| Post-Modernism | 2002-01-06 22:18 8 comments |
 by Flemming FunchThe term "post-modernism" has always confused me. Or, rather, I must admit that I never got a good definition. Now, researching it some more, the best explanation I can find is in these pages. Modernism was characterized by a belief that rational, orderly progress of one well-identified central metaphor, such as Science or Capitalism or Communism, was going to solve things. Post-modernism is the end of belief in any such absolute truths; replaced with a sense that everything is relative; there are no universal answers or agreements; culture just fragments into a playful celebration of chaos. We're surfing across multiple paradigms, without any of them being the obvious RIGHT one. Mostly it means that Science and your local Political Paradigm have been deposed as gods of your world. You can make up the truth as well as they can. Now, that is both depressing and refreshing, and it should definitely have some bearing on how we think about creating a new civilization. I means that it is no longer practical to come up with one better ideology, which everybody can adopt, and which ensures progress and harmony for all of us. That's a Modernist way of looking at it: that instead of Communism or Capitalism, we define the NewCivilizationism, and everybody lines up behind it, and we build a more rational world with it. That also would involve a struggle, where we convince enough people to switch to this way of looking at it, and we gather support, etc. So, now, post-modernism says that such approaches are dead. It is all just a different perspective, so somehow there needs to be room for all of them. So, maybe the best approach to a new civilization is to fully embrace post-modernism. I.e. it is the place where all different paradigms can coexist. It is a place that will work well with rich diversity, where everybody don't agree on the underlying big story. And the idea would probably be that a New Civilization works *better* when built of a fundamentally complex diversity of cultures than if it were attempted to be based on one generally agreed-upon ideology. Now, I would argue that there are certainly still recognizable rules and self-organizing principles in such a different world. If we assumed that there really is some sense in this switch to a post-modern world, then it is the sense that we drop phoney universal stories that claim to have the answer to everything, and instead we adopt a vocabulary that allows us to play with different world-views. We adopt the understanding that humans can choose different world-views, believing things between them that are mutually exclusive. Instead of struggling to defend any one picture of the world as the right one, we learn the principles of how people make pictures of the world, and we become fluid and flexible in switching around between different channels as necessary. A problem is that powerful agencies are still holding on to a Modern approach of pushing one ideology through to a universal status. Most governments still try to make the same rules apply to everybody. The Central Banking economies still try to push the idea that we're all doing well or not-well at the same time. The Multi-National World Trade Globalization movement tries to create the same market everywhere, with the same rules, squelching diversity. Those things will naturally have to go, as they belong to a system that no longer exists, so their batteries will eventually run out. |