Postmodernism, cont. MAGA and WOKE

 

MAGA and WOKE - two sides of the same (idiotic) coin.

   A branch of Postmodern sensibility focuses on “marginalized groups” – mostly based on race and gender (not so much the working class). I would think of what critics call “WOKE” as a sentimentalized version of the most radical of the postmodern thinkers – Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and their followers in academia. I think they would approve of appropriating and popularizing their thought. Sentimentality is a core trait of various forms of narcissism. Curiously, right-wing populism – also a form of identity politics – embraces the exact same postmodern system of thought. I suppose it was a brilliant stroke to see the possibilities of making reality (and self-conception) a matter of “construction” and power (everything being ad hominem) for right-wing politics.

 

Sentimentality (or sentimental) I define thus: The idealizing, distorting, reinventing, and/or falsifying of the complex reality of the objects of the sentimentalizing in order to produce a self-gratifying emotional response, whether of consolation or ego-elevation over others.

 

Narcissism: a variety of psychological conditions characterized by extreme alienation that develops as a result failure of the family and the absence of a community of people who know and respect you as a member in spite of your unavoidable human imperfections. It results in the end from isolation of the ego, a failure of love and a failure to bond with others (a social feature caused by the uprooting inherent in the economy we all must live under). The narcissistic ego must depend entirely on its own resources to find itself loveable – or if that fails, to be feared or otherwise stand out. Since that contradicts the nature of love, which can only be a gift bestowed by another (or God), narcissism is hopelessly doomed to failure. Even the most worthy of love among us can’t love themselves in isolation. Love just is the judgment ‘Good that the loved person exists!’ It is like I can only be given “permission” to exist through the love of others – true love, not a counterfeit narcissistic love that “loves” others only to be able to find themselves loveable: that is, only loves sentimentally.

      Even before we are self-aware we need this. Mother love is the beginning of psychic health, followed by father love; family love; friendship love; love of one’s place on earth and the people who wish to bond to make a life together in that place – all this in different degrees prevents narcissism. If parents themselves are narcissistic and if the bonds of friendship and community are broken, the ego has no choice but to fall back on its own devices. It never “grows up.” It never learns the virtues necessary to live in a common project with others. Narcissism takes many forms. Narcissism is a spectrum: the desire to be worshipped ala Trump at the one extreme and the everyday conflicts between pleasure and duty on the other. Almost all of us born into this economic system fall somewhere on this spectrum.

 

Sentimentality is both a defense mechanism for the narcissistic ego and the means to enhance its self-esteem, which always needs enhancing lest depression results.

 

. . .

 

    Love is a judgment that comes with a range of emotions, but it is above all a judgment: “Good that you exist!” “Wonderful that you are here!” It comes with a corollary: Love – not just a feeling, not just liking or not liking – is the steadfast will to do good to another, whoever it is. What is good for another and within my power. Often it is just giving a hungry beggar something to eat. It can be a form of questioning each other’s life, though only people who know and trust each other can profitably do that as a rule. It means something different between parents and children than it does between friends or strangers – or enemies. We are mortal. Human life is soaked in the injustice and indeed evils of countless generations, which have distorted our nature, our hearts, our reason. Love under the conditions of our life has become extremely difficult.

     The centrality of love, I think, comes from our knowledge of our own mortality and of how fate can destroy our lives or the lives of those we love. It manifests itself in compassion (of which ‘empathy’ is a pale, weak cousin) for the victims of bad fortune; in the remorse evoked by evil done; by grief over the loss of a loved one; in the necessary connection between procreation, sexuality, and love; in parents’ worry about what the future holds for their children; in praying for the broken person who gives into evil; in the love for a precious place on earth or for the beauty still present (though diminishing) in the world. In so many other ways. We want the Good to be in a world in which everything that comes into being passes away and is subject to terrible harm before that. In which so many barriers are placed in the way between the conception and blossoming of every human life.

      It comes also from plurality: Plurality thus refers both to equality and distinction, to the fact that all human beings belong to the same species and are sufficiently alike to understand one another, but yet no two of them are ever interchangeable, since each of them is an individual endowed with a unique biography and perspective on the world. Hannah Arendt, from whom I learned this, cites the two version of the creation of Man in Genesis. The Genesis 1:26-27 version of the creation story describes God creating humankind in His image, both male and female. Arendt interprets this account as highlighting the concept of plurality. In this version, the simultaneous creation of man and woman underscores the inherent multiplicity and equality among humans from the outset. Humanity is created as a plural entity, emphasizing diversity and the coexistence of different individuals who share the world. Love is possible here because of difference. The love of one’s own self can also only happen in this difference between us. Self-love is only masturbation unless it is a reflection of being loved by others.

    In the Genesis 2:7, 21-22 version God creates Adam first and then Eve from Adam's rib. Arendt interprets this narrative differently. She argues that this account suggests a replication of a master model, implying that subsequent humans are derivations from the original human, Adam. This replication implies a lack of true plurality because humans are seen more as copies of an original rather than unique individuals. This version diminishes the sense of plurality by presenting humanity as less inherently diverse and more as extensions of a primary figure (male). What is interesting here is not the gender aspect – that it is part of it – but the idea that we are more a “what” than a “who.”

   Our condition – this is me, not Arendt – is that these are two poles on a spectrum. We fulfill our nature by becoming a who, which means living in and embracing plurality. The will to form others according to my ego (or some master model of humanity) represents the denial of plurality, of the possibility of love, condemning us to a kind of self-love that can be no more fruitful than masturbation.

    I am trying to ground narcissism and explain it as a failure to become what we were all along meant to be. Sentimentality is a coping mechanism that allows us to live with this failure but also prevents us from overcoming it.

. . .

 

If we as human beings are measured by the appropriate standard, we all to some extent or other fall short. This is the great Truth in Jesus's revolutionary subversion of the division of humanity into the righteous and the (to-be-purged) unrighteous.

Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives, but early the next morning he was back again at the Temple. A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them. As he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd. “Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?” They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust. When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman. Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?” “No, Lord,” she said. And Jesus said, “Neither do I. Go and sin no more.” (John 8:1-11)

 

And this:

 

And Jesus said unto him, “Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but One, that is, God. (Mark 10:18)

 

Or this:

 

You hypocrite! First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:5)

 

Or this:

 

And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12: 30-31)

 

When asked, “Who is my neighbor?,” Jesus responded by telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, pointing out that your neighbor is the person whose need you see and are able to meet (Luke 10:26-37). And the craziest teaching of all, which is part of the love that is the essence of the Creator and thus our essence:

“But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:43–44)

 

These passages taken together represent the heart of Jesus’s teaching about how to live. They are compelling to me quite about from any belief in the incarnation or the resurrection. I am constantly amazed that the Trump-loving Christians in my country – including heart-breakingly for me many in the Catholic clergy – never refer to these teachings of Jesus, always going back to the Old Testament attitudes that Jesus literally and explicitly rejects and corrects. And he rejects and corrects them primarily because of an original sinful attitude: denying a common humanity with others; elevating one’s own ego to the judge over good and evil (real and unreal); dividing humanity up into a camp of the righteous and a camp of the unrighteous, like in a fairy tale or fantasy novel or Hollywood blockbuster.  

   A common humanity means that every other human being is a limit to my will in a way nothing else in nature is. And part of that stems from a solidarity in sin, a realization that we all fall short and the role of chance in human life. This teaching is not new; it is part of our culture as marked by sayings like "Don’t judge me until you’ve walked a mile in my shoes" or "There but for the grace of God go you or I." 

   I will just assert here – and I recognize it is a gift of culture, that the Spartans or Nazis (and the most radical postmodernist-type thinkers) could have nothing but contempt for it – that we all fall short of perfect goodness; that it is rare and difficult for a human being to become either a saint or a demon; that we therefore depend on forgiveness to live together, which is the only way for finite and fallible beings to live together. I would gladly debate this with any well-meaning person.

   If you read who is most in danger of Hell according to Jesus, it is the self-righteous hypocrite. The Christian nationalist is thus closest to Hell.

. . .

   The extreme aspects of postmodernity – the metaphysics that all reality is socially or individually constructed (solipsism); that truth is social or person; that there is thus no standard to make judgments beyond the social or the personal; that life is a game of power; that every disagreement is a power conflict, necessarily ad hominem – are perfect for sentimentality. The narcissistic self – whether MAGA or WOKE (and much else) – idealizes itself as an innocent victim and demonizes the ‘other’ as evil, unrepentant perpetrator. All of history is reduced to a Gnostic battle of Good verses Evil.

   WOKE – again, I don’t like this because the origin of it was good – and MAGA (rotten from the beginning) settles on a small number of sins, as Wendell Berry points out: racism, misogyny, and Homophobia vs. abortion and traditional male and female roles. These public sins have the virtue that one is either a sinner or not a sinner. Those who condemn the women who have had abortions are as clean as a new fallen snow with respect to this one sin. Those who condemn racists and their attitudes and actions are likewise a pure as a new fallen snow in this respect, though by reducing all people to "binaries" like black/white, pure/impure, moral/immoral, man/non-man, etc. they are closer to a different kind of prejudice than they think. 

    These folks are the situation in which of those who were about to stone the adulteress (the righteous) and the adulteress (the sinner who had to be purged from the community). These absolute differences, denying the solidarity of sin, denying a common humanity, fight it out, ratcheting up hate and love: love for the self and their identity group; hatred for the other. The cost of living in the illusion of being pure and righteous is the hatred of the other. 

  If reality is constructed and relative power informs the construction, this is perfectly natural.

  I say: it is nothing but the fat, relentless ego, the ego that never had the chance to develop into a soul. It is a denial of reality, goodness, and love.

  If we hold the full picture of goodness up before us – the seven deadly sins, all of the Ten Commandments, the life of Jesus and the saints for Christians – we could not think of ourselves as belonging to a saving remnant. We might do well avoiding racist feelings and thoughts or avoiding an abortion. But who of us avoids failures of justice and love; of sentimentality and truthfulness; of chastity and self-restraint? Don't all these failures collectively make the world what it is? Not just the one or other publicly emphasized sin? 

    C. S. Lewis refused to write critically of sins that he was in little danger of committing. He wrote only of those sins he was most guilty of. He knew them best and was least of danger of feeling self-righteous in the act of criticizing. That seems to me to be a good principle.

   WOKE and MAGA – the sentimental politics of suffering children in adult bodies.

And it is not like there are no deep issues worthy of serious discussion underneath the surface of all this public idiocy. What does justice require? What does a good society look like? How to think about past wrongs and the individual people alive today who have inherited this mess? What does love - or human dignity - require of us? Why does our political process fail on so many fronts? How can we ensure sources of information that value truth over 'narratives'? And more. I have tried to write about some of them in a serious way in my journal. But this public adolescence makes genuine dialog - learning from one another - impossible. 

see Wendell Berry, "Sin" in The Need to be Whole. 

 Postmodernism, cont. - Philosophical Root

                                                                            Kant

To me, Thomas Jefferson is a perfect example of the Enlightenment. He famously wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Now “men” either means human beings (Menschen) or the thought is stupid. This idea is a refutation of the medieval teachings of the Church, taken from St. Thomas. On the one hand, Aquinas's philosophy is grounded in the concept of natural law, which posits that certain rights and moral principles are inherent in human nature and can be discovered through reason. According to natural law, all humans possess inherent dignity and worth because they are made in the image of God. On the other hand, St. Thomas Aquinas articulated a view of social and gender relations that embodies a duality of equal dignity and different social valuations. He upheld the inherent dignity of all human beings, recognizing their equal worth as rational beings created in the image of God. However, he also maintained that natural law prescribed distinct roles for each sex and for different social classes. Men were naturally suited for leadership and public authority due to their perceived greater rationality, while women were inclined toward domestic responsibilities and nurturing roles. Similarly, Aquinas believed that society required a hierarchical structure in which some individuals, naturally endowed with leadership qualities, would guide and govern, while others, suited for various types of labor, would follow and support. This hierarchical complementarity, encompassing both gender and social roles, was seen as reflecting a divinely ordained order that contributed to the common good. While men and leaders were regarded as heads of households and society, women and workers were viewed as essential partners and supporters, their roles justified by theological interpretations of scripture and practical necessities. In this official philosophy of the Declaration, Jefferson stressed human moral and political equality; in his private life, he practiced hierarchy – he was a slave owner.

