Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

by Glenn S. Sunshine

This, at least, is the theory. It turns out that many postmoderns will take these basic ideas and develop alternate or extended forms of moral absolutes from them. One of the earliest and most pervasive emerged in the feminist movement. In feminist theory, everything is ultimately about politics, that is, the e xercise of power. In patriarchal systems, power is competitive. It establishes winners and losers, hierarchies, and pecking orders. Because of this, patriarchal societies are prone to violence, war, pollution, and a host of other ills caused by the type of power they wield. Language is part of this mix as well. Since languages have meaning only in the context of a linguistic community, men use language as a means of social control, and specifically to exert power over other races, lower classes, and women. And since the widely accepted Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that “language shapes thought” rather than the other way around, control of language means control of thought and therefore of culture.1 In contrast, matriarchal societies are seen as cooperative, not competitive, and thus do not go to war, do not oppress, do not pollute Mother Earth, and are intrinsically egalitarian. This type of society is much more congenial to the postmodern worldview, since the radical freedom of the individual is not limited in an egalitarian society the way it is in the oppressive patriarchal system. So postmodernism and this form of feminism are natural allies. (The anticompetiti...