Thanks for the history round up, which I enjoyed & appreciated. It filled some holes in my own data base.
Your thesis would appear to me, is that the present predicament of Western intellectual & broader social institutions is a result of their subversion by the subjectivity Rousseauian inspired Marxist/socialist actors who have systematically undermined (& finally overwhelmed) the conservative & objectivist Lockian inspired traditions of The Enlightenment.
If I do recall, Karl Popper canvassed some of this in his 'The Open Society & Its Enemies' with his concept of 'oracular thinking'.
My own view is that the conservative tradition has been quite robust & only started to lose the game as the 1960s came to a close during the Vietnam war, which gave the New Left rather than the old socialists (whose class analysis based parties were effectively packing up by the mid '70s) a huge lift from which they have never looked back, particularly in academia.
The old Marxists were materialists who regarded the idealist thinking of youthful university ideologues (which is what the New Left was made up of) as an infantile petty bourgeois disorder.that needed to be disciplined into Marxist thinking.
As it turned out, it was the New Lefties who took over the shop, not just in the universities, but in the bureaucracies of social administration that their graduate streams colonized & eventually took over.
I can say this with some certainty because I was part of that push was in the Communist Party of Australia in the mid late '70s & saw first hand how 'the movement' moved.
I was recruited into the party (& a singularly I'll advised domestic relationship that spawned a couple of children) through a Communist Party front organization that was organizing a radical ecology conference in Melbourne in 1975.
I left the Communist (& the singularly I'll advised relationship) in '78, but became a teacher in the school system armed with all the fanciful quasi Marxist ideas you would expect.
There was a whole generation of us who went into the education system armed with extremely callow ideas & proceeded to take down the previously existing & perfectly good pedagogy & replace it with stuff that was little better than ideological blather.
And we got promoted & took over the system.
But the question is, & you do not answer it, is why it was it so easy for such a pile of garbage being run by a bunch of half ased romantics, to so easily take out it's opposition. It collapsed with hardly a whimper. It wasn't a great ideological victory. It was a walk in/walk out takeover.
The old order just collapsed in front of us & almost immediately, a whole generation of students ceased to be educated properly..Only the private schools were able to evade the trashifiication of education for perhaps another generation.
Now the question is, how did this appalling outcome make it's way through the system so quickly & easily? It wasn't just cultural osmosis. Something else was going in, which I felt when I was at uni, but just couldn't put my finger on at the time, much to my own deep distress, because I knew that whatever it was, was upending my world.
It took me another 30 years to track it down to the step change that was rolling itself out at the time, whereby a disciplined economy & culture of needs & wants were being displaced by ones of fantasies of desire & satiating them as quickly as possible, without any thought as to the long term existential, social & ecological consequences, & the kind of excesses it would produce & consume, where anything went, because anything did.....
At the time, the process was invisible & apparently inevitable, as public relations, marketing & sales went into overdrive, & it's world without boundaries or 'repressive authoritarianism' effectively replaced the older mechanisms of social discipline & mentoring with freedom without social agency....& knowing fantasy was replaced by unknowing delusion.
Civil rights were replaced by human rights. Children were no longer effectively under the control of adults as it passed to the invisible Pied Pipers of Cool. Social governance passed to the instrumentalities if publikrelationsmarketingthink.The autonomous adult citizen became an adolescent narcissist.
It all took less than a decade.
I explore this in greater detail in my compendium, 'The Secular Fundamentalist'
Thanks for the history round up, which I enjoyed & appreciated. It filled some holes in my own data base.
Your thesis would appear to me, is that the present predicament of Western intellectual & broader social institutions is a result of their subversion by the subjectivity Rousseauian inspired Marxist/socialist actors who have systematically undermined (& finally overwhelmed) the conservative & objectivist Lockian inspired traditions of The Enlightenment.
If I do recall, Karl Popper canvassed some of this in his 'The Open Society & Its Enemies' with his concept of 'oracular thinking'.
My own view is that the conservative tradition has been quite robust & only started to lose the game as the 1960s came to a close during the Vietnam war, which gave the New Left rather than the old socialists (whose class analysis based parties were effectively packing up by the mid '70s) a huge lift from which they have never looked back, particularly in academia.
The old Marxists were materialists who regarded the idealist thinking of youthful university ideologues (which is what the New Left was made up of) as an infantile petty bourgeois disorder.that needed to be disciplined into Marxist thinking.
As it turned out, it was the New Lefties who took over the shop, not just in the universities, but in the bureaucracies of social administration that their graduate streams colonized & eventually took over.
I can say this with some certainty because I was part of that push was in the Communist Party of Australia in the mid late '70s & saw first hand how 'the movement' moved.
I was recruited into the party (& a singularly I'll advised domestic relationship that spawned a couple of children) through a Communist Party front organization that was organizing a radical ecology conference in Melbourne in 1975.
I left the Communist (& the singularly I'll advised relationship) in '78, but became a teacher in the school system armed with all the fanciful quasi Marxist ideas you would expect.
There was a whole generation of us who went into the education system armed with extremely callow ideas & proceeded to take down the previously existing & perfectly good pedagogy & replace it with stuff that was little better than ideological blather.
And we got promoted & took over the system.
But the question is, & you do not answer it, is why it was it so easy for such a pile of garbage being run by a bunch of half ased romantics, to so easily take out it's opposition. It collapsed with hardly a whimper. It wasn't a great ideological victory. It was a walk in/walk out takeover.
The old order just collapsed in front of us & almost immediately, a whole generation of students ceased to be educated properly..Only the private schools were able to evade the trashifiication of education for perhaps another generation.
Now the question is, how did this appalling outcome make it's way through the system so quickly & easily? It wasn't just cultural osmosis. Something else was going in, which I felt when I was at uni, but just couldn't put my finger on at the time, much to my own deep distress, because I knew that whatever it was, was upending my world.
It took me another 30 years to track it down to the step change that was rolling itself out at the time, whereby a disciplined economy & culture of needs & wants were being displaced by ones of fantasies of desire & satiating them as quickly as possible, without any thought as to the long term existential, social & ecological consequences, & the kind of excesses it would produce & consume, where anything went, because anything did.....
At the time, the process was invisible & apparently inevitable, as public relations, marketing & sales went into overdrive, & it's world without boundaries or 'repressive authoritarianism' effectively replaced the older mechanisms of social discipline & mentoring with freedom without social agency....& knowing fantasy was replaced by unknowing delusion.
Civil rights were replaced by human rights. Children were no longer effectively under the control of adults as it passed to the invisible Pied Pipers of Cool. Social governance passed to the instrumentalities if publikrelationsmarketingthink.The autonomous adult citizen became an adolescent narcissist.
It all took less than a decade.
I explore this in greater detail in my compendium, 'The Secular Fundamentalist'
https://www.writing.com/main/books/item_id/2064958-The-Secular-Fundamentalist