1. Here is the thing that everyone must come to grips with in regards to postmodern critical analysis: very often its thinkers are correct in their analysis and the analytical tools are powerful. x.com
2. It’s incumbent upon Christian thinkers to answer the question as to how it is that knowledge and truth are grounded, given the critiques of the post moderns?
3. If grappling with post-modern authors and wrestling with their insights, learning from them what can be learned makes one “woke,” then pretty much any thoughtful and learned person could be accused of being “woke.”
4. At which point it has to be recognized that the term is largely useless for describing anyone.
5. The category of “woke” is simply a pop culture way of saying “enlightened.” The “woke” are “enlightened” about race, sexuality and gender. It’s the critical analysis of Marx and his derivatives, they would argue, that brought them enlightenment.
6. To then try to reverse this and argue that anyone who finds insights in Marxist analysis is thereby making the same claims to enlightenment as those on the left is just silly. Just because you find Marx or his disciples on occasion to be enlightening, does not make you “woke.”
7. The whole premise of the chain of reasoning is just dumb.
The problem that modern thinking in regards to its fundamental truth claims have all been systematically dismantled by the postmodern thinkers, many of whom were Marxist in orientation.
The problem that modern thinking in regards to its fundamental truth claims have all been systematically dismantled by the postmodern thinkers, many of whom were Marxist in orientation.
8. All of the internal contradictions and flaws in enlightenment liberalism and modern “scientific” rationality have been dismantled by postmodernism. You cannot answer postmodernism by simply doing modernism harder. You can’t put your fingers in your ears and do the la la la la la, I don’t hear you thing either.
9. Postmodernity may not bring true enlightenment. In reality it is an acid upon our culture that must be answered directly. Its criticisms cannot be dismissed.
10. How do you ground truth? Where does authority come from? These are real questions that plague our time and they come to us because of the flaws in modern scientific and rationalist premises for truth.
11. The only way to answer the postmoderns is to recognize that they were, in many ways, correct about modernity and its conception of truth. Recognizing this, you are free to learn from them but also now to grapple with the problems they raise for the foundations of knowledge.
12. Not just knowledge, but also for politics and the realm of political action. The postmodernists with their Marxist critical analysis were very effective at undermining liberal modern institutions and systems of power. We should ask, “Why?”
13. Once undermined, though, you can’t just try to go back to the old modernist liberal institutions. You must have an answer for an opponent who believes that morality is downstream from power. Just saying, “No it isn’t,” is not a sufficient answer.
14. You must answer them in the arena of power. Doing this means confronting hard realities about the nature of power and politics. A politics of the individual and a politics which makes itself subservient to morality will always be less effective than one which begins with power.
15. If you want to do good for society through the political, a good that is rooted in Christian teaching and morality, you must grapple with the reality that in the realm of politics that effectiveness comes first.
16. Before you can do good, you must be effective at gaining and securing power in a postmodern world where your opponent begins with the premise that “the rules” are downstream from power and power is downstream from mobilizing and manipulating the masses.
17. Before you can do good, you must then confront the situation as it is and ask, what is the lesser evil? Being ruled by radical leftists? Or learning the lessons of leftists about power to seize power and open the possibility of doing some good?
18. Unfortunately, destroying the ring of power is not a path open to us in a sin scared world. We must be Boromir, risking our very souls to seize the ring, defeat the enemy and then, in the aftermath, do some good.
19. Is it risky? Sure. Does it imperil our souls, such that we risk losing ourselves to the ring? Yes. But politics has always been a special calling with great risks and rewards. The “good king” is a powerful and ageless archetype. But the good king must secure power before he can wield it.
20. If this has you hyperventilating to the point where you have to throw out dumb critiques like “woke right,” so be it. It just reveals any and all who employ these critiques as a form of controlled opposition who exist to ward off threats to the “woke” regime.
21. This is a long way of saying that we are doing everything you accuse us of doing, and in the end we don’t care, and it’s a good thing that we are. x.com
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