We Are Witnessing The Fruition Of Modernisms War On Transcendent Reality

Sometime in the past fifteen or so years of reading the claims and declarations and theories of the high atheism of academia, science, the humanities, and the somewhat lower manifestation of that in journalism, I came to the conclusion that even the alleged leftist form of that was not qualitatively different from the vulgar materialism of corporate, consumerist mass culture.  The only difference was the felt need of citation and other trappings and pretenses of something higher that allowed the practitioners of the high atheism to make distinctions so as to feel good about themselves.  I will say that the scribblege of such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens had a lot to do with that realization, their thinking being both resistant to factual rigor and logical coherence.  Though even if those popularizers hadn't been there such people as Daniel Dennett,  E.O. Wilson, Paul and Patricia Churchland and others who make ideological claims that dismiss the significance of consciousness and come up with absurdly inadequate claims about the evolution and presence of the mind would have forced the conclusions.  I have noted, repeatedly, that my concentration of these issues was sparked by a lefty of the barroom atheist variety declaring that "science proved that free will doesn't exist," (in which case, how can you claim rights do or that democracy is possible) but I'd never believed that materialism could be a valid ideological position.

The entire program of late modernism, starting in the 19th century has included a demotion of the significance of the truth (it being assigned a merely relative existence based on general consensus) or morality (demoted to that same merely social relativity) or the status of the individual (the frequently encountered modernist icon who supported fascism is only matched by those who supported other forms of anti-democratic dictatorship such as among the Stalinists, Trotskyites and Maoists) and the mind.   The major thrust of academic modernism has been, through its scientism, one long assault on the very things which justify egalitarian democracy, any such claims of some modernists to be supporters of liberalism in the American sense of equal rights, economic justice and self-determination of the individuals, being more than matched by positions and even entire ideological programs that deny the possibility of the foundations of those in reality.

There has been a bizarre double-speak on that count which is more often found in contradictory ideas being held at the same time.  One, which I've noticed more and more is the use of the word "meme" by people like Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes without any seeming understanding that the idea is part of the extreme biological determinism of the neo-eugenicists such as Richard Dawkins and the wacky determinism and reduction of the individual and the mind of people like Daniel Dennett expounds.  If memes are real then there can be no discernable significance to the minds that are the product of their infection, the "lumbering robots" of our genetic determinism - exactly the kind of stuff that the barroom atheist, lefty mentioned above was parroting - and there is no way that egalitarian democracy or even a system that values justice over injustice can survive such an intellectual invalidation.

This came to me while I was watching John Oliver talking with Stephen Colbert talk about the insanity of America, today, in which truth and even reality, itself, has been so undermined that treasonous lies are being normalized in the general babble devoid of holding that some truths are self-evident, some facts are hard facts and, though they may have felt inhibited from making that point, morality is not fungible and and in the end it does really matter.

And if you want to claim that the academic scribblers who promote the high materialism are liberals, that doesn't change for a second the fact that their intellectual program, whatever effect it has, undermines the very foundations on which the American liberalism of equal rights, egalitarian democracy and economic justice.  They dissolve the very morality on which those rest and attack the beliefs on which their reality in the world depend.  In the end, as the likes of Wilson and the Churchlands and Dennett dissolve the validity of the mind in the middle-brow imagination - where most people of influence in society reside - they undermine even the acknowledgement that the truth residing in and depending on those minds, matters.

Think about that the next time you hear Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes or, if I remember correctly, even Bill Moyers use the word "meme".

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American style liberalism as described above, isn't a product of modernism or any kind of thinking compatible with a belief that people and their minds are the product of material causation and without any transcendent capacity or value.  It is dependent on things that surpass the current bifurcation between the vulgar materialism of the right or the more conceited materialism of academic modernism.  It really doesn't fit into either of those, it is a totally different thing that those two other categories are in opposition to.   That became obvious in the late 18th century with the disastrous failure of the French Revolution, the scientifically congealed class system in Britain and the slow motion implementation of the claims and promises of the Bill of Rights in the United States.  The reform movements in the United States were a constant struggle for expanding equality and economic justice against the enlightenment - what became the British style of "liberalism" which was based on market economics and freeing of capital instead of equal rights and economic justice.

The faster that traditional American style liberals - wherever in the world they exist - realize that distinction and the danger of atheism-materialism to it the faster it can dissociate itself from the pseudo-left which has always been anti-democratic and in love with violent dictators.  That pseudo-left, the left of the magazines, Jacobin, In These Times, The Nation is notorious for its frequent support for foreign dictators, even last year some of them carried criticism of those who opposed Putin even as it became clear he was supporting Trump.  That left's affection for and romantic promotion of the French revolutionaries, especially the most violent of those who mounted the Reign of Terror, 3/4ths of whose victims were peasants and the poor is a continuing discrediting of it.  That should stand as a symptom of anything and anyone to avoid.