Re: Postmodernism's Assault On Western Culture
tooly
what hell is that anyway?
See, this is what I mean when I argue about how 'intellectualism'
guises itself as the 'all seeing rational leadership' to humankind,
when in reality, it is mostly just word games to mask human hubris.
Put a nice and tidy 'label' that sounds a bit complex upon something and
then let all them
ignorant baffoons outside academia scatter in befuddlement.
The 'creature' that would be God. They should make a movie.
<Antimult...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:210504...@hotmail.com...
>
> Postmodernism's Assault On Western Culture
> http://members.optushome.com.au/jimball/Postmodernism.html
> Giles Auty
> Quadrant June 2000
>
> IT IS WIDELY BELIEVED that as we grow older we tend to look back on
> earlier times in a spirit of generally unjustified nostalgia. Yet let
> us suppose for a moment that life really was qualitatively better in
> certain vital and readily identifiable ways thirty, forty or even
> fifty years ago. Why has it become so impossible for us to admit this?
> The Prime Minister, John Howard, was widely reviled recently when he
> suggested that Australia was possibly a better place to live in the
> past. Foreseeably, Phillip Adams was quick to point out that
> Australians were less prosperous and also more apparently intolerant
> thirty years ago, so how could they possibly have been happier?
>
> Since I have been living and working in Australia for only five years
> you may not think I am qualified to comment on this subject at all.
> But I would maintain that countries become strong and virtuous or weak
> and confused for much the same reasons wherever they are. The basic
> factors affecting humanity are much more universal than many people
> care to suppose.
>
> I have been a cultural commentator now for about twenty-five years. I
> first came to Australia in 1994 to deliver a lecture entitled "The
> Meaning of Modern" at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. With a title
> like that it was a wonder that anyone at all turned up, but since I
> spoke to a full auditorium I concluded that perhaps many knew me
> already from my writings in the British weekly the Spectator. I wrote
> every week in that journal from 1984 to 1995, when I took up my
> present appointment as national art correspondent for the Australian.
>
> During my eleven years with the Spectator the theme to which I
> returned most often was the fundamental ways in which the phenomenon I
> described as the "rhetoric of radicalism" affects modern cultures. The
> rhetoric of radicalism is one of the most potent forces in society
> today, yet is essentially anti-intellectual. Perhaps its most damaging
> effect is the way it manages to sell the idea that ill-conceived and
> destructive initiatives are automatic examples of progress, and all
> who resist or obstruct them are reactionaries, conservatives or worse.
> The rhetoric of radicalism permeates so much of contemporary thought
> that many people have become inured to its essential intellectual
> dishonesty.
>
> In fact, much of the rhetoric of radicalism can be traced back to a
> small number of lies and distortions, many of which have largely
> become hidden from view by the verbiage which has been constructed
> upon the framework of their basic fallacies.
>
> I am reminded here of Jonathan Swift's famous flea:
>
> So, naturalists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
> And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em
> And so proceed ad infinitum. In art and culture in general, a whole
> superstructure can soon be built up on the back of a first,
> fundamental fallacy-rather like some giant inverted pyramid. The
> trick, from a progressivist point of view, is to get the first fallacy
> past the public's guard while it is not paying proper attention, in
> order that the superstructure can later be built upon it. The seminal
> lie of radicalism is that all change is automatically for the better,
> even though much of our experience of life teaches us otherwise. It
> was on the basis of this simple lie that self-styled radicals were
> first able to seize and retain the moral high ground-and to pour hot
> oil from there on any doubters or dissenters below "If you disagree
> with us you are obstructing progress," the radical yells, hoping
> nobody spots the basic flaw in this statement. For who among us is
> qualified to decide what constitutes progress? Naturally, self-styled
> progressives claim such decision-making as their exclusive
> prerogative.
