POMO RACIST TENDENCIES (2)

Modernism reinforced the concept of empirical racism by enforcing nationalism. It is impossible to understand Modernism apart from nationalism, and it is impossible to understand nationalism apart from empirical racism (a visual emphasis upon race). Throughout the 19th & 20th centuries, the true nationalists of a nation tended to be the racial majority of that nation (apart from colonialism). This model trickled down to other sub-governmental forms within that nation: industry, media, regions, districts, community organizations, churches, neighborhoods, communities, clubs, gangs, schools, families, etc. so that relationships & interpersonal relationships were largely developed along the lines of race or what I term The Old Fraternity.

It is not racist to be nationalistic or patriotic or even a racial majority or minority. However, it is racist to be nationalistic or patriotic when no final authority exists save the state and when the individuals of that state themselves embrace a statist mindset. Why? Because statism is the political form of Atheism. Statism subscribes to no transcendent authority and claims to be comprehensive of all reality. Because statism is not comprehensive of all that exists, neither will it be comprehensive of all humans. Because it is not comprehensive of all humans, statism excludes certain humans. By design.

On what basis does statism determine which humans it will exclude? On the basis of empiricism: material distinction. Why on the basis of empiricism? Because Atheism is materialistic, it argues that the final reality is matter. So it will make decisions based on the superficiality of the visual or what it terms "natural law" or the "apparent."

Christianity is set against Atheism, because Christianity says that God exists back of matter and that He is the Final Reality. So decisions about matter are to be made on the intrinsic character of God's revealed character: not what God has not said about Himself and his world but what God has said about Himself and His world. Atheism is oppositional and makes distinctions on the basis of material alone, so race is the critical factor to understanding the interpersonal human relationships of the Modern era. It is the chief determining and empirical factor to distinguishing humans.

Atheism had it's own "sacred-secular" distinction. It's "secular" portion took credit for the "sacred" portion it intellectually argued did not exist. So it annexed the Christian concept of personality by making superficial judgments about private property. Atheism will claim the aspiration to protect the property rights of individuals. Nevertheless, it will provide a form in which certain persons or peoples have their property rights suspended or revoked. Atheism lacks an intrinsic integrity to deal with the "everything" it claims.

The Modern concept of race cannot be overcome by more Modern logic. Racial reconciliation is a good example, especially the way it happens in the Christian church. In the face of a choking, post-modern environment, the religious Modern for the past couple of decades has been faced with the repugnance of many "theological" positions he held that were as arbitrary as Atheism's statist ideology, empirical racism being an obvious one. So how did the Modern try to "escape" with an ironically "righteous" indignation the racism intrinsic to his own religious expression?

The Church has sought to intentionally graft minorities into majority congregations. The current emphasis upon racial reconciliation in the American Church is largly an emphasis upon the reconciliation of Blacks and Whites, other races being ancillary. The roots of this approach are engined by the old generation’s repulsion of the racist sins of its past. My first response whenever I see this kind of thing happening is to analyze whether or not the motivation is along the flow of the post-modern world spirit which is towards a lack of distinctions. Remember that the drift of Modernism was the creation of a new world on the basis of artificial distinctions. The drift of the post-modern world spirit is the reconciliation of exremes or an emphasis upon a lack of distinctions.

It is easy to champion "racial reconciliation" because it is the drift of POMO culture. Moderns who embrace this post-modern spirit yet who still think on the basis of antithesis are deceived into believing that their repentance of Modern racism equates that they are no longer racist! Yet they go on making empirical judgments in every other category of life (including race) because they have not repented of their idolatrous fixation upon material.

Suffice it to say that the current Modern generational lament against chattel slavery, against unbridled industrialism, and against chauvinistic tendencies does not automatically qualify as repentance. In addition, I would argue that if only Modern racism is being renounced and not the entire Modern system (which is the development of "non-theistic" culture), then it is probable that such renouncement does not qualify as genuine repentance. And much of it is not. Much of it is sentimentalism because the Modern wants to be indispensable. The Modern revolts against being transient. The Modern wants to be "relevant" because the POMO is relevant. The Modern wants to be POMO. But he is not. It is not intrinsic to him.

Secondly, the church has sought to diminish the emphasis upon racial distinctions. Dimishing distinctions is a Modern solution to the problem, because Moderns are all about empirical uniformity. If everyone looked and acted like me, then we would not have a "Modern" problem anymore but a wholly different one. As I have said before, the general drift of post-modern culture is towards the resolution of extremes or the abolition of distinctions. The problem, however, is that these resolutions are largely coming from the Modern generation which means that Moderns are wanting a "place" at the table of the new cultural discussion and are willing to make certain cultural concessions that are not in alignment with their beliefs, cultural or religious.

