THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION INTO INDOCTRINATION

Siggy has an astonishing series of quotes in his special edition of the Wednesday Weekly Whacky Awards that everyone should read. Scroll down to the Thomas Szaz Award and read what some of our "finest" educators and psychiatrists have said over the last 50 years about education. If you can make it though to the last quote, then you will begin to realize why K-12 education has evolved into K-12 indoctrination--indoctrination into the leftist mindset.

Here are just three examples:

“…a student attains ‘higher order thinking’ when he no longer believes in right or wrong“. “A large part of what we call good teaching is a teacher´s ability to obtain affective objectives by challenging the student’s fixed beliefs. …a large part of what we call teaching is that the teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child’s thoughts, attitudes, and feelings.” - Benjamin Bloom, psychologist and educational theorist, in “Major Categories in the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives”, p. 185, 1956

“This is the idea where we drop subject matter and we drop Carnegie Unites (grading from A-F) and we just let students find their way, keeping them in school until they manifest the politically correct attitudes. You see, one of the effects of self-esteem (Values Clarification) programs is that you are no longer obliged to tell the truth if you don’t feel like it. You don’t have to tell the truth because if the truth you have to tell is about your own failure then your self-esteem will go down and that is unthinkable.”- Dr. William Coulson, explaining Outcome Based Education (OBE)-1964

“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future”- Dr. Chester M. Pierce, address to the Childhood International Education Seminar, 1973

Or, how about this one, from the source of the quotes cited by Siggy:

"Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished ... The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at: first, that influences of the home are 'obstructive' and verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective ... It is for the future scientist to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen."
Bertrand Russell quoting Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the head of philosophy & psychology who influenced Hegel and others – Prussian University in Berlin, 1810

Fichte was instrumental in creating the "climate of collectivism" in philosophy (as Stephen Hicks has referred to it) that prevailed in Germany during the late 18th and throughout the 19th century. In this counter-enlightenment climate, the state was worshipped as the source of all reality and that which brought meaning to life. Hegel, building on Kant, Rosseau and Fichte, would go on to write, "It must be further understood that all the worth which the human being possesses--all the spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State."

Hegel's heirs went on to divide into left- and right-wing camps. The charge of the left was led by leftists like Karl Marx, who transformed Hegel's "dialectic of Spirit" into an economic and social system that depended on godless dialectic of "oppressors vs oppressed." The right-wing Hegelians tended to stress the omnipotence of the state and were less willing to abandon a deity. For more than a 100 years, the two camps have been battling it out, each trying to impose their utopian vision onto the human species.

Both Hegelian offshoots summarily dispensed with free will and human freedom; and between them, they brought forth the philosophical abomination that we now call "postmodernism".

The 20th century was the battleground where the two totalitarian branches of the collectivist philosophers vied for spiritual and physical control over humanity. The amount of death, destruction and misery they ushered in is perhaps unprecedented in human history.

By the mid-20th century, the right-wing, or nationalist, Hegelians, or national socialists (Nazis) had been defeated by an alliance of the left-wing Hegelians and those who stood for human freedom and democracy. By the end of the century, the social systems favored by the Hegelians of the left had been exposed to the world for the lie and deception it was.

But, in this new century, both utopian systems have been given new life by recruited a potent new ally in their attempts to control the minds of men. That ally is postmodern philosophy and rhetoric.

Neither can hope to remain viable in a world where human thought is free; therefore, the goal for the last several decades has been nothing less than to undermine mankind's perception of reality itself. They have been most successful in this goal at all levels of education--elementary, high school and college.

If you can convince children that objective reality is an illusion; that A does not equal A; that black is white; and that good is bad; if you can make them accept that everything is subjective and relative; then you have successfully breathed new life into doctrines that by all objective measures and standards led to the death and misery of millions of people. Through the careful manipulation of language, everything can be distorted, without the messy need to resort to facts, logic, or reason.

For the children of postmodernism, what matters is not truth or falsity--only the effectiveness of the language used. Lies, distortions, ad hominem attacks; attempts to silence opposing views--all are strategies that are perfectly satisfactory if they achieve the desired effect--i.e., furthering the collectivist agenda. Ideas and reason make way for reification of feelings; and freedom is replaced by thought control and preservation of "self-esteem" at all costs.

The postmodern assault as it is used by the new totalitarians of the 21st century is a four-pronged attack to undermine
- Objective reality
- Reason and the rational debate of ideas
- Individual freedom and freedom of thought and speech
- Progress and capitalism

The strategies used are:
- The distortion of language and meaning to undermine the individual's perception of reality;
- The use of direct or threatened physical violence to suppress speech and individual freedom;
- Politically "correct" thought control and cultural relativism to undermine reason and rational debate;
- The promotion of environmental hysteria to undermine progress, industrialization and capitalism

These activities represent the most serious assault on reality, reason, and individual freedom since the defeat of the Hegelian twins in the last century.

Radical Islamic ideology is itself an unexpected combination of several toxic threads of Hegelian thought that have merged in the last 30 years. One thread of this meme is Islam itself--a purportedly "peaceful" religion that is actually historically based on military conquest and coercion of belief through jihad-- entwined with the remnants of the left- and right-wing totalitarian ideologies of the last century.

Thus we see how that 18th century philosophical climate of collectivism is still playing itself out several hundred years later. But the battleground in our time has returned to the battlefield of the mind, where strenuous efforts are being made by the remnants of both to claim the minds of the next generation.

Even 5-year olds and younger children are not too young for collectivist propaganda to be inculcated. Destroy free will; inoculate them with political correctness; treat the "insanity" of their attachment to parents, the Judeo-Christian tradition; or their country--i.e., all traditional Western values that brought civilization, individual freedom and economic progress; achieve a "higher order" of thought by showing them there is no right or wrong; good or evil.

After that, what will be left? The tyranny of the Collective; or the State or of Allah.

Today's political left likes to think they are so different from those Hegelian "fascists" of the 20th century. They appear to have a serious mental block, particularly when they speak so disparagingly of the National Socialist Party (better known as the "Nazis") who were simply one faction of Hegelians (socialists) who happened to be ascendent over the other faction (communists) vying for power at the time. Clearly they are victims of their own educational nihilism; and by lobotomizing themselves they have failed to recognize that there is no essential philosophical difference between the collectivist left and the collectivist right. Both are vying for absolute power as they preach the gospel of moral relativism and postmodernism.

In "The Dictatorship of the Do-Gooders and Soul Murder" I commented about a post of Betsy Newmark's that links to an article demonstrating how the "social justice" advocates of today's collectivists have taken over our K-12 education system and are determinedly undermining American values with their politically correct, multicultural and anti-capitalist curriculum. I wrote:

Make no mistake about it, what those teachers are doing is indoctrinating their students minds into an unquestioning obedience to the collective.

While our popular culture refrains sensitively from prtraying Islamofascists as villians in movies out of political correctness (yet another aspect of socialism's quest for "social justice"); it does not hesitate to make businessmen evil and malignant oppressors of the innocent. Individualism, the pursuit of profit, and private property is always bad and everyone must bow to the will of the collective. Islam (the name even means "submit"), even in all its terrorist varieties, does very well by this perverted moral standard.

One very harmful result of this sorry educational situation is that there are few people--even among those who stalwartly defend the free market, who understand and appreciate the essential morality of capitalism. Certainly our children, taught by ideological purists like the ones above who are leftover from the 20th century debacle of socialist/communist tyranny--never even have a chance to rationally consider any ideas not approved by their aggressively collectivist teachers, so intent at quashing those aspects of human nature they don't like.

This is child abuse, pure and simple. It is indoctrination. It is the willful manipulation of young minds which cannot never be allowed to develop even the capability of thinking for themselves. And these perverts call it "social justice."

In fact there is nothing that is "just" about it. It represents the worse kind of oppression with the goal of enslaving the human mind. And enslavement is exactly what is required to establish their socialist utopia, since it refuses to acknowledge the reality of human nature.

Socialist ideologues like those teachers know that in a free market of ideas, their pathetic system-- which has only brought human misery, slavery and death to those who have embraced--cannot function in a real world. Thus they must "stack the deck" and take absolute control over the thinking of the utopia's future citizens.

On some level they even understand that the very foundation of capitalism is human freedom in its most classical, liberal tradition. And that frightens them to death.

Capitalism's incredible production of wealth is the economic side-effect that occurs when political freedom is present. It has been argued, and I agree, that both economic and political freedom are absolute prerequisites for moral behavior.

Children propagandized by dogmatic tyrants like the ones above have had not only their capacity to think for themselves abrogated; they have had their capacity to make moral choices taken from them.

The moral case for capitalism is not taught in our schools, nor is it argued much in our culture. In fact it has been more or less universally accepted by the intellectual elites that systems such as communism and socialism are "morally superior" to capitalism (hence more "socially just")--even though in practice such systems have led to the death and enslavement of millions, and to those unlucky enough not to die from them, they have led to the most horrible shrinking and wasting of the human soul.

The truth is that neither socialism nor communism nor any kind of religious fundamentalism is compatible with morality at all.

If one's actions are coerced by the state or religion, or both; if human activity is indoctrinated, legislated, regulated and ordained down to the last minute detail--particularly to the degree we see in other countries of the world (e.g., Cuba, China, most Middle Eastern countries, North Korea, and now in Venezuela--then how can it possibly be argued that one's actions are moral? Human behavior under such systems is not voluntarily chosen, but actively coerced.

Morality, though, must always be a matter of choice, not mandate.

One cannot hold a person responsible for actions that are coerced or forced from him. Morality can only exist when freedom of action exists; and thus moral actions in any field of human endeavor require freedom.

Conduct may only be thought of as moral or immoral when it is freely chosen by the individual. It is only then that the moral significance of the action can be assessed. It is only when we are free to act that we can exercise moral judgement.

Taking the mind of a child and feeding it exclusively on your ideological pablum is not only the most cruel and abusive of behaviors; it also ensures that such a mind becomes cognitively stunted and morally impaired (much like the minds of the teachers who so proudly perform such oppressive acts).

All totalitarian/collectivist idealogues will casually and deliberately use and brainwash children. Whether it is Fidel and his communist indoctrination in Cuban schools or the mirror image of the Palestinian's using a Mickey Mouse look-alike to make little children comfortable with the idea of murdering Jews. Both are not above the atrocious behavior of hiding behind children and using them as their shields; parents thourougly schooled in the collectivist propaganda will happily send their children to blow themselves up for Allah and celebrate when they are successful; and all of them know full well that decent people are repulsed at the idea of retaliating against innocents. But the collectivist--both right and left--could care less about the harm their despicable behavior does to the souls of the children who are used or brainwashed in such a manner. For them the individual, whether a child or adult, has no meaning except insofar as they can advance the ideology. Their total worth is only equivalent to their willingness to be fodder for the good the "cause."

Modern-day educators, psychologists, and assorted self-esteem gurus, multiculturalists, and PC policemen are the natural-born heirs of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and many others who have refined and advanced the postmodern irrationality. They are the ones who are in charge of educating your children into the accepted dogmas that now are espoused by the left in this country.of political correctness and multicultural religion. They are the people who are determined to have George W. Bush impeached--or declared clinically mentally ill; they are determined to undermine American values; to portray Republicans and conservatives as absolute evil. By this behavior they signal how desperately afraid they are that there are still many individuals and pockets of people who are willing to think outside of the ideological box they have created and who have not been fully lobotomized by their educational system.

Only those whose brains have been damaged by a defective educational system to begin with could adhere on the one hand to a philosophy advocating moral relativism and subjectivism with unapologetic dogmatic absolutism.

What is outrageous is that anyone--anyone who is capable of thinking anyway--could take these postmodern, brain-damaged collectivists seriously.

Progressing from education to indoctrination, postmodernism has ushered in an age of educational nihilism that seeks to destroy the minds of the next generation of Americans. The good news is that the biggest impediment to their grandiose plans is that they earlier suceeded in destroying their own minds on the bullshit they now force-feed the children of today.

And, no matter how they feel about it, reality, truth and reason must eventually prevail.

Unintelligent By Design

OK, let me just say this and get it out of my system. American public education really really is going down the tubes. Between what the LEFT is doing to our curriculum by inserting their peculiar "religious" beliefs into history and the arts (see the "Ten Commandments of Multiculturalism") ; and promulgating environmental "science" by indoctrinating into kids as young as 5 years old in environmentalist propaganda; and what the RIGHT is doing, equally determined to foist their Christian religious beliefs off as "science", I would have to say that if our kids learn to think and reason from school, it will be a frigging miracle.

Charles Krauthammer has a must-read column up about the Christian Right assault on education, "Let's Have No More Monkey Trials":

But nothing could do more to undermine this most salutary restoration than the new and gratuitous attempts to invade science, and most particularly evolution, with religion. Have we learned nothing? In Kansas, conservative school-board members are attempting to rewrite statewide standards for teaching evolution to make sure that creationism's modern stepchild, intelligent design, infiltrates the curriculum. Similar anti-Darwinian mandates are already in place in Ohio and are being fought over in 20 states. And then, as if to second the evangelical push for this tarted-up version of creationism, out of the blue appears a declaration from Christoph Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna, a man very close to the Pope, asserting that the supposed acceptance of evolution by John Paul II is mistaken. In fact, he says, the Roman Catholic Church rejects "neo-Darwinism" with the declaration that an "unguided evolutionary process--one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence--simply cannot exist."

Cannot? On what scientific evidence? Evolution is one of the most powerful and elegant theories in all of human science and the bedrock of all modern biology.

I have written repeatedly on the detrimental effects brought about by the PC and Multicultural curriculum in K-12, as well as at the university level (see here, here, here or here, for example) David Broder, whose excellent column I linked to a few days ago, bemoans the lack of American History being taught and the general dumbing down of the curriculum, and comments:

We are running a terrible risk. Our very freedom depends on education, and we are failing our children in not providing that education.

The unintelligent design of our K-12 curriculum is a complete travesty. The religions of political correctness, multiculturalism and Gaia are already polluting young minds in almost all areas of study--even math and science. We don't need an ill-informed and angry Christian RIGHT to decimate whatever is left of arts and science education.

Someday we will deeply regret this idiocy. As our students fall behind and the best and brightest are taken out of the public education arena (and who can blame parents for doing that?), the public schools will become mere indoctrination camps--shall we call them madrassas?-- for whichever side holds political power at the moment.

If freedom depends on education, how will this country fare in the future as our educational system trains our children not to use reason and logic to determine truth, but to use their feelings and beliefs as the gold standard for understanding and interpreting the world. That is simply unintelligent.

Unintelligent by design.

THE POSTMODERN, 'PRESENT-TENSE' CULTURE

Mark Steyn has a really excellent piece in The New Criterion discussing the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind.

Bloom's controversial exposé of the shallowness and meaninglessness of American pop culture was a bombshell when it first was published in 1987; and, his analysis seems even more prescient when one considers the evolution of that pop culture over the last 20 years.

Bloom was the quintessential academic and a true liberal intellectual (in the traditional meaning of that word), and he could not help noticing that the university--which used to see its mission as the maintainence and transmission of civilization and learning--was failing in that mission. Instead of countering the pervasively vapid "pop" psychology that passed for deep thought about the meaning and purpose of life, it gave credibility to the emptiness and facilitated and celebrated the shallowness.

Instead of preparing young minds with the great ideas and thoughts that had preceded the modern day and which were the very foundation of western civilization; it was deconstructing those ideas willy-nilly; dismissing those thinkers and invalidating their ideas, because they lacked 'modern' sensibilities.

In a previous post I wrote:

By using the now-common relativistic formula, all individuals and thinkers in the past are ridiculed, demeaned, and scorned because they fail to live up to postmodern and politically correct standards of conduct. Thus, their ideas are considered meaningless and described as "hypocritical"--the absolutely worse possible sin from the leftist perspective.

Thomas Jefferson, George Washington--all the Founding Fathers for the most part--did not have the consciousness of the postmodern intellectual: they were slaveholders! Yet they dared to consider the problem of human freedom, bound as they were to the cultural norms of their time. That they could not entirely break out of the culture of their time, but still could push the envelope of civilization forward is irrelevant to the postmodern left. From the left's perch of moral superiority they blithely dismiss these "white males" as hypocrites with no moral standing. Thus are the foundations and the generationally built constructs of civilization invalidated and destroyed. Is it any wonder that all that is left is the nihilistic garbage that postmodernism deems as "reality"?

But consider, if we do not understand the past; if we abandon the ideas that underlie our values and our morality-- how can we appreciate who we are today? If we are only allowed to think of Thomas Jefferson as a hypocritical colonial slaveholder, then we are forced to pronounce his ideas on the struggle for human freedom as no better and no worse than Hitler's Kampf.

And so, Jefferson's mind-blowing, paradigm-shattering declaration, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" has no more meaning or worth than Yasser Arafat's statement that, "Since we cannot defeat Israel in war; we do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel." Both are either completely meaningless; or both are examples of freedom-fighters--who cares which? Bush = Hitler; Good = Evil; Freedom = Slavery; there is no way to judge because the nihilistic relativism we subscribe to has taken away our ability to morally distinguish and discriminate between right and wrong.

By disgarding reason and reality; by abandoning the past and embracing moral and cultural relativism, the left has brought us to this place where we are morally and physically paralyzed and cannot distinguish between the deliberate targeting and killing of innocents and the accidental killing of innocents despite herculean efforts to avoid it; between waging war to give people a chance at freedom and democracy; and waging war for domination and imperialism; between standing up for what is right and accepting the consequences, and abandoning one's values and surrendering with "honor" to the scum of the earth.

