Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

desperate population to believe that they alone held the answers for Germany’s future.
Who at the time could have imagined the insanity that lie ahead for Germany and much of
the world Such is the potential for society’s that loose their moral compass.
While I appreciate postmodernist Richard Rorty’s call for relativistic personal
freedoms, I cannot agree with his anti-foundationalist sentiments, which reflect the
nihilistic bent of Nietzsche, and take the entire matter of personal freedoms to extremes --
something typical of the postmodernists. Rorty believes that what holds a society
together is not a shared ideology, or philosophical commitment, but “a consensus that the
point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best
of his or her abilities, and that that goal requires, besides peace and wealth, the standard
‘bourgeois freedoms’” (Rorty, 1989:84).
What Rorty and so many others refuse to accept is that while these individual and
social freedoms are of great worth and are to be highly valued, they are neither attained,
nor kept through the moral weakness that pluralism produces. Europe, for example, has
learned these lessons through centuries of bitter experience. Because humanity is innately
corrupt -- not innately good as so many choose to believe -- there must be order before
there can be true freedom. Yet, order must be balanced with personal liberties.
Throughout history, men and nations have wrestled with this great tension, and honestly
few governments have been able to make it work for any length of time. Even in our own
day, it is all too often true that those with the most and best weapons make the rules by
which others live.
In arguing that we must simply rejoice in
plurality without ever allowing the possibility
that some truth claims may prove to have
intrinsic or universal validity, postmoderns
allow the warning of Michael Foucault to
become reality: The verdict on differing truth
claims will be decided not only any mutually
reached judgments (since they are impossible)
but on the basis of who has the economic or
military power... The criteria will be
determined... by those who have the dollars
for the guns (Knitter, 1992:114, in
Taylor, 2000:96).
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University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa