Objective Discourse

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Creationism doesn't get enough credit for being an essentially (post)modern ideology. "Evidence does not speak for itself," Jason Lisle and Ken Ham and others always say. The interpretation of evidence requires one to filter it through their own particular worldview and thus—since we can never comprehend the things themselves but only mental models of them—every interpretation is situated within the symbolic cosmos of its analyst's worldview. Of course, we're over 200 years past Kant's critique of reason, and we should know by now that a worldview has overstayed its welcome if it cannot reconcile evidence with its fundamental premises without (speaking figuratively or literally...) divine intervention. In other words, interpretation is also always an opportunity for immanent critique. Lacan's discursive algorithms illustrate this point well, but I'm not going to dig into that here (borrowed illustration below from another blog). Just gesturing.

"Reality has a liberal bias." I've seen a sentiment lately that authoritarian ideology takes hold in society by cracking open the objective discursive field which makes democracy possible, since everyone agrees on basic facts even if they disagree on what to do with those facts. If people can't agree on the basic facts, no formalized political discourse (this is as strict a definition for democracy as we can get) is possible, and sufficiently antagonistic contradictions can only be settled with guns and tanks and bombs and so on. Yet there's a trick: just because liberal democracy supposed an objective discourse, does not mean that its discourse was ever 'objective' except through a liberal democratic perspective which posits 'radical' alternatives as deviations from an objective norm (labeled authoritarian). Liberalism was never a centrist position except within the capitalist world system, outside of which it uses the same repressive strategies now used against it from inside. Césaire's imperial boomerang is a bad omen for business as usual.

If one says, "The great and authentic revolutionaries of the world are two: Trump and Netanyahu," that statement means different things to different people depending on their worldview. But maybe one thing is for certain: on the social level, we are free of the illusion of objective discourse, and it would take divine intervention to save liberalism from the failure of its own systematic premises. One idol is smashed. History is back on the menu.

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