By mocking intellectual giants like Thomas Jefferson and dragging him through the postmodern mud; by equating Bush with Hitler; or the behavior of the Palestinians with the behavior of the Israelis; the actions of the U.S. military with the actions of the Islamofanatic terrorist thugs-- the left is desperately trying to numb the mind of the West. Who are we to judge? they scream, desperately trying to prevent history from judging their own unbelievable and pathological destructiveness, their own morally repugnant behavior and ideology.

This is their quest. To establish themselves as the arbiters of moral behavior by behaving immorally; of being "reality-based" without the necessity of having to acknowledge reality; of speaking "truth" to power, without being capable of recognizing truth (isn't all truth relative, after all?).

Bloom argued persuasively in his book that the modern mindset is running on empty compared to the ancient and enlighted thinkers of history. His argument struck me forcefully when I first read his book some years back; and it has even more meaning for me today when I consider the complete corruption of the academic world and ascendency of those marxist and postmodern nihilistic forces within it who see education only as a tool for the indoctrination of young minds into politically correct ideology and who have transformed academia into an educational gulag.

The rich complexity and depth of understanding that can be gleaned from studying the classics of western intellectual thought has been swept away by today's almost exclusive emphasis on the more shallow and infinitely more convenient modern ones. And like Bloom's students in the 80's, who were programmed to seek 'relevance', they still can't be bothered to care about the ideas of the past. Today, however, this is also the mindset of the faculty who teach them.

Thus, both students and teachers are cut off from the great history of ideas and are tossed about by relativistic winds like intellectual feathers.

Are human beings created in the image of God and capable of reason; choice and both great good and evil; or are they merely alive to follow their animal instincts; without free will or a higher consiousness; incapable of rational thought and a servant to emotion?

America was founded on the idea that reason rules emotion; that religion and brute force are not primary; and it was the concrete example of the abstract ideas of Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and David Hume. These philosophers built upon the ideas of those who had gone before. They questioned the role of religion and the state; but also argued that societies are not sustained by reason alone. And the Founding Fathers were inspired to create a society that promoted life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Bloom's discussions of both culture and values were--then and now--breathtaking in their acuity and insight. As I read somewhere once, we Americans may quote the words of Jefferson, but we have really come to believe those of Nietzsche.

Getting back to Steyn's excellent essay, he notes:

Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.

Steyn next focuses on the part of Bloom's book where he rips apart modern "pop" music:

So Bloom is less concerned with music criticism than with what happens when a society’s incidental music becomes its manifesto. The key to what’s happened is in the famous first sentence of the book. “There is,” writes the author, “one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” To quote the African dictator in a Tom Stoppard play, a relatively free press is a free press run by one of my relatives. A relative culture ends up ever shorter of any relatives to relate to. In educational theory, it’s not about culture vs. “counter-culture” but rather what I once called lunch-counterculture: It’s all lined up for you and you pick what you want. It’s the display case of rotating pies at the diner: one day the student might pick Milton, the next Bob Dylan. But, if Milton and Bob Dylan are equally “valid,” equally worthy of study, then Bob Dylan will be studied and Milton will languish. And so it’s proved, most exhaustively, in music.

He recounts an MTV interview of John Kerry in 2004:

The interviewer asks his guest: “Well, we know that you were into rock and roll when you were in high school, and we know that you play the guitar now. Are there any trends out there in music, or even in popular culture in general, that have piqued your interest?”

And the guest—presidential candidate John Kerry—replied: “Oh sure. I follow and I’m interested. I’m fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there’s a lot of poetry in it. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you’d better listen to it pretty carefully, ’cause it’s important. I’m still listening because I know that it’s a reflection of the street and it’s a reflection of life.”

Really? John Kerry is “fascinated” by rap and “listening” to hip-hop? Think if you broke into the Kerry household and riffled through John and Teresa’s CD collection you’d find a single rap album? I didn’t mind Senator Kerry when he was being mocked as a flip-flopper, but I find him even less plausible as America’s first flip-flopper hip-hopper. You can smell the fear in his answer.

And consider his recitation of rap’s virtues: there’s “a lot of anger, a lot of social energy … it’s a reflection of the street.” That’s something else that happens in a relativist culture. First, if Tupac Shakur is just as good as Milton, then everybody drops Milton. Then comes the second stage: once Milton’s dropped, and Bach and Keats and Mozart, you no longer have a very clear idea of who exactly Tupac Shakur is meant to be as good as. It’s not comparative anymore: he’s all there is. The argument is that, oh, well, you uptight squares are always objecting to stuff: you thought Sinatra exciting bobbysoxers was dangerous, and the Viennese waltz was the mating dance of a hypersexualized culture. No. Benny Goodman, noted by Bloom, was a huge pop star but he could play the Mozart clarinet concerto. Popular culture used to be very at ease with the inheritance of the past. One of the trends of the last forty years is not just the vanishing of “high culture” but of low-culture jokes about high culture—the variety-show sketches in which Schubert’s mates urge him to come down the pub with him and he says “No, I’ve got to stay in and finish my symphony.” It assumes a residual familiarity—from some half-recalled school lesson—with a bloke called Schubert who wrote an “Unfinished Symphony.”

Likewise, P. G. Wodehouse is stuffed with literary and classical and Biblical allusions: “He conveyed to young Mr. Rastall-Retford the impression that, in the dear old ’Varsity days, they had shared each other’s joys and sorrows, and, generally, had made Damon and Pythias look like a pair of cross-talk knockabouts at one of the rowdier music-halls.” Wodehouse assumes you know who Damon and Pythias are: They were best pals back in the fourth century BC. Ran into a spot of bother with Dionysius of Syracuse. You could junk Damon and Pythias and replace them with Damon and Affleck—Matt Damon and Ben Affleck: They’re also best pals, they make movies together. But eventually you dwindle down to a present-tense culture unable to refer to anything beyond itself. You can make the argument that, say, Jerome Kern, the first great Broadway composer of the twentieth century, is at his best as harmonically sophisticated as Schubert. But to do that you would first have to know something about Schubert. I think it’s harder to make the claim to harmonic sophistication in the Beatles, but William Mann, the music critic of The Times of London, gave it a go in 1963, comparing the Aeolian cadence in “Not A Second Time” with the end of Mahler’s “Song of the Earth.” But, as I said, to do that you have to know about Mahler.

And once Mahler’s gone and Schubert’s gone, you can no longer make musical claims for rock and rap, so all you do is hail it for its authenticity and its energy and, as John Kerry did, its copious amounts of “anger.” Thus, the loss of a high-culture aesthetic eventually undermines your pop culture, too

Now, I quoted from Steyn's piece at length (and you need to read it all) because it really captures the relativism and nihilism of postmodern philosophy and demonstrate the consequences those ideas have had on art; and specifically, in this case, music.

Once the genie of postmodern moral relativism was released into Western intellectual thought, it was necessary to undermine history, reality, and truth in order to maintain it.

Without a rational metaphysics--or worldview--that explains the nature of existence and reality; and without an epistemology that says our minds are able to acquire knowledge of that reality; then it is easy for the postmodernists to enforce conformity of ideas (while preaching 'diversity'), totalitarian policies (even as they tout 'free speech'), and 'social justice' (even as they perpetuate victimhood).

Ethics, the study of how man should behave in the world--or, what is good and what is evil--is totally dependent on both metaphysics and epistemology, because it is impossible to make choices without knowledge; just as it is impossible to have knowledge without a reality that can be known and understoody by our minds.

What matters in the postmodernist's convoluted thinking is not truth or falsity--only the effectiveness of the language used. Lies, distortions, ad hominem attacks; attempts to silence opposing views--all are strategies that are perfectly satisfactory if they achieve the desired effect. Ideas and reason must make way for reification of feelings; and freedom is replaced by thought control.

Esthetics is a branch of philosophy that studies art; and it is dependent on metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. The essence of postmodern esthetics is the destruction, often deliberate, of beauty and meaning--two of the greatest and most significant aspects of art.

In the shallow, nihilistic blackness of postmodern art, all one is usually left with in place of beauty is a pile of negative emotions--usually of the anger and rage variety; and, the place of meaning has been appropriated by the opiate of the neo-marxist masses, i.e., the ever-useful concept of "social justice", which can always be pointed to as the "deep" meaning of the work, be it painting, music, literature, or whatever.

Art can be thought of as a selective recreation of reality. Its basic purpose is to take an abstraction and make it concrete; and thus to bring an idea or emotion to physical life. Since it is 'selective' in its recreation, the values of the painter, musician etc. are key to understanding its meaning.

Music is an extremely powerful medium that unlocks and expresses emotion through patterns of sound.

And, as Steyn comments, "It was twenty years ago today, sang the Beatles forty years ago today, that Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. Well, it was twenty years ago today—1987—that Professor Bloom taught us the band had nothing to say."

Most of the 'present-tense' culture that Bloom wrote about in 1987 has become even more cut-off from any esthetic and intellectual roots; and is even more shallow, meaningless, repulsive and mind-bogglingly ugly than would have been thought possible a mere two decades ago. By looking at the postmodern evolution of popular music, we can begin to understand the enormity of the cultural problem we face.

