THE SHIFT FROM PLURALISM TO MULTICULTURALISM
THE GREATEST CHALLENGE/OPPORTUNITY FOR
CHRISTIAN EDUCATION IN THE POSTMODERN WORLD
“. . .men of Issachar, who understood the times and knew what Israel should do“
I Chronicles 12.32
The brilliant work of George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship
(Oxford, 1997) and the reprint of J.A. Newman’s, The Idea of The University (Yale, 1996),
address a Christian view of education in our postmodern culture. Since methodological
naturalism dominates most academic curriculums, it is important to expose the conflict between
Christianity and science. Why was “multiculturalism” chosen to replace the already established
expression “cultural pluralism.?” Cultural pluralism was invented by supporters of liberal
democracy who strongly believed in “American civilization.”
Our greatest challenge in our postmodern culture is for the Church to recover the ministry
of the Discipleship of the Mind. If this is to become a reality, we must be critically aware of
three crucial issues: (1) We live in the 21st century world which is dominated by cultural and
epistemological relativism. (2) We dwell in the arena which has moved from Pluralism to
Multiculturalism. (3) This evaluation applies only to less than 10% of the world’s population.
All Postmodern efforts in Christian Education must be fully aware that narrative
methodology reigns in the field of religious and historical studies. It is not God who is the object
of investigation. It is the “belief in God.” In our cafeteria of belief systems it is pluralistic
diversity that orders the academic agenda. There is, of course, a diversity of world views, but
Animism, Buddhism, Hinduism, all forms of Pantheism cannot both describe and explain and
produce predictive power to attain new data. All idealistic structures (al’la’ Hegel) are
pantheistic. Internal consistency is “vital” but without predictive capabilities it cannot produce
advancement of knowledge (e.g., Animism is consistent but. . .).
Since the Enlightenment (18th century), Western man has been enamored by
“modernism” (19th/early 20th century) which claims that the privileges of physical science over
the “spiritual” dimension of reality (e.g., Soul, Holy Spirit, Mind, etc.) Divine intervention into
the Newtonian World Machine fused with Kant’s removal of the cosmos as rational
consideration and Hume’s distortion of the so-called ubiquitous capabilities of the scientific
method, i.e., empiricism, every category of classical Judaeo/Christian belief was called in
question. By the 18th century, Christianity was condemned as ignorant superstition, by the 21st
century classical Christianity is condemned as being too rational (we must never confuse
between rational and rationalism, all “ism” phonemes in English are clues to world views).
In the postmodern anti-science mode, it is the humanities (art, literature, history, visibility
vs. audibility forms of communication) that control the academic agenda (i.e., the rejection of
any search for “truth” in cyberspace (see my essay, “Search for Truth in Cyberspace” on web)
William James, one of the prophets of pragmatic pluralism, was strongly attached to the
American melting pot which contained adventurous openings to individuality—it was the self
creating person who dwelt on the Western Frontier (see Wm. Turner’s, Frontier Thesis on the
Marxian Analysis of the American Experience (on the web site).
John Dewey was another spokesman who gave credence to “cultural pluralism” (see my
essay, “Darwin’s Influence on Dewey’s Pragmatism”). Christian Education must constructively
confront the post modern meta narrative of a new “Jack, the Giant Killer” who has supposedly
slain the boring Old Giant, Modernism. It is clear to all but postmoderns, who reject grand meta
narratives, that postmodernism has one itself. All postmodern beliefs are eschatological. It is the
secular version of Wagner’s epic opera, “Gotterdammerung“, i.e., the Twilight of the gods. The
so-called Millennium bug is at the level of postmodern mythology. The New Age of Aquarius
dawned with Cinderella on the stroke of midnight.
To attempt to avoid death by jargon, perhaps a brief escape through the lexical caldron of
the worlds of modernity and postmodernity will shed more light than heat. By modernity we
mean the European Enlightenment, which was ultimately grounded in Kant’s perspectivalism,
at the intellectual level, and the Industrial Revolution at the social level, produced the greatest
changes in Western culture since the coming of Christianity. The impact covered how society
worked and how people thought. The Enlightenment exposed the autonomous individual,
separated from tradition and all social institutions. The enormous feat was accomplished by the
Scientific/Technological revolution, i.e., the Newtonian “world machine” fused with Hume’s
critic of miracles were brilliantly addressed in Kant’s First Critique. The new godhead is
composed of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, and Freud which gained control of all
Western educational citadels.
The master of most European universities, especially Germany along with the scientific
revolution came the hermeneutical and historiographical revolutions. In this maze man
became the master of his soul, science alone produced certain objective knowledge, the new
mythology of inevitable progress, the inherent animality of man, the perfectibility of man, the
and the ultimate reality of nature. These new intellectual forces divided up into “facts” and
“values;” facts were objective and values were subjective, with the developments in cultural
anthropology, sociology, economics, politics, psychology, history, and psychology of religion.
These later developments were grounded in the “assured results” of Darwinian theory of natural
selection and social Darwinianism. The naturalistic structures were now in actual concrete.
Lessing’s “Ugly Ditch” and epistemology carved up the world of knowledge into “truths of
reason” and “empirical truth.” Lessing’s Ugly Ditch futility attempted to bridge the gap into two
separate categories of Truth Claims. Ultimately we live in our postmodern culture of
epistemological and cultural relativism (e.g. multicultural pluralism where only tolerance
remains in our postmodern world of conflict of power encounters).
