"Post modernism" is thrown around a lot these days. If I talk to a conservative about modern media in any capacity I will, eventually, hear "post-modern" thrown around like it's the anti-Christ. And it's not hard to see why: progressives embrace the concept like it's nobody else's business. "That's just your opinion, man, there is no objective truth!" is... only a mild exaggeration of the progressive position. So yes, conservatives will fight it. Conservatives, being progressives driving the speed limit, aren't willing to say the quiet parts out loud.
I'm not a conservative.
I'm not a progressive.
I'm a Christian.
So no, I will not fight. Neither will I lie down and die. All the things under heaven and earth are mine, by right of being a child of God. All. Of. Them.
And post-modernism has another name: reality, the pre-modern worldview. Post-modernism is pre-modern.
Alright, so let's unpack that a bit. We have to start with definitions. By post-modernism I specially mean the idea that bias is in everything, that it is all a point of view, and that something completely objective is impossible to discern. Most of the best post-modern works value the raw and direct experience of the main character over anything else, including dogmas, scientific laws, all bows before experience. And progressives love to throw that at conservatives. The idea of a person being the first arbitrator of what is true for them appeals to them. At least in theory. All voices matter! they shout with wild aplomb.
But the trick isn't that progressives own up to this ideology, it's that they're cowards and don't own up to it nearly enough.
You see, there's this funny thing called "history". And, contrary to all progressive attempts to the contrary, the voices of the dead that we have record of are not on their side. Sure, you'll always have dissidents, but the major flow of history does not agree with progressives in the slightest, a fact that forces them to throw around the words "racist", "sexist", "homophobe" or whatever buzzword they have to use to put themselves into their dark littler corners and scream at anything not them. Turns out when you average in all the voices, the prevailing wisdom runs counter to theirs, to a degree that would be shocking if they weren't sitting in that dark little corner screaming, fingers in ears. Either all the voices matter or they don't. If you're going to pick and choose at least be clear that that's what you're doing.
And history is not on the progressive side. At all.
At this, the conservative reading this post will go "Yes, they're on ours!"
No, they're not, simmer down.
The conservative's method is similar to a student caught cheating on a theology exam. Sure, you may have the answers, but you have absolutely no understanding of why the answers exist in the first place and therefore your point of view is absolutely worthless; if anything it's more dangerous than the progressive one! That goes double for rad trad Catholics and uberdox Orthodox, who are the worst copiers of the bunch, making that student who got caught cheating look positively honest in comparison. See, the kid who cheated knew he was doing wrong. He just didn't care! I can't even get that much out of a rad trad or uberdox, by and large. The think they're doing the right thing by bringing the cheat sheet and peaking at it while they think the teacher isn't watching.
Turns out it was an essay test. Yes, that actually happened. It's impossible for me to communicate in print what a sad sack of crap this person was in real life, and the depth of the insult I just threw conservatism's way. Suffice to say that in order to tell you about Franky would derail this blog post so hard that...
Okay, I may do that at some point.
Yes, I do think it's that funny and no I don't claim to be a good person.
Anyways.
Now, to be fair to the conservative, the worldview they are espousing (19th century Enlightenment) has been passed off as the old ways since before Vatican II. And in that "older" context? You reference the abstract statement and go "There! That's the truth!" and you're supposed to move on with your life. Man, as a supposedly solely rational creature, should just be able to do that and move on. I've seen, with mine own two eyes, talks on suffering given by Catholics that are just ragingly wrong... because the answers given in the talk were not given with the proper context in mind. It was just assumed that, by giving out these abstract points of information, the listener would be able to just accept that and integrate it into their lives. And that's simply not true. That's the stupidest thing I've encountered in my life: the idea that context doesn't matter. It does, by the very sources that conservatives claim to follow, with some Desert Fathers going so far as to claim that those who have not experience in an area need to shut their mouth.
So context determines experience and experience is important. So sayeth the sources conservatives took their crib sheet from.
Shit.
We'll start at what's arguably the center of the Christian faith, the Gospels. Now, each of these announcements of victory (which is what Gospel actually means) are made according to the perspectives of that apostle. The writer attempts, to the best of his knowledge and power, to preach the victory of Christ over the world. And these don't line up. Folks have talked about that for years now, as if that was somehow a problem. It wasn't a problem then like how it is today, when we have this stupid idea that somehow the Gospels were meant to adhere this flawless standard of writing.