In addition, the tendency of the Modern generation is to discuss the deficiencies of the past. It is not that hindsight is 20/20, but that hindsight takes less effort than foresight. That is not to say that there are not thousands or hundreds of thousands of Moderns who are after "racial reconciliation" the right way, but it sure is not the commercialized way and it can never be genuine if it is compartmentalized. Nature doesn't allow for such distinctions!

So what does this mean for the POMO? The very same negative, racial stereotypes championed, the POMO embraces positively. That is why Hip Hop culture which was formerly an ethnic subculture, universally embraces people groups of every tongue, tribe, and nation. It is a rebellion against the artifical categorization of humans into "kinds." That is its swag. And that is the one illustration of how the post-modern is trading The Old Fraternity for The New Fraternity: relationships based upon behavior.

RELATIVITY THEORY AS AN ENVIRONMENT

I am always curious about use of the word "relativism", because it directly derived of Einstein's Realtivity Theory. Einstein never proposed that scientific law was absurd or incontinent (popular use of the term "relativism" or "relative"). He emphasized the uniqueness of relativity in respect to observation: the rules are what they are but appear to be more or less, relative to the position of the observer. Sure, Einstein appears to have undermined Newton's overtly Christian position as theoretical and highly simplistic for modern times; however, simplicity is no fault of Newton. He was an 18th century man and profound for his time. Nature and knowledge by design is transient.


However, when I talk about "funny", to another individual in a different referential frame it will translate as "totally inappropriate." When I talk about "complicated", to another individual I might mean "completely normal." Nevertheless, Relativity Theory is still contingent upon a point: the entire theory leverages a point. That is no inconsistency unless an individual coddles a fictitiously infantile perspective about context.
Around this time was borne the new “relativists” who clearly did not translate Einstein's idea well at all. They gloated over the death of Newtonian simplicity and many of them gloated over the death of Newton's God. Einstein was infuenced by the idea of time travel (the fourth dimension) which was becoming a popular discussion amongst intellectuals. H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895, and Henri Poincare wrote Science and Hypothesis in 1902, a text that discusses the measurement of time. We know, for example, that Einstein read Science and Hypothesis and that Pablo Picasso learned about Poincare's book from a Maurice Princet.

I mention Pablo Picasso because he was experimenting with relativity theory in art. Picasso, the Father of Cubism, would break up a painting and depict the various parts of the painting from various perspectives so that as one scanned the painting, one would "see" all perspectives at the same time. Of course, most people, I am sure, did not know what he was doing. It is true that Picasso was morally disreputable, habitually abandoning family after family. However, Picasso's experimentation with relativity did not cause his moral failures. Perhaps, his misunderstanding of relativity supported his infidelity, but that does not diminish the truthfulness of relativity.

Arnold Schoenberg, the 20th century composer, did a similar thing with music. The Father of Atonality, Schoenberg did not set out to create absurd music. He created music based upon the twelve tones of the chromatic scale instead of the traditionally harmonious eight-tone octave. His music had a logical relationship from one tone to the other and from each tone to the whole within the framework he developed. Did people understand what he was doing? Probably not at first. At one concert, Schoenberg's atonal composition was so misunderstood and caused so much emotional agitation amongst the audience that a fight broke out. The police had to be called in, and Schoenberg threatened to end the concert. People initially did not understand what he was doing with music. They assumed it to be both new and disruptive. In this sense, I like to tell my students that Schoenberg is the father of punk music. And that was at the beginning of the 20th century.

Einstein disliked his Relativity Theory being used to support the idea of a sinister moral relativism: the notion that no moral framework is uniquely privileged over all others. Of course, Einstein was a scientist, not a philosopher. Further, he was an exile in America where his ideas and their cultural applications became widely popularized, probably because of media. What we do know is that relativity grew to become the new social framework of the 20th century and was directly responsible for the erosion of "traditional norms" like colonialism. Colonialism could not survive in a framework of relativity (except under very special circumstances) because a political expression of relativity opposes the political subjugation of nations. Under relativity, the nations "parallel" each other: each nation is its own entity. Einstein's relativity was the impetus of the relativist cultural tendency (and of several self-consciously associated cultural movements like Ghandi and Martine Luther King) for wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western culture in the early 20th century as much as its misunderstanding provided a toehold and then an eventual foothold for many destructive changes as well.

It is no mistake that the shakers and movers of the 20th century felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life to be outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of the 20th century. Because nature is finite, it is transient and must change. Relativity, however, was the equivalent of a "quantum leap" and moved at a faster rate than the general culture and its various sub-cultures were able to monitor or regulate. So the beginning of the 20th century was not only the undoing of Newtonian Physics but ultimately the undoing of the religious axioms that underpinned Newtonian Physics. In this way relativism (and its association with relativity) is negatively viewed as a questioning of the axioms, including religious axioms, of the previous age. Relativity, however, is something very different. It is the air that both liberal and conservative Moderns breathe.