The radical cultural revolutions only swapped agricultural serfdom for the industrial
wages of slavery. The Brave New World of modernism’s demise was symbolized by the
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architecture, music, art, and politics of the counter culture of the 1950’s and 1960’s. The new
modern utopian world, promised by scientific and technological advances, seemed empty and
hollow. This in the context of the rise and development of post modernity. Any positiveconstructive effort to develop a Christian view of education must creatively engage the very
foundations of the Enlightenment/Modernism and Postmodernism.
The Scriptures in Modern and Post Modern Context
The Biblical tradition and authority must be overthrown. These concepts had been
weighed and found wanting! The Jesus Seminar debated the resurrection of Jesus and then went
public with a press conference to announce that they had concluded that the resurrection did not
happen, part of their evidence was a young woman who worked in a mortuary in Los Angeles.
She testified that all the dead bodies that she worked with stayed dead. This is, of course, the
issue—all dead persons stay dead, but Jesus was raised from the dead. The biblical claim would
be meaningless if dead people did not stay dead. But the historical evidence must be explained!
In spite of the fact of all the historical data (e.g. but after Hume’s critic of miracle which rests on
a misunderstanding of the nature of Scientific Knowledge claims), the modernist hermeneutical
stance necessitates the position espoused in the Jesus Seminar... the historiographical,
epistemological as well as the scientific revolution is “foundation” of rejecting all efforts to
“recreate” a bygone age as normative. After the Hegelian revolution, no individual or historical
epic can be employed to ground a meta narrative. The end result of the Hegelian and Darwinian
revolutions was the rejection of all historical evidence to support the Christian truth claim. The
tidal wave of modernity has reached our shores. Anyone who questions these “assured” results
is an ignorant, superstitious, legalistic pietist.
The Modernist position has been under attack since Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein,
Plank, Heisenberg, Creek, Monad, et.al. The masters of suspicion were all nurtured in the bosom
of modernity. The radical cultural change has precipitated a “change” in the methods and
presuppositions of the way we live and think. The rhetoric of postmodernists has been
disseminated in our culture from the work force to our homes, schools, etc. Much work is now
done by telephone, fax and modem.
The microchip has all but replaced the factory, the secretary; communities that continue
to depend on 18th century ways of doing things have been reduced either to mass unemployment
or the status of the theme park. Instead of production of “things”, entertainment is the order of
the day.
The industrial and sociological change fits neatly into the vision and reality which
characterizes post modernity. Instead of “objective facts” we have impressions, attitudes and
feelings floating around in the cyberspace. “Truth is stranger than it used to be” according to
Yogi Berea; all truth claims are made by somebody or some group (i.e., the community), and that
all persons and groups have agendas, which only a postmodern Gnostic guru can locate and
encourage participants on the planet to accept the hermeneutic of suspicion generated by Marx,
Freud, Lyotard, DeMan, Fish, Gadamer and all who have been trained in the school of
Deconstructionism and now post Deconstructionism in a constant attempt to escape solipsistic
irrationalism. The 18th/19th centuries attacked Christians for espousing irrational superstition;
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while the 20th/21st centuries reject classical Christianity for being too rationalistic. In the vast
scope of journalism, facts are not important; spin is everything; reality is no longer divided as by
modernity, into facts and values, or truths of reason and truths of science. Reality is only the
virtual reality of each interpreter.
If reality is deconstructed, then so is the “story.” Postmodernism is the death of the meta
narrative (big story); there remains only disjointed “stories”, the modernist myth of inevitable
progress does not play well in the theater of multiple stories (e.g., East/West, the Balkans,
Rwanda, Zambia, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Palestine). In our 21st century maze of “stories,”
everybody’s liberation turns out to be someone else’s slavery. Economic boom turns out to be at
someone else’s expense. The Christian controlling narrative of the “Promises of God” is broken
down into little conflicting stories. Our pluralism of stories is often internally authentic, but in
our global village only power seems to be able to unify the contradictory stories. In our
cyberspace world we can create our own private story which is “virtual reality.” (e.g. a major
voice in “the French Connection”, Emmanuel Levanas, “Ethics as First Philosophy” in A
Levanas Reader edited by S. Had (Oxford/Blackwell, 1989, i.e., seeks the recovering of Greek
thought as rationalistic contra “Systems” and “Theories.” This represents the Liberalism debate
regarding the conflict between Hebrew and Greek thought).
The ultimate consequences of postmodern deconstructionism is the destruction of the
“Individual.” (See my essay ”The Demise of the Person in the Neurobiological Revolution” We
are no longer “captains of our souls.” We are only a mass of floating signifiers, impulses and
impressions, changing all the time and creating new selves by the most recent spin that we
encounter. The meaning of any text, poem, work of art, is not determined by the intention of the
author, but radically changes according to each reader/observer. When meta narratives are
rejected, so are the authors where intentions are opaque “behind” the text and besides, there is no
text. Authorial intentionality is a myth, which is unavailable according to Postmodern
interpreters.
