Hello, Christopher Eastman-Nagle   . This is a review from "WdC SuperPower Reviewers Group"  !  I searched your portfolio and found "Meditations on Postmodernity:" after having read another one of your pieces. I have the following comments to offer.
 Reader Experience
This writer is someone who attempts to engage with reality on a far deeper level than most of us. His insights are worth mulling over and so I came back for a second helping in his discussion of postmodernity.
Here he challenges the inevitable sense of progress that liberal Western society has assumed for itself and indeed the definition of what constitutes progress at all.
We are approaching the limits of our planet's resources and the borders of our current wealth and development models. But the momentum of the current order is such that change is going to be painful. The author argues here for a new form of conservatism based on notions of sustainability, discipline, and rebuilt cultural and spiritual software assets. A stronger leadership model is required in the new order, which will be only partially democratic but considerably wiser. Consumerism is destroying the planet and we need better individual and communal responses to the problems of our closed environmental system.
Consumerism is the totalitarian model that needs to be dismantled now. Radical change and the new are not always better, sometimes experience and wisdom count for more, and the destruction of cultural memory and social structures has terrible consequences. Modern media stars are abbreviated lifeforms with 30-second concentration spans. Maturity and depth are missing, the pretty images of social media stars float on the surface of reality but never engage with it. The media traps us in permanent adolescence and we never grow up.
The prewar social model was one of disciplined restraint but now we have moved into an era of permissiveness. Everyone is an autonomous consumer with unlimited choices and possibilities and the openness of youth, conservative bastions have been systematically demolished by the Libertach machine.
Gender and gender relationships have been redefined, but the only real winners of the change have been divorce lawyers, pharmacies selling antidepressants, and the social welfare bureaucracies that clean up the messes the new ideology has created.
We are now prioritized on a buy/sell model and our non-targeted life concerns have atrophied as a consequence. Our imaginations have been colonized by marketing memes and adverts and the flames of greed and covetousness fanned into a roaring furnace that burns much of the rest of our personalities away. Original thoughts are plundered and turned into products and the new industries leave only wastelands in our psychological hinterlands. The promise of liberation comes at the expense of maturity, responsibility, and wisdom. Narrow definitions of personality pave over the gardens and forests of our minds with a limited range of geometrically shaped ideological convictions. Wisdom requires discrimination not everything can be valued equally and blurring the lines between wisdom and foolishness is destruction on steroids.
Love has been conflated with eroticism, sexuality with identity. We have lost the capacity to see because moral differentiation is no longer possible in the morally relativistic grey of our times. This blindness corrupts moral discourse and the capacity for characters to grow and mature. We remain in the unrestricted egoism of childhood, our consciousness is retarded and immature.
Our energies are siphoned off into the production/consumer model. Women's liberation has effectively withdrawn their labor from domestic development and planted it in the consumer machine without bringing men back from the war machinery of consumerism to make up the balance. The psychological impacts have been immense, shattering marriages and family structures and contributing to the growing dysfunctionality of childhood. This Faustian bargain with the consumer machine means that both men and women have now sold their souls to the Consumerist model and whole dimensions of our existence atrophy and wither away as a result.
The weird and strange are cultivated by the new totalitarianism of consumerism into new products and sales opportunities. But the affirmations of these disturbing trends only contribute to the downward spiral and sense of rot.
The collapse of communism did not mean the triumph of liberal consumerism but raised the questions that will now begin to dismantle it. Human capital and indeed that of our planet have been thoroughly stripped and there has to be a backlash against that and the one-dimensional society that it has generated. The end of colonialism often meant throwing countries back into the arms of their own tribal/feudal demons and allowing them the freedom to run riot over the peoples left behind by the colonial powers.
Immigration into Western consumer societies often challenges that model with more primal calls to reproduce and for values and indeed worship. We may have lost our past but they bring theirs with them.
Religious conservatives are ridiculed and marginalized battling Darwin and modernity when many consider those fights already lost. The author considers that science has dismantled the Biblical picture of reality to the point that there is no going back and erroneously claims it speaks of a flat earth and spheres for example.
He considers the past to have been so thoroughly dismantled that it is only in a newly built future that conservatives can find refuge. This must be pragmatic, not idealistic, paced not rushed, long-term in its outlook, intolerant of dysfunctional behavior, respecting hierarchies, and giving children a more disciplined environment to grow up in, being less tolerant of marital and familial failure. It will not directly challenge consumerism so much as transform it into something better and more integrated with a fuller view of society. He looks for a new spirituality though not one governed by anything like a biblical or Christian perspective. The key is bringing things into balance with each other whether biological, psychological, technological, or human. we do not live by bread alone.
Commentary: Content, Characters and Plot
This is my own reading of what you wrote, as it read to me, feel free to disagree with me.
Again your description of the woes of liberal-consumerist society is challenging and insightful and I agreed with many parts of your analysis. There is considerable value in what you wrote though I found it a little too pessimistic. In part that is because I live in Germany where there is a far better work-life balance and where individualism, while chaotic, has not permitted the atrophying of the non-consumerist inner spaces nor the diverse cultural landscapes of small-town Germany.
Your view of religion is of a straw man. Much of the Christian world embraced Darwin years ago and sees no contradiction with scripture on that. Creationists like myself see no imperative from demonstrable science to challenge a properly interpreted literal reading of scripture. Science has a limited scope and does not challenge scripture at any point. There is no flat earth doctrine in scripture, it simply does not say that and you are quite liberal in accepting the comparative religious analysts who misdate scriptural accounts and then interpret them in falsely sequenced time frames. Empirically your rejection of religion is premature, it is not overwhelmed by liberal consumerism though there are dysfunctionalities that have resulted from this interaction
So I am not clear that a new conservatism is really necessary. Religion gives better foundations for moral consideration than the ones you suggest. This includes notions of stewardship of our planet and also of greater care and wisdom in managing non-utilitarian areas of our cultural landscapes and inner spaces. Social democracy like that in Germany balances an enterprise society with social care and concern. I share your commitment to a more pragmatic and long-term approach and agree the media and education systems should not be simply hijacked by agendas that dissolve all capacity for moral differentiation, epistemological checking, and discrimination between right and wrong, and true and false.
To some extent, the reproductive sterility of German society since the seventies is due to the embracing of a pleasure-seeking consumer model that puts comfort before long-term strategic wisdom. This is a powerful insight I derive from your writings. Germans have been deeply disturbed by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine in part because they cling to this pleasure-seeking lifestyle. But the lack of wisdom regarding energy security in the preamble to the current energy crisis illustrates all too well that short-term thinking like this can be disastrous economically and socially. Germans need to think more long term and not just about the environment where they excel, nor about neglected areas of the cultural landscape where they are also good but so also about energy security, food security, family-friendly value systems, and areas like military defense which they would prefer not engage with for historical reasons.
Mechanical issues
The text is well enough constructed to be readable though you do repeat certain themes, could summarise others better and if run this through a grammar checker it does light up.
Thanks for sharing.
 
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