Postmodernism for Rationalists Powerpoint

cromulentenough:

slatestarscratchpad:

bambamramfan:

Postmodernism is… 

• A badly misinterpreted term with a lot of baggage 

• Can’t be tabooed because none of its elements are sufficiently synonymous with the gestalt 

• Kind of like a conglomerate corporation 

• Is Amazon a… Bookstore? Cloud computing provider? Organic grocery chain? Liberalleaning newspaper? Movie rating website? Game streaming service? 

• Reducible, but unsatisfactorily
    • Amazon is a Seattle-based public corporation helmed by Jeff Bezos, trading under the ticker AMZN 

• The definition fits, but doesn’t really tell you anything 

• “But that’s still informative to someone who has no idea what Amazon is” – True, so…
    • Postmodernism is a post-WWII collection of reactionary movements in art, architecture, literature, and philosophy to the totality of prior approaches in each discipline. 

Trying to understand this, parts of it I can at least make sense of, but can anyone explain the claim that capitalism is central to the modern idea of identities/“tribes”?

When I think of these groups, I think Catholics, New Atheists, SJWs, channers, kinksters, gun nuts, transhumanists, fanfic writers, etc.

None of these are capitalism focused in the sense where they’re things like “Pepsi drinkers” or “North Face wearers”. A few have marketable accessories - gun nuts need their guns, kinksters need their handcuffs - but that doesn’t seem any more central than Catholics buying the occasional crucifix necklace. I agree capitalists market to these groups - you can always buy your Darwin fish bumper sticker or your THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE t-shirt or whatever - but it doesn’t seem interesting in the grand scheme of things.

And what the heck does it mean to say “no universal values except money” or “money is the common denominator”? Money seems uniquely and surprisingly unimportant in social discourse - no New Atheist is going to say “The Pope seems like a bad guy, but I’ve got to give him credit for having a palace made of gold”. Mark Zuckerberg has more money than God and everybody hates him for unclear reasons. A Ta-Nehisi Coates or Bill O'Reilly has a hundred times more cultural influence than the average multimillionaire.

I know this isn’t the point but argh:

But what is “God”?

•NOT a big invisible man in the sky deciding the fate of the universe forever

•Only literalists / fundamentalists still believe this

•Theologians began discarding literalism in the 1600s•Vast majority of Christians today read Bible allegorically / metaphorically

•New Atheists = Beating dead horses & straw men

uh,

1) christianity is not the only religion, sure it’s the biggest one, but not by an outrageously large margin

2) literalism/ fundamentalism is more common than the author thinks, especially outside of christianity

(some religions are easier to interpret non literally/ allegorically, i would say that MOST muslims believe in a literal god and if not most, a very significan portion, probably due to the fact that a much bigger deal is made about how the quran is the literal word of god as revealed to muhammad by an angel physically manifesting and reciting it with actual sounds to him and not ‘divinely inspired’ like the bible. “some of the things god tells you are allegory, but the god who is doing the telling is literal” is probably the most common position)

3) maybe you never meet them, but the literalist/ fundamentalist horse is all but dead or made of straw.

bubbles, bubbles and more bubbles.

Islam’s got nothing on rabbinic Judaism in terms of its fetishization of text.  Don’t you know that Moses himself wrote down the entire Torah as it was being directly dictated by God personally, including the bits about Moses’s own (future) death?  Don’t you know that this dictation actually included the entire Oral Torah (the Talmud)?  Don’t you know that all this revealed text was actually known to Jacob, who taught it to his sons?

Point being: Christianity is actually pretty unusual in terms of its willingness to treat its scripture “lightly,” as revealed monotheistic religions go, and that’s mostly because its early history instead focused on the development of a concrete institutional Church that could issue binding decrees regarding religious issues.