When we understand how this irrational confusion enters other spheres, i.e., politics,
marriage, sexuality, and education, we are then prepared to evaluate the place of Christian
Education for the effective witness of 21st century disciples. Postmodern deconstructionism is in
a serious dilemma. The great meta stories have fallen on evil days. We live in a pick-and-mix
culture, i.e., if it feels good, “do it” context (whatever turns you on). The counter culture of the
1960’s appears in the emperors new clothes with nowhere to go in our constantly changing world
of violent sound and the pornography industry, cyberspace sex. We are surrounded by near
perfect symbols of this confusing, ambitious, yet “rootless culture.”
Theology of Promise: The Hermeneutical Unity of Scripture
How are the scriptures to be communicated in this dark milieu? We must ground the
encounter with the Big Story of the Biblical Canon. From Genesis to Revelation the story is
intact. No amount of Deconstruction can remove the enduring power of The Promises of God,
from creation to consummation. Post Modernity totally rejects the biblical meta narrative as
oppressive (e.g. Jewish story as oppressive in the Middle East), while the Palestinian
communities comprise most of the native Christians in that cultural structure.
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Promise in the Biblical Meta Narrative of the Created Universe
The biblical perspective is under attack because it is inflexible in the eyes of the
Postmodern opponents. The Bible is criticized as a literature of the conqueror (e.g., see Graham
Shaw’s work, The Cost of Authority; it presents a polemic against Paul’s supposed manipulation
of his readers (esp. II Corinthians). Paul emphasis on the cross is a cynical manipulation of his
readers. Paul is only on a power trip, according to Shaw).
The Biblical world view is grounded in creational monotheism, but is under severe
attack in our postmodern, deconstructionist academy. From the First Scientific Revolution,
biblical creational monotheism had been under attack. Only the biblical narrative sets forth
absolute creation (Genesis 1.1) in the contexts of Pantheistic perspectives. (See my essays,
“Eastern Antecedents to the Development of Western Science: From Eastern Narratives to
Chaos, Non-Linear Physics, Postmodern Anti science; “Prolegomena to Theories of Scientific
Revolutions: From Kant, Lakatos, Carnap, Popper, Kuhn”)
The Postmodern cafeteria/smorgasbord culture has also attended the funeral of the “death
of man.” The “person” has been rejected specifically by the neurobiological revolution, where
the mind has been reduced to brain, and the brain reduced to a computer analogue, i.e., the death
of the self. There is no acceptable meaning to the biblical claim of man being created in the
image of God to postmodern auditors. Any biblical preaching/teaching of this matter is reduced
to “power trips.” The authority of the scriptures has no place in the postmodern academy (see
my essay, “The Demise of the Person in Postmodern Neurobiology”). We must be aware that
neither the scriptures nor Augustine or any of the reformers call the tunes. The pipers are Kant,
Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Fish, Lyotard, Popper, Kuhn, Polanyi, Feyerabend, et.al. Without
critical encounter with these genius minds we are in no position to ground Christian Education
for the generations from the counter culture of the 1960’s to 2005.
An awareness of the agenda of 19th century biblical criticism is also essential curriculum
for Christian Education in the 21st century. The radical deconstruction of the music revolution
from classical, biblically grounded hymnology to jazz and postmodern musicology wars exposes
the fascinating contradiction between two postmodern agendas: (1) the need to tell “my story”
rather than “anyone else’s;” and (2) inseparably confused with the perpetual deconstruction of
the self, The bible has a reply to our confusion
The unity of the canonical scriptures is affirmed by the Promises of God from Genesis to
Revelation. The biblical meta narrative is the Promise of God from beginning to consummation.
From the creator to creation “The Story” centers on the healing of the world and “the chosen” are
themselves in need of rescue and restoration.
The New Testament scriptures consistently declare with one voice that the meta narrative
(story) reached its climax in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the promised
Messiah of Israel. Israel’s Messiah was always supposed to be the Lord of the whole creation
(John 3.16—God so loved the “cosmos”). Therefore our Lord’s final commission was the
“proclamation” to the whole world for its Lord and King. The early heralds of the Gospel saw
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themselves living between the first days and the last days. The entire structure of Acts unfolds
the divine narrative which undergirds all the Epistles. No critical rearrangement of the biblical
literature can remove the unifying narrative of God’s Promise (“All the promises of God are yes
in Jesus, II Corinthians 1.20). From Genesis to Revelation, from creation to re-creation, from the
call of Abraham to the New Jerusalem, the consistent message is the truth in which all
counterfeits are mere parody. All forms of paganism, past and present, worship creation, not the
creator. All forms of Pantheism—Shemetic, Graeco/Roman, Modern or Postmodern—are mirror
images of the radical dualism, i.e., the belief that eternal matter is shaped by all forms of lesser
gods who are always locked in mortal combat for control. “Here lies the real search for
control/domination, not the biblical meta narrative of God who created heaven and earth.
It is a myth that there are “creation myths,” only Genesis 1.1 claims the absolute origin of
all things, i.e., the universe. For all Eastern religions were pantheistic, i.e., matter was eternal;
this is also true of classical Greek thought (resurgent postmodern pantheism).
The biblical meta narrative challenges and subverts the worldview of philosophical
Idealism, in which historical events and persons are mere contingent, ultimately trivial data.
Only the creator’s love, mercy, justice and forgiveness draw attention to the meaning and
historical context gives it meaning. All these dimensions are affirmed at the Cross and Empty
Tomb. Here the unifying narrative of all “stories” is fused.
