I'd hardly call abolition, feminism, indoor toilets, refrigeration, flight, automobiles, televisions, epidemiology, robots on Mars, etc., etc., etc... a downhill trajectory.
Neither would I, which is why I didn’t. When I said “recent times,” I mean in the last decade or so. Postmodernists might criticize many of these products of the Enlightenment, though, as they would argue that technological advancement culminated in the destructive power of two world wars and the introduction of weapons of mass destruction.
So, Postmodernism is skeptical about the objectivity of many factual claims but that's not quite the same thing as saying that all truth is subjective.
Meh… splitting hairs over how to define postmodernism is a bit futile as one of the common criticisms against it is that it is poorly defined. Also from wiki:
“It can be described as a reaction against attempts to explain reality in an objective manner by claiming that reality is a mental construct.”
To say that moral or cultural relativism are somehow more Left than Right is deluded. All Americans are moral relativists from birth. Our Founding Fathers understood slavery was a great evil and an essential cheap labor if the South was to compete in the burgeoning Industrial Era. They held two opposite and intercancelling moral viewpoints, cemented the paradox into out Declaration of Independence and Constitution and consciously laid the foundation for the American Civil War. Lincoln's moral relativism was exclusively focused on maximizing American power. In August 1862, Lincoln stated: "If I could save the union without freeing any slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that." Such a platform is not at all leftist but a perfect example of American comfort with moral relativism even before the term Post-Modernism was coined.
What you describe is more of what I would call moral quandaries and moral conflicts rather than a relativistic worldview. The train problem— do you save the train full of adults, or the train with one infant— is a moral quandary and a moral examination but not indicative of moral relativism.
What evidence can you present that the Left is more relativist than the Right? I say the opposite is more likely to be true.
One example that comes to mind is Gloria Steinem— a pioneering and highly influential feminist, yet she is, from what I have gathered, largely silent on the treatment of women in much of the Islamic world. This example is not exceptional in nature, either.
Let's note that where Cristo71 blames Postmodernism for the rise of Marxism, Dr. Sharpe states that Postmodernism supplanted Marxism in academic articles
You won’t be able to note that because I didn’t say that. Why would I, when Postmodernism came into being well after Marxism? Actually, the claim that postmodernism has supplanted Marxism neither detracts from nor contradicts anything I have said.
The burden of proof is yours to demonstrate this embrace- not just that you can find some postmodernist Leftist but that post-Modernism itself is more popular on the Left than the Right, I just don't see any evidence that this is true.
Cultural and moral relativism are not Classical Liberal principles. Such relativism exists in anthropology and, as I pointed out, western feminism. Middle Eastern feminists don’t care for it…
Thoughtcrime!
It’s not merely a thought when one expects, or even demands that all of society accommodate and validate one’s thoughts.
“Postmodernism abhors criticism of all cultures except for Western, European cultures”
Postmodernism originated as a critique of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment occurred in Western civilization. So, critiquing the West is kind of the point. In criticizing Enlightenment values (reason, universalism, objective reality, and so forth) it posited relativism instead. With relativism, cultures should not be judged (ie criticized) outside of their own context. As I said earlier, this idea inhabits much of anthropology.
Faith requires an absence of objective truths. If a claim is objectively true, then the claim requires no faith to demonstrate its truth. Faith, by definition, is the acceptance as truth in the absence of any proof.
Not if one sees their god as THE objective truth, which is the case in the Abrahamic religions.
People of faith can only trust science up to the point that science discredits their belief system, therefore people of faith have always and will always distrust science to an important degree. Again, if science did not discredit the belief, then the belief would require no faith. If people of faith trusted science deeply, they would no longer be people of faith.
What I am saying is that if trusted institutions give people more and more reasons not to trust them anymore, that will motivate more people to put their trust in other things— such as fundamentalist religion.
Right, because there was no confusion or chaos or decline to be discovered in the atomic bombs and holocausts at the apex of Modernism, no confusion or chaos or decline in the French and American revolutions at the apex of the Enlightenment.
Here, you are actually making a postmodernist argument.
I think you've taken a few of the most pervasive negatives of the human condition, blamed Post-Modernism for those negatives without demonstrating an understanding of the term, then blamed the Left for inventing the concept without any evidence and in the face of experts who actually credit the Right-wingers.
No, this is actually what the postmodernists have done (except they blame the Enlightenment and Westernism, not Postmodernism, of course).
