Societal Disintegration and the Rationality of Narratives

Earlier this year, in a sermon about postmodernity, I preached about Foucault's inversion of Sir Francis Bacon's "Knowledge is Power." For Foucault, power is knowledge. But what does this mean? It means that the social disintegration we see around us, particularly in the increasing bifurcation of our political worldviews, can be explained by Foucault. "Post-truth" politics seems to be the phrase of 2016, but Foucault predicted this and even suggested that it undergirded our systems of rationality nearly four decades ago. The increasing separation of our worldviews (Republican and Democratic) is a reflection of the structures of power, and their constituent methodologies, that create and sustain the narratives and news-cycles that we consume. Without a common enemy, like the Soviet Union, our competitive worlds have turned on each other, rather than unifying behind a singular methodology - like the kinds of journalism we saw under the Cold War.