his book Specters of Marx (1994), Derrida promotes a Marxist style radicalization of critique against liberal democracy, which he sees as a potentially greater evil than totalitarian communism. It should come as no surprise that we have a generation that is eager to take our country down the weary path of socialism, a generation educated by corrupt, postmodernist Marxist devotees.

A Marxist style radicalization of critique is Newspeak for the anger-driven, mostly non-lethal terrorism we have seen in recent times. Everywhere we turn we see the radicalization of critique against anyone who doesn’t capitulate to the whims of the woke mob. Postmodernists will usually not engage in any sort of meaningful dialogue because they see logic, reason, and language itself as corrupt tools of a patriarchal hierarchy.

It’s no exaggeration to state that today’s universities are among the most hierarchical, dogmatic institutions on the planet. Academic freedom? You’re kidding, right? That veritable foundation of the university concept has been swallowed by the postmodern abyss.

So, what about those changing winds? Well, there’s the inevitable: every generation finds fault with the previous generation, a process set in motion by concupiscence—you know, that process that allowed Adam and Eve to imagine that God had flaws, a tendency that is now, obviously, genetic. It allows us to laser focus on our parent’s generation’s faults and leaves our own comfortably out of focus.

That tendency is now greatly enhanced by mandatory public education and an academic elite that takes the process well beyond laser focus, finding flaws that never actually existed in previous generations. That has been the power of postmodernism yoked with academia.

But what if the academic purveyors of this insanity overplayed their hand? What if they so dominated the lives of students as to rob the focus from parents, essentially becoming a sort of parental figure themselves? What then?

I think the answer is obvious. The flaws of some actual parents begin to dwarf, appearing to be of little consequence, and those parents take on the look of allies: advocates—a voice of reason railing against the stupidity of their own generation.

And though postmodernism seems to have been instrumental in pushing our culture in the direction of totalitarianism, Marxism is not exactly the new kid in town, Marx’s Manifesto having been written 174 years ago. Marxism is old enough to seem to have its own sort of warped patriarchy, and Marx’s verbiage doesn’t withstand postmodernist destabilization any better than the next pie-eyed philosophy wannabe. In fact, postmodernism is a house of cards that doesn’t withstand its own scrutiny—dead on arrival.

Though dead on arrival, it’s left a foul vacuum in its path. What’s next? Hopefully, a return to the hunt for the truth. Concupiscence prefers a vacuum, a university of uncertainty; the heart craves certainty.

The antidote for uncertainty is Jesus Christ, and representing his interest in the realm of philosophy and theology are a number of amazing saints. Just as St. Thomas Aquinas made a huge comeback in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to counteract modernism, his common-sense philosophy is easily the best antidote for postmodernism as well.

Modernism, from the Reformation until now, can be summed up simply as an ongoing attempt to separate faith and reason. Postmodernism was its last, all-in, desperate attempt at maintaining that division. Its complete success would be the death of both faith and reason. Its natural offspring, the philosophical separation of church and state is proving equally as devastating to both. It is a division that cannot exist if metaphysics is allowed to gain ground.

This division becomes a license. Reason gives license to faith—believe anything you want, no matter how utterly illogical and moronic. There is no standard, no sensible tradition that can question what you believe to be a personal revelation because sensibles belong to the physical world which is subject to the laws of reason. Don’t be sensible; Maybe you are the Easter bunny. If you believe that’s what God is telling you, just run with it. Or hop, I guess.

And, of course, faith granting license to reason gives us a grim reductionism—a truncated human reason that has no interest in questions that cannot be answered in the laboratory. Without a heart that hopes for a deeper knowledge of God through his creation and a mind that craves a deeper understanding of creation through faith, the important questions cease to be asked in either realm. Reason is reduced to graphs and data points, faith to pious fiction and moralizing, and the human person to a calculator with delusions of grandeur.

That is the state that much of our culture has promoted. I would like to say that we can’t sink any lower, but history shows us that we can go much, much lower. Philosophically, there is nowhere to go but up. Spiritually, there’s always plenty of room in both directions.

So, where is the light at the end of the faith versus reason tunnel?  It’s found in the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas.  His writings introduce us to the Christ of the Gospel, the Godman whose very existence defines and fulfills all of the requirements of both faith and reason. In the estimation of The Servant of God, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, St. Thomas Aquinas was “the greatest mind that ever lived.”

In his book, St. Thomas Aquinas, G.K. Chesterton wrote,

St. Thomas was one of the great liberators of the human intellect…who reconciled religion with reason, who expanded it towards experimental science, who insisted that the senses were the windows of the soul and that the reason had a divine right to feed upon facts, and that it was the business of Faith to digest the strong meat of the toughest and most practical of pagan philosophies.

The effect of the modernist faith/reason debacle on the mission of the Church has been to diminish that mission to something that lies outside of the debate: social work. It seems that faith is now often measured somewhat existentially; that is, by works that often have more to do with faith in man than faith in God. The disintegration of faith and reason ushered in the plague of our times: the disintegration of body and soul. Both divisions are born of the same satanic impetus. Let us pray for divine integration.

St. Thomas, pray for us!

 

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3 thoughts on “Postmodernism Was Dead on Arrival – What’s Next?”

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