In our postmodern culture today, the notions of “tough love” or a rebuke done in love for the good of another, are almost incomprehensible. To disagree with someone now is to “hate” them. It can’t possibly be otherwise, because now people are their opinions (x = y); not separate from them (x has opinion y).
The people who commit these horrible acts of tough love must have hidden nefarious motives: so we are informed by the upholders of the secularization zeitgeist and idol. There are no absolutes. We either agree with other people (in which case we “love” them), or we disagree, which is intolerance and hate. Those are the only two possible scenarios. We can’t disagree and love them.
So, for example, to follow this pseudo-thinking to its logical end, we can’t tell an alcoholic he shouldn’t drink, for his own good. That is disagreement and therefore hatred. If we love him, we have to let him drink himself to death and kill someone on the road, where he’s out drunk driving.
Therefore, tolerance is literally impossible, because tolerance, of course, is loving people and allowing them freedom even though we disagree with something they believe or do. Postmodernism renders this intrinsically impossible, since disagreeing (by definition) is hatred and touchy-feely / warm fuzzy agreement is love. Last night I dared to disagree with someone and so several people came and told me that I “hated” him.
We either love or hate, and so intolerance is a meaningless category in postmodernist groupthink. It never happens because it can never happen. The new categories preclude it. In order to be a good postmodernist I have to lie about myself and agree with whatever anyone else says in order to love them. And that makes mincemeat of both truth and love, and I can never do either thing.
Therefore, I am not a postmodernist and so, must necessarily (so we’re told) be a hater in the postmodernist’s eyes, because (routinely, in the course of doing apologetics) I dare to disagree with someone, and beyond that, even outrageously dare to tell them sometimes that they are wrong, for their own good (and to accept the same criticism coming my way).
Thus, the “bad guys” in this brave new thought-world are those who reject postmodernist subjective-mush-relativism. The “good guys” are those who get with the program and accept all that nonsense: who learn as quickly as possible how to be clones and groupthinkers and doublethinkers and bootlickers.
George Orwell predicted and rather prophetically described the whole thing 69 years ago.
As we inexorably drift further and further away from the biblical worldview, this madness will continue and become exponentially worse. Let’s pray that reason and true tolerance will again one day actually return to their rightful place.
Postmodernism is part of the “world-system” (kosmos) that the Bible command us to oppose. People follow things to different degrees, but certainly subjectivism and denial of absolutes and moral relativism are major trends in thinking and behavior today. No one (who believes this stuff) ever puts it bluntly in those terms, but how they act confirms that they do think it (whether consciously or not).
I wish I had a dime for every time I’ve been accused of “hating” someone just because I had an honest disagreement concerning what they believe or do. But fuzzy, illogical thinking is also part and parcel of postmodernism. And it often infests even Christian environments, because the world always does that, and we are all sinners, prone to the overwhelming cultural influences around us.
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(originally 10-3-17)
Photo credit: photograph by k_donovan11 (6-28-06) [Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license]
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