What does the twenty-first century hold for the Western life of ideas, with regard to formal humanistic thought? I foresee massive paradigm shifts in Western philosophy, social science, and religion, based on five impending inter-related changes in ideas.
1. The concept of cultural relativity, which is now the basis of Western social science, referring to sociology, anthropology, political science, and history, will be destroyed as a universal social rule and restricted in applicability, in limited procedural modes, to local cultural analysis.
Some of the work in undermining cultural relativity is being done for practical and political reasons in the name of human rights. Human rights cannot be justified as universal so long as cultural relativity has force. The notions of political rationality and market rationality, at the moment relegated to the status of minority opinion in the social sciences, will rapidly sweep aside social science post-modernism.
2. The concept of transcendent political rationality will replace cultural relativity. This notion would claim that all peoples, in whatever their condition of local cultural relativity, develop a rational intellectual comprehension of the world of universal validity as they engage in political control of their destinies.
At the moment, consideration of transcendent political rationality is driven by President Bush's foreign policy doctrine of democratic freedom as the basis of national legitimacy and sovereignty. The closest analogy to this concept is the Enlightenment philosophy (Kantian, perhaps) of political and ethical reason.The Enlightenment philosophy will be seen to be an inadequate philosophical grounding for transcendent political rationality. Two contemporary candidates for the theoretical basis of political rationality are game theory and market theory. The great intellectual prize of our century will be finding a new, more solid grounding for it.
3. The concept of humanity initiated by Heidegger, which bases phenomenology on primordial anxiety, will be abandoned as fundamentally mistaken. Heidegger was the founding source of post-modernism; although some European thinkers have rejected post-modern phenomenology, Heidegger is still regarded as the basic reference. He will finally be abandoned.
Scientific understanding of brain function, physiological sources of consciousnesses, and scientific psychology will drive rejection of "anxiety" as the original human condition. The general intellectual issue will be to translate this scientific understanding into philosophical terms.
4. The idea that all religions are of equal validity and worth will be abandoned. This notion has driven and been sponsored by the interfaith movement. The interfaith movement requires, as a fundamental unspoken assumption, that the experience of God, e.g., as by Pentecostals, is bogus. Western intellectuals will try to find criteria and philosophical approaches that would allow them, without claiming allegiance to any particular religious doctrines, to discriminate between good and bad religions and between true and false religions.
Obviously, it is the encounter with Islamism that is driving and shall drive this shift. The sooner we get on with it, the better off we will be.
5. Nietzsche's project for the trans-valuation of values will end, to be replaced by a project to re-valuate values. This paradigm shift will occur partly in accompaniment with the four previous shifts and partly as an independent concern.
The vitality of intellectual debate and development in Europe is related to Europe's confrontation with its Muslim demographic destiny. Islamism should provoke deep thinking in the same way that de-colonization after World War Two provoked profound reflection on European ideas and ideals. If Europe is not to succomb to Islamic totalitarianism, it must understand the political, intellectual, and demographic crises it faces. Native continental Europeans must dramatically raise their birth rate. Doing this would require lowering taxes to leave younger families with the money to have children. To do this, social power must shift from older persons and the pension classes to younger working families. If this shift occurs, intellectual debate will be lively.
In the U.S., intellectual debate over these paradigm shifts will be lively to the extent that philosophical feminism, which is tied to antiquated post-modern philosophy, and secular humanist philosophy, including the interfaith movement within this designation, fade. These establishments will not debate the new ideas. First, they will simply ignore them; then they will try to stifle them. If these establishments are weakened in practical ways by conservatism, room shall be opened for vigorous, meaningful debate.
(Revised.)
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