>
> That is why senseless, destructive and otherwise ill-conceived
> initiatives continue to be sprung on us-in education especially-in the
> confident and generally justified belief that few will dare to oppose
> them. After all, who wants to be called a reactionary; a Luddite or a
> fascist? What makes moral cowards of so many is nothing more than a
> cultural confidence trick. This is not to say that genuine,
> professional risks do not exist for those who resist self-styled
> progressivist fashions. In certain fields such as education and the
> arts those who speak out against radical excess often pay for such
> candour with their jobs.
>
> How did Western society allow itself to tumble into such an
> intellectually dishonest morass? The answer as in so many other cases,
> has been a general lack of vigilance and vision or will to safeguard
> our freedoms. By contrast, most of those who have been swept along by
> cultural fashions and catchphrases fail to foresee the likely
> consequences of their actions. Frequently they are too young to do so
> and, lacking knowledge of other political systems-an almost universal
> problem for young Australians-have no idea of the value of the system
> they are attempting to destroy. Coupled with this, our current
> cultural controllers are not always keen to own up to what their
> hidden agenda may be. Thus the true weight thrown behind supposedly
> progressivist art forms, say, is often cleverly concealed from us.
> This was one of the points I made in the first talk I gave in
> Australia, on "the meaning of modern".
>
> So here is a question to ask yourselves. Some hundreds of hugely
> prestigious and influential museums of modern art and modern
> collections exist in the world. But what exactly does modern mean in
> such a context? Two definitions are offered by most dictionaries for
> this much-used adjective: "of the present or recent times" and
> "new-fashioned, not antiquated". While the first meaning refers simply
> to time, the second has to do with style and attitude. So is a major
> museum of modern art simply a repository for the best national and
> international art created in a given time span-say the past 100
> years-irrespective of that art's styles and attitudes? Or does the
> word modem refer here largely to the novelty of the art's style and
> character? If, as I believe, museums of modern art are effective
> showcases for avant-gardist styles, where can we go to see the best
> non-avant-gardist art of the period?
>
> The truth is that not a single publicly funded museum anywhere is
> devoted to such a purpose. In visual art, the rhetoric of radicalism
> holds total sway and we have been persuaded somehow to make novelty
> almost the sole effective index of quality. In fact, in art, the
> fundamental fallacy that change is automatically superior to
> continuity lies like a dead weight at the heart of our official
> cultures. It will certainly take some shifting.
> However, as we can discover by examining all sorts of other areas of
> human activity, even cursorily, no guarantee truly exists anywhere
> that newer means better. By foolishly assuming that it does we are, in
> fact, at least as likely to regress culturally as to create any
> genuine advance.
>
> Wherever a choice exists between radical and continuous traditions,
> this should be decided purely on its merits. Regrettably, the empty
> and intellectually dishonest rhetoric of radicalism usually intervenes
> here to ensure this does not happen. In a society in which the
> description "conservative" has become an automatic adjective of abuse,
> we are increasingly unlikely to conserve even those customs and
> practices which are of essential value to us. Indeed, the vital
> qualities necessary for human fulfilment are as likely as any to be
> sacrificed in a non-stop Gradin rush to achieve some new landmark of
> unnatural behaviour. Most of us know in our hearts that this is
> happening yet seem increasingly unable to prevent it.
>
> EVEN BY the distant 1950s, the adjective modern had probably become
> the most used-and abused-epithet in any advertiser's armoury.
> Admonitions to modernise our homes and to discard our old possessions
> and habits filled almost every magazine, billboard and newspaper.
>
> Since then, however, there has been a long series of reactions, as
> many people turned away from using modern convenience foods, say, or
> buying man-made fibres, to quote just two examples. They have turned
> increasingly to preparing their own food and to sleeping in the kind
> of linen or fine cotton sheets our great-grandparents might have
> recognised. More modern did not automatically mean better in these or
> umpteen other instances after all.
>
> Why, then, have we been so slow to apply this lesson to more crucial
> areas of our lives, such as culture? Are modern morals and manners
> really likely to prove better in the long run than their traditional
> forerunners? While we may all know what traditional courtesy is, we
> live now in an age where modern courtesy has probably become a
> contradiction in terms.
