Postmodernism, a critique of the over-ambitious nature of Enlightenment rationalism, is the beginning of an age deeply disenchanted with modernity. What is modernity and (following the most powerful of Twentieth Century constructs) its –ism? This generalization strikes me as a decent one.
I think modernism and its stylistic descendants can be reasonably conceived of as the defiance of common experience, endless experiments based in theory and speculation, very few of which work out; by contrast, tradition, those practices based in experience, are more likely to succeed. Without echoes and remembrance of our human experiences, where is eternal life? The loss of place is the great dread of Sheol, Purgatory, and Hell. It is the absence of relational communion whose summit is Eucharistic Communion, a descent into the despairing punishments of nothingness. A lonely absence is the fate worse than death. Much of the modern human is a tourist, a sampler, a “chooser” of taste and fashion consistently and fundamentally unnourished. The complexities of the human experience will defy the reductionisms of modernism, from the many varieties of Marxism to utilitarianism to architectural “cleansing,” if we allow it. A reality beyond our experience – the embrace of mystery that is postmodernism rightly understood – is revealed in historical and limited circumstances. These can be uprooted in the embrace of wandering, shallow emotions at the peril of an imaginative core that prompts truth to become gradually known. The faddish freedoms that supposedly liberate from the past are an absence of place. These reduce humans to the small and unimportant, granting little more than the illusionary lie that life is a monologue and one is capable of creating, even of directing, a destiny. What is needed is greater skepticism of the apostles of Progress and greater scorn to the notions that politics may be reduced to a set of problems that our rational intelligences may solve. No cold, synthetic creation such as government will ever accumulate sufficient knowledge or goodness to “solve” anything. But an understanding and appreciation of place, of belonging, will help.
June 2nd, 2009 | 5:54 pm
Codswallop. Postmodernism is no more a critique of modernism, as you describe either, than Leninism was a critique of czarism. Postmodernism is about the confusions of life, not its mysteries, and about raising those confusions to narrative status. Human beings have antecedent rational purposes that are buried in traditions and sentiments. So what. We can’t keep everything in mind. The Church and natural law watch over many of them. Institutions embody them. Prejudice, in its real sense, minds most of the rest.
The mysteries themselves are not buried: they stand starkly naked at the end of every rational thread. Children find them immediately. It takes long academic training to ignore them.
The parallel tracks of reason and faith are perfectly observable throughout the modern era. Positivism and modernism are not the same thing, the former being the wrong bus out of Hume. True modernity begins with Aquinas, to whom the vital first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence could be footnoted.
If there was such a thing as the “Englightenment” it had far more Las Vegas than it needed and those elements are the madness of crowds purified of “superstitions” turning up on the scaffolds of the French Revolution and then serially across the twentieth century in the utopian carnages.
Postmodernism is an excuse for overgrown academics to reject clarity and deny wisdom while embracing their crotches. It is in its final irony the other side of the Positivist coin, a skepticism collapsing inward to final provincial conceits. The attempt here to transform it into the wee rituals of the Shire is like the lovely damsel on her ecstatic romp through the glade with her foot in bear scat.
June 2nd, 2009 | 7:42 pm
“What is needed is greater skepticism of
the apostles of Progress and greater scorn of the notions that politics may be reduced to a set of problems that our rational intelligence may solve.”
Insightful and erudite…much appreciated. That the Enlightenment degenerated into a revolt against metaphysics and theology, failed in its efforts to recover existence, and derailed into a world-immanent consciousness is kind of self evident. And, I would like to read your comments re: “…an understanding and appreciation of place, of belonging, will help,” with the emphasis on “place” and being.
June 3rd, 2009 | 10:54 am
Well said and a fine generalization.
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