If you think there’s a shortcut to something of value, you’re going to end up with a cheap knock-off that will fall apart on first use.
What many want from religion or ideology is a simple formula to follow — the moral equivalent of getting your ticket punched.
Once their ticket is punched, by a confession of faith and ritualistic reaffirmations, they can then be nakedly self-serving in pursuing interests that dovetail with the favored interests or beliefs of their peer group — a homogeneous community or workplace, a sectarian, nationalist, ethnic or ideological faction — so long as they march in step with the rest of the group.
That’s safety in numbers, the confidence that emboldens mobs.
Human beings long to be thought moral, but being lazy, they prefer the appearance to the reality.
And often, they’re fooling themselves:
as when yuppies engage in nimbyism (not realizing that the localized ill effects of a policy that sounds right in the abstract will fall on those less equipped to organize on their own behalf)
as when famers deny that crop supports are subsidies
as when affluent urbanites campaign for green zones, not realizing that this raises rents beyond the reach of lower-income workers, driven by them to longer and longer commutes, adding to unpaid job costs
as when local majorities have no experience of negative racial profiling by police and other local officials.
as when political partisans ignore the verdicts of judicial processes and investigations following accepted procedures for assessing claims and validating alleged evidence, not in isolated cases but in multiple and repeated findings of publicly observed and rule-governed procedures.
In the New Testament (Matthew: 23: 25-28), such people are referred to as whited sepulchres, holy on the outside, corrupt on the inside.
What damned the Pharisees (or at least their leaders) was not their ethnicity, which they shared with their victim, but the self-righteousness and self-interest so natural to the mainstream and the orthodox (within the politically relevant demographic), who feel the wind of the laws and the majority at their backs.
Someone saw Donald Trump coming.
Whited sepulchres are even willing to make real efforts within limited zones, primarily, treating well those like them, or in their debt.
Clients welcome, independent-minded citizens, not so much.
Many voters, if they were any more predictable, would come with instructions for assembly, maintenance — and disposal, when no longer of use.
Paradigms & Axioms
It all depends where you start from
All, or nearly all, identifiable doctrines are systems of coherent explanation encompassed by a paradigm, by which I mean a conceptual framework composed, like a mathematical system of geometry, of 4 elements:
1) Definitions (units of observation, data or analysis),
2) Axioms (a small set of assumptions without which systems can have no definitive structure or coherence),
3) Principles of empirical evidence or theoretical construction (rules governing how data is certified and how units are combined into larger compounds),
4) Methods of deduction or inference (rules governing how new propositions are generated from prior axioms and propositions).
For examples of each above category, Euclidean geometry (the kind you learned in school) requires:
1) Definitions. Example: a circle is the set of points equidistant from a single point.
2) Axioms. Example: the parallel postulate, paraphrased, if two straight lines intersect a third, both at right angles, then alone will they never meet, even if extended indefinitely. (if that’s confusing, Google it, the picture makes it clear, and if you don’t get why it matters, Google non-Euclidean geometries).
3) Principles of construction. Example: one can draw a straight line from any point to any point.
4) Method. Example: pure logical deduction only. But Euclid uses a deductive method called reductio ad absurdum, meaning assume the opposite and show it contradicts itself. This method was challenged by Kant in his antinomies of pure reason, when used outside a closed system like Euclidean geometry.
My hunch is that there can be no single perspective to which every truth can be neatly reduced. (My cumulative thoughts on this are found in my Rules page. Warning: it’s not beach reading.)
Immanuel Kant, writing at about the time of the American Revolution, identified a minimum of 3 fundamental perspectives, each ruled by its own principles within its own jurisdiction
These 3 (propounded in his critical philosophy, which begins with The Critique of Pure Reason) are:
1) the empirical jurisdiction of science, 2) the ideal-driven jurisdiction of morality, and 3) the jurisdiction of judgment, subdivided into the aesthetic jurisdiction and the jurisdiction of natural teleology (which today is understood as that of Darwinian evolutionary biology.
In later works, Kant added 2 more speculative perspectives, history and religion, both hybrids of the empirical and the moral jurisdictions, history leaning more on the empirical, religion more on the moral.
Call this view perspectivalism. It’s neither moral relativism nor postmodernism.
An earlier form of moral relativism, logical positivism, distinguished facts from values, to limit knowledge to facts, setting values adrift as some merely emotional preferences formed from personal and cultural quirks from which truth could not be expected.
Postmodernism is the more prevalent modern form of moral relativism. It is strongly partisan, holding deeply felt emotional values but it converts all knowledge claims into mere partisan rhetoric.
I hold it partly responsible for the moral self-doubt and out-of-control extremism currently defacing affluent (especially Westen) democracies (characterized interchangeably as liberal democracies or democratic republics).
If you use words like deconstruct, grand narrative, or constructs (as a noun), you test positive for postmodernism.
Objective reality and value-judgments are likewise diagnostic for logical positivism.
Caution: be careful when using strange words: you don’t know where they’ve been!
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is the doctrine that reduces all systems of explanation, both practical (i.e., moral codes, cultural traditions and articulated philosophies, theologies or ideologies) to grand narratives, by which postmodernists mean myths (fictions concocted to conceal unfair advantages dropping into the laps of their privileged originators).
In plain language, there are no truths, only self-serving fictions.
Grand narratives are, in this view, just skeins of rhetoric justifying the advantage of a dominant group who veils their unjust privileges with mythological grandeur, to misdirect and mislead.
Except, of course, postmodernism itself, the last narrative standing.
One is reminded of John le Carré’s last illusion of the illusionless man, referring to master spy George Smiley’s faith in his faithless wife, Ann.
Postmodernism claims to be the one perspectiveless perspective, the sole occupant of the single point from which extends the only perspective that is no perspective .
But what I see is a partisan perspective in an ongoing contest of diverse perspectives, one that wishes to be judged by different rules than its competitors.
Postmodernism seeks the position of the solo dictator of rules for all others, while itself standing above the rules.
This is exactly the same lunge for power that sets Machiavelli’s new prince and founder above his rivals, cutting the ground from beneath them (since the law inevitably favors those who prosper with and control it) while leaving the new prince to shape the rules to his own advantage.
It is no less surprising that the new order works to the advantage of its makers than that the old order worked to the advantage of its makers.
At the close of every revolution, the guys with the guns decide how things will be. More often than not, it stays as it was: only the faces change, and the power base they groom to keep themselves in power.
In practice, postmodernism is a potent rhetoric wielded by minorities (and academics splintered off from the old ruling class) to redirect the flow of market, social and government benefits.
There are 2 problems with this strategy:
1) Of all human culture, what spreads fastest are the habits, arts and knowledge that gave one’s enemies victory. Nothing’s more persuasive than the power of the tactic or weapon that just brought you low.
So, predictably, as long-standing but declining majorities in affluent Western nations watched minorities gaining ground using the new postmodernism-infused tactic of identity politics, they adopted majority identity politics.
As no one can fail to see now, the tactic is even more potent in the hands of entrenched adversaries.
2) By disparaging any idea of truth, however seemingly neutral, moderate centrists (and, in America, at least, the 30% of the electorate now identifying as Independents) have become more cynical about moral standards and norms altogether, especially those voiced by politicians.
This seems to leave them free to vote their narrow, short-term interests rather than balancing, as swing voters, those overcommitted to either extreme.
This leaves the field open to extremists of every persuasion, never a recipe for sound government, stability or the defining challenge of a true republic: the search for common ground.
In autocracies it’s a government monopoly, in democracies it comes in partisan flavors.
When All Is Said and Dunn 