Contending For The Faith---Part 21

 

In St. Jude 1:3, we read, "Dearly beloved, taking all care to write unto you concerning your common salvation, I was under a necessity to write unto you: to beseech you to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints." [Emphasis mine]. Contending For The Faith is a series of posts dedicated to apologetics (i.e.,  the intellectual defense of the truth of the Traditional Catholic Faith) to be published the first Monday of each month.  This is the next installment.

Sadly, in this time of Great Apostasy, the faith is under attack like never before, and many Traditionalists don't know their faith well enough to defend it. Remember the words of our first pope, "But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect..." (1Peter 3:16). There are five (5) categories of attacks that will be dealt with in these posts. Attacks against:

• The existence and attributes of God
• The truth of the One True Church established by Christ for the salvation of all 
• The truth of a particular dogma or doctrine of the Church
• The truth of Catholic moral teaching
• The truth of the sedevacantist position as the only Catholic solution to what has happened since Vatican II 

In addition, controversial topics touching on the Faith will sometimes be featured, so that the problem and possible solutions may be better understood. If anyone has suggestions for topics that would fall into any of these categories, you may post them in the comments. I cannot guarantee a post on each one, but each will be carefully considered.

World's Apart: Postmodernism

Continuing from last month when Existentialism was examined, I'm going to be explaining various worldviews.  What is a worldview? In the simplest terms, a worldview may be defined as how one sees life and the world at large. In this manner it can be compared to a pair of glasses. How a person makes sense of the world depends upon that person’s vision, so to speak.  The interpretive lens helps people make sense of life and comprehend the world around them. Worldviews also shape people’s understanding of their unique place on Earth. This month the worldview of Postmodernism will be explained.

As stated in last month's post, a well-thought-out course, or worldview, needs to answer seven ultimate concerns that philosophers identify as “the big questions of life:"

 1. Ultimate Reality: What kind of God, if any, actually exists? 

2. External Reality: Is there anything beyond the cosmos, or is what we perceive all there is?

3. Knowledge: What can be known and how can anyone know it? 

4. Origin: Where did humanity come from? 

5. Morals and Values: How should I live, and what things are important in life? 

6. Problem of Life and Resolution: What is wrong with the world? How can humanity’s problem be solved? 

7. Destiny: Will I survive the death of my body and, if so, in what state? 

(Sources were many, and of special mention:

Dooyeweerd, Herman. Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular, and Christian Options.Trans. John Kraay. [2003]; Harris, Robert A. The Integration of Faith and Learning: A Worldview Approach. [2004]; Sire, James W. Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept, [2004]. I take no credit except for the compilation and condensation of the material into a concise post.---Introibo). 

Postmodernism Defined

A culture cannot lose its philosophic center without the most serious of consequences, not just to the philosophy on which it was based but to the whole superstructure of culture and even each person’s notion of who he or she is. Everything changes. When God dies, both the substance and the value of everything else die too. The acknowledgment of the death of God is the beginning of postmodern "wisdom." It is also the end of postmodern wisdom. For, in the final analysis, postmodernism is not “post” anything; it is the last move of the modern, the result of the modern taking its own commitments seriously and seeing that they fail to stand the test of analysis.

Our age, which more and more is coming to be called postmodern, finds itself afloat in a pluralism of perspectives, a plethora of philosophical possibilities, but with no dominant notion of where to go or how to get there. A near future of cultural anarchy seems inevitable (and some would argue, quite convincingly, that we have already arrived at such anarchy). What, exactly, does the term postmodernism mean? The term postmodernism is usually thought to have arisen first in reference to architecture, as architects moved away from unadorned, impersonal boxes of concrete, glass, and steel to complex shapes and forms, drawing motifs from the past without regard to their original purpose or function.

Postmodernism has influenced religious understanding, including that characteristic of Christian theism, but it accepts the foundation at the heart of naturalism: Matter exists eternally; God does not exist. 

Postmodernism on Ultimate and External Reality

The first question postmodernism addresses is not what is there or how we know what is there but how language functions to construct meaning. In other words, there has been a shift in “first things” from being to knowing to constructing meaning. There has been a movement from (1) a “premodern” concern for a just society based on revelation from a just God to (2) a “modern” attempt to use universal reason as the guide to justice to (3) a “postmodern” despair of any universal standard for justice. Society then moves from medieval hierarchy to Enlightenment, universal democracy to postmodern privileging of the self-defining values of individuals and communities. This is a formula for anarchy. It is hard to think of this as progress, but then progress is a “modern” notion.

Only matter exists. There is no God. Humans construct meaning.

Postmodernism on Knowledge

The first decent of the human mind by rejecting Thomistic philosophy. Theism puts being before knowing. "Enlightenment" Naturalism puts knowing before being. Rene Descartes is seen as the first modern philosopher, not least because he was more interested in how one knows than in what one knows. Descartes’s approach to knowing is legendary. He wanted to be completely certain that what he thought he knew was actually true. So he took the method of doubt almost (but not quite) to the limit. What can I doubt? he asked himself in the quietness of his study. He concluded that he could doubt everything except that he was doubting (doubting is thinking). So he concluded, “I think, therefore I am.” He then further considered whether there was anything other than his own existence of which he could be sure. 

One individual, Descartes, declares on the foundation of his own judgment that he knows with philosophic certainty that he is a thinking thing. From this foundation Descartes goes on to argue that God necessarily exists and that reality is dual—matter and mind. The notion of the autonomy of human reason liberated the human mind from the authority of the Church. 

