Absolution From Lies
Pay a close attention to these two illustrations. Took these (or a rephrasing of these) from an advertisement promoting a US sitcom entitled “Eureka”:
WORK – DREAMS = JOB
HOPE – LOGIC = FAITH
There was another equation, but I forget. Anyway, these two are the ones I wish to highlight and they strike me as two equations that best summarize today’s postmodern paranoia. I have made it clear to my friends and brethren, there is something dangerous about treading the postmodern highway. For there is no highway at all, it’s more of a web. I give this paradigm or way of approaching studies credit if it resembled a web of thought. But actually, postmodernism is something more than that, more chaotic that is. The main issue here is about what the truth is all about and all the jargon that include epistemology and ontology in the list. Truth is relative. No this is not Einsteinian relativism and I do wish it spelled as such. That’s why I call it something far worse than a web. A web has structure. Postmodernism is the perfect chaos theory, and this one doesn’t even consider a unified telling of history to it. I do not have good schooling in this perspective (that’s what I call it and that’s as high a pedestal I am willing to give it). But I do have an appreciation of its fundamentals (there aren’t many) and a knack of where it is leading the world (particularly the West). I studied Richard Rorty very carefully. I reported on him during my methods class. He is a leading authority in postmodernism and its view of the truth. I consider it both a blessing and a curse to have delved into his world. But I indulge the idea that I did and came out stronger in grip of my principles as ever. This is what is so dangerous about this kind of thinking. Come in a made man and come out arguing that everything is a matter of personal appreciation of the situation. Yes, your principles are yours and yours alone. Individualist, check. Amoral, check. And the two equations are but interpretations of the time allowed in a postmodern analysis. Okay, I’ll even throw in the modern analysis of things in its political and economic. Blah blah indeed. Meaning? It all goes out to bite the dust.
A job is what you make it, that’s a presumption. Let’s take it further. A job is work without fulfilling your dreams. Tragic. Actually, this statement is as just a product of modern thinking as it is postmodern. I say a job is me having work but not living my dreams and it’s mine to live, that’s postmodern. Notice the”I”. I say a job is me having to work because living my dreams and working don’t go together and so I choose practicality and utility and live, that’s modern. Notice the tragedy of the circumstance the modern man is in. Actually, if we trace the philosophy of modern thinking and credit due to Francis Schaeffer for such a beautiful retracing of thought, we find that modernism is a product of breaking-away from time-old and established basics. The basic being, the concept of me, myself and I don’t work. It simply drains life away and isolates meaning, the meaning of existence, to a jar that we open up during college and leave it there. The other basic being, we are not alone. We can’t be alone. It simply, including science, does not point to man being alone. Goodness, even evolution is crumbling. So the tragedy of man is such. He tries to make it all about himself, serving himself, utilizing the world all for himself and he fails. Communism and religion are not man’s greatest experiments. Sharing in commune is a time-old basic that man is commissioned to do by nature or by nurture. Religion is a manifestation of a time-old basic that man believes and ought to believe in things not known to him and a creator that directs his existence towards eternity. Man’s greatest experiment is trying to live on his own and in denial of what are basic to him. It is also the greatest failure of mankind. And so comes in postmodernism, the grandchild of this project.
Postmodernism is the second or third-generation step towards chaos. We began with an established basic. The Greeks disputed by disputation. The Christian churches grounded man’s life in a vertical connection to God and a horizontal one to fellow man. Simple. Truth also was established. Truth is God and is through God, nothing fancy. We next moved on to what the equation Hope-Logic= Faith is saying. We made faith a commodity either marketed or genuinely experienced from an ivory tower. Faith began as something logical. We believed in something out there or a deity above us because of reason and this was faith. We knew it was true. We felt it and so we believed. Faith made sense. It was not dismissed to hermits and zealots. Thanks to the modernist and even people like Kant, we slowly imagined a dichotomy between reason and faith. Rousseau and company even suggested we become primitive and primal. This is not what it should be. We separated both and it becomes ever so clear in science. I spent my college days defending the social sciences as a legitimate science more than an art. Realizing the ties that bind thought and soul in the basics of things made them clear and interconnected. Science and art? They serve a grander picture, a greater glory preordained. The mind and the heart, they complement not contradict or present an option of one or the other! It all makes sense. For a comprehensive illustration of how this mess came to be, read “How Should We Then Live?” Now, we move on to postmodernism and dismiss truth as both imagined and relative. This is our fall from grace. This is our undoing. It’s not the global warming crisis. It’s not nuclear proliferation. Our doomsday shall indeed come from ourselves and it indeed will be more of a “I knew this but did not take it to heart.” lesson. The cycle is complete. The lies we believed and propagated are coming back to us. And yes, it was foreseen ages ago. It’s self-fulfilling! How can we be so blind? How can we be so in denial?
We look at ourselves in a mirror and watch television. How are we? Where are we going? Do we actually still feel and see the meaning to our lives? Do we see the short-term as important as the long-term? The truth is not out there. It is not self-serving. It is not relative. I will be bashed in the academic realms for attacking this emerging paradigm. I will be called many brands. But I take to heart that I have to let out a perspective if only to challenge a perspective. I play by the rules of the world to emerge sane, let alone renewed. Let us cleanse our minds of lies we impose or others have shaped in us. It is not inextricably hard. Mankind once had a feel for this. It chases it still. Time is wasted. Lives are lost. Let’s not be part of the body count. Let us truly be enlightened.
Absolved.
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