Quote: (04-27-2017 07:48 AM)Wutang Wrote:
Sometimes I wonder if the reason all of this nonsense never took off until the Millennial generation start coming along is because the Millennial generation has been constantly bombarded with messages about how they can do anything and that anyone that puts a foot down and tells them "no" is oppressing them. It's a generation that's grown up on slogans such as "You do you" and a million variations of "follow your heart".
In honour of Trump, I herewith erect my Great And Beautiful Wall Of Text.
There are three reasons for this.
(1) Narcissism
(2) Postmodernism
(3) Cultural relativism.
Narcissism is basically the sexually transmitted disease that the baby boomers left to every generation following them. I wouldn't necessarily say it's solely in the millennials, merely that it's at its most concentrated because the millennials are fifty years into a well-moulded consumerist society and social media is like jet fuel thrown on the fire of narcissism. The Internet has basically magnified and accelerated every horrible (and few good) tendency the human race has.
Narcissism is one of them. And narcissism came to rule essentially because the one discipline that should have held the line -- psychiatry -- bowed to cultural relativism and elevated
identity above
behaviour in assessing whether a person was crazed or not. That elevation rippled through every aspect of society and fuelled narcissism because, so long as you were able to assert your identity as being more important than your behaviour, you always had an excuse for your behaviour if it conflicted with your idea of who you were as a person. Remember the old adage "Actions speak louder than words?" Psychiatry literally threw that adage out. And you can see its net effect most clearly (as with a lot of things) among the criminal element in society, as recorded in Theodore Dalrymple's essay "The Knife Went In", wherein he observes that while everyone claims to fall in with the wrong crowd, he has never met a single person who belongs to the wrong crowd. When it's observed that you stole something, the instinctive response of Western people, now, across the board, is "Yes, but it was justified in this case." It was justified because of something in me. It was justified because my identity overrides my behaviour.
It wasn't Darwin or atheism that destroyed Christianity. The elevation of identity over behaviour did that to all organised religions which require certain behaviours, and if you can always excuse your behaviour by reason of your identity, salvation is not required; churches can only contain people who believe in a God other than themselves. Instead, the state of the Western individual is exemplified best by the weak, watery assertion in stoner Kevin Smith's
Dogma: "It doesn't matter what faith you are, just that you
have faith." Or as Last Psychiatrist puts it, in old school horror films, the Devil (when he appears) is not defeated by a morally pure person, he's defeated by following certain Catholic Christian rituals to the letter. Compare even something like
The Exorcist with
End of Days, for example. Where the Devil is beaten in the present day, it's because a specially gifted hard man asks to become the instrument of God, to become God. Or to take another example, when was the last time you saw a movie vampire repelled by someone showing them a cross?
Next question being: how did psychiatry come to elevate identity over behaviour? My hypothesis is that they did it because of the following:
Cultural relativism. On this one, Edward Wilson in
Consilience adroitly sums up, discussing how the social sciences tend to ignore the natural sciences, i.e. biology, chemistry, etc:
Quote:Quote:
The social sciences are hampered in this last regard by the residue of strong historical precedent. Ignorance of the natural sciences by design was a strategy fashioned by the founders, most notably Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Franz Boas, and Sigmund Freud, and their immediate followers. They aimed to isolate their nascent disciplines from the foundational sciences of biology and psychology, which at the inception of the social sciences were in any case too primitive to be of clear relevance. This stance was fruitful at first. It allowed scholars to search widely for patterns in culture and social organization unencumbered by the patronage of the natural sciences, and to compose such laws of social action as the prima facie evidence demanded. But once the pioneering era ended, the theorists were mistaken not to include biology and psychology. It was no longer a virtue to avoid the roots of human nature.