The biblical narrative also challenges and subverts the non storied aphoristic world of
“The Gospel of Thomas” and The DeVinci Code.. In the Jesus Seminar and all forms of
resurgent Gnosticism, the Gospel is only the ground of hope and not the so-called oppressive
narrative of the canonical gospels. Jesus is the Old Testament Messiah and the historical
incarnation of the creator. He is not a wandering cynic but the “raison d’etre” of our Lord’s
final commission to go to all the “ethnics.” The world of the biblical narrative is not a solipsistic
private world. It is also a challenge to all secularized versions of the private world of the
dualistic pietist, in Jesus and Scripture we are told not only about “ourselves” but also about the
narrative of the created universe.
This is not an Enlightenment/modernist rejection of postmodernity. We do not need the
postmodern narrative to critique modernist meta narrative! The developments in science fused
with Goedel’s Theorem have overthrown the autonomy of both mathematics and the scientific
method.
During the age of the growth of the Christian faith in the context of the Roman Empire a
new golden age had begun. During the Enlightenment, Scientific Revolutions, Heremeneutical
Revolution, Historiographical Revolution—the liberal movement reached its apogee in the
expression of four theses: (1) the Inevitability of Progress; (2) the Inherent Perfectibility of Man;
(3) the Complete Animality of Man (a’la’ Darwin); (4) the Ultimate Reality of Nature (e.g.
materialistic pantheism). This represented a new golden age. This is precisely what
postmodernism rejects. The above assumptions represented a secularized eschatology. These
cultural factors were merely “rearranging the deck chairs.” The counter eschatologies dwelt
between apocalyptic and catastrophe! We must clearly state that the biblical meta narrative is
not a controlling narrative. It is not a power ploy, it is a love ploy. Postmoderns cannot
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deconstruct love! Here is the fundamental weakness in their Achilles heel! Christian witnessing
in our postmodern culture requires combining two often times contradictory opposite poles—
HUMILITY AND TRUTH TELLING. Promise has at its heart the unity of Baptism “into
new life in Jesus” and the Lord’s Table as a “call to a remembrance”, what God has done for us.
The narrative of the cross moves us from the dark side of existence to the light of
resurrection life. The new life must be expressed in a richer biblical theology of worship, where
God is the center, not the audience. Resurrected selves are not arrogant, lonely individuals,
“captains of their fate and masters of their souls.”
The supposed objectivism of Enlightenment epistemologies, which was a cloak for
political and social power encounters—the biblical understanding of knowing is grounding our
knowledge in the creator of the universe and not in autonomous knowledge of mathematics,
scientific method, but in the World View narrative of creation. Augustine was partly correct;
there is no autonomous reason; all reasoning is theory laden, but all theories do not have
explanatory and predictive capabilities.
The scientific and technological advances during the 18th and 19th centuries were the
bulwark of Deism, Humanism, Theism, Relativism, Skepticism, Narcissism,
Existential/Phenomenological irrationalism. Here we see the death knell of classical modernism
and the aberrant child—Postmodernism, was delivered stillborn. A fundamental task of
Christian Education in the 21st century is to understand Enlightenment Modernism and
Postmodernism. This awareness is not a substitute for the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ,
but a pre-evangelistic necessity (Romans 12.1-4 . . . do not conform any longer to the pattern of
this world, but be transformed (present tense participle) a constant renewal of your “mind” and
Matthew 22.37, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind.
This is the greatest commandment. . .”)
Love removes us from being a detached observer. We must now be engaged passionately
and compassionately with “others.” We must encounter postmoderns with an epistemology of
love of God, others and self in that order. By loving God, others, self we are loving the story
narrative. The model of Loving God must be the base in God’s love in creation, promise,
judgment, mercy, incarnation, atonement, resurrection and ultimately, in re-creation, which is the
ground of our self understanding, our daily lives and our vocation. When this process is fused in
the priesthood of believers, then biblical language of the new heaven and earth is constantly
renewed by the living God known in the incarnate and inscripturated Word of God
Slogans and shibboleths have their life history in the American academy. Now, since at
least the 1980’s, one such slogan is multiculturalism and has replaced an already existing
expression—“cultural pluralism.” The 20th century has utilized the special lexicon of
syncretism, inclusivism, exclusivism, cultural relativism, etc.. These terms derive from the
supposed scientific objectivity of sciences Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology,
Philosophy of Religion, etc., i.e., the gauntlet of the behavioral sciences (humanities). The
fundamental fallacy of much work in these categories derives from a misunderstanding of the
nature of the scientific method and fallacy of positivism, i.e., only facts are “objectively real,”
while values are “culturally relative.”
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Western culture has been in radical transition since the 17th century (e.g., (1) 17th century,
True Truth was available in mathematics; (2) 18th century, nature replaces creation; and
scientific development; (3) 19th century, Historiographical Revolution (conflict between
Positivism and Historicism, physical and social sciences); (4) 20th century, Language, i.e.,
Linguistic Revolution; (5) and 21st century, Multiculturalism, i.e., epistemological and cultural
relativism.
We cannot encounter the multicultural Education Revolution without critically
understanding the scientific revolution from Descartes to Newton which generated classical
mechanics in physics (e.g., absolute Time and Space); historiographical revolution from Kant’s
influence and Lessing and Herder. The historiographical revolution developed by Dilthey and
Darwin leads to Heidegger and the historization of all reality. Dilthey’s revolution was utilized
by Bultmann and Heidegger’s existentialism and Dilthey’s historico/hermeneutico relativism.