I used to get mad at my school
The teachers who taught me weren't cool
You're holding me down, turning me round
Filling me up with your rules.

The children of postmodernism are now the teachers, professors, and administrators who run the schools. How long do you suppose it will take before the recent atrocity promulgated at University of Delaware is elevated and accepted as a progressive beacon of 'intellectual' and 'moral' clarity?

Ideas have consequences in the real world. And very bad ideas unfortunately have very bad consequences. I suspect that fact has something to do with reality, truth, and reason....

THE CORRUPTION OF THE CURRICULUM

Want to see where American schools are heading, if they have not already reached the same politically correct destination? Then check out this report on the UK educational systems:

No major subject area has escaped the blight of political interference, according to the report published by Civitas.

"The traditional subject areas have been hijacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the Government's social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students," it says....

Civitas casts doubt on the value of much of what children are now "taught". History has become so divorced from facts and chronology that pupils might learn the new "skills and perspectives" through a work of fiction, such as Lord of the Rings, it says.

Teenagers studying for GCSEs are being asked to write about the September 11 atrocities using Arab media reports and speeches from Osama bin Laden as sources without balancing material from America, it reveals.

In English, the drive for gender and race equality has led an exam board to produce a list of modern poems from around the world without a single poet from England or Wales being represented.

The new 21st-century science curriculum introduced last September substitutes debates on abortion, genetic engineering and the use of nuclear power for lab work and scientific inquiry, it says.

Designed to make science more popular, the results of a study show it has had the opposite effect, with pupils less interested in the subject and less keen to pursue it in the sixth form than they were under the previous, more fact-based lessons.

Future scientists will be even more likely to come from independent schools because the new GCSE courses will leave state pupils ill-quipped for further study, it says.

Be sure to read the entire article.

In this country, the same fashionable people who swoon at the mere mention of including "intelligent design" into the curriculum and beat their breasts at the idea of the Christian fundamentalists elected to school boards, are completely sanguine about their own particular brand of political brainwashing that is so pervasively integrated into the same curriculum that must be protected at all costs from the corrupting influence of the evil theocrats.

By their obvious contempt for the very idea of including a religious perspective in science, you might conclude that they are champions of pure science and that they want to protect the curriuclum from being corrupted with non-scientific, religious dogma.

You would be completely wrong.

They simply want to ensure that their particular beliefs and its quasi-religious holy dogma are enshrined in the curriculum, to the exclusion of all others.

Just as in the British schools, science is now filled with environmentalism's trendy anti-human, anti-capitalist, anti-American bias. I'm simply thrilled that my daughter has been able to see Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" multiple times in different classes--obviously to ensure that she appreciates how important a work it is. She comes home and tells me about mock trials in Civics class where George Bush has been impeached; about how only two students (out of 22) in her History class thought the war on terror was a "good idea" (yes, they took a nice democratic vote to prove that it wasn't). She tells me all about the serious discussion groups in other classes that try to raise student's consciousness about gay, lesbian and transexual issues and so on and so forth.

Indeed, no major subject area has escaped the blight of political interference. I shudder when I read the word problems she brings home from her math classes.

Here is a summary of the objectives of the math curriculum from a school in Massachussets, which:

...defined the new number-one priority for teaching mathematics, as documented in the curriculum benchmarks, "Respect for Human Differences - students will live out the system wide core of 'Respect for Human Differences' by demonstrating anti-racist/anti-bias behaviors." It continues, "Students will: Consistently analyze their experiences and the curriculum for bias and discrimination; Take effective anti-bias action when bias or discrimination is identified; Work with people of different backgrounds and tell how the experience affected them; Demonstrate how their membership in different groups has advantages and disadvantages that affect how they see the world and the way they are perceived by others..."

Have you looked at what your children's teaches say in the brochures they send home in the kids' backpacks? It is sure to be some variant of the above multicultural, politically correct nonsense that is sucking the substance right out of every subject area and replacing it with leftist dogma.

The health of our educational system--from K-12 through college-- is absolutely essential to the long-term welfare and competitiveness of the United States. American education used to be the strongest on the globe, and to the extent that remains true, it is because the hard sciences in this country (e.g., math, engineering, computers etc.) have been largely resistant to the political taint that runs rampant in the humanities. The latter subject areas, which include literature, philosophy, and history, have become unabashedly ideological over the last two decades; and the "social justice" advocates of today's collectivists have taken over our K-12 education system and are determinedly undermining American values with their politically correct, multicultural and anti-capitalist curriculum.

I have written about this before (see here and here, for example; but it is worth repeating again.

Make no mistake about it, what many teachers today are doing is indoctrinating their students minds into an unquestioning obedience to the collective. This they cannot do unless they also can manage to corrupt even the hard sciences with their dogma.

There can be no area where a child is allowed to think freely and without the proper political perspective. That is far too dangerous for the underly ideology they are promulgating. I wrote:

While our popular culture refrains sensitively from prtraying Islamofascists as villians in movies out of political correctness (yet another aspect of socialism's quest for "social justice"); it does not hesitate to make businessmen evil and malignant oppressors of the innocent. Individualism, the pursuit of profit, and private property is always bad and everyone must bow to the will of the collective. Islam (the name even means "submit"), even in all its terrorist varieties, does very well by this perverted moral standard.

One very harmful result of this sorry educational situation is that there are few people--even among those who stalwartly defend the free market, who understand and appreciate the essential morality of capitalism. Certainly our children, taught by ideological purists like the ones above who are leftover from the 20th century debacle of socialist/communist tyranny--never even have a chance to rationally consider any ideas not approved by their aggressively collectivist teachers, so intent at quashing those aspects of human nature they don't like.

This is child abuse, pure and simple. It is indoctrination. It is the willful manipulation of young minds which cannot never be allowed to develop even the capability of thinking for themselves. And these perverts call it "social justice."

In fact there is nothing that is "just" about it. It represents the worse kind of oppression with the goal of enslaving the human mind. And enslavement is exactly what is required to establish their socialist utopia, since it refuses to acknowledge the reality of human nature.

Socialist ideologues like those teachers know that in a free market of ideas, their pathetic system-- which has only brought human misery, slavery and death to those who have embraced--cannot function in a real world. Thus they must "stack the deck" and take absolute control over the thinking of the utopia's future citizens.

On some level they even understand that the very foundation of capitalism is human freedom in its most classical, liberal tradition. And that frightens them to death.

Capitalism's incredible production of wealth is the economic side-effect that occurs when political freedom is present. It has been argued, and I agree, that both economic and political freedom are absolute prerequisites for moral behavior.

Children propagandized by dogmatic tyrants like the ones above have had not only their capacity to think for themselves abrogated; they have had their capacity to make moral choices taken from them.

The moral case for capitalism is not taught in our schools, nor is it argued much in our culture. In fact it has been more or less universally accepted by the intellectual elites that systems such as communism and socialism are "morally superior" to capitalism (hence more "socially just")--even though in practice such systems have led to the death and enslavement of millions, and to those unlucky enough not to die from them, they have led to the most horrible shrinking and wasting of the human soul.

The truth is that neither socialism nor communism nor any kind of religious fundamentalism is compatible with morality at all.

If one's actions are coerced by the state or religion, or both; if human activity is indoctrinated, legislated, regulated and ordained down to the last minute detail--particularly to the degree we see in other countries of the world (e.g., Cuba, China, most Middle Eastern countries, North Korea, and now in Venezuela--then how can it possibly be argued that one's actions are moral? Human behavior under such systems is not voluntarily chosen, but actively coerced.

Morality, though, must always be a matter of choice, not mandate.

One cannot hold a person responsible for actions that are coerced or forced from him. Morality can only exist when freedom of action exists; and thus moral actions in any field of human endeavor require freedom.

Conduct may only be thought of as moral or immoral when it is freely chosen by the individual. It is only then that the moral significance of the action can be assessed. It is only when we are free to act that we can exercise moral judgement.

Taking the mind of a child and feeding it exclusively on your ideological pablum is not only the most cruel and abusive of behaviors; it also ensures that such a mind becomes cognitively stunted and morally impaired (much like the minds of the teachers who so proudly perform such oppressive acts).

In the end, all totalitarian/collectivist idealogues have to deliberately and callously use and brainwash children. Whether it is Fidel and his communist indoctrination in Cuban schools or the mirror image of the Palestinian's using a Mickey Mouse look-alike to make little children comfortable with the idea of murdering Jews. Each has their own idea of "social justice", and they insure that their children's minds are never able to break out of the ideological box within which they have confined their respective societies.

Collectivists--either from the right or the left--could care less about the harm they do to the souls of the children who are used or brainwashed in such a manner. For them the individual, whether a child or adult, has no meaning except insofar as they can advance the ideology. A child's total worth is only equivalent to their willingness to be fodder for the good the "cause."

