It’s hard to guess what the next front line of post-modernism activism will be. There seems to be a general movement toward the end of discrimination, in virtually any sense. Which is problematic, since our survival and sanity depends on that ability, and efforts to erode it, positively motivated as they may be, won’t actually end up being kind because they don’t actually help you live in the world. If you aren’t forced to bow down to and adapt to reality and develop a way to deal with it, when something real does come calling you’ll be totally defenseless.
There’s a real conflict between the world as it is and the world as we wish it to be. And on an individual level we’ve all got competing ideas about what we wish the world was what we were, and a private reality would be infinitely preferable for most of us. A world where we’re gods, where we’re the most important, attractive, talented person and everything about us is great and everything we do turns to gold and everyone appreciates us and we get exactly what we wanted and needed. That’s the world things like pornography and video games tend to offer us. But that’s not the world we live in, and trying too hard to live in that world can actually harm us.
Nevertheless, we need our idea of what the world could be. We need to be able to challenge our ideas of what the world is. We need to discover areas where it could actually be better (in a way we can agree on, there’s no shortage of ways the world could be better for me personally). We don’t want to get trapped into a kind of false determinism or fatalism, thinking there’s nothing we couldn’t do and we know everything and nothing can be learned or changed. Both approaches are seeking truth and seeking our good, but through different strategies.
There is a broader range of situations where the standard approach will work and things are the way they need to be and the conventional cultural or moral or practical shorthand applies, but there are also a huge amount of situations that don’t conform to the norm and require some creative, flexible thinking to solve. They may only add up to a tiny fraction of cases, but they’re still numerous enough that if we don’t have some flexibility and perspective we won’t get the best results. And as conditions change we need to be able to adapt our expressions to the new conditions so we still get the intended results. Still, I don’t think that comes from taking a shallower view of reality or denying reality, but from taking a deeper look at it, returning to the source instead of relying on the shorthand.
Unfortunately, the approach these days seems to be more structured around the assertion that there are no higher or deeper realities or levels of truth, and that the existing known levels also don’t really exist. That the shorthand isn’t derived from any underlying reality, but is merely an artifice of power. And you don’t improve it by returning to the source for a better, more accurate shorthand that’s better tailored to the current conditions, you improve it by disposing of it or denying it or just replacing it with something more to your personal taste.
Sexism isn’t currently being solved by discovering a better, more balanced and nuanced idea of sex, it’s being solved by attacking the entire concept of sex and deconstructing it. Sex is whatever you want it to be. Having found some problems in the functions of various social and political and religious and cultural and moral structures, there seems to be a movment to abolish and tear down and deplatform them altogether. They’re seen as purely arbitrary, merely machines of power, fundamentally unjust, with no reality behind their discrimination or structure; so tear them down and replace them (or better yet don’t replace them at all) and the utopia will follow. That seems to be the most popular idea at the moment. Tear down the very mechanisms of discrimination that prevent some people from getting their happy endings and everyone will get their happy endings in the new utopia.
We live in a world where ease of life and advancement of accrued historical and technological benefits have made imagining such a world, or even feeling entitled to it, is fairly easy.
I think a lot of politics is really about this divide in human perspective. Order and realism vs experimentation and imagination. Practicality vs creativity. And there are some very clear personality tendencies when it comes to party affiliation. And there seems to be an divide across rural and urban, worlds closer to the harsh realities of nature and closer to the creative constructions of humankind. And there seems to be a divide between more masculine and more feminine approaches.
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