    The basis for political equality was reason – a minimal competence that we all share. We can know enough about ourselves and reality to understand our own interests and the common good to govern ourselves. The previous class society was premised on a denial of competence: women, children, the laboring classes, and of course Jefferson’s slaves were thought to lack full rationality, full competence. They needed patriarchal guidance. They were incapable of self-government. People – like the sovereign monarch – did not have to know everything to be able to govern themselves. But they had to be able to make competent judgments based on evidence and reasoning. The government is to the sovereign people was the cabinet was to the sovereign monarch: presenting to the sovereign arguments and evidence as to the requirements of justice and reality. The denial of competence was thus also a denial of a capacity of judging what reality and justice requires. Both arguments appealed to human nature.

   Thomas Aquinas’ teachings on nature and natural hierarchy lent themselves to an ideological justification of the power of an elite over the great majority of working people and women. Enlightenment thinkers got around nature by reducing it to what can be quantified and described without respect to meaning and value. The universe for the 18^th Enlightenment was a closed system operating by mechanical laws indifferent to human aspirations. With this ontological shift came a simplifying of reason, reducing it from a richer Aristotelian understanding to a much more restrictive empiricist-rationalist conception in philosophy and of course to the scientific methods – which did wonders for natural science to be sure. (More specially, it cut out Aristotle’s concern with essence and teleology, which understood in a certain way brings a hermeneutic aspect to reason and a meaning-aspect to reality.) A collection of raw materials without intrinsic value. Nature so understood didn’t justify any hierarchy. On this reduction, the justification of unequal classes and restriction of women’s political involvement was taken away – it was emancipatory.

   But it came at a heavy price. Adopting the Galilean picture of the world cut off our inner lives – the realm of meaning; the realm of art, religion, morality, political action, and philosophy; the realm of freedom, reason, spontaneity, and love – from reality; imprisoned us in our subjectivity. If nature (reality) is a closed system, then everything in it is predetermined. If everything is predetermined, then our experience of (limited) freedom and meaning is an illusion. The belief in emancipation, an illusion.

   [I believe the way to go would have been to keep the classical understanding of a meaningful nature but criticize and purge the ideological interpretations of it.]

  Kant attempted to reconcile our freedom (and thus meaning) with determinism by making the physical, sensual world a kind of Matrix – designed by whatever programmer designed our brains. Our brains construct reality; our minds to not conform to it. The physical world is a closed system because our minds (subconsciously) generate it as such. Reason is thus powerless to know anything about reality as such, about goodness, about beauty. Our knowledge is the knowledge of our own construction, like mapping our minds instead of the world. The world we know is our own representation of reality, and we cannot get out of our minds/brains and compare our representations with reality itself. Our deterministic science accurately describes the representation – the algorithms of the Matrix. But even though we cannot know anything about reality, we are free to imagine or to have faith that our subjective lives correspond to something real, even if not the phenomenal world. Science can’t prove that wrong, since it is limited to appearances, to the world as a human representation.

   The roots of Postmodernism today – the extreme forms of it in art and philosophy – are to be found here.

  For Kant, we are imprisoned in a subjective Matrix, the creation of our own conscious experience. But within that subjectivity, we experience the world at the level of sense perception universally the same. It is like we are in windowless spaceships orbiting a planet but at least have all the same instruments. Thus the sky appears blue to all of us. We all see the white coffee cup on my desk. The data of science are the same for all of us. And science works. Like being inside a computer-programmed virtual world that has been programmed with the laws of physics, which we can amazingly discover from our location inside the program.

    But even on Kant’s terms, what gives anyone the warrant to assume that his instrument panel is the same as others. Perhaps the sky is blue for me but green for you as it was for the painter Eduard Munch, who asserted that what his critics can't understand was that for him the sky was green. Perhaps for you it is green, too, but the abstract sign ‘blue’ refers to that color and it refers to the color blue for me. Since I can’t get inside your spaceship mind and experience the world as you do, and vice-versa, we can never know.

   From there it is a short step to the idea that different kinds of people do have different instrument panels based on different natural or political histories. Whorf-Sapir believed different cultures had different instrument panels. Marx believed that the exploited working class had a different instrument panel from their capitalist exploiters. Nietzsche thought that the resentment weak had a different mode of experience from the value-creating noble – that the drive for power or the maximal possible elevation of the ego determines how we experience the world. And from there it is a short step to Foucault, who believes that this power drive permeates all of experience and expresses itself at the very core of our language – in discourses – that make, for example, the subjectivity of marginalized groups very different from those who are not marginalized (I guess the billionaires).

   All of this begins with the idea of Kant: reality, the reality that we perceive even, is a human construction all the way down. Few share Kant’s belief that the construction is universal – as science is universal. Many postmodern folk also see science as one power discourse among others. But the assumption that we live in a Matrix of our own making is dogma.

 Postmodernism, cont. [hurriedly written]

Much postmodern culture focuses on sex and gender, categories that I usually prefer to forget about. And one of the most confusing trends for me is the attempt to dissolve the ‘binary’ of man / woman, boy / girl into a spectrum of possible gender ‘identities.’ Here is a sample of possible identities, going in alphabetical order:

Agender: A person who does not identify themselves with or experience any gender. Agender people are also called null-gender, genderless, gendervoid, or neutral gender.

Abimegender: Associated with being profound, deep, and infinite. The term abimegender may be used alone or in combination with other genders.

Adamas gender: A gender that is indefinable or indomitable. People identifying with this gender refuse to be categorized in any particular gender identity.

Aerogender: Also called evaisgender, this gender identity changes according to one’s surroundings.

Aesthetigender: Also called aesthetgender, it is a type of gender identity derived from aesthetics.

Affectugender: This is based on the person’s mood swings or fluctuations.

Agenderflux: A person with this gender identity is mostly agender with brief shifts of belonging to other gender types.

Alexigender: The person has a fluid gender identity between more than one type of gender although they cannot name the genders they feel fluid in.

Aliusgender: This gender identity stands apart from existing social gender constructs. It means having a strong specific gender identity that is neither male nor female.

Amaregender: Having a gender identity that changes depending on the person one is emotionally attached to.

Ambigender: Having two specific gender identities simultaneously without any fluidity or fluctuations.