All knowledge and meaning is not only context specific, it is context bound (i.e., no meta
narrative). Twins were born to Dilthey’s empiricism—skepticism and relativism. This thesis
developed the death of authorial intentionality (e.g., enters deconstructionism in all literature and
in homiletics, “audience analysis” and “seeker friendly” perspectives. Dilthey’s Structuralism is
just a form of relativism.
Dilthey’s relativism is described by his “synchronic/dialectonic” contextualization thesis.
His thesis moves from considerations of the relation of mind and expression to the relationship
of the individual to culture. In this maze the historian is a historical being. His contributions are
utilized by Bultmann and Heidegger’s existentialism. The impact on historical relation to the
foundations of the Judaeo/Christian faith is crystal clear. The constitutive elements of his view
of diachronic contextualization lead to relativism of historical knowledge. Three factors are: (1)
the historian is bound in historical process; (2) Dilthey’s constant for historical understanding,
i.e., universal human nature is lacking in defensible context; (3) the whole through which the
parts can be understanding is unattainable. The result is the loss of “objectivity” of historical
knowledge. Knowledge, understanding and meaning are ultimately context bound. Empirical
holism leaves the problem of historical knowledge as insolvable or illusive.
The significance of Dilthey’s revolution for the Judaeo/Christian historical heritage
should be crystal clear. Since there can be no “objective historical records,” all records are
created by a believing community. The hermeneutical and historiographical revolutions have
destroyed the historical foundations of the Bible as objective, cross culturally communicable
history, theology (doctrine). These can be no normative past/present or event which can interpret
the present after Dilthey, Kant, Hegel and Darwin., et.al.
Fused with the Historiographical Revolution was the Linguistic Revolution.
Linguistic relativism, fundamental to this position, its thought and language are
inseparable. Here we enter the temple of Linguistic Relativism. The prophets in this temple of
relativism are Humboldt, Sapir, Whorf and Kuhn. The result of the Linguistic Revolution is that
language is the worldview of a people and the 7000 languages and dialects are their own
worldview. We now enter the gates of Wittgenstein’s “Language Game”, i.e., every language
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has its own game; there is no Meta narrative—objective/universal game. The gates are now
closed on the cathedral of cultural and epistemological relativism. Extreme forms of linguistic
and cultural relativism are the curriculum of Multicultural, Pluralistic Diversity, which controls
the academy.
The relationship between Whorf and Sapir and “language competence” is a psychological
category. The terms “langue” and “parole” have been made clear by Chomsky, who
distinguishes a theory of language competence (a grammar) from the performance model which
will specify how grammar is put to us by the speaker, (Noam Chomsky. Syntactic Structures
(The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1957, p 102) and aspects of The Theory of Syntax (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1965, p. 9)
The entire debate from Hamann, Herder to Humbolt is an attempt to counteract the
Kantian thesis of “Innate Faculties” in the human mind, for which there seems to be no empirical
evidence. This continued debate rests in failure to understand the limitation of Empiricism as an
epistemology.
If linguistic relativism is to be testable there must be “proof” that the discussion does not
rest on philosophical judgments which are not an empirical propositions because thought is not a
demonstrable phenomenon. Therefore, it is impossible to ascertain whether all thought is
dependent on language or not. It is true that semantic categories may affect cognition; it is a far
cry from Whorf’s suggestions that the grammar and lexicon determine cognition. Some aspects
of language may affect cognition, but probably only the semantics categories, and then only
when ignorance of reality leaves a person dependent on other people’s verbal labels for a
description of the bit of reality in question.
From Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralism to Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm, the
French structuralist movement in philosophy includes Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault who
sought to identify human reason with language. These Deconstructionalists treated the human
mind as essentially linguistic and to dissect the nature of the unconscious by deconstructing
language. Foucault focused more on the development of ideas and systems of thought within
cultural context. Within the Deconstructive model all world views are the product of the
discourse, the conversation between members of society, which necessarily takes place in the
context of a particular language, culture, and framing system of assumptions. The limitations of
the discourse therefore define the limitations of world views. Herein lays our cultural/linguistic
relativism, i.e., hostility to all Meta narratives/worldview discussions.
From the scientific revolution to historiographical, linguistic, to cultural relativism, we
must fuse our discussion with the positions of at least four gurus of “Relativism”: Ruth
Benedict, Stanley Fish, Anne Salmond, and Margaret Mead. Mead and Benedict unfold the
worldview of “Relativism” in their work, Patterns of Culture and Mead’s An Anthropologist at
Work: The Writings of Ruth Benedict (Boston: Houghton/Mifflin, 1954).
Skepticism and Relativism
The cultural relativism of Ruth Benedict is activated by seven theses:
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1. We abandon our illusions of cultural superiority; each culture makes its own claims.
2. Human achievement is not dependent on any force external to human culture.
3. Western culture has assumed religious superiority in viewing other culture (cf. one of
the assumptions of the postmodern culture is the rejection of Western superiority
(WADA) based in scientific development and Christianity).
4. Western Christian culture is plagued with the irrationality of race, prejudice, and
nationalism/patriotism.
