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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (38060)	8/19/2002 9:22:45 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Sorry to resurrect old issues; I am having a hard time keeping up.... postmodernism: A rejection of the sovereign autonomous individual with an emphasis upon anarchic collective, anonymous experience. Collage, diversity, the mystically unrepresentable, Dionysian passion are the foci of attention. Most importantly we see the dissolution of distinctions, the merging of subject and object, self and other. This is a sarcastic playful parody of western modernity and the "John Wayne" individual and a radical, anarchist rejection of all attempts to define, reify or re-present the human subject. This definition seems to deal mainly with art and art criticism; it is difficult to deduce any relevant application to political or ethical structures. [Postmodernism] affirms that whatever we accept as truth and even the way we envision truth are dependent on the community in which we participate . . . There is no absolute truth: rather truth is relative to the community in which we participate. I have to wonder what sort of "truth" is being discussed here. I don't think that even the most rabid postmodernist would assert that the boiling point of water at sea level is relative to the community in which we participate. I don't think that any thinking person would challenge the notion that assertions like "Jesus Christ was born of a virgin" or "there is no God but Allah" are very much relative to a community. The previous discussion was not about "truth", generically, but about social and ethical values. I don't see how it is possible to assert that these are not products of a culture. I don't see how it is possible to assert that these are absolute: the values of our culture are different today than they were 100 years ago; they will presumably be as different 100 years from now. I also cannot see how it weakens our values to acknowledge that they are a product of our culture, and that they have changed in the past, will change in the future, and are probably changing right now.