I Don't Mean to Brag or Anything, but I'm Probably a Prophet

Time has proven that I am a prophet, probably. My students would not remember these things, but I distinctly remember predicting certain realities that would emerge from our culture's slide into secular postmodernism. Nobody calls it that, by the way. It isn't as if there is an orientation class in college called "Instructions in Proper Secular Postmodernism," or a band called "The Secular Postmodernists," about which my former students would be alerted to say to themselves, "Wait a second, my entirely prophetic teacher in high school warned me about these scalawags, these rascally secular postmodernists. It's so helpful that they have made themselves so easy to spot." No, it is so pervasive that it is water to a fish. Everyone today is intellectually oblivious to the fact that this worldview is becoming our acrid atmosphere. It's like smog to people in LA in the 80's. You breathe it in until you don't notice it. People think carbon emissions will kill us, but I am confident we are currently dying of a noxious and unquestioned ideology, an ideology incidentally that is displacing much better, older, stronger, truer ones. 

And I told my students exactly the ideas to beware of! I even told them how things would go if these ideas were to gain sway over the culture.

Here is a list of the things I told them would happen:

1. Secular schools will simply choose a secular religion over Christianity and teach that. Why? Because you cannot separate religion and the state; specifically you cannot separate religion and state schooling. 

Another way of saying this is that there is no "value-neutral" form of education. We are not A.I. simply crunching data. Actually, I predicted that just about anything would fill the void, so long as it could be speciously defined as "science" or "reason" or "practical education," etc. And so now we have Marxism, scientism, identity politics, socialism, and postmodern relativism, all incoherently filling the void left by Christianity in schools. It is not as if students are simply given brute facts, after which they go home to make their own decisions. No, these schools have given them a God (The Earth), unquestioned authority (scientists or leftist "experts"), sin (disrespect of individualistic identity, or harm to the planet), the devil (those of the old religious paradigm), penance (renunciation of privilege), salvation (having one's penance accepted), and heaven (a world of nebulous green and race harmony which never comes). 

The end result of all this is a staggering lack of self-awareness on the part of educators in particular, but students as well. These people affirm with uncritical zeal that religion and education are a toxic brew, but then turn around and boldly claim that it is a manifest truth that capitalism, for example, produces all manner of moral problems in a society. Now, whatever your view of capitalism, surely you can see that claiming such a thing is a bald moral pronouncement. On what basis is the claim made? These same people will say that old cultures defined marriage a particular way and it produced patriarchy, but now we have evolved. And then they will, with all the severity of Jonathan Edwards, claim that their utterances are wholly grounded in authority, and that reason manifestly affirms the truth of their utterances, and that an apocalypse awaits those who don't heed! Their inability to see this glaring inconsistency compromises their ability to analyze the truth claims that matter most to humanity and make them the worst kind of religionists--namely, those that merely make claims to their authority in advancing their positions. 

2. The new postmodern paradigm is offered as a solution to the evil old system of certain truth (dogmatism), and as such claims to solve conflict in the world, but paradoxically will create more conflict in the end. 

You would think that telling people that everyone gets to be philosophically correct would lead to peace and harmony. Nope! The most intolerant of all people are the pharmaceutically pacified clones of the modern university and their intellectual parents. They all think exactly the same way and are ready to tear everything apart, especially anything that seems old, Christian or American. They like vintage; they just don't like old! 

But I even told my students why this would happen, and it seems so obvious. If you take two minds in conflict over something, say religion, and you tell them that the truth of their beliefs is subjective, and there is nothing outside the two minds towards which they are arguing, then of course you can only be right if you shout louder or exert force or get a mob to agree with you and beat back the other view. If there is no "Truth" and there are only ephemeral "truths in minds," then argument loses its art and becomes merely an evolutionary struggle to win. 

3. The new apostasy will never be viewed as such because in a postmodern world any amalgamation of ideas can live under the arbitrary label "Christian." 

If Christianity is a "relationship and not a religion," then it collapses down to subjective experience. This is why so many people are offended when you try to define them out of being a Christian. There are no definitions because words are a power play, and why should anyone listen to you? And that will always be the reaction of the postmodern to an argument. He or she will become offended that you have the audacity to claim that your brand of Christianity is the correct one. You might as well be a Buddhist Christian or Muslim Christian in such a state of affairs, for there can be no contradiction in such things definitionally. 

4. Postmodernism will lead individuals to solipsistic isolation and then depression and meaninglessness and despair and ennui and disease and psychosis. 

If reality or truth only exist for each individual within the ongoing self-defining exercise of personal experience; if it all reduces to the accidental personal theater of neurons and synapses creating a kind of personal matrix, then what can come but desperate loneliness? 

In such a belief structure, there can be no real connection, or at least the connections with others that exist are only a part of the self-defining and self-experiential complex of experiences necessary to find oneself and define one's own reality in a potentially meaningless world. And so people look within, elevating themselves to the position of arbiter of all sense impressions from the world; in fact, combing the internet and social media for more data, drowning in an unmanageable sea of data. And they do it to enlarge their own self-created world, to interpret it all, to arrange it as they wish. They are in fact God, presiding over all of reality, and that is precisely why they are so miserable. It is far too much to arrogate to oneself. And their worlds always collapse or at the very least become unmanageably fractious and incoherent. Then they start asking what difference it would make if there were one less naked ape locked in this game, and of course they know the answer. 

5. The meaning of categories like male and female and marriage and sexuality will be rendered so meaningless that people will push for things like identifying as an animal or polygamy or pedophilia or just about any imaginable perversion. Marriage will become so meaningless that fewer and fewer people will seek to be married. 

Did you realize that women seeking a traditional experience of marriage and motherhood are now given the countercultural name of "Trads?" That is the counterculture! Having as many partners or abortions as necessary to be able to be Vice President of marketing for some exceedingly important widget maker and delaying marriage to 40 if at all is the new culture. No children, just a Burmese Mountain Dog and an apartment in New York or Austin. Certainly there will be more time for a total submersion into self in such a state of affairs, and that is why it is to be preferred. 

And if children come into it, a true postmodernist would not raise his child to be male or female, Christian or atheist American or anything else. They put upon their children the same god-like burden of creating and sustaining all of reality! A true postmodernist would attempt to somehow raise a child in a state of pristine neutrality, or infinite idealogical openness, so they can be truly free to create their own subjective world. To do anything else would be to imprison them. And yet it never occurs to such people that they are in fact raising the child with a set of philosophical assumptions. One obvious assumption is that human beings can function in prolonged states of philosophical neutrality. Another would be the entire network of uncritical assumptions brought in by the secular postmodernism that clearly informs such an insane view of reality and human psychology. 

In conclusion, think about the realities that this series of changes entails. It encompasses one's view of reality, identity, authority, ethics, and sense of purpose. In other words, in the past few years there has been a seismic shift in the intellectual ground of every area that is most significant to human life, and it has happened with most Christians living in blinking cluelessness. Applaud the godless for their power in terra forming the entire intellectual world, and in one generation rendering Christianity and any other Theistic religion nearly obsolete. The only problem then is what they have left in its place.