A Transformative Figure Could Offer New Hope. Such A Figure, If Found, Would Require The Power Of Jesus, Though.

Posted on | September 20, 2015 | 23 Comments

by Smitty

Just another installment in the occasional “Ain’t it funny when they reject the truth and everything comes up false?” series. Via Instapundit, Politico.eu has “The decline of the French intellectual”
For a snippet:

The disintegration of Marxism in the late 20th century left a void which was filled only by postmodernism.
But the writings of the likes of Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard if anything compounded the problem with their deliberate opaqueness, their fetish for trivial word-play and their denial of the possibility of objective meaning. . .

Marx preached “The Kingdom of God, hold the God”, with results only the Devil could love. The irony of “a void which was filled only by postmodernism” is astounding. It’s like filling a void with something that sucks still more. Postmodernism is really just the ultimate intellectual troll, begetting such lunacy as Stacy McCain’s radical feminist “friends”.
The author concludes:

Indeed, as Europe fumbles shamefully in its collective response to its current refugee crisis, it is sobering that the reaction which has been most in tune with the Enlightenment’s Rousseauist heritage of humanity and cosmopolitan fraternity has come not from socialist France, but from Christian-democratic Germany.

These crappy philosophies seem to start with a rejection of the Judeo-Christian heritage undergirding the West. Maybe it’s time to reject crappy philosophies and the false prophets bearing them, instead.

Category: Culture

Comments

23 Responses to “A Transformative Figure Could Offer New Hope. Such A Figure, If Found, Would Require The Power Of Jesus, Though.”

Adam Kelm
September 20th, 2015 @ 5:04 pm

Ravi Zacharias deliver us from evil shoes where this logic has taken us
RS
September 20th, 2015 @ 5:48 pm

The French are discovering that when one’s national “thinkers” engage in a decades long war to destroy the foundation of the nation, at then end there’s nothing left to defend when it matters. I do, however, question his attribution of German hospitality to either “the Enlightenment’s Rousseauist heritage of humanity and cosmopolitan fraternity” or its “Christian-democratic” outlook. More precisely, it is the lingering fear of and reaction to the years 1933-45. The Germans will do anything to prevent the world from saying, “Here we go again.” The question is whether that “anything” will include its own cultural suicide.

Aside: The author of the linked piece mentions the famous French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy. Everything you need to know about him specifically and French Intellectualism generally may be discovered here from a few years ago. French intellectualism has been rotting for a long, long time.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
September 20th, 2015 @ 6:05 pm

Don’t let the door hit those postmodernists on the ass on their way out…actually, I hope it does objectively hit them so they can tell me what it subjectively feels like…
Fail Burton
September 20th, 2015 @ 6:07 pm

And are we surprised the gibberish that is American queer theory cherry-picked Foucault and Derrida to the point it wouldn’t even exist in it’s present form without them? Anything is anything sounds great if you’re a mentally ill sociopathic and radicalized lesbian. The very foundation of nature can be blown off as a “social construct,” every man on Earth can be his own li’l Devil and there’d be moar lesbians and cowbell if only men would stop acting like men. Plus incest…
JasonJones
September 20th, 2015 @ 6:32 pm

Exactly. Trying having a scientific argument about natural selection, and gender differences with a feminist or post modernist leftist, and it’s abundantly clear that they know nothing about science, or human nature, and their ideas like “gender is a construct” is nothing more than ideological propaganda. It’s ironic, too, when they talk about what champions of science they are when it challenges religious beliefs, especially when those beliefs challenge queer, and feminist dogma, but are absolutely anti scientific when anthropology, Evo psych, and biology dismantle feminist, and post structuralist theory. Say what you want about Noam Chomsky, but he cleaned Foucault’s clock in a televised debate they had back in the 70’s on the concept of human nature which Chomsky believed through his work as a linguist, and Foucault rejected, along with science in general as nothing more than an expression of “power”. Not to say mainstream science doesn’t have a tendency to reject fringe theories that challenge their orthodoxy, and “established” theories, especially in the realm of parapsychology because it challenges their atheist materialism, but to say science is only an expression of sociopolitical reality is insane.
smitty
September 20th, 2015 @ 6:44 pm

American theories are just the next stage in the French excrement experiment.
Steve Skubinna
September 20th, 2015 @ 7:08 pm

The first time I heard of “deconstructionism” I asked “It’s a gag, right?” How can you possibly postulate a system of philosophy that, in essence, maintains that nothing is real and that nothing means anyway? It’s akin to chasing your tail until you disappear up your own butt…

As Chesterson said “When a man stops believing in God, the problem is not that he believes in nothing, it’s that he’ll believe in anything.”
Fail Burton
September 20th, 2015 @ 8:14 pm