Hence, the swooning leftists, so overcome by the idea that Christian religion might creep into the K-12 curriculum, are correct to suppose that dogmatic indoctrination would ultimately compromise the ability of children to think critically and to make moral choices. But take a look around and note the actual source of the pervasive dogmatic indoctrination in our schools.

It is certainly not from the rather desperate objections to Darwinian evolution that originate from a Christian right, whose beliefs have been systematically excluded and ostracized from education and whose influence is being carefully purged from the larger culture itself; it is almost exclusively from the politically correct and multicultural dogma of the political left.

UPDATE: The left's indoctrination of children today is really no different from what is going on in the madrassas of the Arab world. I remembered this post from Siggy's archives:

...imagine a school that gave each student a glass of alcohol every day. Each day, beginning at tender nursery school age, the child was encouraged to drink the beverage that would come to poison his mind. Suppose that beverage was from the well aged bottle of anti Semitism.

Suppose also that once that child downed that alcoholic beverage, the teacher refilled that glass with more alcohol. This time, the flavor is religious bigotry directed at non Jews.

Suppose once that glass of alcohol was consumed by young dutiful children, the glass was immediately refilled with the beverage from the bottle of anti western and anti democratic values.

After decades, these children, now adults, go home every day, turn on the television and read the newspapers- and they are fed more alcohol. They get more when their kids come home from school, and share the same familiar poisoned ‘fire water.’ They poison they are fed gets the God’s seal of approval when fed to them from the pulpit- or so they desperately need to believe.

Of course, to keep a drunk or a junkie hooked, it takes an ever increasing amount of poison to induce the same stupor that blinds the drunk or the junkie to his own surroundings and dysfunction. The supply of poison never ends.

After years of such ‘education,’ it would be reasonable to expect that there would be a lot of alcoholics in the Arab world, poisoned by the hate and ideologies of dysfunctional and corrupt leaders. Like alcoholics and substance abusers, they will tell you they ‘have it under control‘ and that they ‘can quit anytime they want.‘

In the case of the left, the "alcohol" is postmodernism, a toxic intellectual addiction which undermines reality and truth and short-circuits the critical cognitive skills that children will need to survive and meet the challenges of life.

That is the net result of their progressive indoctrination.

IDEOLOGICAL PSYCHOPATHY

Here are two examples of ideological child abuse:

The first is a case of attempted murder for the sake of the ideology: how young girls are being turned into weapons by Al Qaeda:

The teenage girl, handcuffed to an iron railing, hangs her head as an Iraqi explosives expert cuts the trigger cords on a suicide vest strapped to her body. Gunshots echo in the distance as the white vest, carrying about 30lb (15kg) of explosives, is peeled off the 15-year-old, leaving her standing in the street in a sleeveless, orange frock.

The footage was taken in August, when police said they found Rania Ibrahim Mutlib in a side road in Baquba, north of Baghdad, having failed to detonate her charge.

When The Times met her in a police interrogation cell this week with her mother and grandmother, she claimed that she had been drugged and had no intention of killing herself or of becoming the 16th teenage girl bomber said to have struck in the past year.

The second is an example of attempted soul murder for sake of the ideology: (NOTE: A reader has alerted me to the fact that the Obamaniacs have already taken down the video of the "Obama Children's Chorus"--but it is still up at Michelle Malkin if you haven't seen it.



Both ideologies in question share a fundamental feature: neither sees the child as an individual--i.e., separate, unique or independent in her own right--but instead sees that child as merely an extension of the will of the ideology; and therefore as fodder to further the ideology.

The psychopathy of the first example is obvious to all; the psychopathy of the second thinks to disguise itself under a layer of [perverse] 'cuteness'.

Both, however, are examples of the totalitarian/collectivist mindset...

For more on this psychopathoology see the following posts:
The Clever Psychological Disguises of the Left
The Totalitarian Impulse of the Left
The Evolution of Education into Indoctrination
Totalitarians, Left and Right

TRAGEDY AND FARCE

For anyone who has lingering doubts about the extent to which postmodernism and the trashing of history has thoroughly saturated Western culture, I refer you to this article from Reuters. Two points stand out. The first is this statement that is made without documentation as a simple matter of fact:

Millions of tribal Indians are believed to have died as a result of European colonization backed by the Church, through slaughter, disease or enslavement.

The only purpose of such a statement is to emphasize how bad European white culture is compared to the poor oppressed indiginous culture. This as we all know is the primary tenet of multiculuralism: all cultures are equally good, except fro Western culture which is evil evil evil. Al-Reuters could have escalated the provocation if only America had colonized Venezuela. Maybe though, they can alter history enough to ensure that happens.

The second is that this is a "news" article that contains the following laughable statement about the socialist thug currently consolidating absolute power in Venezuela:

Chavez, who has expanded the rights of indigenous peoples from the Amazon rainforest to the Caribbean, said he felt he was Indian because Venezuelans are a mix of the European race and indigenous peoples.

This is presented as undisputed fact. I mean, isn't Chavez wonderful? What a guy!! He has "expanded the rights" of the poor and oppressed indigenous peoples.

What is Reuters, Chavez' publicist?

Many dictators claim to be standing up for the "rights" of the oppressed; that's how those dictators get power. Hitler's preferred "oppressed: population were Aryans, as I recall; and, he also nationalized banks and industry to consolidate his power. Interestingly, while they are standing up for the rights of the oppressed, these very same champions almost always manage to find a group to demonized so that failure can be externalized and not blamed on the regime. Funny how it works like that, and Chavez is hardly an exception to this motif.

One of the commenters in my post on The Transformation of Education into Indoctrination makes the following excellent point:

There has recently been a survey of Australian High School history students which concluded that they were feeling guilty and uncomfortable at the way the colonial history curriculum was being taught. Similarly to the US, leftist educators have promulgated a "black armband" version of our colonial past and particularly as it appliied to the indigenous aborigines.
Any historian who dares to challenge this orthodoxy of genocide and subjugation is howled down as a racist and apologist for the imperialists. http://www.adelaideinstitute.org...ndschuttle1.htm
This review of one particular book concludes with a calm but telling indictment of the postmodernist educational agenda.
Quote:
"I want to conclude by looking at the motives of historians like Lyndall Ryan and why they write things which are apparently not true.

One critic of Windschuttle, Alan Atkinson, accused him of wanting to “take the discipline back to some golden age, when it was all about facts.” (Australian Book Review, February 2003, p 4 ). This sounds bizarre. We assume history books describe facts and are based on facts. If history is not supposed to be about facts and not based on facts, then what are you supposed to base it on?

This is an issue, which Windschuttle addressed in an earlier book The Killing of History and in several articles on his webpage, The Sydney Line, about history and postmodernism. As the word suggests, postmodernism means what comes after modernism. Modernism, in this context, means the belief that it is possible to find out the facts, to know what is true. Postmodernists believe that it is impossible to know the facts and find out what really happened in the past. They believe everyone is so politically and culturally biased that it is impossible not to be biased and to see things objectively as they really are, so the truth and facts are unknowable. They believe the traditional writing of history, based on facts and evidence, has been used to oppress women and ethnic minorities. So they believe the new purpose of history writing should be to be deliberately politically biased and write history that supports a political agenda, that is, propaganda, in favour of the oppressed minority, such as Aboriginal land rights in this context. Rather than basing what they write on the evidence, they twist or invent the evidence to support their political agenda, much in the same way that Communists used to rewrite history and make events disappear to make history fit their Communist ideology.
[...]
Postmodernists try to justify their bias and creative writing to make up for the way Aborigines or other minorities have been mistreated in the past. However, if they do not believe there are facts and it is impossible to know what really happened, then how can they know the minority group was mistreated or oppressed in the first place? Whatever our political agendas, what we believe about history has to be based on the evidence, not on what we would like to believe happened. "(Emphasis mine)

In an earlier post about the intellectual origins of neoconservatism, which has been a counter-movement to postmodernism and seeks to reclaim historical perspective and preserve the intellectual heritage of Western civilization-- I discussed at length the postmodernist's tendency to rewrite history to make it to fit a particular ideological template. The points of that articale bear repeating, since, as the Chavez example glaringly demonstrates, postmodern mantras and manipulations are inserted everywhere--in news articles like the Reuters one linked above; in educational curricula and in art and even smoothly inserted into entertainment. Indeed, the ubiquitous propaganda generated by the postmodern worldview is designed specifically to ensure that no mind be allowed to come to any "unapproved" conclusions or have any "politically incorrect" thoughts flitting around in the synapses.

Big Brother is always watching and no area is too trivial or inconsequential that it can't be used as an object lesson on the correct way to think; witness the link above where even in a film that promotes bestiality in a positive and sympathetic manner, it's important to have the proper political perspective.

The postmodern slogans and talking points of the left are everywhere portrayed as if they were universal, incontravertible, and absolute truth. Which is very curious since postmodernists will tell you that all truth is relative-- except, of course, for postmodernism which is absolutely true.

