Anyone who reads the NYTs, but especially those who have noticed its shift to a sort of Maoist Propaganda Outlet, will have noticed a radical shift in tone and in content. If I were to attempt to provide an example of how 'Cultural Marxism' functions, the Times would be a good example. I am not sure if it came out in Diebert and Jupe's attempt to establish a definition, but one element of it seems to be that it 'spins of its own accord' and within its own terms and preoccupations, while the material world, the economic world, the underpinning machinery as it were, grinds on.NYT wrote:In August 1990, George H.W. Bush met Margaret Thatcher in Aspen right after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. The pair resolved not to allow Iraq’s “naked aggression” to stand, and it did not. This was how the West was supposed to work — and how, sometimes, it did.
Today the U.S. and Great Britain scarcely govern themselves, never mind shape world order. Theresa May, who as prime minister resembles Thatcher in no respect other than gender and party, just suffered the worst parliamentary defeat in nearly a century over her Brexit deal. Donald Trump, who as president resembles Bush in no respect other than gender and party, presides over a shuttered government, a revolving-door administration, a furiously divided nation, and a mistrusted and mocked superpower.
The West is now rudderless. To be rudderless puts you at the mercy of elements. The elemental forces of politics today are tribalism, populism, authoritarianism and the sewage pipes of social media. Each contradicts the West’s foundational commitments to universalism, representation, unalienable rights, and an epistemology built on fact and reason, not clicks and feelings. We are drifting, in the absence of mind and will, toward a moment of civilizational self-negation.
Who do you think -- I mean of the commentariat -- who do you think offers the best hermeneutic in order to be able to *interpret* our present? Do you think that anyone can? Is there anyone who is actually doing it? Is it even possible? Now, each one of us (to one degree or another) offers an interpretation. We all attempt one -- how could we not? Curious, isn't it? that we have no choice by to deal in hermeneutics. Even if our terms might be outlandish and lunatic.
Recently I watched a talk -- the sort of thing we all might watch on YouTube and which the Algorithmic Gods present to us -- in which the thesis of the speaker was that we are not in a phase similar to that of the 1930s, but rather to the middle of the 15th Century and the invention of the Gutenberg Press. Now, with our belovèd Internet, we have an instrument through which we can receive information that lends to our Interpretive Processes; that determines them.
But it seems to me that if we are 'rudderless' as the opinion writer suggests, we are rudderless insofar as we do not have an interpretation that we can work with. Rather, we have 'tattered manuscripts' or 'ghosts of idea' that appear in our meditative séances.
Now, what is the relationship between our Exterior World which is likely heading toward some sort of Catastrophic Event (usually in times of great upheaval this has been the process, no?) and our Interior Worlds? I think this has been one of the *points of contention* that has often taken shape on the Forum, has it not? The notion of 'enlightenment', the 'praxis' of it, the conversation about *it*?
This is an interesting introspective sentence, isn't it? I cannot say that I would have expected such in the Times. The entire epistemological question is rather a grand one, isn't it? He simplifies it grotesquely, of course, yet it is not a bad place to start.Each contradicts the West’s foundational commitments to universalism, representation, unalienable rights, and an epistemology built on fact and reason, not clicks and feelings.
Come now Boys & Girls, let us put down the Silly Swords of False Disputation and speak outrightly on these important questions. I am interested in knowing what you genuinely think.