What is Postmodernism?

Breaking it down, so that my small brain can grok all this:

Postmodernism is a re-evaluation of philosophy/thought that came after the “modernism” of the 20th century.

Modernism, is loosely defined as the movement or period of the Enlightenment, or Industrial Revolution, or the “Age of Reason”. Whilst I’m no scholar on the subject, I take it mean the reliance on science, technology, combined with liberty and the rule of law as a means for progress in society. To work, Modernism relies on reason and rational thought, heirarchy and absolute laws, to bring order and meaning out of chaos.  In some respects, the Modernism is the triumph of science over religion – which, given the spectacular advances in our understanding of the natural world, and of ourselves, was inevitable. Modernism suffered though from events such as Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Whilst these events and others highlighted our abilities with science and technology, the flawed nature of humans was impossible to avoid, and shows just how cold and calculated a modernist solution could be. In rejecting God and relying on human endeavours, we lost something- although we were unsure exactly what that something was.

Post-modernism basically tweaks Modernism, as an attempt to circumvent some of these issues. The main shift is the rejection of the idea of absolute truth, which Modernism attempted to arrive at by scientific and rational methods.  Postmodernism holds that there is no truth, no basic right or wrong, nothing good or bad, nothing evil or noble, nothing moral or immoral.

Instead, Walter Truett Anderson identifies postmodernism as one of four world views, all of which effectively define themselves according to their version of “truth”. These four worldviews are:

• the postmodern-ironist, which sees truth as socially constructed,
• the scientific-rational in which truth is found through methodical, disciplined inquiry,
• the social-traditional in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western civilisation and
• the neo-romantic in which truth is found either through attaining harmony with nature and/or spiritual exploration of the inner self.

Beyond these simple compartmentalisations, postmodernism is a pessimistic reaction against the optimism of the modernist era. It also suggests a lack of conviction, where the population is unwilling to critique or reason with ideas (or “truths”) that suffer from a lack of linear thinking and analytical reasoning. Partly this is a result of political correctness, where openly disagreeing with someone that holds a different viewpoint might be considered rude, or confrontational – after all, who are we to hold ourselves up to the cold, harsh light of what is true – especially when it has become impossible to define what is true. What is true for person A is not necessarily true for person B, and how dare person A attempt to convince person B of the merits of their position.

Strangely though, it has become far more easy to define what is “false” – and damned be those who attempt to disagree with what “consensus” has defined as false.  Religion, especially of the organised kind, is definitely false, according to the zeitgeist. This extends to areas of taste, where we are free to express a dislike of anything, especially if it might be considered popular. Unlike in the 20th Century, there seems to be an ill-defined but definitely perceptible ceiling of popularity, above which it is considered uncool. Music is probably the best example of this, where there has been a proliferation of “Indie” labels to promote artists. Supergroups like U2, Coldplay, and the Spice Girls, are just so… nineties.

In a postmodern world, we define ourselves not by who we are, but by what we are not.

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