>
> So far I have talked largely about modernism rather than its mutant
> offspring, postmodernism. Yet, in a sense, modernist excess and
> reliance on rhetoric rather than argument to render such excess
> acceptable helped pave the way for postmodernism. For one thing,
> modernism helped reveal how complacent and disorganised a lot of
> traditionalist thinking had become. The revolutionaries of 1968 could
> hardly avoid seeing the Western liberal democracies of the time as
> ripe for the plucking. Thankfully, the baying of slogans still remains
> insufficient to bring most modern Western governments to their knees.
>
> The unfortunate inhabitants of China were not so lucky, of course, the
> Red Guards of the time bringing murder, misery and mayhem to millions.
> The would-be Red Guards of the West ran into more serious obstacles in
> trying to wreck the democratic institutions they had targeted. People
> in the West had fought too long and too hard for their freedoms-and
> many had also witnessed at first hand the disagreeable realities of
> the Marxist systems which prevailed elsewhere.
>
> But the Marxist-inspired revolutionary initiatives of the late 1960s
> did not simply go away. Driven by the teachings of influential figures
> such as the Italian Antonio Gramsci, the would-be subversives in our
> midst next targeted those more vulnerable areas of Western life which
> form the soft underbellies of our nations: education and the arts. If
> these could be subverted successfully from within, corrosion might
> soon succeed where political confrontation seemed likely to fail.
> Political programs which would not stand a prayer at the polls thus
> simply by-passed the inadequate defence mechanisms of democracy and
> achieved a choke-hold on our cultures instead. I do not think the
> communist parties in Australia or Britain ever polled even one per
> cent of the vote n general elections; yet Marxist ideas control much
> of tour contemporary education and culture. Centrist and
> right-of-centre governments in general have been too slow in
> identifying or reacting to this threat and now have a more or less
> intractable problem on their hands.
>
> Observers like me, who once saw the excesses of late modernism as
> representing a major threat to Western Cultures could hardly have
> reckoned with the virulence of its postmodernist successor. To deal
> with postmodernism is like struggling with a Hydra-and one which
> constantly mutates. Among the Hydra's heads we might begin with
> deconstruction, post-colonialism, revisionist history, gender theory,
> political correctness, multiculturalism and feminism. All share one
> basic characteristic, in taking their flavour from neo-Marxist theory,
> which may be identified clearly from a continuing passion for
> simplistic groupings, explanations and Would-be solutions. Content no
> longer with communism versus capitalism nor the proletariat versus the
> bourgeoisie we are now exhorted to believe that the true solution to
> all of modern society's ills lies in warfare between men and women,
> blacks and whites, homosexuals and straights. An even more
> traditional, polarised antagonism-evil versus good-has been relegated
> to the sidelines as a kind of laughable anachronism. By its very age,
> the conflict between good and evil can be dismissed as irrelevant to
> contemporary problems. Instead, white heterosexual men are to blame
> for more or less everything-more especially so if they are British.
> The only worse-regarded group in Australia is probably the
> conservative theologians.
>
> BACK IN THE 1970s, some of the earliest manifestations of political
> correctness seemed so silly that intelligent people were more inclined
> to ignore or laugh at them than bother to answer their allegations. In
> the event, the folly was probably ours for failing to foresee how
> inexorably political correctness and related movements would grow in
> stridency if not in moral force. Perhaps we were guilty of the same
> strain of shortsightedness as the French aristocrats who foolishly
> ignored the vengeful women who would soon spend their days knitting
> away happily at the foot of the guillotine. In postmodern. times, we
> ignore any example at all of apparent communal madness at our peril.
> Next week could see it incorporated into a new by-law passed by North
> Sydney or some other similarly militant council. Unwarranted
> interference in our lives is no longer confined to culture, of course,
> but can occur anywhere.
