Our own Peter Lawler is the James Brown of the blogosphere, the hardest working man in the business. Over at the the Encyclopedia Britannica blog , he argues that a "postmodernism, rightly understood" is essentially a realism that counters our modern tendency towards self-abstraction or the dominant view that we’re merely autonomous, rational producers with interests. According to Lawler:
The point of higher education is to counter this dominant, largely unscrutinized presumption and an emphasis on the Great Books tradition does this particularly well since the best historical authors "aren’t in the thrall of our prejudice that we’re merely productive beings. They think love and virtue are real, and that we’re stuck with both as self-conscious mortals in this world. They know a lot about us that we usually and quite wrongly think we don’t need to know to live well."
Our prejudice, to be blunt, is that we believe that there’s nothing real—nothing to be known—about love and death. We’ve just about forgotten that a rational being—a being with logos— is necessarily also an erotic being. We’ve forgotten how to think about whole human persons; we’ve forgotten how to think about the purposes or point of being human.
As Lawler points out, one hallmark of postmodernism, typically understood is an insistence on the singularly important virtue of irony, or the posture of clever levity in the face of the absence of truth and purpose. We acknowledge the peculiar fact of human longing, and the inexplicaple stubborness of virtue and love, but only with a wink that indicates deep down we know it’s all chimerical. Higher education in general and the Great Books in particular can be an antidote to the irony that takes the unreal abstraction of the socially constructed individual as more real than the whole human person of our unvarnished experience. This brief essay is well worth the read.
