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When looking back at my padlet posts, two things stand out to me. The first theme that I noticed throughout my padlet posts was that postmodernism prevents the individual from finding contentment in their life. At the beginning of the course, I noticed how the existentialist philosophy offered an optimistic outlook to atheists. However, as the course progressed to communism and cultural Marxism I noticed how postmodernism loses the potential for hope in its application. During the class discussion on Weber’s The Protestant Work Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, I noticed how postmodern thought made it difficult for people to discern what makes an action right or wrong and if actions can be placed in a moral middle ground. I responded to this idea in Caleb Hudson’s padlet post Blessings or Greed. In class, people were questioning whether or not it was sinful to spend money on earthly pleasure liking buying chicken quesadillas or taking a trip to Greece. In my response to Caleb, I said that finding contentment in our lives is something that reveals the blessings that God has gifted us with. A postmodern society makes it difficult for Christians to reflect on earthly pleasures with gratitude towards God instead of viewing them as a sin. People can earn material wealth without making it into a god. I believe that Christians struggle to be content because they associate all personal pleasures with sin. This shift can be attributed to secular society using personal pleasures to create societal or individual identities. I think we can see society attempt to grasp contentment in the rise of marxism. My padlet #3 post used a Monty Python and the Holy Grail clip to contrast the perception of communism in the past and the growing acceptance of it in today’s youth. In the past western society rarely took communism seriously while today socialism is promoted by the Left. When we watched Bauchman’s lecture on cultural Marxism, I came to the conclusion that the idea of “cultural Marxism” originates from the current need for communal identity. Bauchman highlighted in his lecture from the cultural Marxist perspective an individual's worth comes from how many minority groups they are born into. The philosophy behind postmodern thought originates from Sartre’s idea of the individual’s creation of meaning and Neizsche’s metaphors; however, the practical application of the ideas lacks the same inspiration. While the idea of a person creating their own meaning is inspirational, it seems that the average joe has no idea how to accomplish this daunting task. The result is a growing need for communal identity. Today, communal identities are not formed from an amalgamation of diverse people but the formation of groups around a single point of biological similarity or perceived oppression.

Another theme in my padlet post that I noticed was the postmodernist attempt to discredit ideas based off of their origin. While I did not talk about the application of postmodernism in education directly, reflecting on my posts it is easy to see the connection. I wrote one of my padlet posts on how I was shocked to find out that Freud did not believe that Moses was Jewish. Freud seemed to think that since religion was a necessity for civilization, it is only a result of society's psychoses. The idea of debunking religion based on society's need for it is seen in Freud's The Future of an Illusion, Darwin's work, and Nietzsche's Parable of the Madman. In each of these works, the author claims that religion exists because of society's need for it and that it has no claim to objective truth. However, does religion's scientific origin debunk religious claims? Both the modernist and postmodernist seem to think that recognizing how religion benefited society automatically debunks the claims that religion makes; however, the idea aligns fairly well with the Christian perspective that the world is broken and the Church serves the only hope of order. Freud claims that religion was an illusion that man created to survive but how does religion aiding man's survival prove biblical objective truth to be a fabrication? Another one of my padlet posts reflected on C. S. Lewis’s arguments against subjectivity. The Green Book example from The Abolition of Man shows how the postmodernist believes that an individual's description of something reflects nothing but an individual's emotions towards that object. For example, the contemptible action of abusing a child is only contemptible because of the observer's feeling of “contempt”. Under a postmodern subjectivist perspective, value is only given extrinsically by the individual and no emotion, value, virtue, or truth has intrinsic value. Throughout the course, I was wondering how modernist and postmodernist could argue against Christianity by saying that it was once necessary but now is redundant. However, I now understand that it is because they believe that Christianity's only worth comes from the value extrinsically placed on it by society. Intrinsic value does not exist from the postmodern perspective and with that truth cannot exist.

Of my padlet posts only three reflected obvious biases, one source was a political cartoon poking fun at postmodernism, another was a meme criticizing Nietzsche's attacks on Christianity, and another was a summary of a section from C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. The summary of The Abolition of Man was written by theater scholar Dr. Cole Matson. His commentary was written from a Christian perspective that reflected upon the work of C. S. Lewis in a positive light. The meme and the political cartoon do reflect the biases of the creators but I think in the context of my postings they are a better representation of my personal biases. In high school, my interactions with postmodern thought were frequent in my conversations with my peers. Since I was already exposed to the current application of postmodernism, I already had a negative perception of it when entering the class. Similar to the meme's mocking of Neiszche’s criticisms of Christianity, I had a similar perspective of my peers' opinions on religion. Oftentimes, my peers equated Christianity with racism, homophobia, and other Ad Hominem attacks. The political cartoon also reflects my biases because it portrays philosophy as being in a standstill. Overall, this course helped me to understand how the early embodiments of modernity and postmodernity were hopeful but the application of the philosophy leaves society to struggle to find what it should place value on extrinsically.

