The Postmodern Left

Charles Colson's most recent book is The Good Life, written with Harold Fickett. The book is part memoir, part self-introspection, part political philosophy, and part inspiration.

Chapter 18 is entitled Can We Know The Truth?, and I wanted to highlight some of the things Colson says about postmodernism, because you will certainly recognize its influence on the Left.

First, what is postmodernism?

Havel's belief in knowing the truth and living it goes to the very heart of what it means to live a good life. It raises the most urgent and controversial question in today's culture: Can we know the truth? Strident voices in our culture answer that question with a resounding no.

The principal reason for this is found in an extraordinary cultural revolution in the West. In the period after WWII, as we noted earlier, existential philosophers, mostly Frenchmen, took seriously Nietzsche's formulation that God was dead and that life has no transcendent purpose. The human challenge was therefore to overcome life's inherent lack of meaning through personal experience. This gave birth to the generation of the sixties, free love, and drugs. Existentialism was soon accompanied by deconstructionism in literary and cultural studies. This held that societies live in "the prison house of language", meaning that we can ever escape our culture's prejudices; every claim about the way the world works can only be the expression of biased groupthink. It doesn't take a philosopher to see that these two streams of thought undermine any authority structure.

Truth became whatever one person believes. So you have your truth, and I have mine. This is the essence of the postmodernist era.

Because postmodernism is hostile to absolute truth, it is hostile to religion.

The deeply entrenched ideas of postmodernism have made the New Age the fastest growing religion in America today. The New Age allows us to construct our own religion and makes no truth claims on anyone. It provides no genuine moral direction, for if god is in everything, god is in both good and evil.

New Agers and postmodernists have created a deity out of tolerance, and people have become greengrocers displaying placards saying "There is no such thing as truth! Tolerance is god!" The only cardinal rule of American life is that we must respect everybody's opinions as morally equivalent.

Dorothy Sayers, the great English wit and writer, had a description for this state of affairs. "In the world it calls itself Tolerance, but in Hell it is called Despair. It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin which believes nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for."

Does that not describe much of the Left today? It stands for nothing, offers nothing, and respects no opposing arguments. Its political foundation is built on philosophical sand.

Postmodernism and its dogmatic tolerance can only lead to despair, as Sayers wrote and as we witness in the lives of so many today. Despair in turn leads to slothfulness, and slothfulness to boredom. In spite of our great technological advances and the highest level of education and material advances any society has ever achieved, we have managed to suck all of the meaning out of life, to destroy any basis for human dignity or human rights, to undermine moral and rational discourse--to leave ourselves adrift in the cosmos.

Colson concludes the chapter with this thought.

The truth is, much of postmodernism has abandoned reason and in the process left its adherents with "both feet planted firmly in midair".

To chronicle the evidence that the Left has abandoned reason would take volumes. Michelle Malkin has recently done a masterful job of illustrating how hateful the Left can be in her new book Unhinged.

Hugh Hewitt had a post showing how some on the Left misrepresent the facts in Iraq to make political points, an example of defining for one's self what truth is.

In fact, the postmodern influence on the Left is no more evident than in its opposition to the war in Iraq.

From Joe Wilson's lies, to denying Iraq and Al Qaeda had anything to do with each other, to claiming the Bush Administration lied about WMDs in Iraq, to simply calling our President "Chimpy McBushitler", to ignoring the success the US is having in Iraq, Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, and on and on, the Left cannot give reasoned arguments for its opposition because it does not operate from reason.

As John pointed out in the comments of this post, the Left cannot even acknowledge that we are fighting an evil enemy, and will not address the question of whether it would have been morally right to leave a murderous dictator like Saddam Hussein in power.

They cannot because to admit the reality of an evil enemy would admit the existence of evil. To admit the existence of evil would admit a standard of truth that defines evil. To admit a standard of truth would admit the existence of a Standard Giver, God, and the ultimately the Left cannot and will not do that.

Political debate with the Left will go nowhere if we simply try to reason with them. Such an exercise is merely shadow boxing. We can only press on with what we know is right, and the reality of success will be self-evident.

The Left can say there is no brick wall, and run headlong into it. However, the pain of a cracked cranium would tell them there is indeed such a thing as objective truth.

As Iraqis vote in historic elections next week, as the enemy's capacity for evil reveals itself in broken bodies shattered by suicide bombers, as the US military and intelligence forces continue to achieve amazing success against a stubborn enemy, even the Left will realize the futility of its baseless claims.

The Left will not be changed, oh no. Being unmoored to any firm anchor they will simply drift to the next attack. But we who do believe in reason and truth can rest assured that the sacrifice of so many is not in vain, but has established that there is something worth dying for.