>
> What at least some aspects of political correctness have done is to
> enfranchise the talentless, the resentful, and the shouters of
> slogans. Such folk aim to inherit what remains of our earth as rapidly
> as possible. Nor will there be any room in their world for even the
> most reasoned forms of dissent. I fear the land of the fair go may
> shortly be far gone unless we all wake up very rapidly.
>
> It is not as though we have been short of warnings from excellent
> sources about the true nature of post-modernism. Typically, the fact
> that the distinguished American academic and art critic Roger Kimball
> was speaking in Melbourne about a year ago was not widely reported.
> Anyone who has not yet read Kimball's book Tenured Radicals should
> right that omission straight away. Kimball was writing
> about the United States, but parallels with Australian practice are
> far from difficult to find. Here is Kimball on
>
> Marxist teaching:
>
> In good Marxist fashion, culture is denied autonomy and is reduced to
> being a coefficient of something else: class relations, sexual
> oppression, racial exploitation etc. Questions of artistic quality are
> systematically replaced with tests for political relevance, even as
> the whole realm of aesthetic experience is "demythologised" as an
> insidious bourgeois fiction designed to consolidate the cultural
> hegemony of the ruling class. The thought that there might be
> something uniquely valuable about culture taken on its own terms, that
> literature, for example, might have its own criteria of achievement
> and offer its own distinctive satisfactions that are independent of
> contemporary political battles-none of this seems to matter or indeed
> to be seriously considered by our multiculturalist radicals.
>
> Far from demythologising anything, Marxist education-.1 radicals are
> in fact often creators themselves of a series of malignant myths. This
> is hardly surprising, since communist political regimes as a whole
> always depended heavily on lies, propaganda and the suppression of
> truth. However except in a few cases, even these inhuman measures
> failed to save them.
>
> When I was living in England, a popular cultural joke was that,
> following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the last genuine communist
> cells were to be found in Beverly Hills, the BBC and the staffrooms of
> any Western university. Marx remains the true puppet-master behind
> almost all postmodernist initiatives, including the growing antagonism
> and contempt for Christianity and organised religion of all kinds.
>
> Basic Christian codes once underpinned society and the law in most
> Western countries. Sometimes these codes could seem sanctimonious, but
> much of the fabric of Western society once depended heavily on the
> cement they provided. When I was a boy, theft was very rare in rural
> England even though many people did not bother to lock their doors. I
> gather the same was true of Australia. I believe this was at least
> partly because a kind of secularised Christian code still prevailed.
> Certainly Christian fortitude was a major factor in helping Western
> families survive both the Second World War and the process of
> rebuilding during the 1950s.
>
> However, the 1960s saw a marked dilution of such sterling virtues, as
> improving prosperity led not to gratitude but to increasingly mindless
> hedonism. Until the 1960s, drugs were used by only a minute minority
> in Britain. Today in most Western countries three quarters of all
> urban crime is connected to drugs. Next time your car or house is
> ransacked or you are held up at knife point, do please offer a hymn of
> thanks to the sixties.
>
> Pornography of all kinds also proliferated following the sixties. In
> its wake has followed the ready availability of hideous, ritualised
> violence in films, videos and toys even for the very young. That this
> was the kind of thing the future might hold would not have entered
> even the worst nightmares of most citizens in the fifties.
>
> So was John Howard's nostalgia for earlier decades unwarranted? Since
> the advent of postmodernism almost every worthwhile certainty and
> traditional virtue has not just been called into question but has come
> under increasing assault-usually in our centres of further education
> and supposed enlightenment. When the concepts of truth, honour,
> objectivity, altruism, justice and religious faith are treated with
> contempt or scepticism by those who instruct our young, is it any
> great wonder that some of the young should seek refuge in oblivion or
> narcolepsy?
>
> Not surprisingly, those in the arts and education who are so keen to
> destroy Western democracy have nothing worthwhile to recommend in its
> place. Who, in their right minds, could have been sold the old myths
> of communism that the events of 1989 finally exposed once and for all?
