Just as all music from an unfamiliar genre sound alike until the crude unfamiliarity gives way to subtle but crucially important distinctions, to profane ears all religions seem to strive after the same thing.

This is simply not true: there may be a transcendent unity of religious truth, but that unity is not necessarily unity of purpose. But this difference in purpose is eclipsed by the outlandishness of the realities above and below what we mistake for the mundane. Until this transcendent reality becomes familiar, its unfamiliarity is its overwhelming feature. Once that unfamiliarity subsides — and not many religious souls try to understand it from an angle that encourages familiarity — deep conflicts in purpose become evident.

And the same thing is true of post-positivist thinking (not to mention post-positivist existence). It is 100% possible to believe in the realities the heroes of post-modernism work in, but to utterly reject their romantic egalitarian ideals. One could employ the same insights to elitist and tyrannical ends, which is in fact what the Neo-Conservative movement seeks to do. And it is possible to transcend an egalitarian vs elitist framing of the conflict as well.

It seems many of the postmodernists of the 70s and 80s were unaware that their insights were not essentially and necessarily attached to an ethic, and this is because they were newcomers to an unfamiliar sphere of reality and their ears were still filled with the mud of exoticism.

By the way, this is why we should be nervous when we generalize about realities in which we have not immersed. You will absolutely fail to see the most important distinctions, and you’ll understand it all only in relation to yourself in your own uninitiated ignorance. There’s myriad classical sub-genres, Christianities and postmodernisms, and hidden beneath these categories are deeply consequential conflicts.