They weren't.
They were pronouncements of victory, following a series of genre rules totally dead today.
Asking them to stick to the same details is like trying to get siblings to agree upon the details of a Thanksgiving dinner. They'll agree on the broad strokes, but if you think you'll get them totally agree you're stupid. It's the experience of what they remember that matters, and that's why they were written.
But it gets much worse than that, because this appeal to experience over anything else is built right into the pagan mindset too. See, if a Mediterranean person wandered into another area and found they worshipped other gods, he integrated those gods into his pantheon, and if they had similar portfolios? Well, they clearly had different experiences of the same deity, but it was the same deity. Part of Christianity's triumph was to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they had claims to a unique god, one who was not bound to a particular area or experiences, but was above them all. The experience of the Christian God trumped everything else.
Don't think this perspective didn't carry on past paganism? You're utterly wrong. The Golden Legend, the second most important book in Catholicism I guarantee you don't know about (but should), was a 13th century compilation of saint's stories and sermons. There are incidents in the book that the editor outright says he doesn't know what to do with factually, but that's the story he heard and he's not about to discount it. He simply records it because someone may have actually experienced it. And that's a lot more important than his ideas on the incidents in question. In addition, The Book of the Elders, a compilation of Desert Father stories that finally stopped being edited around the 9th century, employs the same logic, copying out meetings with centaurs and demons and floating mountains with nary a comment on the veracity of the incidents themselves. It ain't because the editors believed the incidents with 100% certainty, but because they knew they couldn't, that the stories were copied down.
Now, while Christian conservatives may have forgotten this whole affair of subjective experience trumping, the modern masters of fantasy didn't. Gene Wolfe, possibly the finest writer of science fiction of the 20th century, was a post-modern master, particularly with works such as Book of the New Sun, where each read-through shows just a bit better how incapable Severian is at telling the truth. The Latro trilogy is literally the recordings of a man with persistent short term memory loss. Each of Wolfe's books are a puzzle of perspective, where characters try to relay what it is they experienced... and fail consistently. And let's not forget that the Silmarillion, Hobbit, and Lord of the Rings are translated in universe artifacts, to the degree to where the names of the hobbits themselves are translations: Frodo, Sam, Pippin and Merry are actually Maura, Ban, Razar and Kali!
Now, the big difference between pre-modern and the modern progressive, who is at least at the root of the approach, is the refusal to weed out all voices you can find. The problem is that if you do turn the filters off, deny your own ideological lens as hard as you can... a very strange world emerges. One which defies all ideological conventions as we have them today. Ultimately, however, one religion begins to emerge as the one that openly claims supremacy... and it's the one that most progressives are running away from, even if its assumptions about the worth of humans are totally unique to it.
Yes totally.
If you like humans and think they should prosper you ain't goin' to Islam.
I mean, unless you like the idea of women needing to prove they were raped depending upon four Muslim men as witnesses?
And you sure aren't going to be a true pagan. The bits we have of actual ancient Norse religion were cruel beyond imagination, with human sacrifice being a norm. When Christians came with the idea of a God that cared about the little guy the ancient Norse way was so inferior that we barely have any record of it now. Heck, the same is true of most Western European paganism; whatever Wiccans are doing today, it's not actual paganism.
"But Nathan!" the progressive may protest. "We can start all over! Who needs what came before?"
Look, go and look at all the attempts to do that so far, the most hardcore of the bunch being The French Revolution, with its 10 day weeks, temple prostitutes for reason... and the buckets and bucket and buckets and buckets of blood. Oh, and then the monarchy returned. Because that's what happens whenever anarchy reigns: monarchy comes back. It's a cycle as old as the hills.
Dear Progressive... that's the only place where reinvention has led. Ever. There is no utopia. Every attempt to build a new shining city on the hill leads to genocide. And then someone steps up and manages the chaos. Always. Your "better tomorrow" will lead to a dictatorship, and from dictatorship to monarchy. As it always has. As it always will.
If you think you're better than the past not only will you repeat it but you'll one up its atrocities.
The only way out is through.
And that means actually owning that yes, indeed, all perspectives matter, even if that winds you back to the conclusion that the ancients really did know what the hell they were talking about, because they actually did what you claim to do.
And you don't.
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