What is called “modernity” (roughly 1500 to the present) has at times been called “the age of ideologies.” Ideology is an essentially diseased mode of thinking, based on a warped conception of reality. These are the familiar “isms."
Some of the major diseased thought-systems or ideologies of “modernity” are listed below. All of these ideologies are alive, to some extent, in our contemporary culture; all oppose genuine openness to reality that is the life of the mind and soul.
- Calvinism and the extremes of the Protestant Reformation
- Catholic reaction in “traditionalism” and the authoritarian Church
- Man-centered humanism of the Renaissance and since “Enlightenment” with the occlusion of reason; deification of truncated reason as “rationalism”
- Hegelianism, the intellectual father of Marxism, nationalism, Statism Comtean Positivism and Scientism
- Romanticism and irrationalism; unchaining of emotions from rational grounding
- Liberalism and laissez-faire capitalism, free trade, etc.
- Democracy and the myth of “natural rights” (“human rights” later)
- Nationalism, with the idolizing of a particular “nation” and its “state"
- Utopian Socialism with Marxist “analysis” of political and social reality
- Statism, especially in form of “democratic Welfare State” (W Europe, US, etc)
- Communism, combining Marxist Socialism with Statism
- Anarchism and its more recent child, “libertarianism”
- Fascism and National Socialism, combining nationalism with the idol State Psychologism (including Freudianism), Biologism, and other forms of “determinism”
- Conservatism (as combining traditionalism, Statism or libertarianism, nationalism, etc)
- Selfism, and the absolutizing of the individual person (intellectualized egotism
Attention to the pettiness of American political “debate” (petty Left,
petty Right) makes me think about the ideologies masking the naked drive
for power and wealth that constitute the substance of “modern”
politics.
Some
of the major diseased thought-systems or ideologies of “modernity” are
listed below. All of these ideologies are alive, to some extent, in our
contemporary culture; all oppose genuine openness to reality that is
the life of the mind and soul.
