We still own, for the most part, the religious sphere of influence. And we own small business, at least. My point is that we have a base from which to launch. Another of the reasons for the relentless attacks on Christianity.
We still own, for the most part, the religious sphere of influence. And we own small business, at least. My point is that we have a base from which to launch. Another of the reasons for the relentless attacks on Christianity.
I’m bot familiar with it so I’m just going from the graphic. That said, I don’t understand what the left replaced religion with in that model because it’s only really been since the Swaggart era that they really began their infiltration outside the black churches.
If they in fact used that, then the above throws me. Otherwise I could see it.
Jeepers, dear brother in Christ, I can't figure out how Talcott Parsons got integrated into this discussion. But I do find his "Structural–Functional Model of Society — Institutional Interaction" intriguing, and so did a little background research into Parsons.
On this base, I am confident that Parsons himself was not a socialist. And that it is absolutely the case that he detested both communism and national socialism equally, not discerning a dime's-worth of difference between them.
I gather he had two main mentors WRT his intellectual development and subsequent worldview: the great German idealist philosopher, Immanuel Kant; and John Calvin (who needs no introduction here). What an extraordinarily interesting "brew!"
Anyhoot, just because Parsons was not himself a socialist does not mean that socialists would not find his work attractive and helpful for their own ends.
What I find most remarkable about Talcott Parsons is that he really did seem to believe that the problems of the order of the human person and by extension to society at large could actually be reduced to a "scientific model." [And as we all know by now, Socialists are always fond of invoking "science!!!" to justify any lame-brained proposition they advance. In which case, people who cannot tell you the boiling point of water will nod they heads "sagely," in concurrence with "expert opinion."....
He had total confidence in the ability and fitness of the scientific method to reveal the heretofore hidden secrets of human nature and experience. With this supposition in mind, he persuaded Harvard University — where he conducted most of his distinguished and long-lived academic career — to help Pitirim Sorokin establish an official Department of Sociology there, in 1931; and to provide indispensable stewardship of the new department in the following years.
But to me, such a project is doomed to failure from the get-go. The scientific method, as it is currently understood and applied, deals only with a teensy little slice of the total Reality — that is to say, to that which falls under "direct observation/perception," under the further condition that the observer himself has already selected that which he will observe.
What could go wrong there???
Anyhoot, Parson's wonderfully vibrating "Structuralist/Functional Model" can be further translated from actual experience into such "scientific terms" as:
The Cartesian Plane. This is a two-spatial-dimensional layout, the grid onto which "evidence" is to be transposed, analyzed, and confirmed/disconfirmed. As if there were anything in human experience or Nature at large that could conceivably be reduced to two "measurable" dimensions!!!All this is so much speculation to me. To me the interesting thing is that such a deep, capacious, enormously well-researched social thinker as Talcott Parsons would get so abstracted by the idea that the "social sciences" could possibly advance by dumping all the "non-observational" elements of human existential experience in order to make it conform to generally accepted "scientific principles and methods."
The Context of Newtonian Space and Time. In this classical model, time is a linear, irreversible, sequential movement of "objects" (particles) moving from past to future state. [There is no "in-between," as Aristotle's Third Law demands. But then, Aristotle never heard of either relativity or quantum theory.]
And the law of causation that applies in this conceptual situation requires that (1) every motion invokes an equal but opposite motion; and (2) all causation implies LOCAL causation — an assumption about the very nature of things that quantum theory absolutely denies.
Parson's "Scientific Bent". Parsons may have been an intellectual/spiritual child of John Calvin, but he was also a child of the Enlightenment — who evidently had not digested the revolutionary implications of Relativity and Quantum Theory. I gather, being generally unaware of developments in these fields, he struggled to reconcile his Calvinist worldview with Newtonian dynamics as such.
In this process, he conceptualized a sort of "social action principle." This is what I see in the model you posted, dear xzins. Which reminds me that in science, physics has its "least action principle" as foundational to all the various disciplines of the natural sciences. Except, as some would argue these days, the biological sciences, which entail a "greatest-action principle."
I'd love to speak about the sectors of human Reality that have to be totally excised and obliterated from human consciousness for such a "method" to triumph. But I may not find respondents who care about such things.
Oh, before I sign off, I alluded to some kind of new "action principle" that Parsons was evoking in his Model. It seems to me it is premised in the Newtonian idea that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. As if "actions" were fully "quantifiable" in the first place.
Which I daresay, they are not. At least they are not within the "measurable" reach of scientific predictive tools....
Thanks for mentioning Talcott Parsons. He was a man of enormous intellectual reach and influence. And I can say that, even if I think and believe that he spent most of his distinguished professional career on a "wild goose chase."
Of course, the Socialists LOVE Parsons' "science," >qua science. The Socialists — especially the Progressive wing — LOVE to invoke "science" in support of their fallacious and nefarious falsifications of reality. But as Professor Gruber says, they are so stupid they don't know how to think or make rational decisions about scientific propositions, let alone their their own personal welfare.
Haven't heard that name in a long time. Parsons was a mid-twentieth century Harvard sociology professor. That made him a liberal (in the American sense) two or three times over. He could hardly have been anything else at that time and place and in that field and position.
But New Left types, like my Sociology professor, really, really hated him. They saw him as the Establishment Man par excellence. My sense is that Parsons doesn't play much of a role in the field now.
If you're looking for somebody who emphasized the cultural field as politics by other means, you could start with Gramsci, but the problem with such speculation is that theories and political ideas move far beyond their presumed starting points.
Tendencies that people like to blame on the Frankfurt School, say, in hopes that they can easily refute the whole approach of Adorno and Horkheimer, have become so rooted in academia that the sources or seeds really don't matter as much to present-day academics.
It's also hard to compare the atmosphere of the 60s, say -- the young radical left and the corporate liberal establishment -- with what's going on today. Our political and social divisions run along different lines nowadays. I guess we still have Harvard mandarins something like Parsons, but the confident WASPy establishment is long gone.