(This post is a long time coming. Since the National Religious Broadcaster's convention, my brain has buzzed with thoughts of modernism and post-modernism, cyncism and localism, and many other great -isms. Here are my armchair philosopher thoughts. They might be scattered or difficult to understand. A friendly comment saying so would be helpful as I refine both my writing style and my thoughts...)
Let's start with a definition of post-modernism. The term itself is shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding (it's sort of ironic, really). The Oxford English Dictionary calls it, "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions." One of Merriam-Webster's defintions is "of, relating to, or being a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culutre, identity, history, or language." The definition that I have been working from since hearing it in my undergraduate philosophy class is attributed to a French philosopher called Jean-Francois Lyotard: "incredulity toward metanarratives."
I mean, think about it. The 20th century wasn't that great in many ways. We had recently(ish) come off the enlightenment, a time when all promise lay before man. Indeed, I think most of the 20th century was spent pursuing the promises of the Enlightenment and Modernism. Radio took off, closely followed by telephones, television, cable, computers, and, by the end, the internet. People trusted the power structures of the world to deliver them out of their problems. Technology will make me lose weight, keep the peace, do the chores, feed me, entertain me, connect me to others, anything. Our lives would get easier and easier. Or, at least, that was what the metanarrative of modernism offered.
But what did it deliver? More war (perhaps) than ever before in history. A fundamental rift between people and government as leaders fell to corruption and greed. The disintegration of family life as central to human experience as divorce rates skyrocketted. Corporations rising and falling, crushing the wallets and souls of people who no longer had the self-discipline to spend less than they earned. Is it any wonder people began to be skeptical about grand visions of universal truth-claims?
I think at its heart, post-modernism is this fundamental distrust of anything. You can't trust the government's claims that through big/small government, you will be helped/free to do whatever you want. You can't trust the advertiser's claims that this product actually works. You can't trust your parents to know what is good for you. Twentieth century psychoanlytic theory even undermined the trust in self that people could fall back on. When you are a teeming cauldron of subconscious, evolutionary urges conditioned by a lifetime of experiences, how can you know that you truly believe what you believe?
This has produced a very tolerant culture. What works for me is great. What works for you is great. If those are completely opposite, that's fine. Ultimately, I'm forced to trust myself and my experience. And I expect the same of you. So that's fine. We can get along with our completely opposite worldviews because both of us accept that we can't tell anyone else that what I've experienced is more true that what you've experienced.
Deconstruction, the first tool the post-modern reaches for, can only go so far by itself. We have taken apart everything from science to government to religion to social structures, but what has it left us with? Nothing but a pile of broken pieces. We finally figured out that modernism was a lie, but we never found the truth to replace it.
I think we're starting to figure something else out, too. We're all into sustainablity, right? (Those nasty moderns in their imperialistic, dogmatic, self-centered, earth-destorying ways made us a little bit... not those things.) Post-modernism - this incredulity toward metanarrative - is unsustainable. We can't do it much longer. It's killing our spirits and we know it. So we're reaching out.
At first, it's small. It's our friends. In my generation, there was a turn towards peer tribes among adolescents. Instead of caring for and listening to our families, we allied ourselves with our friends - the people closest to our daily experience. We trust our tribes. We love our tribes. To sin against the tribe (through breaking whatever internal rules it has) is worse than Judas' betrayal of Jesus or Brutus' betrayal of Caesar. The millenials are growing up now and taking their tribes with them. Most of them are going online. Social networking, I think, is a direct result of our desire to connect with the only people in the world who we can trust. We can't trust advertisers to tell us what products work (despite the inundation of custom-made advertisements... thanks Google...). We can trust our friends. If they say a product works, then we flock to it and buy it en masse (You're welcome, Steve Jobs.).
So where is all this going? What am I rambling towards?
I think everything is going to keep going local. There are apps that tell you who is tweeting near you. Farmer's markets are rising in popularity and use. There is a general distaste for all things mass-produced in the mouths (literal and metaphorical) of millenials.
With each step outside of the self, with each snarky comment held in, with each belief firmly and lovingly stated as true, we build trust. And with that trust, I think comes hope. I have little hope in the super-structures of society that have been so poisoned with greed and self-interest, but I do have hope that local communities will rise again and people will love their neighbors a little better than they used to. Now that everything has been deconstructed, we can start constructing again.
