Culture Wars Era - is it moving into its final phase?

[pbrower2a]

(03-13-2019, 06:58 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(03-11-2019, 11:48 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: No, enjoy your long break from the awakening mindsets that your generation much prefers; you are getting your way now, but your children will rebel again.

A rebellion in name of values which are now mainstream in pop culture and social media wouldn't be very "rebellious". But it could ignore this aspect and go against other aspects of the millennial conformity, for example against social media or authoritarian politics, while accepting the way millennials handle sexuality as a given. In old China, for example, sex was never a big deal. Noone considered it dirty like Abrahamic traditionalists do, but noone claimed is the most important thing in life like MTV thinks. IDK if Maoism changed that.

I still think the next saeculum will be more Apollonian (interested in mind and the cosmos) rather than Dionysian (Earth and flesh). In the end of Great Power Cycle it could be argued that Reason led to Auschwitz, but the lesson of the current saeculum is that Reason abdicating and leaving things to blind market forces leads to a world economic crisis.

Reason is not enough. People need some moral compass if they are to avoid using it as an excuse to do horrible things in the name of some 'good' cause -- even liberty and equity. Reason without conscience led to the Reign of Terror in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Bolshevism was reason without sentiment, mercy, or conscience. Pure reason is great for the hard sciences, but go beyond those and one finds its deficiencies.

Fascism more derives from Romanticism than from reason, an attempt to reinvent glory that either never existed, had horrible flaws, or could never be recovered. The Nazi variant of fascism had no rational tests of good and evil, and could not even apply those to its victims. Reason requires one to test hypotheses instead of accepting them on faith alone. It would have been reasonable to test the racist values and ferocious nationalism at the core of Nazism -- but Nazi faith precluded such.  Yes, Romanticism is good for creating some colorful culture, but drawing conclusions from Wagnerian bombast instead of recognizing it as pure entertainment has severe faults.

Reason gives one the ability to judge propositions for built-in failings such as contradictions. Contradictions at the least expose liars, fools, and the insane -- and are the easiest tools to use. .