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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (25606)	9/1/2001 9:23:06 AM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

The disagreement seems to be simply the origin of the rights of man. In the 20th Century, everyone knew we had rights and it wasn't a big deal where they came from. But now, humanity is under siege by scientism, where there are no self-evident truths. To postmodernists, truth is not something we discover; rather, it is something we construct. Knowledge and morality, laws and institutions, the arts and the sciences, are all social constructions. There are no absolute truths, only a series of explanatory paradigms, which have a pragmatic use but which vary from culture to culture. Some postmodernists stress how truth claims and cultural institutions are essentially acts of power, of the people in charge imposing their will through a fagade of rationality or high moral purpose on groups they are oppressing (minorities, women, the poor, the homosexual, or other "marginalized" groups). For postmodernists, all meaning is nothing more than interpretation, and interpretation is inherently subjective, variable from one person to another, and open to ideological bias. Whether Western democracies built on earlier worldviews that affirmed objective truth and trans-cultural absolutes can survive postmodernist skepticism remains to be seen.