As I noted:

The rise of neoconservatism represents the only modern intellectual counter and the only known antidote to the infection of postmodernism and its resultant toxic effects on philosophy, rehtoric, and politics.

In order to succeed in undoing and undermining the clear and unambiguous evidence of socialism's and communism's utter human toxicity, the totalitarians of the political left had to undermine nothing less than reality, reason, and truth. Furthermore, they had to deconstruct and invalidate human consciousness, making sure that the everyone understood that the only apparatus available to humans for perceiving reality--the mind--was completely unreliable, and that the evidence of the senses must therefore be discounted. This intellectual strategy resulted in a pervasive cultural relativism and intellectual nihilism that permeated all aspects of society and intellectual thought. Words and language were redefined to mean whatever one wanted; history was deconstructed--ostensibly to expose it's lies, but really to render it meaningless; and the ideas and values that were the foundation of Western civilization were mocked and shown by postmodern "logic" to be no better than any other random ideas.

Thus, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose; and not significantly different from slavery; democracy is just as much a fraud as tyranny; that which was always considered the good, is really just as evil as evil; and so on. Twentieth century postmodernists thus set themselves up as culturally and morally superior to all other humans in history, and with the postmodern relativistic advantage, they could pass judgement on everyone and everything. Thus from the superior postmodern perspective, there was nothing of value to learn from a slave-holding Thomas Jefferson; there is no moral superiority in a system that strives toward increasing individual human freedom and dignity compared to a system that doesn't even recognize the rights of the individual. There is no difference between right and wrong; good and evil--all are suspect, all are hypcritical, all are imperfect; and thus all such concepts are rendered irrelevant.

The key to this undoing of that which is good and conflating it with that which is evil; of deconstructing the reality and reason upon which more than 5000 years of civilization is founded; is through the nihilistic process of deconstructing and reinterpreting the historical past and redefining and undermining its meaning.

You are probably familiar with the leftist drill, since it is now frequently applied to anything valued in the West (in the last week it has even been used to "demythologize" Thanksgiving so as to invalidate what that quintessential American holiday even means). By using the now-common relativistic formula, all individuals and thinkers in the past are ridiculed, demeaned, and scorned because they fail to live up to postmodern and politically correct standards of conduct. Thus, their ideas are considered meaningless and described as "hypocritical"--the absolutely worse possible sin from the leftist perspective.

On the deconstruction of the American past:

Thomas Jefferson, George Washington--all the Founding Fathers for the most part--did not have the consciousness of the postmodern intellectual: they were slaveholders! Yet they dared to consider the problem of human freedom, bound as they were to the cultural norms of their time. That they could not entirely break out of the culture of their time, but still could push the envelope of civilization forward is irrelevant to the postmodern left. From the left's perch of moral superiority they blithely dismiss these "white males" as hypocrites with no moral standing. Thus are the foundations and the generationally built constructs of civilization invalidated and destroyed. Is it any wonder that all that is left is the nihilistic garbage that postmodernism deems as "reality".

Likewise, the postmodern left means us to understand that the exploration of the world by the intrepid Europeans; the discovery of other continents and all colonization--in other words, the rise of Western civilization and its expansion westward only resulted in "slaughter, disease or enslavement"; and that this process is merely one of "white imperialism".

But consider, if we do not understand the past; if we abandon the ideas that underlie our values and our morality-- how can we appreciate who we are today? If we are only allowed to think of Thomas Jefferson as a hypocritical colonial slaveholder; if we only see history as evil white males enslaving or slaughtering the oppressed indiginous cultures-- then we are forced to pronounce Jeffersons ideas on the struggle for human freedom as no better and no worse than Hitler's Kampf; and human progress itself as "oppressive".

And so, Jefferson's mind-blowing, paradigm-shattering declaration, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" has no more meaning or worth than Yasser Arafat's statement that, "Since we cannot defeat Israel in war; we do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel." Both are either completely meaningless; or both are examples of freedom-fighters--who cares which? Bush = Hitler; Good = Evil; Freedom = Slavery; there is no way to judge because the nihilistic relativism we subscribe to has taken away our ability to morally distinguish and discriminate between right and wrong.

By discarding reason and reality; by abandoning the past and embracing moral and cultural relativism, the left has brought us to this place where we are morally and physically paralyzed and cannot distinguish between the deliberate targeting and killing of innocents and the accidental killing of innocents despite herculean efforts to avoid it; between waging war to give people a chance at freedom and democracy; and waging war for domination and imperialism; between standing up for what is right and accepting the consequences, and abandoning one's values and surrendering with "honor" to the scum of the earth.

This is the postmodern quest. To establish themselves as the arbiters of moral behavior by behaving immorally; of calling themselves "reality-based" without the necessity of having to acknowledge reality; by speaking "truth" to power, without even being capable of recognizing truth (isn't all truth relative, after all?); and by teaching history that fits the marxist/socialist template.

In the specific example from Reuters at the beginning of this post, where the "journalist" has set himself up as the arbiter of moral behavior, the correct way to think is clearly spelled out for us. No other interpretation of history is permitted; and the underlying assumption is that all cultures are equally good and special, the white male-dominated Western culture is uniquely evil and its values must be denounced by all right-thinking people.

Thus, European colonization of the New World was particularly evil and wrong because it disrupted ("enslaved and slaughtered")all those peaceful and morally superior cultures that were already here. SC&A have noted:

...much has been made of ‘Colonialism’ as the scapegoat for hindering change, but clearly, that excuse is wearing thin. Colonialism has now become the watchword- and an excuse for those who refuse to join the rest of a modern and productive society.

The legacy of colonialism is what those former colonies made of it. More often than not, colonialists came into a society that was far behind their own, in terms of achievement, advancement and human progress. Notwithstanding the mythical and fabricated notions that ‘the white man’ came into primitive, peaceful and loving cultures, only to destroy them, the fact remains that these cultures and societies could have been greatly benefited by the advent of the ‘white man.’ Those societies resisted the advances they could have assimilated into their own culture.

It is true there were abuses, of course, as there are in any human endeavor. It is also true that taking advantage of modern day tools and ideas are not an all or nothing proposition. Even today, there are groups of people that refuse the tools that might make their lives easier.

Strange, isn't it, that the same people who are adamant that Darwin's theory of evolution must not be "contaminated" with any non-scientific dogmas like creationism; and can be heard screaming with outrage if any hint of religion is allowed to seep into the curriculum believe that indigenous cultures must never be contaminated by new ideas or behaviors. You wonder how the hell they imagine that "evolution" actually takes place in the real world--either on the cellular or societal level?

Evolution is adaptation to change and change is constant. And it is a process that goes on at every level of human existence--from genes to culture. Those "indiginous cultures" which they see as somehow superior to Western culture and are eager to add to their preferred victim group list, are subject to it and must be capable of adapting to change--or they will die out just as surely as the platypus and other extinct species. Adaptation will either makes them stronger or will undo their "superiority". "Survival of the fittest" does not give a free pass to the unfit and unadaptable morally virtuous; and as Siggy notes above, the interaction of cultures, while not always peaceful, almost always results in a dynamic exchange of strengths and an infusion of creativity and innovation. Under ideal circumstances, both cultures will absorb aspects of the other and be stronger because of it.

But idealize the primitive; keep it forever in amber; demand that it forever be immutable and "uncorrupted" by change or progress; or by freedom and innovation--and you have the recipe for cultural stagnation and the crushing of the individual mind.

The postmodern left elevates clowns like Hugo Chavez and call him a "liberator"; they swoon over despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Fidel Castro; and have champagne toasts with fruitcakes like Kim Jung Il.

Karl Marx once said, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy and second as farce." And he was absolutely correct.

Marxism in its initial incarnation was the tragedy; and its current revival via postmodernism, is the farce.

UPDATE: I was thinking of the dodo, when I wrote the platypus. My bad. This error on my part clearly is convenient proof that nothing I say means anything. I am just crushed.

EDUCATION IS A WEAPON

“Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.” - Joseph Stalin

If you thought I was joking or too extreme in my discussions of the ongoing corruption of k-12 education; and how all the leftist "educational experts" like Bill Ayers intend to destroy the minds of your children in the era of hopenchange, then you need to read this. All of it.

What is happening in Minnesota is the evolution of education into leftist political indoctrination.

The health of our educational system--from K-12 through college-- is absolutely essential to the long-term welfare and competitiveness of the United States. American education used to be the strongest on the globe, and to the extent that remains true, it is because the hard sciences in this country (e.g., math, engineering, computers etc.) have been largely resistant to the political taint that runs rampant in the humanities. The latter subject areas, which include literature, philosophy, and history, have become unabashedly ideological over the last two decades; and the "social justice" advocates of today's collectivists have taken over our K-12 education system and are determinedly undermining American values with their politically correct, multicultural and anti-capitalist curriculum.