5. Cultural anthropology encourages mutual cultural tolerance.
6. Western Christian culture tormented women, discouraged races (the Feminist
revolution and Civil Rights).
7. Demise of the normative superiority of Christianity (cf. sin, guilt, responsibility).
Stanley Fish is a major voice in the Cultural Relativism of Multicultural Pluralism. His
evaluation is based in the postmodern hermeneutical/epistemological narrative displacement, as
well as by Lyotard, DeMan, Bernstein, et.al. All of their postmodern tomes are mere
descriptions of narrative displacements, not an explanation of why one Received View narrative
was displaced by another. The essence of postmodernism is resurgent Gnosticism, Visigoths and
Tribalism. The history of narrative displacement in the “hard core” sciences precludes the
identification of Description and Explanation in any debate between alternative legitimization
structures (Kuhn’s Paradigm). Liberal democratic pluralism is implicitly a subversive faith,
subversive of all alternative views that do not conform to the dictates of reason as shaped by
liberalism.
The Cultural Anthropological Relativism of Anne Salmond
She has copied the postmodern approach well and uncritically, and her massive book
attempts to tell of the first encounter of Europeans and Maori and awaits all meta historical
discussion of how the two views are related or why they differ. In an issue of The American
Anthropologist (vol. 94, 1992, esp. p. 812) it declares that such reliance on the finality of
uncritical self representation has become American anthropological orthodoxy. One does not
have to return to Ranke, who maintains that there are contradictions in the courses; over and
above the stories told there is the reality of what “actually happened” and that it can be found if
the contradiction in the sources is resolved (see R.W. Fogel and G.R. Elton, Which Road to the
Past? (New Haven: Yale, 1983, p. 83). The crucial weakness in this postmodern anthropological
relativism is that every agent represents themselves, thus overriding implicitly the limitations of
the testimony of the people she is professing to allow to represent themselves. This makes all
diversity final and irrepressible. The European protagonists were external to the genealogical
network that provides the key principles for ordering the tribal historical accounts.
The Maori were not “good” observers. They remained caught in the tribal genealogies
and that was all that the past and the present meant to them. Their interest was neither historical
nor sociological; but on Salmond’s own testimony, they were confined to the bonding effects
the recital of genealogies has on a clan or tribe. Thus they were not able to take interest in the
Europeans who were coming to threaten and eventually destroy their indigenous style of life.
This same failure to discern and diagnose life-threatening events is present in the collapse of
every studied culture in the history of the world. The Europeans discovered Maori but the Maori
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did not find Europe until the English showed it to them. Even if one speaks of a Polynesian
discovery of New Zealand this knowledge was lost. In wondering about the relationships in
which different systems of knowledge might stand to one another, Ms. Salmond allowed herself
to be guided by Heidegger, Foucault, Ricoeur, Gadamer, Habermas, Mary Hesse, Derrida, Eco
and other postmoderns, their cultural and epistemological relativism is evident on every page of
their literature.
The postmodern agenda is largely vitiated by their failure to understand that scientific
narrative displacement had not taken place through the empirical methodology. Pure Empiricism
is only a description of individual data. Mere description provides only data, not explanation of
any coherence.
The excursion into cultural relativism perhaps will expose the dynamic movement from
Pluralism to Multiculturalism which controls the agenda in Outcome Based Education, i.e.,
multicultural pluralism,
It would require a revision of Christian Education in our schools and churches in order to
effectively engage the narrative shift from Pluralism to Multiculturalism. A crucial question that
arises is—why was multiculturalism chosen to displace the established expression” Cultural
Pluralism”? This phrase entered the American lexicon through supporters of liberal democracy
who had strong attachment to American civilization. One of the gurus of American pragmatism,
William James, set forth the expression “cultural pluralism” around 1906. It was John Dewey
who extended this term when he advocated the integration of the “best elements” of all cultures
and religions into an emerging novel American civilization at the turn of the 20th century.
America was a cultural melting pot and primarily made up of Roman Catholics, Protestants, and
Jews. Immigration was composed of Irish, Jews, African American, and Eastern Europeans.
The new work force entered the steel, coal, and railroad industries. Here we see the rising
middle class.
Until the mid 1930’s, the promise of cultural pluralism for Jewish citizens was limited to
two industries: garment manufacturing and the American movie industry. In the curriculum of
universities there was little concern for the altruistic cultural systems derived from the European
and Asian invasion into the American melting pot. However, we must not forget that we entered
the nuclear age because of men like Einstein and Oppenheimer. Their contributions strikes a
death blow to postmodern anti science, i.e., science is an American/Eurocentric phenomenon.
Science carried on in any culture is carried by universal/objective foundations... This
phenomenon is totally repudiated by postmodern diversity. All reality is not encoded, its
foundations are decoded. World War II deified science as the greatest of the new industries.
The scientific culture was probably the first such phenomenon in history
In this context, the brilliant play writer, Arthur Miller, wrote The Death of a Salesman
about the garment industry. During this time Asian competitors, using highly underpaid
workers, were displacing American workers. With the coming of global economics fused by
Keynesian economics, we enter the era of the credit card. Global progress is now falling prey to
economic deficit and our entitlement socialistic culture. For over two decades there has been a
sustained attack on capitalistic democracy as dominated by greed and wealth acquisitions. Its
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strange how our postmodern denial of “True Truth” is the foundation for the irrational
confrontation with alternative belief and behavior systems. Where we are barraged with attacks
on American culture as unjust and irrational, when there is no meta narrative to judge any
alternative system. ” If there is no true truth, then these negative evaluations are also power
plays and have no truth claims. 19th century intellectuals attacked Christians for being “ignorant
and superstitious”; the 20th century has attacked Christianity for being too “rationalistic” (e.g.