“Power” is one of those catch-all words gay third wave feminism uses a lot but which they never explain in real world terms. That’s because it’s meant to serve no other purpose than to demonize men, whites and heterosexuals as having “unearned privileges.”
DeadMessenger
September 20th, 2015 @ 9:17 pm

BWAHAHA! Good one, EBL!
DeadMessenger
September 20th, 2015 @ 9:22 pm

Yeah, but that won’t work. Even excrement sounds good when it’s written in French. But in English, it sounds like what it is: crap.
DeadMessenger
September 20th, 2015 @ 9:36 pm

“The disintegration of Marxism in the late 20th century…”

When did this happen? Seems like “Marxism” was simply rebranded as “Progressivism” or “Hope and Change”, and appears to be attracting ever more entitlement leeches, along with vast armies of public-skooled youth (who falsely believe they know every damn thing in the world).

In contradistinction to God, who is the same yesterday, today and forever.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
September 20th, 2015 @ 11:02 pm

Merde sounds a bit more polite than its English equivalent, but it is hardly good.
Shawn Smith
September 20th, 2015 @ 11:30 pm

Ain’t gonna be much Christianity left in Germany if they keep on opening their borders to the Muslims. Ask the Christians in what used to be Iraq how that will turn out . . . if you can find one still alive.
Bob Belvedere
September 21st, 2015 @ 6:27 am

It’s appearance is a sign that a Culture has become terminal.
RS
September 21st, 2015 @ 6:29 am

I’m not sure the author is arguing that collective utopianism has disappeared. Rather, he’s noting that the fall of the Soviet Union and its Stalinist client states lifted the veil on what was really going on behind the Iron Curtain. That, in turn, diminished the prestige of a lot of European “intellectuals” who’d pointed to Eastern Europe as a model.

Postmodernism, on the other hand, stuck around. The purpose of postmodernism, i.e. nihilism directed at Western Civilization, was to pave the way for Marxist Utopias. Without Marxist utopias–and the hoi polloi wasn’t buying those anymore–the destruction existed merely to destroy. Now Europe–the author emphasizes France, because the Île-de-France is the center of the universe, don’t you know — is finding out that those bourgeois values they spent so much time criticizing, demeaning and eliminating from the national culture were the only thing holding back the hordes of barbarians.

Karma is a bitch, as they say.
Bob Belvedere
September 21st, 2015 @ 6:34 am

‘Could this be one explanation?’ – as Jean Raspail has said.
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September 21st, 2015 @ 8:30 am

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Steve Skubinna
September 21st, 2015 @ 10:40 am

It does appear to be an attempt at organizing nihilism.
Bob Belvedere
September 21st, 2015 @ 10:47 am

I just about finished rereading The Devils bu Fydor Dostoevsky and I’m tempted to put quotes from the Nihilists in the novel in a post, so that people can see how much of their way of thinking has pervaded American Society today.
JohnM
September 22nd, 2015 @ 7:00 am

Before the USSR there was no objective standard that people could point to and say “see, socialism doesn’t work”. [I’m ignoring the dozens of little known failed utopian communities like New Harmony]

The arrival reality meant Marxist either had to acknowledge that Socialism didn’t work or else redefine reality.

As Stephen Hicks argues, they did the latter
http://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/hicks-ep-chart-56-evolution-of-socialist-strategies.gif

So for instance, although Marxists thought material wealth good, the reality of Marxism failed to deliver that. Either stop being a Marxist or better define material wealth (consumption) as being bad: you become Green.

In the case of Post Modernism, you deny reality – Socialism was a success.
arcadius
September 23rd, 2015 @ 4:15 pm

Right, this is a good article but that sentence didn’t quite ring true for me either. The author seems to not want to take a longer view and see how it is the Rousseauist antinomianism of the “Enlightenment” that actually started the process of decay that has culminated in the current situation.

And is he really implying that taking in hundreds of thousands of savages and semi-savages is going to improve French culture?
arcadius
September 23rd, 2015 @ 4:17 pm

I think it started as a prank, to see if people would actually go along with it…
Steve Skubinna
September 23rd, 2015 @ 7:42 pm

I think the same of Luwak coffee. I mean, some guy was musing “You know what, I bet we could get Yuppies to drink weasel poop if we charged enough for it and told them it was rare.”

But if you’re going to take deconstructionism seriously, you may as well slurp down a nice hot cup of weasel poop too. As a tenured (Fill in the blank) Studies professor you can afford $300/lb coffee. And it’s all the better for its rarity.

“I only drink this special imported coffee. You won’t have heard of it.”