Make no mistake about it, what many teachers today are doing is indoctrinating their students minds into an unquestioning obedience to the collective. This they cannot do unless they also can manage to corrupt even the hard sciences with their dogma.

There can be no area where a child is allowed to think freely and without the proper political perspective. That is far too dangerous for the underly ideology they are promulgating.

LACK OF CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT

[More Cartoons by Eric Allie]

...or, as Power Line argues, this lack of curiosity may well signal the end of journalism as we know it. John quotes Orson Scott Card's "Open Letter to Journalists", which I had read a few days ago and was meaning to comment on:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

There's more, so read it all.

When finsished, you realize that there is not a lot more to say on the subject of journalistic bias, but there is a lot that can be said about the tendency today to consider the perception of reality as the same thing as the reality itself. And, the leftist bias of the media has a lot to do with that.

In the postmodern world, the Democrat's outright distortions of truth get more play than truth.f. The Democrats and their leftist base understand--consciously or unconsciously, it really doesn't matter anymore--that the only thing that counts anymore is perception. Truth is passé and irrelevant. All that matters is making people perceive it the way you want.

This is why, of course, they put so much stock in polls and other instruments that measure popularity and what people believe is true.

This is why destroying the messenger or anyone who attempts to bring truth back into the discussion is such a high priority. Just ask Joe the Plumber.

This is one of the principal reasons that with almost all media--both news and entertainment--deeply in the tank for Barack Obama has been so frustrating for conservatives. And the few outlets that are not swimming in that tank (i.e., Fox) are the subject of ridicule and contempt for daring to present the news without as much leftist spin.

That's why John goes on to suggest that it is time to move on :

But the mainstream media--which is to say, most reporters and editors who work for "mainstream" news organizations--have no honor and are not interested in truth. They are, as Card says, "the public relations machine of the Democratic Party." It's time to accept that fact and move on. Our existing news organizations--the New York Times, the Associated Press, NBC, CNN, CBS, and so on--can't be reformed, they can only be ignored. It is time for conservatives, libertarians, moderates, and normal citizens who are interested in straightforward reporting of the news to build their own news organizations in competition with the corrupt ones that now exist.

But I must disagree with him a little. I think his suggestion is a good one; and in the blogsphere we have begun to set up that competition and break the stranglehold of the MSM on news.

But the fundamental issue at heart here is a philosophical one.

And that means we must also deal with it on a philosophical level. To put it succinctly, WE MUST NOT LET THE DEMOCRATS AND THE LEFT GET AWAY WITH THE PREMISE THAT OBJECTIVE REALITY DOES NOT EXIST. WE MUST NOT LET THEM ARGUE THAT ALL TRUTH IS RELATIVE, BUT THEN CLAIM THAT THEY ALONE POSSESS IT EXCLUSIVELY.

The issues that underscore journalistic incuriousity and the distortion of truth are philosophical and thus the battleground must also be on a philosophical level. And it's important to remember that philosophical battles cannot be won unless we go back to fundmental philosophical premises. And that brings me around to the role of our academic institutions--supposedly the repository of our knowledge--in understanding reality and searching for truth.

As it turns out, these institutions are also in thrall to postmodern relativism / nihilism.

A former military person andcommenter from yesterday's post who states that he used to run a "string of informants in the SDS and, later, in the support elements of the Weather Underground" has this to say:

It is amazing to me to now encounter names and even people from that period who run municipal governments, have high office in all branches and levels of government and are prominent in law and business. I can only imagine what it must of been like living split lives, inwardly still the sociopaths and outwardly the people in PTA and gardening on weekends. They are very dangerous people since they are still True Believers described by Hoffer and able to dissemble so well from many years of practice.

Ayers now uses the contemporary fiction that he was "fighting religious fundamentalism" but those who knew him and his expanded circle know full well that he is still the "Revolutionary Communist" he used as a descriptor back in the day.

I ran the operation for nearly five years before handing over to the Feds and backing out when the Movement went totally underground to emerge like cicadas in the current political climate.

They didn't really frighten me in those days but they scare the hell out of me now.

Yes. These people and their motives have not changed. But what has changed is that the underlying philosophical ideas that drove those motives have now become mainstream in America. Postmodernism has eroded away the cognitive tools that once could have been used to dismiss or counter the nonsense coming out of the mouths of today's politicians, today's media stars and today's journalists. In fact, almost everything about today's popular culture is derived from and owes allegiance to postmodern philosophical ideas and rhetoric.

I remember a really excellent Mark Steyn piece that came out in The New Criterion in 2007. This article discussed the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind.

Bloom's controversial exposé of the shallowness and meaninglessness of American pop culture was a bombshell when it first was published in 1987; and, his analysis seems even more prescient when one considers the evolution of that pop culture over the last 20 years.

Bloom was the quintessential academic and a true liberal intellectual (in the traditional meaning of that word), and he could not help noticing that the university--which used to see its mission as the maintainence and transmission of civilization and learning--was failing in that mission. Instead of countering the pervasively vapid "pop" psychology that passed for deep thought about the meaning and purpose of life, it gave credibility to the emptiness and facilitated and celebrated the shallowness.

Instead of preparing young minds with the great ideas and thoughts that had preceded the modern day and which were the very foundation of western civilization; it was deconstructing those ideas willy-nilly; dismissing those thinkers and invalidating their ideas, because they lacked 'modern' sensibilities.

In a previous post I wrote:

By using the now-common relativistic formula, all individuals and thinkers in the past are ridiculed, demeaned, and scorned because they fail to live up to postmodern and politically correct standards of conduct. Thus, their ideas are considered meaningless and described as "hypocritical"--the absolutely worse possible sin from the leftist perspective.

Thomas Jefferson, George Washington--all the Founding Fathers for the most part--did not have the consciousness of the postmodern intellectual: they were slaveholders! Yet they dared to consider the problem of human freedom, bound as they were to the cultural norms of their time. That they could not entirely break out of the culture of their time, but still could push the envelope of civilization forward is irrelevant to the postmodern left. From the left's perch of moral superiority they blithely dismiss these "white males" as hypocrites with no moral standing. Thus are the foundations and the generationally built constructs of civilization invalidated and destroyed. Is it any wonder that all that is left is the nihilistic garbage that postmodernism deems as "reality"?

But consider, if we do not understand the past; if we abandon the ideas that underlie our values and our morality-- how can we appreciate who we are today? If we are only allowed to think of Thomas Jefferson as a hypocritical colonial slaveholder, then we are forced to pronounce his ideas on the struggle for human freedom as no better and no worse than Hitler's Kampf.

And so, Jefferson's mind-blowing, paradigm-shattering declaration, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" has no more meaning or worth than Yasser Arafat's statement that, "Since we cannot defeat Israel in war; we do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel." Both are either completely meaningless; or both are examples of freedom-fighters--who cares which? Bush = Hitler; Good = Evil; Freedom = Slavery; there is no way to judge because the nihilistic relativism we subscribe to has taken away our ability to morally distinguish and discriminate between right and wrong.

By disgarding reason and reality; by abandoning the past and embracing moral and cultural relativism, the left has brought us to this place where we are morally and physically paralyzed and cannot distinguish between the deliberate targeting and killing of innocents and the accidental killing of innocents despite herculean efforts to avoid it; between waging war to give people a chance at freedom and democracy; and waging war for domination and imperialism; between standing up for what is right and accepting the consequences, and abandoning one's values and surrendering with "honor" to the scum of the earth.

By mocking intellectual giants like Thomas Jefferson and dragging him through the postmodern mud; by equating Bush with Hitler; or the behavior of the Palestinians with the behavior of the Israelis; the actions of the U.S. military with the actions of the Islamofanatic terrorist thugs-- the left is desperately trying to numb the mind of the West. Who are we to judge? they scream, desperately trying to prevent history from judging their own unbelievable and pathological destructiveness, their own morally repugnant behavior and ideology.

This is their quest. To establish themselves as the arbiters of moral behavior by behaving immorally; of being "reality-based" without the necessity of having to acknowledge reality; of speaking "truth" to power, without being capable of recognizing truth (isn't all truth relative, after all?).

Bloom argued persuasively in his book that the modern mindset is running on empty compared to the ancient and enlighted thinkers of history. His argument struck me forcefully when I first read his book some years back; and it has even more meaning for me today when I consider the complete corruption of the academic world and ascendency of those marxist and postmodern nihilistic forces within it who see education only as a tool for the indoctrination of young minds into politically correct ideology and who have transformed academia into an educational gulag.

The rich complexity and depth of understanding that can be gleaned from studying the classics of western intellectual thought has been swept away by today's almost exclusive emphasis on the more shallow and infinitely more convenient modern ones. And like Bloom's students in the 80's, who were programmed to seek 'relevance', they still can't be bothered to care about the ideas of the past. Today, however, this is also the mindset of the faculty who teach them.

Thus, both students and teachers are cut off from the great history of ideas and are tossed about by relativistic winds like intellectual feathers.