“The Death of God, History, Language, Science, Logic, and True Truth”). After attending to the
above, we enter our pluralistic, divergent, multiculturalism.
WASP America has become a divergent multicultural culture. The melting pot no longer
melts! Divergent, contradictory, alternatives rule the academy and all elements of our social
structure, i.e., family, home, art, literature, media, education, etc. (Diana L. Eck, The New
Religious America (Harper pb., 2002); Will Herberg, Protestant Catholic Jew (Doubleday,
1955); Harold Bloom, The American Religion (Touchstone, 1992)
The Coming of the Two Cultures: Scientific and Literary
In the post World War II era, American Jews all but controlled the Nobel prizes, having
been awarded prizes by 1950. They were the new cultural elite. World War II German physicists
hated Einstein. They refused to allow him to lecture in Berlin. The Nazis maintained that the
German racial experience conferred an intuition superior to all rationalistic science. In America,
the dominance of the scientific culture has proven the reaction known as multiculturalism. It is
strange that the liberal Swedish members of the Nobel prize committee have found no AfricanAmerican candidates. The journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education provides the figures for
graduate students in the sciences. The figures remain quite low for the completion of research
theses in the non-white arena. The entitlement programs of the 1990’s have increased the
numbers from minorities to participate in advanced academic work in the scientific disciplines.
It is essential to understand that statistics cannot determine the truth of the position of either
majority or minority. Here lies the crucial ground for repudiating True Truth in the discussions
of the academic and political realms. Statistics only describe what certain segments of our social
structure hold as belief systems. They cannot determine whether either or both of the proposed
issues are right or wrong. This is the ultimate results of Dewey’s pragmatic epistemology.
While Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” thesis fits well in the context of Democratic majority
rule, it has been rejected by postmodern developments in mathematics, neurobiology, physics
and chemistry as merely Eurocentric objectivism which dismissed all minority groups from the
decision making procedures. The division between literary and scientific cultures intensifies
almost daily. Now we are perhaps in a position to understand the radical postmodern emphasis
on literature and art as merely arenas of deconstructionalism. Hamlet’s soliloquy on suicide
seems outmoded to this generation (i.e., Generation X, the counter culture of the 1960’s, contra
the academic allegiance to scientific objectivity as we enter Neil Postman’s world of his book,
Amusing Ourselves to Death, i.e., a radical shift from audibility to a visibility culture fused by
the computer revolution. Truth is no longer in the hands of the scientific elite but rather the
individual or the audience becomes the authority (thus enters the Seeker Friendly audience
analysis in homiletics and Christian Education).
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The multicultural generation is post Freudian, post Marxian, post Durkheinian, and asks
why would anyone contemplate suicide so readily? This question was surely derived from
feudal presuppositions with its medieval masochist extolling of martyrdom.
“To die, to sleep, perchance to dream. . . .
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil. . .
Most postmodern multiculturalists are agnostics or atheists who are indifferent to
questions about dreams of death (e.g. preoccupation with euthanasia is to postmodern not
suicide, but a “right”).
The majority of scientific students have imbibed on the melancholy recognition felt by
Darwin, Huxley, and Einstein seems to be the dominant “creedless” outlook in an age of
democratic parties, civil rights organization and multiple choices in sexual activities, and attacks
on the Judaeo/Christian view of the family, (e.g., homosexual/lesbian marriages taken before the
states, then the Supreme Court—Euthanasia, abortions on demand, right to choose/right to life
conflict, political correctness is the left wing censorship) which denies the creation/creator of
universe (Genesis 1.1ff.) This claim was the first issue to be attacked in the scientific realm,
especially in astronomy and cosmology. Too many postmodern students concentrate in the less
demanding social or literary studies.
The Multicultural Movement enters the social arena precisely at the time when
throughout the world it is the American English language, its literature, its movie industry and its
democratic political culture that holds primacy, whether in such Asian societies as India, Japan,
China, or the Republics in sub-Saharan Africa oscillating between military regimes, or the social
unrest among Soviet peoples to refashion their ethnic republics (e.g., the fall of Communism and
the recovery of national identification in Eastern Europe).
The American experiment is still the socio-economico, politico paradigm. While there
were other much smaller multicultural movements, when hundreds of Christian anti-intellectual
sects arose, each claiming that their theological revelations were of higher order of truth than that
of Greek science/philosophy practiced at the library and museum in Alexandria, when an
enraged Christian mob in 415 A.D. lynched Hypatias, the famed woman mathematician, and set
fire to the great Alexandria library, the destruction of ancient science was countersigned in favor
of anti intellectual myths and pseudo reasoning. It has taken hundreds of years (ca. 1000) before
a scientific revolution could take place in Christian Europe (e.g., Galileo, Kepler, Newton, et.al.;
the Renaissance recovery of Greek thought; the Muslim use of Aristotle, Aquinas’ use of
Aristotle in response to the Muslim use of Aristotle) and their discussion regarding the nature
and existence of God.