> Perhaps what our would-be cultural commissars envisage is a kind of
> existential void, punctuated by further tightening of politically
> correct thumbscrews? They have wasted no time in replacing the
> commandments Moses brought down from the mountain with man-made
> inventions, such as Thou shalt not smile at nor otherwise flirt with
> members of the opposite sex in the street or in the workplace, even
> though in many countries the continuation of the human race has
> depended largely upon such manoeuvres.
>
> But what about other main planks of postmodernist practice? Perhaps
> the most insidious of these has been the entirely negative, and
> largely self-defeating, quasi-academic process known as
> deconstruction. Deconstruction wilfully fails to see language as an
> excellent and poetic tool of communication and one in which the
> listener, also, can play a positive role by trying to perceive meaning
> even through veils of incoherence. The latter role will be a
> thoroughly familiar one to psychoanalysts, priests, pedagogues and
> parents. Deconstruction, which has helped wreck both the teaching of
> English and the joyful appreciation of literature, is a negative
> pseudoscience with no positive end-product. But if you feel I am being
> over-harsh about the subject, this is what the estimable English
> philosopher
>
> Roger Scruton, in An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modem Culture, has
> to say about it:
> What deconstruction sets before us is a profound mystery, which can be
> approached only through the incantation of invented words, through a
> Newspeak which deconstructs. its own meaning in the act of utterance.
> When at last the veil is lifted, we perceive a wondrous landscape: a
> world of negations, a world in which, wherever we look for presence we
> find absence, a world not of people but of vacant idols, offers, in
> the places where we seek for order, friendship and moral value, only
> the skeleton of power. There is no creation in this world, though it
> is full of cleverness-a cleverness actively depl6yed in the cause of
> Nothing. It is a world of uncreation, without hope or faith or love,
> since no "text" could possibly mean those transcendental things. It is
> a world in which negation has been endowed with the supreme
> instruments-power and intellect-so making absence into the
> all-embracing presence. It is, in short, the world of the Devil.
>
> MOST ORDINARY PEOPLE remain as confused to this day about what
> postmodernism is as they do about its aims and origin. They are merely
> aware that a great number of things with which they disagree totally
> are slowly changing their lives.
>
> So what is postmodernism? One easy answer is that it is radical
> relativism gone rampant. But the answer I prefer is that it represents
> an attempt to usher in a new kind of left-wing totalitarianism via
> the unlocked back doors of democracies. Postmodernism represents the
> neo-Marxist conquest of Western cultures by stealth. The profession of
> journalism in which I work is one of the last outposts of artistic
> thinking in which independent ideas may still be tolerated.
>
> Determinists like to believe that what we think of as our independent
> and individual beings are mere products of social and environmental
> forces: the era and particular circumstances in which we grew up and
> were educated, for instance. But I do not believe in the inevitability
> of the consequences of such social processes at all. A number of
> people undoubtedly exist whose backgrounds are very similar to mine
> but with whom I do not share a single opinion. Fed roughly the same
> stimuli, we have somehow reached diametrically opposed views. The
> determining factor here-or so I believe-lies largely in our
> propensities to accept or reject fashionable theories. Thus people
> must exist somewhere who are entirely comfortable with the claim made
> by our national broadcaster that it is "your ABC", whereas to me the
> fact that anyone should make such a claim ought to make us suspicious
> in itself. In fact, the real meaning of the slogan is clearly, "It's
> our ABC. If you don't like what we do, take a running jump."
>
> One of the most valuable responses any human being can develop is an
> instinct for plausibility. Note I do not use the word truth here in
> case there are tender, postmodernist sensibilities among us.
> Postmodernists claim that no such thing exists as truth in the
> singular. Indeed, in occasional moments of despair at the state of the
> world, I soothe myself by imagining conversations which might take
> place in post-modernist households: "Cathy and Andrew, we would like
> you to say who broke your little brother's space rocket. We want you
> to tell the truths."
>
> --
> JimB
> http://www.geocities.com/UAM01
> Union Against Multi-Culty
>
> "Time to string up the traitors in our midst"