Ambonec: The person identifies themselves as both man and woman and yet does not belong to either.

Amicagender: A gender-fluid identity where a person changes their gender depending on the friends they have.

Androgyne: A person feels a combination of feminine and masculine genders.

Anesigender: The person feels close to a specific type of gender despite being more comfortable in closely identifying themselves with another gender.

Angenital: The person desires to be without any primary sexual characteristics although they do not identify themselves as genderless.

Anogender: The gender identity fades in and out in intensity but always comes back to the same gendered feeling.

Anongender: The person has a gender identity but does not label it or would prefer to not have a label.

Antegender: A protean gender that can be anything but is formless and motionless.

Anxiegender: This gender identity has anxiety as its prominent characteristic.

Apagender: The person has apathy or a lack of feelings toward one's gender identity.

Apconsugender: It means knowing what are not the characteristics of gender but not knowing what are its characteristics. Thus, a person hides its primary characteristics from the individual.

Astergender: The person has a bright and celestial gender identity.

Astral gender: Having a gender identity that feels to be related to space.

Autigender: Having a gender identity that feels to be closely related to being autistic.

Autogender: Having a gender experience that is deeply connected and personal to oneself.

Axigender: A gender identity that is between the two extremes of agender and any other type of gender. Both the genders are experienced one at a time without any overlapping. The two genders are described as on the opposite ends of an axis.

Bigender: Having two gender identities at the same or different times.

Biogender: Having a gender that is closely related to nature.

Blurgender: Also called gender fuss, blurgender means having more than one gender identities that blur into each other so that no particular type of gender identity is clear.

Boyflux: The person identifies themselves as male, but they experience varying degrees of male identity. This may range from feeling agender to completely male.

 

 

 

 There seems to be a lot of overlap, with the common theme being: ‘I am not a man or a woman, strictly speaking.’ The underlying assumption seems to be: sex (arguably) and gender (certainly) are “social constructs,” not natural phenomena. Nature is not normative here. Reality doesn’t tell us how to think or act here. Rather, how we think, feel, and act has been determined by social power: the power of men over women, of heterosexual people over homosexual people, etc. Rejecting the traditional ascriptions of sex/gender gets associated with an act of liberation from these repressive social structures that are perpetuated ‘on automatic’ so to speak by language and its ‘binary oppositions’ and ‘hierarchies’ among such concepts.   

 

   What sense can I make of this? Growing up, I never questioned the idea that nature divided humanity into two sexes, male and female. The connection to reproducing the species seemed obvious at some point: my father didn’t give birth to me or nurse me; my mother did. That seemed a rather fundamental difference. As did the fact that I could not give birth and that I could get a woman pregnant. Indeed, getting women pregnant and becoming a father have been the most impactful events in my life. Reflecting more generally, the central role of sex and birth in human life (along with death), it certainly makes sense to me. It is a bridge between all human cultures: we are born of woman, we are born into a world that was there before us and will be there after us, and we are mortal.

  Are the ‘binary’ sexes, male and female, natural? Depends on what you mean by natural. What is the difference between a human mother who loves and cares for her children and a mother cat or bear? If we think of ‘natural’ as what is exemplified by the mother cat or bear, then the human mother transcends ‘nature.’ The cat and bear abandon and apparently forget their offspring after they can fend for themselves. They only “love” their offspring in a radically attenuated sense. They don’t tell stories about mothers' love – or violations of that love; about the meaning of motherhood. We can’t imagine the mother cat suffering remorse if something happens to a kitten while she is distracted by other things. Their souls can’t be wounded by evil done to a child or the grief of losing a child. We mark the difference between human meanings and animal instincts in all kinds of ways. Humans imbue the nature we share with cats and bears with meanings, within a world (Welt, not just Um-Welt). But inhabiting a realm of meaning is natural for us; it is how we are. Natural is relative to the being in question: what is natural for us is not necessarily natural for a cat, though many overlaps obviously exist. For a cat, human motherhood can only be super-natural. But our meanings are not radically cut off from nature as expressed in the lives of cats; they emerge from that matrix to become something that transcends it.

     The dominant experience between the ‘binary’ of man and woman is related to sexual reproduction and the meanings it has within our different worlds. We can imagine a world – an ‘unnatural’ world- in which sexual reproduction and its associated human meanings did not have this importance. For instance, in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, motherhood and reproduction are fundamentally restructured to align with the World State’s highly controlled society. Natural reproduction is entirely eliminated; instead, human embryos are artificially created through the Bokanovsky Process, which produces large numbers of identical individuals from a single egg. These embryos are then conditioned and socialized to fit into their designated roles within the societal hierarchy. Traditional family structures, including motherhood, are abolished, with the concept of family being deemed outdated and unnecessary. Citizens are conditioned from birth to accept and value their roles in society, with emotional detachment from natural processes and familial bonds being promoted. Hatcheries and Conditioning Centers play crucial roles in producing and preparing citizens, ensuring uniformity and control. This system erodes personal connections and individual identity, focusing instead on maintaining a stable, compliant population through technological means rather than human relationships. That world is more imaginable today than it was at the time Huxley wrote the novel.

    In George Orwell’s 1984, attempts were made to radically reengineer the natural-worldly meanings of sex and sexual relations. The Party exerts extensive control over sexual identities and behavior as part of its broader strategy to dominate every aspect of life. The Party suppresses sexual desire and personal pleasure by promoting policies that view sex merely as a means of procreation for producing loyal Party members, rather than as a source of personal fulfillment. Techniques such as promoting chastity through organizations like the Junior Anti-Sex League, and viewing any deviation from Party-approved sexual behavior as "thoughtcrime," are employed to eliminate personal pleasure and emotional bonds. The Party’s pervasive surveillance extends to private activities, including sexual behavior, to prevent dissent and maintain control. By destroying intimate relationships and emotional connections, the Party aims to ensure that all loyalty and emotional energy are directed solely toward Big Brother and the state. Through propaganda and indoctrination, the Party enforces its ideological control, eradicating personal and romantic fulfillment to prevent any challenges to its authority.

