“What was envisioned by increasing numbers of people, beginning in the fifteenth century, gaining momentum in the seventeenth century and culminating in the nineteenth century, was a veritable utopia of prosperity and progress in which the whole human race would be united. This vision, embodied in the progress myth, describes the essential contours of the cultural imagination and spiritual driving force of the West. 
Human progress is not only possible but inevitable, we have come to believe, if only we allow autonomous reason the freedom to investigate our world scientifically. By this free and open investigation, we have confidently believed, humanity will be able to acquire the technological power necessary to control nature and bring about the ultimate human goal: increased economic consumption and affluence, with resulting peace, fulfillment and security…This is a myth that has been woven into the fabric of our common Western existence. Langdon Gilkey summarizes well the role of the progress myth in our culture: ‘It helps us determine what is relative and what is not in the world, and what our own priorities are or should be. It tells us what to defend and why we defend it. It gives meaning to our work, confidence in the midst of failure, and hop in the face of tragedy…. It helps us to distinguish good from evil forces in the world around us, and gives us confidence in the ultimate victory of good over evil in history. Above all, it tells us who we are in history and why we are here. It forms the ultimate set of presuppositions for most of our aims and so our patterns of education.’”
Excerpt from Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be by Middleton & Walsh, pg. 19
This forms the basis for much of the foundation of modernity and in the process explains so well the ‘tao’ of our president. We have a modernist president trying to lead a growing postmodern constituency wherein lies a great deal of difficulty as the values of a postmodern culture are vastly different from the aims of the modern culture. Take for instance the thrust of the excerpt above: ‘…we have confidently believed, humanity will be able to acquire the technological power necessary to control nature and bring about the ultimate human goal: increased economic consumption and affluence, with resulting peace, fulfillment and security’. The whole goal of capitalist America has been increased economic consumption and affluence believing that those things will bring about the “salvation” of the world. The postmodern culture has become disenchanted with this view seeing the faults, yet with every action done in office we can see that President Bush has swallowed the progress myth of modernity hook, line and sinker–he did grow up with this mindset after all.
This is the ‘Tao of Bush’. Although it may be an “outdated” view of the world and of culture we shouldn’t expect anything different for voting a modernist into office. If we expect change we must look carefully at how a candidate views the world and relates to culture for then and only then will we have a President that sees things our way.
Related posts:
- What Bush’s Win Means
- I Voted for Bush…Can I Take It back?
- The 10 Commandments
- Well, at least it lasted for a day!
- Happy Festivus!