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In class we discussed C.S. Lewis’s The Poison of Subjectivism. While I did enjoy this essay, Lewis’s The Abolition of Man is a better representation of the consequences of accepting moral subjectivism. I could not find a great article about the Green Book illustration, so I posted a blog about it (although I recommend reading the actual book). Early in the book, he uses the illustration of the Green Book. Lewis claimed that the Green Book promoted that it was teaching english yet was actually teaching bad philosophy. In the textbook the authors use an example where a person calls the waterfall “sublime”. They claim that by calling a waterfall sublime the speaker is making no observation about the waterfall, rather they are merely stating their feelings towards the waterfall. Lewis argued that denying sentiments can be reasonable, it prevents individuals from the ability to emotionally respond to experiences of goodness and beauty in both literature and the natural world. Lewis argues that under this perspective when a speaker calls an act “contemptible” he is actually saying “I have contemptible feelings”. Certainly we can call an act contemptible and actually mean that the act itself is contemptible.

When looking back at previous readings I noticed that this trend was also described in the Hick’s reading. Hicks argued that Postmodernism changed the reading of literature from and academic perspective. “The task of the literary critic, accordingly, is to deconstruct the text to reveal the author’s race, sex, or class interests,” (Hicks 16). Schools and textbooks now focus on the motivations of the author rather that the experience of reading a literary work. “Nathianal Hawthrone, for example, in The Scarlet Letter seems at least ambivalent about Hester Prynne’s moral status--and this ambivalence reveals that he is sold out to an authoritarian, conformist, and masculine religious establishment,” (Hicks 16). To me this perspective of literature in schools is somewhat disturbing. What is your opinion on the consequences of accepting a postmodern perspective in literature and schooling? Do our words only mean anything with reference to our perspective or is it possible to speak objectively about an object's beauty? When we think about values do come from within us or are they discovered from an external source?

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Last summer, I attended the first of two Summer Seminars-in-Residence at the Kilns. This one was led by Dr. Christopher Mitchell, the Director of the Wade Center at Wheaton College. There were about a dozen of us who attended the seminar. The first weekend in February, eight of us got together for a reunion at Wheaton. Chris Mitchell took us into the lower depths of the Wade, into the double-sealed room that holds Lewis' actual library. There Chris showed us Pauline Baynes' original sketches for the illustrations in The Chronicles of Narnia, an afghan that Joy (Lewis' wife) had knitted, and several books with Lewis' own annotations, including one in particular: the Green Book.

In The Abolition of Man - one of my favorite Lewis works - CSL writes in reaction to a book of which he received a review copy. With his signature courtesy, even toward his intellectual opponents, Lewis declines to name the authors with whom he took issue - or even name the book. Instead, he calls them Gaius and Titius, and their book the Green Book. He assures his readers that the Green Book is no conglomerate of other modern educational books, or a hypothetical textbook, but an actual book sitting on his shelf.

I squee'd when Chris pulled the book off the shelf, and then not only revealed its identity, but let us hold it. When I received the book and tenderly opened its pages, I saw dozens of scrawled notes on the inside covers, as well as on the various pages. It was amazing to see a Lewis thought, and know how it had developed in the published Abolition.

The Abolition of Man is one of Lewis' most under-rated works, and one of his most intellectually robust. However, it still maintains the clear readability of Lewis works like Mere Christianity. I highly recommend you put it at the top of your CSL reading list if you haven't read it already.

The problem with the Green Book, according to Lewis, was that it purported to be an English textbook, but it really taught very little about English at all. Instead, it taught philosophy in the guise of literary criticism. And not only philosophy, but bad philosophy. Here students were taught moral relativism and subjectivity in the name of not being "taken in" by statements of feeling or value. Gaius and Titius quote the story of Coleridge at the Falls of Clyde, in which he speaks with a tourist, who calls the waterfall "sublime." G & T inform the student that the tourist was not really making a statement about the waterfall, but about his own feelings about the waterfall. They go further to inform the student that poets are never really talking about the subject they seem to be talking about (e.g. Love, the Fall from Heaven, a cloud of daffodils), but are merely talking about their own feelings, their own psychological experiences. (See Lewis' brilliant exchange with E.M.W. Tillyard on this Personal Heresy, now finally back in print in an inexpensive edited paperback edition!)

For Lewis, this reading of poetry took away any possibility of poetry communicating anything of value. G & T were in effect saying that nothing could be beautiful, or good, or true in itself, but only that we could feel happy, or calm, or safe, or some other feeling when we thought of them. But of course, if I've started to describe my psychological state, I'm no longer describing the waterfall. And what is the point of making poetry about majestic waterfalls, if all I'm really saying is that the waterfall induces feelings of majesty within my emotional experience? I might as well just show you a scan of my amygdala and be done with it. It would give you the same amount of information about the world in a more efficient manner, and be more honest.

