The Marxist Revival (3): All Purpose Invective

~ Continued from Part 2: The Marxist Revival: The Epic Narrative ~

In Part 1 "The Lie at the Bottom" we saw that at the base of the covert strategy for spreading neo Marxist thought lurks the basic fallacy of the Primacy of Consciousness, or Subjectivism, or Relativism [1].

On a tactical level we find language, which to Postmoderns, signifies something entirely different than it does traditionally: it could be best described as rhetoric, characterised by gross generalisation, ludicrous equation and massive exaggeration, often giving quite another meaning to the word chutzpah: anything goes really, however aggressive and unreasonable. This approach can eventually be alternated with infantile, sentimental whining, or emotional manipulation and blackmail. As we have seen, given the Universal All Importance and the Nobility of The Cause, anything goes.

To Postmoderns language is not about the transfer of information related to reality, objective data flowing from one person to another. To Subjectivists language at best perhaps communicates the speaker's personal version of 'reality'.

All that is written ought to be in quotes and inverted commas, signifying the 'irony' with which any 'meaning' should be taken.

The spoken word is just personal bla-bla. You could set yourself the task of discovering what the speaker means to convey by his choice of words (deconstruction), but underneath that layer of bla-bla we would only find more personal, subjective yada-yada, a sheer endless process of deconstruction would have to take place.

Hicks in "Explaining Postmodernism": "There is no non-linguistic standard by which to distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical, the true and the false. Deconstruction is therefore in principle an unending process ... accordingly, Postmodernism recasts the nature of rhetoric: rhetoric is persuasion in the absence of cognition ... not to prove or disprove anything."

In other words: in the absence of objective reality, orators by any means possible try to persuade an audience of their personal version of reality. In yet another way: speech is rhetoric, is propaganda, is populism, is sophistry, is demagoguery in which reality and truth are subjective, and lies and fallacies are just another personal opinion.

Although Rorty was a notable exception, most Postmoderns see conflicts between groups as unavoidable (see above) and - after Rousseau, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer - in the absence of God as the Prime Mover, it is that which generates change and growth.

It does makes you wonder about the sincerety of all that talk of peace, non-violence and anti war: would that perhaps be the same logic by which Islam makes the distinction between the Dar-al-Harb and the Dar-al-Islam? War is absence of hegemony?

Given that fateful conflict, Postmoderns see and use language primarily as a weapon, which - apart from Koukl's Passive-Aggressive Tolerance Trick acting out on innocents and on misguided bystanders alike - explains the often unreasonable and intolerant nature of the debate with Postmoderns: from expletives to ad hominem attacks, rhetorical catch-as-catch-can wrestling - the catchwords being effect and proselytizing by any possible means - not by arguments or through persuasion, but by intellectual parlour tricks, sophistry and personal intimidation. No rules as practiced by the Debating Society, and certainly no quest for truth.

As crypto Marxist thought and Postmoderm abuse of language covertly insert itself in the various walks of life - from television talk shows to new approaches to 'intractable' problems in academia: from meta-psychology to forensic ethics and the judiciary - we'll devote a number of posts to this interesting subject.

~ To be continued: Part 4: The Marxist Revival: The Assault of Free Speech, "Many have wondered: what's with the gross hyperbole, the unreasonable generalizations, from the downright insulting to the quasi baby-talk? "All hetero-sexual males are rapists", "Zionists are Nazis", "History is one wave of ethnic cleansing after another" ~