![]() ![]() While deconstructionism seeks to define the “real meaning” of something said or written by delving into the cultural context and individual biases and ideology of the speaker or author, one can see how it can also be used to twist meaning when the “deconstruction” is based on assumption or a willful misreading of history or context. Deconstructionism is based on two ideas: first that no passage or text can possibly convey a single reliable, consistent, and coherent message to everyone who reads or hears it and second is that the author who wrote the text is less responsible for the piece’s content than are the forces of culture (such as language) and the author’s unconscious biases and ideology. Jacques Derrida invented the concept of “deconstructionism”. Done with that for a moment – now, if you aren’t bored to death, I’ll go to the names mentioned earlier. In a sense, even our Constitution is a metanarrative and that Western civilization is also a metanarrative. We each live separate lives, each of us with our own stories, and yet we are united by a common national bond, that of being American. The world has always had metanarratives – it can be argued that nations themselves are metanarratives. As one would expect, through the combination of narratives, the metanarrative that remains is the result of an “averaging” of sub-narratives, the result of a process of “sanding off the corners” as it were while retaining the critical substance that glues all the sub-narratives together. Individual narratives are collected into common group narratives, and then the common group narratives are combined into one grand narrative. Marxism’s metanarrative is that the history of the world has been one of class oppression, and a revolution of the proletariat is the only solution to end poverty, scarcity, and injustice.”Īs the definition indicates, metanarratives are typically built from the bottom up. The Enlightenment’s metanarrative is that rational thought grounded in empiricism leads to human progress. ![]() ![]() Christianity’s metanarrative, for example, is that humans have been sinful since Adam and Eve’s fall in the Garden of Eden, but there is hope for salvation in accepting Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. In plain English, they’re the tales we’ve been told all our lives about existence from various perspectives. In the books and the Peter Jackson movies, the One Ring is essentially a physical manifestation of a metanarrative, one grand narrative to rule all narratives.Ĭasey Given, writing at the Foundation for Economic Education, describes the metanarrative concept this way: “As the word’s etymology implies, metanarratives are narratives about narratives, giving a grand structural story to human history. The “metanarrative” is a concept much like the One Ring to rule them all of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. To do so, they should be familiar with the term “metanarrative” and the names of some people – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, you should already know – but you should also know Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Herbert Marcuse, and Jean-François Lyotard. People need to understand from whence this tactic arises and they need to understand the concepts of postmodernism and Critical Theory (the parent theory that gave birth to Critical Race Theory). Trump, which in their lexicon is just another term for “white supremacy”). It seems the progressive left and their allies in the collectivist and radical camps have decided “white supremacy” is the cause, reason, and outcome for everything these days – even when blacks commit crimes against Asians or each other, it is due to anger caused by white supremacy (or Donald J. There is just no other way to till this ground without using multiple plows. You guys are smart and already get it, but I wrote this for sharing with people who have not yet “got it” to help them understand some of the irrationality and chaos they may be sensing these days, so please bear with me for a few minutes of your day. I am going to warn you right up front: this is long – and most (if not all) readers will not need the level of specificity contained within. ![]()
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