Now enter postmodernism. Look again at Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am.” What if it is the thinking that creates or causes the "I" rather than the "I" that creates or causes the thinking? What if the activity of thinking does not require an agent but produces only the illusion of an agent? What if there is only thinking—a fluid flow of language without discernible origin, determinate meaning, or direction?  The truth about the reality itself is forever hidden from us. All we can do is "tell stories."

According to postmodernism, nothing we think we know can be checked against reality as such. Now we must not think that postmodernists believe that there is no reality outside our language. We are not to abandon our ordinary perception that a bus is coming down the street and we’d better get out of the way. Our language about there being a “bus” that is “coming down” a “street” is useful. It has survival value! But apart from our linguistic systems we can know nothing. All language is a human construct. We can’t determine the “truthfulness” of the language, only the usefulness.

Truth is whatever we can get our colleagues (our community) to agree to. If we can get them to use our language, then—like the “strong poets” Moses, Jesus, Plato, Freud—our story is as true as any story will ever get. In short, the only kind of truth there is is pragmatic truth. There is no truth of correspondence. It is easy to see how this notion, when applied to religious claims, triggers a radical relativism. No one’s story is truer than anyone else’s story. Does the story work? That is, does it satisfy the teller? Does it get you what you want—say, a sense of belonging, a peace with yourself, a hope for the future, a way to order your life? It’s all one can ask.

Postmodernism on Origins

We don't know where humanity came from or where it is going. Stories give communities their cohesive character. Christians, for example, believe that God is triune. The postmodernist may say that this story cannot be known to accord with reality, but a Christian thinks it does anyway. A naturalist really believes that “the cosmos is all there is,” regardless of how the postmodernist may explain that this belief cannot in principle or practice be substantiated. One might say, too, that a postmodernist really believes that this explanation is true, though if it is, then it can’t really be true (but this anticipates the critique of postmodernism that follows below). In any case, stories have great social binding power; they make communities out of otherwise disparate bunches of people.

There is no substantial self. Human beings make themselves who they are by the languages they construct about themselves. 

Postmodernism on Morals and Values

Postmodernism follows the route taken by naturalism and existentialism, but with a linguistic twist. Morality, like knowledge, is a linguistic construct. Social good is whatever society takes it to be. This is pure cultural relativism. If some future society decides that Communism is what it wants, a person for a republic, or anyone else, is without appeal. The good is whatever those who wield the power in society choose to make it. If a person is happy with how society draws its ethical lines, then individual freedom remains. But what if an individual refuses to speak the ethical language of their community?

Postmodernism can make no normative judgment about such a view. It can only observe and comment: so much the worse for those who find themselves oppressed by the majority.

Postmodernism and the Problem of Life and Destiny

It is simple and bleak: life just is and there is no problem, per se. Death is the end of an individual existence, if indeed, individuals can actually be said to exist at all.

Postmodernism: A Critique

 First, the rejection of all metanarratives is itself a metanarrative. The idea that there are no metanarratives is taken as a first principle, and there is no way to get around this except to ignore the self-contradiction and get on with the show, which is what postmodernism does.

Second, the idea that we have no access to reality (that there are no facts, no truths-of-the-matter) and that we can only tell stories about it is self-referentially incoherent. Put crudely, this idea cannot account for itself, for it tells us something that, on its own account, we can’t know.

Third, postmodernism’s critique of the autonomy and sufficiency of human reason rests on the autonomy and sufficiency of human reason.

Postmodernism is an incoherent worldview that must be rejected.

Modernism and Postmodernism

Modernism, the synthesis of all heresies, is not the modernism contemplated by postmodernism, but the Modernist Vatican II sect has led the way for postmodernism. Postmodernism is an atheistic worldview taken to the limit, where even the self is questioned. Without exaggeration, Modernism is the cause of all the major problems in our sick world today. With the Church driven underground, morality and truth have been obscured to a degree not seen since the days of Noah. Atheism is the logical and final outcome of Modernism; postmodernism being its most radical expression.  Atheism is on the rise like never before; and the "New Atheists" are denigrating religion and making disciples.

Postmodernism is seen in the Vatican II sect. All paths lead to God. There is no One True Church, since all religions are the subconscious need for the Divine manifested in various ways. Different religions are merely different stories. No religion is more true or better than any other.

In society, the "transgender" madness is also linked to the idea of a world constructed by language. Gender studies claim that society has forced men and women into “social constructs” of gender; in other words, gender theorists believe that the social categories which distinguish men and women from each other have no basis in reality. Gender studies promotes an anarchic view of gender and sexuality where there is no objective standard for gender and everything from clothing to sexuality should be subject to each individual’s experience. The word “sex” is rejected because it suggests an essential link between the bodies and souls of men and women; the jargon word “gender” does not bring with it the same connotation. In fact, the word “gender” used this way suggests that masculinity and femininity are not essential traits but social constructs. 

Conclusion

The bankrupt and morally degenerate worldview of postmodernism is in every facet of society, to one degree or another. It has been said that,  “Postmodernism is a worldview that denies all worldviews.” It’s a philosophy that explodes all comprehensive systems without offering to build anything new in their place. In place of purpose, design, logic, and meaning it affirms and embraces uncertainty, anarchy, chaos, and chance. It considers any effort to impose order upon the world or human life as purely provisional and arbitrary. It asserts that “truth” can vary from person to person and group to group. 

Our only sure foundation to fight against it is to study the philosophy of Aquinas and the teaching of the One True Church. This will be our sure anchor against the evil tide.