Synopsis
We are now living in the graveyard of western rationalism. The modern notion that reason is a universal substitute for tradition has itself been reduced by philosophical analysis to nothing more than a competing tradition. Reason is not an exclusive, tradition-transcendent method which logically necessitates a particular description of reality (a particular vocabulary and grammar). The common man never took this notion seriously. But elites and ideologues have exploited it to justify their authoritarian political projects including socialism in general and Marxism and Progressivism in particular. The death of this notion that universal, tradition-independent reason can and will lead to a universal account of Reality is a profound crisis in western culture and politics. It destroys Liberalism and Progressivism as the claim that universal reason leads to universal standards of justice and progress. The panic we see in these traditions today is an intuition of this crisis. Relativism is destroying authoritarianism, including the naïve rationalism of the modern liberal journalist.Western Liberalism is no longer the tradition-transcendent, universal application of reason. This demotion of Liberalism has been apparent since the middle of the last century as the mythological nature of universal standards of rational justification and the metaphysical nature of scientific realism became increasingly clear. Simultaneously, existentialism questioned the primacy of any reductionist, scientific conception of Reality, as nothing more than a prescientific philosophical commitment. The ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy has recognized the independence of human language from human experience as a supposedly objective, stable basis for justifying one description of Reality. This, in turn, has led to a pragmatic (moral, subjective) theory of truth. The truth is universal only if human subjectivity is ultimately universal, made in the image of God. The meaning of human experience is mediated by the language we choose to apply to it. Unless God exists, and provides an authoritative paradigm of language, reality is relative to rival ways of talking about history and existence. Our experience, which is therefore no longer the same experience, is incapable of an ‘objective’ verification or falsification of modern ‘facts.’ In this way philosophy finally catches up to the Christian understanding of language, of The Word, as an agent. The truth is an event which changes and redeems human experience. The postmodern age is here. The notion of universal standards of rational justification is dead. But this does not imply either the death of reason or the death of truth. A particular tradition, including its account of reason, may be absolutely true, corresponding to God’s language as the only absolute, all-encompassing frame of reference. But then authoritarianism cannot be justified even while one is in possession of the truth. All truth is tradition-bound.The death of rationalism and its concomitant authoritarianism will issue in an historic new emphasis on democracy as the source of all temporal authority. Democracy is first and foremost the private control of all of the means of cultural production, especially education. Democratic competition will issue in a dominant tradition which will describe and prescribe justice. If people are made in the image of God, this dominant culture will be Christian. The rebirth of democracy will destroy the administrative state and all of the rationalist political ideologies of the Enlightenment including Liberalism, Libertarianism, Conservatism (as crypto-rationalism), Progressivism, and Marxism. It leads us to Christian populism.
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