MysteriousFaith

As Wilber points out, postmodernity gave us an ability to appreciate how our own cultural perspective impacted our viewpoint as to objective truth; however, postmodernity was taken to an extreme and became unhelpful. This happened in large part because taken to its logical conclusion, postmodernity’s denial of any objective truth (claiming only subjective cultural perspectives) means that postmodernity’s own perspective, insights and contributions must be similarly faulty. Foucault recognized this and, towards the end of his life, repudiated much of his work within postmodernity seeing its inherent self-contradictions. Wilber saw this earlier than most, and recognized that postmodernity marks a very difficult social transition: a postmodern culture gives us an appreciation for the truths in other cultures, philosophies and worldviews. Yet, along with its accomplishing this tends to come an unwillingness to speak directly towards those ideas which are poorly constructed or internally flawed. Why? Because postmodernity urges caution – a graduated appreciation that what you see as a flaw in another’s ideas may just be a “truth” you can not appreciate from your vantage point. This is a potentially dangerous flaw in postmodernity in that it makes it difficult for postmodern pluralistic cultures to say clearly what is right and wrong, what is evil and what is good, and what we must do to deal with those who wish to hurt us.

This difficulty has been most recently encountered as the American Baby Boomers have aged:

“As we will see, the Boomers, to their great credit, were the first major generation in history to develop to the green meme. That’s a very important point … The Boomers moved beyond the traditionalism of blue and the scientific modernism of orange, and pioneered a postmodern, pluralistic, multicultural understanding – the green meme and the sensitive self. And that is exactly why the Boomers spearheaded civil rights, ecological concerns, feminism, and multicultural diversity … Under the noble guise of pluralism, every previous wave of existence, no matter how shallow, egocentric, or narcissistic, is given encouragement to ‘be itself,’ since none is felt to be intrinsically better than the others. But if ‘pluralism’ is really true, then we must invite the Nazis and the KKK to the multicultural banquet, since no stance is supposed to be better or worse than another, and so all must be treated in an egalitarian fashion – at which point the self-contradictions of pluralism come screaming to the fore.”

Because pluralism struggles to differentiate between competing moralities under the auspices of an enlightened appreciation of another’s perspective, it does a poor job of distinguishing between clearly inferior and superior moral claims. Consequently, the elevation of each person’s perspective means pluralism encourages a wholly individual understanding of truth. Such a position inevitably leads to narcissism as we descend into a world where only what I believe matters. Religious readers eager to point out the need this illustrates for divine morals should reflect on the fact that postmodernity does not emphasize reason, and in not doing so, fails to extinguish the tired argument that morals must be disseminated from above.

Pluralism builds upon the foundation of the philosophy from the stage of development beneath it; by necessity, the new stage – if it is in fact verifiably “better” – must struggle with the internal recognition of its superiority contrasted to the ideal of pluralism it advocates. This paradox, while by necessity the hierarchy within which human morality must evolve, is one of the reasons philosophers are suspect as to whether our collective consciousness as a species can ever move beyond its current status.

What does this all have to do with the crisis of liberalism you might ask? Liberalism, and I beg the reader’s understanding that we resort to this word within its current-day definitions (how very postmodern of me), is traditionally the vanguard of changes to what society accepts as normal. Pluralism inevitably is rooted in an appreciation that much of what you believe is nothing more than a culturally inherited artifact which, were you to come from another culture, would be easily replaced by an entirely different orthodoxy. For some this recognition never develops into more than a watered down “appreciation for other cultures”; for others who wrestle with the implications to the words “this I believe”, this is a moment of truth when we elect to develop an intellectually coherent system of belief not wholly predicated on what our culture believes. This pluralism finds its most comfortable home within people willing to change from tradition, a position that conservative ideology – in its elevation of a storied past – does not equally adapt towards.