Dachshund wrote:...and I think it is fair to say that the current "progressive" liberal orthodoxy in the postmodern West has indeed embraced an intrinsically leftist world-view in the doctrine cultural relativism, and that cultural relativism has clearly established its intellectual descendents in, for example: multiculturalism, persistent attempts at social engineering, the Marxist political narrative of "political correctness", the equalitarian theory of feminism and the so-called "Women's Liberation" movement, etc; very firmly in today's Western societies.
Again, this is simply you setting out your political views, well known on this forum now.
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Steve,
You have posted quite a numbers of objections and requests for further evidence/clarification to a number of claims I have made in this thread to date. I could not deal with them all in one post as this would result in a massive "wall of text", and I am aware that such are not viewed favourably on this forum, which , I think, aims to encourage a relatively brisk and lively exchange of opinions through that are expressed in as succinct and to-the-point manner as possible. Therefore I shall deal with addressing your concerns one by one and in as parsimonious a fashion as I realistically am able.
Let me start with the criticism above that my claim postmodernism is a leftist, liberal "progressive world -view in the West is merely one of my personal political views. It is not.
Every person reading this post will be familiar with the terms postmodern and postmodernist. The era that we in the West are now living in is commonly referred to as the postmodern era and is typically viewed as having begun between the mid and late 20th century.The postmodernist world - view is basically grounded on the notions that: the attainment of universal/absolute truth is impossible, because all truth is
relative; that no ideas or truths are transcendent; that all ideas such as "race" and "gender" are purely culturally or socially constructed; that historical facts are unimportant/irrelevant; that ideas are only true if they benefit the oppressed. Postmodernism is skeptical about any
weltunshaaung - or any paradigms; the postmodern paradigm is, if you like, anti-paradigmatic; it denies the view that there could be a compelling, comprehensive world-view. For man in the postmodern West life is intrinsically fraught with doubt and uncertainty - he is cast adrift amidst the shifting sands of a widespread skepticism and agnosticism. It is assumed that truth is revealed equally in different doctrines (even if they contradict each other) and on this understanding everything is reduced to a matter of subjective "
interpretation" or mere opinion. What was a legitimate plurality of of ideas has, in Western postmodernity, given way to an undifferentiated pluralism based on the assumption that all positions are equally valid.
The founders and leading thinkers of postmodernism were all Left in their politics and often hard Left. With hindsight we can clearly identify these men, they were four french intellectuals, namely: (1) Michel Foucault (a member of the French communist Party in the first half of the 1950s, who declared himself a Maoist in 1968); Jean - Francois Lyotard ( who spent 12 years working with and writing for the radical Left group "
Socialisme au Barbarie"; Jacques Derrida ( closely associated with a group focussed around "
Tel Quel", a far left journal and sympathetic to the French communist Party); Richard Rorty, an American Democrat (who cited the Socialist Party candiate and leader Phillip Randolph as one of his great heroes).
Thus I provide a compelling argument evidence to substantiate my claim that the current era of postmodernity in the West is a world-view that has it origins predominantly in
(hard) Left political ideology and remains a
leftist, liberal /"progressive"/culturally relativist/ egalitarian/equalitarian philosophical, social, epistemological and moral paradigm; a paradigm robustly underpinned by the Marxist rationale and concepts of:
oppression ( of minority/disempowered /disadvantaged groups)
inequality ( between the genders and, for example , between the Western white
Europid race and the coloured ( black African/latino/hispanic/
Australoid , Mongoloid, etc;) races; revolution and the nation of Marxist-Leninist (capitalist) imperialism
AND that this is
not,, as it happens, merely one man's (one Dachund's !) opinion.
I will deal with another one of your many objections to my arguments on this thread in my next post and so, one by one until I have dispatched them all.
Regards
Dachund