To be continued when I review the new edition of The Personal Heresy ...

By the way, in case you're wondering. The name of the Green Book? The Control of Language: A critical approach to reading and writing, by Alec King and Martin Ketley (1939).

P.S. You can now follow Bruce L. Edwards, Lewis scholar and writer of the Introduction to the new Personal Heresy, on Twitter @cslewisnews! Oh, and you can follow me @colematson.

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Last summer, I attended the first of two Summer Seminars-in-Residence at the Kilns. This one was led by Dr. Christopher Mitchell, the Director of the Wade Center at Wheaton College. There were about a dozen of us who attended the seminar. The first weekend in February, eight of us got together for a reunion at...

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Padlet #2: Freud believes Moses wasn’t Jewish???

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Padlet #2: Freud believes Moses wasn’t Jewish???

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In Freud’s essay Moses and Monotheism, he argues that Moses was an Egyptian and that he did not believe in the Christian monotheistic God. In summary, the evidence he provided is that the name Moses is of Egyptian origin and that Moses most likely believed in the god Aten. Furthermore, he argues that the Judaism of the Bible is the result of the collective guilt Jewish people felt in learning of Moses’s execution (the article explains why he was supposedly killed). From our readings of Freud in class he seems to believe that religion evolved from our need to control natural events. Furthermore, his arguments align with the idea that religion evolved over time--from animalism to polytheism to monotheism. Why does he need to explain Biblical history from a psychoanalytic perspective? Do his arguments require more faith to believe than the Biblical narrative of Moses? Based on the reading and this article, do you think that Freud understands religion, or is the reason he dislikes it so much because he fundamentally misunderstands Christianity?

I will spare you reading Freud’s actual article since it is about 50ish pages (and who wants to read 50 pages of Freud), so here is a link to a good summary of his articles.

http://www.supersummary.com/moses-and-monotheism/summary/

Here is an unrelated meme I have been laughing at all week:

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Padlet #3: Monty Python and the Holy Grail “Repressed Citizen” Clip

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Padlet #3: Monty Python and the Holy Grail “Repressed Citizen” Clip

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One of my favorite movies is Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so when we talked in class about The Communist Manifesto I had to post the repressed citizen clip. The 1975 parody of the King Arthur legend centers around King Authur’s travels in search of knights to help him in his quest to find the Holy Grail. On one of his journeys he encounters some peasants who he thinks are subjected to a local lord’s rule; however, little does he know that they will no longer stand for the feudal classism of the time.  While watching this clip I could not help thinking about how previous generations mocked communism (which I am 100% here for) or were afraid of it. However, today younger individuals seem to be more accepting of the ideas of communism. While communism is a subject of many funny memes, the ideas of communism and socialism are beginning to be taken with more seriousness in American politics. Why do you think these ideas are beginning to be taken more seriously? Also, why do these ideas appeal more to younger Americans (millennials and Generation Z)? Is there something about communism that makes it inherently more appealing to young and idealistic people?

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Padlet #4: Why do postmodernists attack Christianity?

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Padlet #4: Why do postmodernists attack Christianity?

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In class, we discussed Nietzsche's idea that individual truth comes from collective lies that society agrees upon. In On Truth and Lies, he states that society will only act against the liar that threatens the collective identity. In The Parable of the Madman, he forwarns society about the danger of abandoning enlightenment and Christian morality before society is ready. However, he believes the abandonment of these ideas are necessary. In general, postmodernism values the formation of a collective identity and the abandonment of God. This meme pokes fun at Nietzsche’s attacks on Christianity. Nietzsche attacks Christianity, but does not offer a practical framework for society. In response to the meme, why do you think postmodernists attack or abandon Christianity? Is postmodernism a progression or regression from modern thought? Is it fair for postmodernism to use rationality to oppose modern thought, but then claim that their own philosophies need not rationality to be justified?

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Padlet #1: If you can’t know anything...

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Padlet #1: If you can’t know anything...

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The cartoon below illustrates how philosophers with no other principle besides Descrates’ acknowledgment of his own consciousness cannot come to conclusions about objective truth. By viewing each action, perception, or accepted principle as something that cannot be fully known, truth is bound to the subjectivity of the individual. Sartre presents existentialism as an optimistic philosophy that allows for each individual to create his own meaning. The abandonment of God places the weight of each decision the individual. As a result, the individual is placed in a state of anguish. According to Sartre’s philosophy, believing there is no hope to be saved by an outside force commits the individual to action. While optimism can be found in man’s ability to create his own meaning, how can hope be found in the constant doubt of reality? How can the subjective good faith of an individual’s actions lead them to an objective morality?