     In the human world, which is natural for us, the forces of nature at work in the mother cat are weaker; they don’t force a particular set of meanings on a given form of life. At the level of gender, depending on the form of life, there are many ways to be (not just perform!) a girl or a woman, a boy or a man. I have raised a daughter. I tried to make her aware of how capitalism reduces the being of women – through entertainment, advertising, and fashion industries – attempts to construct a female type such that the human worth of a woman is a function of her sexiness. I always admired athletic women – “Tomboys” – who dared to buck the system in that respect. But although I understood that there were different ways to be a woman – some better than others – I never questioned the fact that there were women and men. The same applies to being a man. I never thought that to be a “real man” you had to be like John Wayne.

    I think how we think, act, and feel as men and women depends on what makes sense in a form of life, or as a rejection of a particular form of life. My critique of both masculinity and femininity in capitalism was based on my belief that capitalism alienated men and women from one another, constructing in ways that violated our reality in order to perpetuate itself as the dominant economic form. Again, I never questioned the reality of masculinity and femininity themselves.

The radical break with human nature as I have been trying to understand it – becoming conscious of yourself within a realm of meanings and interpretations emerging from the natural forces at work in cats and bears and being interwoven within a form of life interacting with other forms of life – occurs with ‘Modernity,’ of the regime of Science-Technology-Capitalism. Galileo’s crime was not providing definitive evidence and knock-down arguments for a more scientifically accurate model of the solar system; it was reducing all of physical reality – nature – to fit his mechanical physics, alienating not only human meanings from the universe but the attenuated love of the mother cat as well. This paralleled an analogous movement in capitalism, which reduced all of nature (including human nature) to raw materials to be exploited for profit. We always demean and devalue that which we intend to violate and exploit.  The product of this was the transformation of the natural rhythms of birth and death for a society in which technology has become our ‘nature’ and a society that has made traditional male-female roles – and the gender conceptions associated with them – increasingly irrelevant. We are somewhere between traditional economies that had to live within the natural limits of their places and Huxley’s Brave New World. Confusion is the result.

    My great-grandparents are the best example of a marriage I have known. They both farmed a piece of land they loved and cared for. It was – together with raising their children – a common project, a common love. They divided the labor. It made more sense for my great-grandfather to plow the fields with the horses and my great-grandmother to tend the garden and the chickens, for example. Both that was not alienation. All jobs that were necessary to the life of the farm were valuable and valued. My great-grandmother was not demeaned by tending the garden rather than plowing the fields, strong woman though she was. She gave birth to their three children at home and nursed them. Neighbors helped pick up the slack, for the farm was embedded in a farming community in which self-help networks were essential. Both loved their children, but as a mother who carried each of the children in her body, gave birth to each in pain, and nursed each her relationship to the children was naturally different. Now in that farming community, having 72 genders or doing away with men and women in favor of a spectrum of identities would have made no sense at all.

   But it is not nonsensical in the urban metropolises generated by Science-Technology-Capitalism (now global). What roles there are have become largely interchangeable. I am a teacher. My masculinity is not essential for my teaching. I live together with my sons: I cook and do all the tasks my grandmother did. There are no fields for me to plow. Not even a garden to tend to. Men and women have been disconnected from the kinds of social and economic functions that made sense in pre-industrial economies. Carrying over the norms and concepts that made perfect sense to metropolitan Berlin in 2024 makes no sense. Neither do the virtues that both great-grandparents had to have to a high degree to be a competent member of their agricultural community. Success in capitalist Berlin demands a whole different set of qualities – not virtues but the ability to present yourself in a certain way, to manipulate others into believing what you need them to believe, etc.

   What I am suggesting is that postmodernism does belong to a certain form of life – contemporary global, urban capitalism, with its social atoms and masses. And I am also suggesting that this form of life – if you want to call it a form at all – is the setting for the 72 genders and the dissolution of the natural (in a human way natural) categories of man and woman. For Science-Technology-Capitalism is premised on the denial of nature – or replacing our human ideas of nature with the reductive form embraced by Galileo, Descartes, Newton as well as Rockefeller and Bill Gates.

     In place of trying to live by conforming our minds with nature (in the broad sense), we have taken over the lore of ‘autonomy’ – which also fits perfected into urban capitalist cities populated by isolated individuals and their acquaintances. I don’t see any difference between Modern and Postmodern in this respect: both posit the self as the source of meaning and value. Nature is cookie dough to be cut up by the autonomous self. Or the identity-group. Or the powers-that-be. The idea of nurturing mothers and fathers as a response to the human reality of birth and child-rearing gets thrown out with the rest.  I am not saying that every woman has a vocation of being a mother or every man the vocation of being a father. Some clearly do not and that is fine. I am saying that a form of life that cannot honor being a nurturing mother or father – a form of life cut off from human nature – is destructive.

    The metaphysical system of Nominalism that underpins Science-Technology-Capitalism also only makes sense within that regime (or in the minds of people who affirm that regime). Reality transcends our conceptualizations and classifications of it. To take the well-know example: we have one word to refer to ‘snow’; the Inuit have a more complex vocabulary:

• kanevvluk: 'fine snow'
• qanikcaq: 'snow on ground'
• muruaneq: 'soft deep snow'
• nutaryuk: 'fresh snow'

 

The net of their language is more compact, captures more of reality than ours because their form of life required that at some point in their history. Meaning in both cases does have a referent, a referent that transcends language and can be classified and conceptualized in different ways – even as a poem can be translated in different ways. All the possible ways of classifying and conceptualizing ‘snow’ would be its reality even as all the possible plausible translations and readings of a poem might be thought to constitute its meaning, its reality. But making sense depends on who we are, where we are, and when we are. We are finite. Motherhood has been important in different ways because it has been important to us, necessary to us. In my world, it had been embedded in a language of love. That limits what can make sense.

    Nominalism abstracts from this. Anthropomorphic readings are subjective, prejudiced, ideological (as they indeed often are), socially constructed. But even a shadow is a shadow of something real. Even a distortion distorts some reality that could be seen more clearly. Nominalism denies nature. It posits that reality is cookie dough, and the mind can carve it up in any way it likes – ways that imply power over others or liberation from that power. From that fact that no one system of meaning (classification, conceptualization) can be THE TRUTH, it concludes that all possible systems of meaning are arbitrary. And that matches the experience of the alienated city-dweller caught in the web of capitalist life very well. It becomes logically a matter of taste whether I am a man, woman, or one of the other identities. And if there is no reality to violate, if I or my group can cut it up any way we like, then someone who wants to undermine my meanings and values and force his on me is just a naked attempt to dominate me. Nominalism makes sense in the context of Science-Technology-Capitalism.

