Monday Thoughts 1: Redefining Postmodernism

17.1 Redefining Postmodernism
It is somewhat ironic that the idea of "postmodernism" has become part of the very Western "myth of progress" that it proposes to unravel. In an age of ever increasing technological advancement, Western culture ignorantly dubbed postmodernism as the next stage in human cultural evolution. To be postmodern is thus to be forward looking, to be on the cutting edge of the future.

But of course anyone who thinks of postmodernism in this way does not understand what postmodernism is. Nor is postmodernism new in terms of what it represents, although it has never manifested itself in such a pervasive and thoroughly pessimistic way.

Postmodernism is, more than anything else, doubt that we can speak of truth in any definite or absolute sense. François Lyotard called it "incredulity toward metanarratives," by which he meant disbelief in any overarching system of truth. So you can see that anyone who speaks of postmodernism as if it were the newest and best system of truth to date has not really understood what postmodernism is.

The word postmodernism itself of course evokes the idea of modernism, which evokes the idea of pre-modernism. In a moment we will suggest that these labels are less than helpful philosophically. Their main value comes as an introduction to one segment of the history of recent thought. Even here, though, any deep penetration into the thinkers of recent times deconstructs this superficial model and begs for a more sophisticated way to categorize various individuals.

Modernism is said to originate with René Descartes, whose agenda of doubt aimed for certainty in knowledge. What Descartes famously concluded was that he could doubt everything but his own existence--"I think; therefore, I am." For the next four hundred years, so the story goes, philosophers sought objectivity in knowledge, to divest themselves of all bias.

It is no coincidence that the age of science ran parallel to this quest. The scientific method of Francis Bacon required a person to collect evidence impartially and form objective hypotheses that one might then test against the evidence.

The term pre-modern thus was a slam against the age before, the pre-critical age, the age of religion, the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages between the ancient Greco-Roman world and the Renaissance. Such terminology, whatever truth it may relate, is itself riddled with bias of its own sort.

The truth of the term "pre-modern" is the sense that most human cultures have tended to be unreflective toward the reasons underlying what they believe to be true. The human animal tends to assume that the way its herd views the world is in fact the only way to view the world.

For example, when those in the Western world draw lines around the world, they draw cats and dogs on the domesticated side of the line, the human side. It is thus unthinkable to most Westerners that a person would eat cat or dog. And how uncivilized of those from other parts of the world to do so. This ethic is unreflective, unexamined for those in the West.

The impulse of "modernism" was thus to become aware of all biases and become objective about the truth. Like Spock from Star Trek, the perfect modernist divests him or herself of emotional reasoning and forms conclusions only on the evidence. The perfect modernist would thus be completely reflective and objective.

Postmodernism--after modernism--correctly recognizes that the perfect modernist does not exist in the human plane. God is the only modernist who knows all the evidence and can process it with complete objectivity in relation to all the other evidence. Postmodernism tells the modernist that he or she is only partially reflective at any time. And what is worse, by very definition we cannot know the points at which we are unreflective.

The next section presents some of the key changes in thinking that took place after Immanuel Kant. Then we will meet some of the key postmodern thinkers of recent times and attempt to process their ideas from a Christian perspective. The chapter ends with some suggestions for how Christians might think about thinking as we look toward the rest of the twenty-first century.