I have been pondering something for a while now, and just couldn’t figure out why things felt so “wrong” getting lectured by the liberal elites about how “science matters.” (Ignore, for a brief moment, Biden’s quote “We believe in Truth, not facts.” We will come back to it…)
For decades now we (on the right and in the center) have endured a push towards “post modernism.” The age of “relativism.” The idea that “objective reality” is impossible. (Don’t believe me? Start reading about Post Modernism. Here’s a definition: Postmodernism:
(noun) A broad and somewhat intentionally difficult to define term, typically applied to the arts and philosophy that was skeptical of “objective” universal explanations of how society and culture operate._ https://sociologydictionary.org/postmodernism/
Sadly, post-modernism has taken root among the populace. Whether one views oneself as a philosopher or not is immaterial. It’s not “whether you subscribe to post-modernism” but rather how you behave.
So, it is not surprising to see so many people moving forward in their own view of the world (not necessarily the same as “world view”) and arguing that everyone else is “wrong.” (A mis-application of post-modernism, which by all rights SHOULD accept that everyone’s view is “right” for them, but not for others.)
So going back to Biden. When he argues that the left believes in TRUTH, not FACTS (a statement many assert was simply him stumbling over words) I think he truly shared a belief structure. That belief structure of a post-modernist world where there is no objective truth, but relative truth only for yourself.
Now, let me quote one other post-modernist, and hopefully you can see our current society in the quote: “For Jean Baudrillard (1929 – 2007), the post-modern age is a world where people respond to media images rather than to real persons or places. Thus when Diana, princes (sic) of Wales, died in 1997, there was an enormous outpouring of grief all over the world. But were people mourning a real person? Princes (sic) Diana existed for most people only through the mass media, and her death was presented like an event in a soap opera rather than an event in real life. Separating out reality from representation has become impossible when all that exists is ‘hyperreality’ – the mixing of the two.” (https://revisesociology.com/…/postmodernism…/)
Sound familiar?
Now–how do we “come together” when we all have this perspective? When “truth” is relative and subjective, and (as some post-modernists argue) “that the pursuit of scientific knowledge (and especially its application) has in some ways made the world a riskier, more dangerous place – nuclear weapons and global warming are both the products of science, for example.”
