The summer of ideological downgrades

The creditworthiness of relativism, individualism, freewheeling capitalism, and materialism has slipped from AAA to CCC.

Philosophical ideas take time to percolate into the streets. But powerful ones precipitate in a matter of decades as ideologies and manage to provoke social upheavals. Such dire results lead to the original ideas' ending up in humanity's intellectual dustbin.

Consider some examples from modern history. In the early 19th century Hegel started the ball rolling when he identified conflict as the dynamic heart of human history and hyped up the State as the embodiment of a people's spirit. This, philosopher Karl Popper has argued, served as a remote foundation for future totalitarian regimes that would lead the German nation on to a quest for world dominance.

Nietzsche subsequently rejected Hegel's hyper-rationalist views, but his own ideas followed a similar roller-coaster trajectory. Only a few decades after his death, his exaltation of the "Übermensch" and the "will to power" found its way into the minds of Nazi ideologues and played its part in plunging Hitler's Germany into a disastrous second world war -- after which, naturally, all forms of absolutist worldviews, whether rationalistic or voluntaristic, fell into discredit and were replaced (in the later 20th century) by milder forms like scepticism, "soft thinking", emotionalism and irrationality.

A parallel story may be told of Marx's materialistic rendering of Hegel's dialectical philosophy. It led --less than a half-century after Marx's demise-- to the rise of Communism in Russia, and later on in China and several Latin American countries... only to be discredited by the breakdown of Communist-style economies at the end of the 1980s. (This left liberal capitalism as practically the only functional socio-economic formula -- till the global financial crisis broke in 2007 and revealed the horrid face of a capitalism turned into a "no-holds-barred, come-what-may" money-garnering activity).

Now, in the summer of 2011, Britons have witnessed, shocked, the empirical effects of a way of thought whose principles are "no truth, just opinions", "anything goes", "me first", "having is more than being". As Rebekah Hebbert has pointed out in MercatorNet, we're actually witnessing the bankruptcy of postmodern ideology, though (much as I don't like being a prophet of doom) the aftershocks will probably continue to be felt for years to come. Just think of similar recent events in France and Spain.

While it's true that we humans often err in judging philosophical ideas for what they're worth, common sense at least lets us perform an a posteriori (or should I say post mortem?) critique. The time for a re-evaluation --complete with status downgrade!-- of a worldview whose hallmarks are relativism, individualism, license, and materialism, is, I hold, now upon us -- in fact thrust violently upon us, whether we like it or not. For postmodernism's real-life consequences, seen live on TV or Twitter or directly as bleeding flesh on British tarmac, now impel us to conclude, "We've been had!", and to start looking for sounder alternatives. (Something with nicer consequences, please! -- even if we have to call it something like, er, post-postmodernism. )

In this quest, it might help to consider the other notable event of this summer: the meeting of a million and a half young people with Benedict XVI in Madrid for World Youth Day, with its admixture of commitment and fun, vitality and serenity, challenge and hope. Most participants' faces contrast starkly with the brooding visages of Hegel, Nietzsche, Hitler, Marx, and Stalin, not to mention the shifty looks and hooded faces of the UK rioters and looters. I mean, hey, look --those young people in Madrid (quite a few non-Christians among them, too) seem able to behave well and have fun at the same time! Isn't there something to be learned from that?

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