Thomas Lee Abshier, ND
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Naturopathic Physician

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Political Philosopher & Author

 

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The Christian Constitutional Republic
One Nation Under God

Government of, by, and for the People

Liberty and Justice for All
by: Thomas Lee Abshier, ND

 

Cultural Critique

 

Written by

DONALD WOOD
Professor Emeritus, Media Studies, California State University, Northridge

Modern Western civilization came into being about three centuries ago as an intellectual vision, shaped by the Enlightenment philosophy that human beings could conduct their social, economic and political matters with reason and responsibility. It was conceived out of the idea that men and women were rational, were able to think for themselves, were committed to logic and scientific enquiry and would be able to govern themselves in a responsible manner. Today, however, we are not managing our affairs in an intellectual manner. We have evolved into a chaotic post-intellectual culture.

The modern view was based on scientific empiricism, humanism, reason, individualism, personal and social responsibility, liberal democratic principles, exploration, capitalism, growth and progress. We proceeded under the elegant assumption that the citizenry would evolve into an increasingly intellectual populace, and hence could be entrusted with more and more responsibility for its own destiny. During the 19th and 20th centuries, however, this modern paradigm of scientific and humanistic reason gradually lost some of its cohesiveness and its sense of inevitable destiny. Romanticism, existentialism, urbanization, capitalistic exploitation, Marxism, scientific uncertainties, global warfare, enveloping technology and international politics all contributed to the erosion of Enlightenment idealism.

We sense today that something has gone amiss. Many of our intellectually-based institutions—schools, business enterprises, the judicial system, churches, the family, government, indeed the very idea of democracy itself—are no longer functioning the way they were originally envisioned. We send increasing numbers of our youngsters on to higher education, but we know that our schools are not turning out citizens that can cope with our increasingly incoherent society. We rush down the path to embrace new advances in digital and genetic technologies, but we are not clear in what direction this path is leading us. We invest all of our material expectations in the economic free marketplace, and then watch it collapse around us.

The information explosion overwhelms us overwhelms us, adding to our disorder rather than to our knowledge. Our technological leaps determine new urgencies and uncertainties with every quantum jump. The long-cherished economic promise of ever-expanding growth and progress seems to have vanished. We have entered into a new and unstable postmodern era of post-intellectualism. We question scientific reason and rationalism and embrace spontaneity and passion; we have swapped our commitment to privacy for the promise of security; we have downplayed competition in order to foster sensitivity; we have embraced hi-tech expertise while surrendering control of our own destiny; we have sacrificed our individualism on the altar of retribalization; we have given up a broad liberal arts intellectual perspective in order to focus on specialized vocational training; we have abandoned our quest for universal truth and adopted a loose form of moral relativity. As a result, our modern civilization has evolved into a postmodern rejection of reason and structure. As we liberated ourselves from the tyranny of history and the rigidity of truth-seeking, we also liberated ourselves from responsibility. We have engineered a new era of ambiguity and futility. Whatever.