    And if, as I believe on the basis of the reasoning provided by Christopher Lasch and others as well as my own experience of life, this regime generates various form of narcissistic personality types (disorders) as it main character, then ‘autonomy’ and ‘Nominalism’ become even more commonsensical. For the narcissist desires above all to remove all limits to its needs and desires, and reality is by definition a limit. If doing x violates the being of an animal or a person, then the animal or person limits my will. Nature is a limit. Love – from the outside of love – is a limit. The self or the identity as a source of meaning and value is the denial of nature or reality as a source of meaning and value. And this is the necessary prerequisite for Science-Technology-Capitalism: if I need to deforest the upper peninsula of Michigan for profit, then I must treat it as raw material. If I want to technologically intervene in my body to change it, I must view it as raw material, as property. If I want to extract stem cells from the aborted fetus, I must view it as raw material. I must demean and devalue everything, which means I must exclude it from the language of love, indeed from the realm of meaning. This is not true philosophy; this is the anthropology of a particular regime: Science-Technology-Capitalism.

   Aspects of so-called postmodernism push against this. I am sympathetic to them. Other aspects attempt to embody its logic more perfectly. I am opposed to them.

   I believe we have a nature – not the same kind as the cat; not one that forces one interpretation on us. Nature is like a poem. There are many possible readings of the poem; there are fewer possible profound readings. We are limited by our finite perspective. We are fallible: especially to the extent we remained locked into narcissism. But the poem – nature – talks back to us and we need to listen. Science-Technology-Capitalism is deaf, blind, and mute.

 Postmodernism, cont.

                                                          Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

One of the strangest features of popular postmodernism is the emphasis on ‘binary opposites’ and the alleged implications undermining people’s ability to represent reality using language.

   The basic idea is not complicated. My 9-year-old son expressed it not too long ago”: “You know, without evil, there would be no good. The good would just be common.” He is thinking Derrida’s thoughts after him. I have tried to write about how the meaning of one concept depends not only on an opposite (sometimes) but a whole web of other, related concepts.

    Now if we don’t get carried away, that can be a helpful insight. I immediately think of what a revelation it was to Malcolm X and Mohammad Ali how black and white, darkness and light, are connotated in our language; how categorizing people as black and white imported all those connotations into our experience of race; how their natural response was to reverse the hierarchy, seeing white a of the devil and black as of God. I can understand how the use of ‘men’ or ‘Man’ for human beings normalized a view of men as somehow paradigmatic human beings and women as only human by analogy. What this means for me is that we must subject the use of such language to critical, moral thinking. I have no problem with that. Let’s root out all demeaning, dehumanizing uses of language, both conscious and unconscious uses. Concepts are not fixed. Philosophy is the making sense of and the deepening of concepts. This deepening can go on without end.

   It is when the idea becomes metaphysical, absolute that the problems begins. An argument like this:

The meaning of one concept is intelligible only with reference to another opposite concept. If meaning is thus constructed, it is a function of the differences between concepts and not how they represent reality. Thus attempts to represent reality with language are futile. Thus there is no truth, no understanding, etc.

It is true we would not clearly – clear and muddled, another binary opposite (I unashamedly think clarity a virtue and muddle a vice – another binary) – recognize the evilness of Auschwitz without the concepts of good and evil. We would not recognize the evilness of the evil of Auschwitz without at the same time being able to recognize the goodness of a Primo Levi, who wrote so truthfully about the experience of being alive in Auschwitz. The meaning is not conveyed by one concept alone but both. More, the ‘binary’ belongs to a larger conceptual web of concepts. It is a complicated phenomenon. We apply the concept ‘evil’ to Auschwitz but Auschwitz expands the meaning of the concept ‘evil’ as well. When applied to Auschwitz, evil means something different than it does when applied to, say, Donald Trump. Every application of the concept changes both the concept and the object it is applied to and the person applying it. Every application involves perspective and interpretation. In no case do we have a god-like, absolute understanding of things. We are always in danger of applying it in inauthentic ways, in ways that cover up as opposed to revealing reality. Any use can involve us in difficult thought. But the goal is to conform our language and our thinking to the experience of evil – in this case, the evil of Auschwitz. And our experience of evil is an experience of something that confronts us, shocks us even. Reality is thus the measure of thinking. It is like that perfect circle that judges all the empirical circles we draw with pencil and paper.

    The point of the pop-Derrideans is that trying to conform your mind to reality is pointless because the structure of language constructs reality all the way down. (I am not sure this is Derrida’s point. I don’t pretend deeply to understand him though I have spent some time and effort reading a selection of his ‘texts’). That would make sense only if I accept a binary – Absolute knowledge or complete skepticism – that makes no sense to me. It is important to understand how ignorant we are. We understand this better the more we understand. But it trivializes experience to imagine that evil is just a word (nominalism!) and thus doesn’t disclose anything about Auschwitz.

 Postmodernism, cont.

                                                          Christopher Lasch (1932-1994)

At the extreme fringe of philosophy, you get an epistemic relativism that goes all the way down. Precisely this variant is most popular in the culture at large. It is easier for one thing: ‘x is true or good because I desire or need it to be true or good’ (or ‘my identity-group so desires or needs it to be true or good’). This is nonsense but powerful nonsense (cf. witch-burning in the past). I think its power is connected with the dominant personality type produced by consumer capitalism.

   I will make my background assumptions explicit.

·        We need to live in a certain kind of community to develop our nature – our highest most defining capacities. Part of this is contingent: whether a person becomes a craftsman, actor, teacher, physicist, or farmer is contingent; learning to be good at something and to be able to live in fellowship with others dedicated to that goal is essential.

·        We are less than fully human if we do not make virtues part of our being. You only become honest, just, courageous, discerning, etc. by doing honest, just, courageous, or discerning things. Without living in fellowship with others in a community – including friendship, a great gift – which values such virtues you cannot make them a part of yourself. You will be left with your desires just as they are, focused on you, unrefined by the higher needs of living in fellowship with others. (Cicero defines the tyrant as the person who is incapable of living in community with others.)

