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 laodan rated 10 months ago - The New Atheism and the end of postmodernity
in Open Democracy by Tina Beattie
We need to explore some of the complex underlying reasons for the persistence of religion after a century in which it more or less disappeared from view in western politics and public life, and was banished by totali...
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5 Reviews
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- mlekas rated 5 months ago
- sweeping generalizations mar this otherwise intelligent editorial on the end of postmodernism. I like the questions being posed, but rarely do I find the answers satisfying... I will start my own post-post-postmodernism work soon.
- Thar rated 9 months ago
- From the page: Instead of freedom we have choice, and instead of values we have labels and lifestyles. We citizens of the western democracies have become solipsistic consumers indifferent to the squandering of our hard-won freedoms and rights by governments for which terrorism has become a byword for ever-more draconian strategies of surveillance and control."
- lrdbyron rated 7 months ago
- From the page: "I think it was Martin Luther King who asked: "If there is nothing you are willing to die for, is there anything you have that's worth living for?" The postmodern condition gave us nothing to die for and nothing to live for, but it seems to have given us a great deal we are willing to kill for."
- hamish40 rated 10 months ago
- A most intriguing issue.
- laodan rated 10 months ago
- The New Atheism and the end of postmodernity
in Open Democracy by Tina Beattie
We need to explore some of the complex underlying reasons for the persistence of religion after a century in which it more or less disappeared from view in western politics and public life, and was banished by totalitarian communist regimes.
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The 19th-century confrontation between religion and science was largely fuelled by a power-struggle between men of science and men of God, most of them members of the Victorian ruling classes. Whereas the clergy and the Church of England had previously ruled the roost of English public life, in the mid-19th century the dynamics of power shifted, and scientists began to wrest much of the authority from their clerical counterparts in shaping intellectual enquiry and values.
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As democracy withers and the political forum is colonised by the suave-speaking mediocrities of the soundbite era, ... we in whose names the battles are being fought have allowed our horizons to shrink so that we see no further than the nearest shopping-mall.
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For many others, it is religion - particularly in its more dogmatic forms - that offers a potent alternative; ... instead of confusion, clear rules instead of ambiguity, tight-knit communities instead of shifting and transient relationships; and all this is presided over by a wrathful male God who hates all the things they hate.
The end of postmodernism: the "new atheists" and democracy
This article starts on an excellent question. Why does religion make a comeback in late modernity? Was it not a given that the higher the level of modernity the less people would recourse to religion? Well now that we are in late modernity we see that this was a fallacy.
While asking the right question Tina Beattie does not offer any valid answer.
The fact is that we humans:
- need to find appeasement from existential questions that harass our minds
- do not share a common worldview
- can't survive out of our societal bind
Science and rationality have not been able to elaborate a simple story, that all and everyone could have shared, answering all our existential questions and we were thus left with the market place for ideas to appease our demons.
This has seriously disrupted the cohesiveness of modern societies reaching what we only can describe as an atomization of late modern societies. Once the societal ride becomes rough uncertainty builds up and anxiety plagues the individuals. Without the reassuring warm feeling bestowed by the sharing of a common worldview with the rest of the community the individuals are searching for a foundational story that they can understand and share.
Economic globalization and the frenetic generation of new technology has had the effect of destroying much of what was which resulted in incomprehension and fright of tomorrow. People are thus searching for answers that they can understand and share with others.
Science and rationality being unable to give such simple answers and stories people turn to religions and sects of all kinds. What is dramatic here is that religions and sects are unable to give actionable answers to their followers; answers that would allow them to understand what is going on out there. Those religions and sects had answers that were actionable in the past in the societal conditions at the moment of their emergence but they fail miserably in the present.
What we need to enter postmodernity is a simple foundational story that everyone could share. A story integrating science into the more encompassing fold of the eternal spiritual observations that are shared by all our religions and philosophies:
- we humans are very small particles into the vastness of the whole
- the vastness of the whole will remain for ever inaccessible to our understanding
- we have the power to shape the conditions of our lives within the limits of our environment
- material possessions don't procure happiness this is found in the societal comfort procured by the sharing of a common worldview...
- and so on
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