The Postmodern Conversation
I’m going to venture out, even if you don’t agree with me… I’m just going to get it off my chest.
Postmodern ≠ moral relativism
Call me crazy, I know, I know. But I’m totally convinced that to be “postmodern” is not be mired in relativism. “So what?!” you might say. Well, my virtual friend, here is why it is important. Everybody is talking about it! And if everybody has labeled it something that it is not, then we’re all dancing around in circles singing songs that we don’t know the words to! Seriously! Why talk about something when we haven’t even decided on the meaning of the word that we use so often? “Postmodern this, postmodern that… blah blah blah!” We might as well be chickens running around with our head cut off. (ok, sorry, violent mental image)
Well, here’s my little take on what “post modern” does NOT mean.
Postmodern doesn’t refer to people.
It doesn’t refer to being trendy.
It doesn’t mean joining one-world religions or the latest import of Eastern mysticism.
In fact, I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a question.
A question about what? Ok, here’s where we can look at the word “modern.” The word here doesn’t mean “current” or “the latest thing.” We use modern to talk about cars, business, countries… a lot of things. The “modern world” that we live in. It’s not the world of yesterday… its modern.
Well, that’s not what modern means in postmodern. Modern is actually also associated with the 18th and 19th century movement in philosophy and science called the Enlightenment. Therefore postmodern is actually a reaction against modernism. So the real issue is “what is modernism?”
Modernism describes a way of thinking that is common in the academic and scientific world. Basically, modernism looks at religion and ancient cultures as being emotional, assumption-based views of the world that are based on nothing but stories. Cultures and religions are man-made creations that are structured for domination and control. Science is really the crown of modernism. Science gives us a way to know the world that is provable, reliable and controllable.
Of course, the downside is that you can’t account for anything spiritual, whether divine or human. Humans become just an physical being with glands and hormones which form emotion, personality, and any religion or culture is viewed as something that was created so that one human could dominate other humans.
Oh, and here’s the biggest downside. Modernism, or science, sees its explanation of the world as being the only truly viable and non-biased view, because it’s based on pure fact. This is, of course, false. Science as a way of studying the world, is one way among many. That’s the problem with modernism. It pretends to be the end all of knowledge, the only way to know, the ultimate explanation of life, existence, being.
Postmodernism suspects modernism of being wrong all along. That’s why postmodern is a question, and that’s why it’s hard to define. That’s why we need to talk about it. It may help us understand the world around us, and the world in us, better.
Suddenly, postmodernism isn’t sounding so bad.