·        We need roots: ties to a family, a place in the world we care deeply about. We need a home in other words.

·        You can take this or leave it but I think we need hope, faith, and love as metaphysical or theological virtues – that is, as spiritual demeanors. I don’t see how a person can affirm life or find themselves loveable without them. I think this has roots in our mortality and our being subject to great misfortune.

·        We share a common humanity with others, and that has deep moral implications. I love the particular; I love diversity if for no other reason than places on earth are diverse. But without an underlying solidarity with all of humanity, we cannot explain good or evil and thus are incomplete. This absence of this sense of common humanity leads to othering, reducing people to categories. That is a major root of evil.

  

That is an important part of my (and not only my) picture of human nature.

Capitalism (globalization) as a totalizing economy destroys community and the dignity of work, alienates people from their roots (from a sense of belonging: no wonder ‘identity’ politics are so prevalent), encourages vice (greed, sloth, covetousness, violence, etc.), and reduces people and the earth to commodities. The factory worker to the craftsman can serve as an analogy for capitalist vs. human work. The sprawling urban center where people are mostly strangers to one another pursuing their own private interests vis-a-vis the southern Indiana farming community that my great grandparents were part of is an analogy for the loss of roots, our accursed social mobility (or perhaps the airport – masses of strangers from everywhere and nowhere with no interest in each other going on their separate journeys). I could go on. All of this is supported by an ideology of individualism and “success” defined as wealth and status – or today, by finding an identity to latch on to: leaving home and making it big. Or today by self-definition, appearing before others as the self-defined self, usually with the aid of purchased products. I have no time to do a thorough analysis here. I will just quote Christopher Lasch:

 

“Every society reproduces its culture, its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing experience— in the individual, in the form of personality.”

 

“Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.”

 

“Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his “grandiose self” reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power, and charisma. For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design.”

 

“In a society that dreads old age and death, aging holds a special terror for those who fear dependence and whose' self-esteem requires the admiration usually reserved for youth, beauty, celebrity, or charm. The usual defenses against the ravages of age—identification with ethical or artistic values beyond one's immediate interests, intellectual curiosity, the consoling emotional warmth derived from happy relationships in the past—can do nothing for the narcissist. Unable to derive whatever comfort comes from identification with historical continuity, he finds it impossible, on the contrary, "to accept the fact that a younger generation now possesses many of the previously cherished gratifications of beauty, wealth, power and, particularly, creativity. To be able to enjoy life in a process involving a growing identification with other people's happiness and achievements is tragically beyond the capacity of narcissistic personalities.”

To the performing self, the only reality is the identity he can construct out of materials furnished by advertising and mass culture, themes of popular film and fiction, and fragments torn from a vast range of cultural traditions, all of them equally contemporaneous to the contemporary mind.* In order to polish and perfect the part he has devised for himself, the new Narcissus gazes at his own reflection, not so much in admiration as in unremitting search of flaws, signs of fatigue, decay. Life becomes a work of art, while "the first art work in an artist," in Norman Mailer's pronouncement, "is the shaping of his own personality.”

 

I see the prevalence of the narcissistic personality type as a sociological phenomenon more than a moral critique. It is usually a “defense mechanism,” a way of protecting the self against an absence of love and all the spiritual needs that capitalist society cannot meet. We are all affected by the structures that give rise to it: weak nuclear families (if that); social mobility and atomization; loss of roots; cut off from history; consumerism and advertising, which encourages consumption as lifestyle; commodification of practices that could promote true character, like sports; the worship of idols, who we call stars; dependence on media (especially social media) rather than interpersonal communication and reading for a sense of reality; work that cannot be imagined as a vocation. Everything conspires to force us back in on ourselves and to prevent the transformation of self-centered desires into virtuous characters.

   What I can add to Lasch is that the perfect epistemology for narcissism is epistemic relativism or subjectivism. And the perfect narcissistic ontology sees reality as something analogous to cookie dough which the self can cut up in any way it pleases. Existentialism – or nihilism – is the best way to look at ethics for the narcissist. And deconstruction is the best narcissistic approach to art. What all of these have in common is this: they remove limits to self-wishes, desires, and perceived needs. Reality limits the self. Truth limits the self. Beauty limits the self. Goodness in things limits the self. The self is constantly seeking to overcome limits to its will. The way the damaged narcissistic self can try to find itself loveable – which is narcissistic precisely because it does not have the resources to find itself truly loveable – is to follow Nietzsche’s advice: having killed “God” (the source of reality, beauty, and goodness outside you that can find you loveable), the (pitiful) self secretly tries to become a God substitute itself. Hopeless and absurd. The more entrenched in narcissism you become, the less objectively loveable you become, except as an object of pity. And outside of being loved and being part of a community that demands virtues, narcissism is all that there is. Except failed narcissism, which results in depression and other kinds of mental illness. Whenever the nature of any being is damaged, illness is the result. And capitalism in its present form damages human nature at its core.

   So narcissism unhinges us from reality. Capitalism manufactures narcissism (and mental illness) by depriving us of the sunlight, water, and soil, so to speak, we need to flourish (in exchange for a bunch of consumer goods and a few genuine benefits like modern dentistry). MAGA and the politically correct left are different expressions of the same thing with the same roots. Both are “postmodern” in a negative sense. I would say they represent extreme cultural distortions of postmodernism that are largely explainable sociologically.

 POSTMODERNISM: Some Reflections

                                                        Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1948)

 

Like many people, I dislike this term and the cliches associated with it. I some senses I am also ‘post’ modern: that is, I am a critic of certain aspects of modernity, which in a still more radical form are the aspects of the postmodern I am critical of. I will skip the labels and focus of some of the ideas I find problematic. These will be loose reflections only.