The postmodern multicultural movement was a similar kind of secession from Western
Europe/American civilization; it is the latest “alienation” which became overt in the counter
culture of the 1960’s. But the foundation of cultural relativism school of Margaret Mead and
Ruth Benedict left off in mid century. We must place in the context of the ultimate results of
polysyllabic Deconstructionism in the cultural relativism maze. Also, Nietzsche’s Trans
valuation of values is undertaken. The hermeneutic of suspicion dominates the scene. English
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and American literature, science and philosophy are regarded as unfair claimants of a “western
monopoly.”
The multiculturalist seeks to break the American trust. The Asian literature of Confucius,
the poems of LiPo and the pithy sayings of Mo-Tzu, as well of the tedious meandering novels,
The Dream of the Red Chamber and The Scholars. These literary contributors in their view are
equal to the works of English literature.
In 2005 we are spared the demands for African cosmology and Asian conception of
gravitation and the Pythagorean view of magnetism. This also applies to the Feminist African
Americans and multiple alternative groups who feel that they have been disenfranchised It is
strange that Chinese Nobel laureates, such as T. D. Lee and C.N. Yang, who were honored in
1957 for their work in discovering the principle of parity conservation, was violated in certain
sub-atomic particle interacters, were departing from the symmetries highly prized in Chinese
pantheistic philosophy.
The supposed equality of African/Asian, etc. cultures where we note that disease and
massacres have been the principle cultural offerings. Multiculturalism leads to the morass of
collective self lacerations; on the other hand, it is the common human marketplace of ideas that
ultimately evokes the most intense achievement.
Free intercultural commissars cannot mandate for long a literary canon that goes contrary
to the most advanced judgment unless they invoke some kind of ideological or artistic
dictatorship. Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Feodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, all acquired an
enormous vogue in America that placed them on a humanly universal level. Their status was
very similar to that of their countrymen in the sciences—Nicola Lobacechevsky, Dmitry
Mendeleev, and Ilya Metchhikoff (Eastern scholarship). In England, Charles Dickens sprang
form the lower classes and had as a novelist a claim on the British consciousness akin to that of
the scientist Michael Faraday, born a working class boy of an obscure Sandemanian sect. And
the world outlooks and emphasis of such scientists as Charles Fourier, Sadi Carnot, and Andre
Ampere found rough novelistic counterparts in Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, and Rene de
Chateaubriand. C.P. Snow counterposed literary and scientific cultures; both are often parts of
a cultural whole. A period of flourishing in the arts has usually been accompanied with a
simultaneous flourishing in the sciences.
The postmodern slogan “Cultural Diversity” leads to a quagmire because its aim in large
part is to entrench a place for superficial and mediocre and to obviate the standards of scientific
probing, searching scientists and scholars. If multiculturalists succeed in acquiring a dominate
control of the curriculum, and if they intensify their control via institutionalized force
conditioning of students with the “literature” and ideological apologia for backward peoples, the
consequences for the universities will continue to produce results quite undreamed of. Science
students, with their essential preparatory studies growing all the time, will finally rebel against
the “humanities” requirements, the college of science will secede from their traditional
association with the liberal arts college. The curriculum will become more “ideological” than
“liberal.” At Berkeley there is a rapidly growing Asian student body. Caucasian competitors
have relatively diminished with ideology. Asian or African students rarely elect multicultural or
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literature courses. Universities which have imbibed on a multicultural curriculum are acquiring a
reputation of being second or third rate institutions. The free marketplace of students and
professors will, unless politically intimidated, decide for those institutions committed to classical
scientific procedures. From Moscow to Beijing, from Johannesburg to Tokyo, it is American
culture and the American language that are accepted as having the world’s common culture. All
scientifically oriented people—youth, scientists, industrial and artistic communities—all look to
America for the design of progress and the maintenance of “order” and “freedom.” Why?
Those who choose secession from American civilization advocate multiculturalism on
American campuses are the most recent malady of generative progress. This phenomenon
represent worldviews in conflict, rather than Darwinian degenerative evolution (see esp. Lewis
S. Feuer, Imperialism and the Anti-Imperalist Mind; Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism;
Einstein and The Generation of Science—all for Rutgers State University: New Brunswick, NJ;
also his crucial essay, “From Pluralism to Multiculturalism Culture Consensus” in Society
(Nov/Dec, 1991).
(For essays of Dr. Strauss, see his web site at http://www.worldvieweyes.org/straussdocs.html)
(See especially W.C. Stewart, ‘Religion and Science’ in Reason for the Hope Within
(Eerdmans, 1999, pp. 318-344); for those opposed to methodological naturalism and arguing
instead for “cosmic design” as theistic science, see esp. Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The
Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (Free Press, 1996); Mathematician Wm. Demski, The
Design Inference (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between
Science and Theology (InterVarsity Press, 1999); Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos
(Navpress, 1994); Nancy Pearcy, The Soul of Science and Christian Faith and Natural
Philosophy (Crossway, 1994); also Total Truth (2004); J.P. Moreland, editor, The Creation
Hypothesis: Scientific Evidence for Intelligent Design (IVP, 1994); D.K. Clark, To Know and
Love God (Crossway, 2003); D. Dockery and G.A. Thornbury, Shaping a World View
(Broadman and Holmes, 2002).
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