Are human beings created in the image of God and capable of reason; choice and both great good and evil; or are they merely alive to follow their animal instincts; without free will or a higher consiousness; incapable of rational thought and a servant to emotion?

America was founded on the idea that reason rules emotion; that religion and brute force are not primary; and it was the concrete example of the abstract ideas of Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and David Hume. These philosophers built upon the ideas of those who had gone before. They questioned the role of religion and the state; but also argued that societies are not sustained by reason alone. And the Founding Fathers were inspired to create a society that promoted life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Bloom's discussions of both culture and values were--then and now--breathtaking in their acuity and insight. As I read somewhere once, we Americans may quote the words of Jefferson, but we have really come to believe the nihilistic words of Nietzsche.

Getting back to Steyn's excellent essay, he noted:

Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.

Steyn next focused on the part of Bloom's book where he rips apart modern "pop" music:

So Bloom is less concerned with music criticism than with what happens when a society’s incidental music becomes its manifesto. The key to what’s happened is in the famous first sentence of the book. “There is,” writes the author, “one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” To quote the African dictator in a Tom Stoppard play, a relatively free press is a free press run by one of my relatives. A relative culture ends up ever shorter of any relatives to relate to. In educational theory, it’s not about culture vs. “counter-culture” but rather what I once called lunch-counterculture: It’s all lined up for you and you pick what you want. It’s the display case of rotating pies at the diner: one day the student might pick Milton, the next Bob Dylan. But, if Milton and Bob Dylan are equally “valid,” equally worthy of study, then Bob Dylan will be studied and Milton will languish. And so it’s proved, most exhaustively, in music.

He recounts an MTV interview of John Kerry in 2004:

The interviewer asks his guest: “Well, we know that you were into rock and roll when you were in high school, and we know that you play the guitar now. Are there any trends out there in music, or even in popular culture in general, that have piqued your interest?”

And the guest—presidential candidate John Kerry—replied: “Oh sure. I follow and I’m interested. I’m fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there’s a lot of poetry in it. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you’d better listen to it pretty carefully, ’cause it’s important. I’m still listening because I know that it’s a reflection of the street and it’s a reflection of life.”

Really? John Kerry is “fascinated” by rap and “listening” to hip-hop? Think if you broke into the Kerry household and riffled through John and Teresa’s CD collection you’d find a single rap album? I didn’t mind Senator Kerry when he was being mocked as a flip-flopper, but I find him even less plausible as America’s first flip-flopper hip-hopper. You can smell the fear in his answer.

And consider his recitation of rap’s virtues: there’s “a lot of anger, a lot of social energy … it’s a reflection of the street.” That’s something else that happens in a relativist culture. First, if Tupac Shakur is just as good as Milton, then everybody drops Milton. Then comes the second stage: once Milton’s dropped, and Bach and Keats and Mozart, you no longer have a very clear idea of who exactly Tupac Shakur is meant to be as good as. It’s not comparative anymore: he’s all there is. The argument is that, oh, well, you uptight squares are always objecting to stuff: you thought Sinatra exciting bobbysoxers was dangerous, and the Viennese waltz was the mating dance of a hypersexualized culture. No. Benny Goodman, noted by Bloom, was a huge pop star but he could play the Mozart clarinet concerto. Popular culture used to be very at ease with the inheritance of the past. One of the trends of the last forty years is not just the vanishing of “high culture” but of low-culture jokes about high culture—the variety-show sketches in which Schubert’s mates urge him to come down the pub with him and he says “No, I’ve got to stay in and finish my symphony.” It assumes a residual familiarity—from some half-recalled school lesson—with a bloke called Schubert who wrote an “Unfinished Symphony.”

Likewise, P. G. Wodehouse is stuffed with literary and classical and Biblical allusions: “He conveyed to young Mr. Rastall-Retford the impression that, in the dear old ’Varsity days, they had shared each other’s joys and sorrows, and, generally, had made Damon and Pythias look like a pair of cross-talk knockabouts at one of the rowdier music-halls.” Wodehouse assumes you know who Damon and Pythias are: They were best pals back in the fourth century BC. Ran into a spot of bother with Dionysius of Syracuse. You could junk Damon and Pythias and replace them with Damon and Affleck—Matt Damon and Ben Affleck: They’re also best pals, they make movies together. But eventually you dwindle down to a present-tense culture unable to refer to anything beyond itself. You can make the argument that, say, Jerome Kern, the first great Broadway composer of the twentieth century, is at his best as harmonically sophisticated as Schubert. But to do that you would first have to know something about Schubert. I think it’s harder to make the claim to harmonic sophistication in the Beatles, but William Mann, the music critic of The Times of London, gave it a go in 1963, comparing the Aeolian cadence in “Not A Second Time” with the end of Mahler’s “Song of the Earth.” But, as I said, to do that you have to know about Mahler.

And once Mahler’s gone and Schubert’s gone, you can no longer make musical claims for rock and rap, so all you do is hail it for its authenticity and its energy and, as John Kerry did, its copious amounts of “anger.” Thus, the loss of a high-culture aesthetic eventually undermines your pop culture, too

Now, I quote from Steyn's piece at some length (and you need to read it all) because it really captures the relativism and nihilism of postmodern philosophy and demonstrate the consequences those ideas have had on art; and specifically, in this case, music.

But this is the same relativism and nihilism that it has had on all aspects of American society in the last fifty years or so; and that is why all these 'social justice' terrorists; all the dead-end remnants of the radical 60's; all the deposed communists and socialists of the 20th century have just been quietly waiting underground, biding their time.

Because, once the genie of postmodern moral relativism was released into Western intellectual thought, it was only a matter of time before it would eat away at the foundationss of that thought and undermine history, reality, and truth in order to maintain its blatantly contradictory and irrational discourse.

Without a rational metaphysics--or worldview--that explains the nature of existence and reality; and without an epistemology that says our minds are able to acquire knowledge of that reality; then it is easy for the postmodernists to enforce conformity of ideas (while preaching 'diversity'), totalitarian policies (even as they tout 'free speech'), and 'social justice' (even as they perpetuate victimhood).

Ethics, the study of how man should behave in the world--or, what is good and what is evil--is totally dependent on both metaphysics and epistemology, because it is impossible to make choices without knowledge; just as it is impossible to have knowledge without a reality that can be known and understoody by our minds.

What matters in the postmodernist's convoluted thinking is not truth or falsity--only the effectiveness of the language used. Lies, distortions, ad hominem attacks; attempts to silence opposing views--all are strategies that are perfectly satisfactory if they achieve the desired effect. Ideas and reason must make way for reification of feelings; and freedom is replaced by thought control.

Esthetics is a branch of philosophy that studies art; and it is dependent on metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. The essence of postmodern esthetics is the destruction, often deliberate, of beauty and meaning--two of the greatest and most significant aspects of art.

In the shallow, nihilistic blackness of postmodern art, all one is usually left with in place of beauty is a pile of negative emotions--usually of the anger and rage variety; and, the place of meaning has been appropriated by the opiate of the neo-marxist masses, i.e., the ever-useful concept of "social justice", which can always be pointed to as the "deep" meaning of the work, be it painting, music, literature, or whatever.

Art can be thought of as a selective recreation of reality. Its basic purpose is to take an abstraction and make it concrete; and thus to bring an idea or emotion to physical life. Since it is 'selective' in its recreation, the values of the painter, musician etc. are key to understanding its meaning.

Music is an extremely powerful medium that unlocks and expresses emotion through patterns of sound.

And, as Steyn comments, "It was twenty years ago today, sang the Beatles forty years ago today, that Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. Well, it was twenty years ago today—1987—that Professor Bloom taught us the band had nothing to say."

Most of the 'present-tense' culture that Bloom wrote about in 1987 has become even more cut-off from any esthetic and intellectual roots; and is even more shallow, meaningless, repulsive and mind-bogglingly ugly than would have been thought possible a mere two decades ago. By looking at the postmodern evolution of popular music, we can begin to understand the enormity of the cultural problem we face.

I used to get mad at my school
The teachers who taught me weren't cool
You're holding me down, turning me round
Filling me up with your rules.

The children of postmodernism are now the teachers, professors, and administrators who run the schools. They are now the keepers of knowledge and history; and postmodernism has no use for either.

But, whether they like it or not, ideas have consequences in the real world. And very bad ideas unfortunately have very bad consequences--which can be seen clearly when one considers the current financial meltdown. Ignoring reality in favor of one's feelings and wishes can lead to devastating consequences.

In order to counter the tide of postmodern nonsense epitomized by the vacuous messiah of the Democrats/left, we need more than just a counterculture media like the blogsphere--we need to go back to basic premises and stand behind the ideas and values that created western civilization.

Until we do, we will only be shouting in the postmodern wilderness. Lack of curiosity killed the cat; but lack of dedication to reason and truth will kill western civilization.

UPDATE: If the Democratic candidate is, in truth, a "philosopher king", then I'm afraid it is precisely his philosophy that will be disastrous for this country.