 

There are aspects of classical liberalism (in the tradition of Locke, Hume, and Mill) that I find indispensable; others I criticize. I resist the idea that liberal democracy as arose during the Enlightenment is nothing but an illicit universalizing of a European/American, middle-class, white, male perspective – of no value beyond that category; a form of oppression of marginalized groups. It is not wrong to say it was the ideology of the middle class in the early stages of capitalism and the industrial revolution. It is not wrong to say European (mostly British) men formulated it. I agree that outside of that socio-economic context it may make no sense: I suppose it made little sense to Tecumseh, for example; it would probably have made no sense to Japanese Samurai of the 17^th century. The idea that an individual has natural rights and in that respect are all equal disclosed something about our humanity – perhaps in distorted, culturally thick form – that most pre-modern regimes repressed. Yes, natural rights were a gift of culture, of a particular culture in a specific historical constellation. But I for one do not want to undo that aspect of the Enlightenment. I don’t want to return to a society in which torture is fine or in which witches and heretics were burned at the stake. The idea that an idea is tainted by its origin – that it originated largely in the minds of white middle-class men in this case – is a fallacy. I wouldn’t give a damn if it arose in a Japanese fishing village, a medieval nunnery,  or in the halls of Montezuma. I am grateful for anything good from my past irrespective of its contingent origin.

 

. . .

 

In a graduate philosophy course called “Conservative Thought,” I read Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (I was also introduced to Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Foucault in this course.).  We discussed the by now well-known themes: the incredulity toward “meta-narratives” – the grand, all-explaining “narratives” like Marxism, Naziism, Thomist Christianity, Enlightenment progress, etc. as ultimate justifiers of knowledge (beliefs) and action; the rise of the computer society and the commodification of knowledge at the expense of truth and wisdom; skepticism concerning the representations of reality we make through language and art; the loss of legitimacy of institutional repositories of expert knowledge. All of these categories are so vague. I wish some meta-narratives had lost their potency. Then one economic blueprint destroys whole rural farming communities and working-class communities, when it thus causes the loss of local knowledge of the land and people, then, yes, I say fuck that economic meta-narrative. (I still recall a speech by Angela Merkel in which she cited a statistic about the decline of farmers from 30% in the GDR to 4% with the matter-of-fact assurance that this was a necessary adjustment to the modern economic philosophy – without a thought for the destruction of the village culture and the loss of knowledge and skills that had been accumulated over generations. The same kind of thing happened in Stalinism.) Yes, I judge a meta-narrative by its fruits. The fruits are always local and personal. But we can’t live without metaphysics, whether in the form of religion or not. (Nihilism is also a metaphysics; so is pragmaticism.) That would be like trying to communicate with language without grammar or logic.

 

. . .

 

Epistemic pluralism is another theme of ‘postmodern’ thought that I am sympathetic to. No epistemic relativism – sometimes the one is confused with the other. Enlightenment thought often assumes that one model of rationality is valid universally. Thus the scientific method is often considered to be rationality as such and applied in all areas of life – you can study ‘literature science’ in Germany. This is because reality (ontology) is interpreted as being just what a perfect science (defined by the methods scientists actually use) would tell us it is – and nothing more. This wished-for ontology defines the parameters of much Enlightenment-liberal belief in its ‘realism.’ As a philosopher I admire, Hilary Putnam, put it: “What I used to find seductive about metaphysical realism is the idea that the way to solve philosophical problems is to construct a better scientific picture of the world (Representation and Reality, p. 107).” Or, it is the same in modern philosophy: the entire philosophy of the past was discredited because it was naïve: it did not make the ‘critical turn’ that Descartes initiated with his methodical skepticism.  Take a form of rationality that works for some particular purpose and make it the imperial ruler over all other forms of rationality in every context, and you have the Enlightenment and modernity. In this, I side with the so-called postmodernism. No doubt science in its social meaning – for better or worse – functions as discourse in Foucault’s sense and ideology in Marx’s sense.

     Where I draw the line is here: the practice of science is not discourse; it represents reality (nature) if only from a very narrow point of view. It is a form of reason tailored to knowing certain things about the way the universe works. In science, 'data' refers to empirical evidence collected through observation, measurement, and experimentation, serving as the foundation for testing hypotheses and developing scientific theories. An observation can only count as a datum if interpretation is bracketed out: everyone regardless of background or worldview must agree that, for example, the atmospheric temperature is at a certain place and time is a certain value. The recorded average global surface temperature for a specific year consists of many discrete measurements (the data) taken from various locations around the world. These individual temperature readings, collected from weather stations, satellites, and ocean buoys, are the 'data'. Each measurement represents a data point that contributes to the overall dataset. When aggregated and analyzed, these discrete measurements allow scientists to calculate the average global surface temperature and identify trends, test hypotheses, and refine scientific theories about climate change. The point is that the data are intersubjectively verifiable and reliable in the sense that all scientists offer compatible descriptions. There is no room for subjectivity or interpretation here.

   Continuing, a hypothesis is a testable statement or prediction about natural phenomena; for example, "Increased atmospheric CO2 levels contribute to global temperature rise." To test this, scientists gather data on CO2 levels and global temperatures over time through methods like ice core samples, satellite observations, and weather station records. They analyze this data for correlations and causal relationships using statistical methods and climate models. If the data supports the hypothesis, it gains credibility; if not, it may be revised or rejected. A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation based on a body of evidence and multiple tested hypotheses, integrating and explaining a wide range of phenomena. In climate science, validated hypotheses about factors influencing climate change are integrated into the theory of anthropogenic climate change. Continuous data collection refines and validates theories, with the theory of climate change predicting future patterns based on current trends, guiding policymakers and scientists. In the context of climate change, data on CO2 levels and temperatures help test hypotheses about its causes and effects, contributing to the comprehensive theory of anthropogenic climate change, which is supported by diverse lines of evidence and has significant predictive power for future climate conditions.

    Fossil fuel burning is either causing the climate to warm or not. Science is the rational way to approach this question, it doesn’t matter whether you are Muslim or Jew, Christian or Buddhist, atheist or pagan.  There is no Jewish or pagan science. Science can indeed represent reality but from a limited point of view. Science cannot tell me what is real, good, beautiful, true, rational per se, or wise. Science is not a religion or a metaphysics. When it aspires to this, it can become used as discourse or ideology. Carl Sagen and Richard Dawkins are examples of scientists taking on another role as discourse propagators. People confuse these two faces of science and thus believe silly things like vaccines cause autism or a witch doctor is just as scientific as a practicing scientist; or that any belief that is not justified by science (e.g. I love my children. The birch trees are beautiful.) are ultimately unreal.

   When postmodernism becomes metaphysical – claiming that everything is text or discourse – then I part ways with it.

I will go on with this later.