The theorists were inhibited from probing in that direction by another problem endemic to the social sciences: political ideology. Its effects have been especially clear in American anthropology. Franz Boas, aided by his famous students Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, led a crusade against what they perceived (correctly) to be the eugenics and racism implicit in Social Darwinism. With caution swept
aside by moral zeal, they turned opposition into the new ideology of cultural relativism. The logic of the ideology, still shared in varying degree by most professional anthropologists, can be expressed as follows:
It is wrong to suppose that "civilized" peoples are the winners over "primitive" peoples in a Darwinian struggle for existence, hence superior; it is wrong to think that the differences between them are due to their genes rather than a product of historical circumstance. Furthermore, culture is wondrously complex and tuned to the environment in which it has evolved. Therefore, it is misleading to think of cultures as evolving from a lower to a higher status, and it is wrong to entertain biological explanations of cultural diversity.
Believing it a virtue to declare that all cultures are equal but in different ways, Boas and other influential anthropologists nailed their flag of cultural relativism to the mast. During the 1960s and 1970s this scientific belief lent strength in the United States and other Western societies to political multiculturalism. Also known as identity politics, it holds that ethnics, women, and homosexuals possess subcultures deserving equal standing with those of the "majority," even if the doctrine demotes the idea of a unifying national culture. The United States motto, E pluribus unum, "out of the many, one," was turned around to "out of the one, many"; and those who wished it so asked this question with a good measure of reasonableness: What can be wrong with identity politics if it increases the civil rights of individuals? Many anthropologists, their instincts fortified by humanitarian purpose, grew stronger in their support of cultural relativism while stiffening their opposition to biology in any guise.
So, no biology. The reasoning then came full circle with a twist that must have brought a smile to the little gods of irony. Where cultural relativism had been initiated to negate belief in hereditary behavioral differences among ethnic groups—undeniably an unproven and ideologically dangerous conception—it was then turned against the idea of a unified human nature grounded in heredity. A great conundrum of the human condition was created: If neither culture nor a hereditary human nature, what unites humanity? The question cannot be just left hanging, for if ethical standards are molded by culture, and cultures are endlessly diverse and equivalent, what disqualifies theocracy, for example, or colonialism? Or child labor, torture, and slavery?
It is simple to see how cultural relativism thereby leaches down to
moral relativism. If all cultures are equal, all have excuses, then all people have excuses as well. Backed by anthropology itself, the science of which Darwin himself is the patron saint.
Postmodernism. Possibly the father of both of the above to a certain extent. Again, deferring to Wilson a bit:
Quote:Quote:
To varying degrees they have been more influenced by postmodernism, the competing hypothesis that denies the existence of a universal human nature. Applied to literary criticism, the extreme manifestation of postmodernism is the deconstructive philosophy formulated most provocatively by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. In this view, truth is relative and personal. Each person creates his own inner world by acceptance or rejection of endlessly shifting linguistic signs. There is no privileged point, no lodestar, to guide literary intelligence. And given that science is just another way of looking at the world, there is no scientifically constructible map of human nature from which the deep meaning of texts can be drawn. There is only unlimited opportunity for the reader to invent interpretations and commentaries out of the world he himself constructs. "The author is dead" is a favorite maxim of the deconstructionists. Deconstructionist scholars search instead for contradictions and ambiguities. They conceive and analyze what is left out by the author. The missing elements allow for personalized commentary in the postmodernist style. Postmodernists who add political ideology to the mix also regard the traditional literary canon as little more than a collection confirming the world view of ruling groups, and in particular that of Western white males.
Postmodernism was the bastard child of modernism, which had one thing going for it: it basically supported and legitimised scientific technique, the idea that the conclusion follows the data and not the other way round. But you can see from the bolded part how postmodernism is the academic justification for narcissism, how, like the Force, postmodernism creates it, makes it grow. The only good thing you can say about postmodernism is that it's dying: narcissism will outlast it, but as an intellectual argument it's dead, because like so many abandoned philosophies, it doesn't fit the biological or genetic reality of humanity.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm
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