Post-modernism has many different definitions but one of the consistent definitions of post-modernism is the perpetual criticism of Modernism. Modernism dates from the Enlightenment when theology began to be de-throned as the the queen of the sciences and chief arbitrator of truth and Reason was enthroned as the final method for establishing truth, meaning and value.
As a result theology was delegated to a very narrow field of morals and ethics or a practice of nostalgia for a different era when we did not know so much.
The crowning jewel of modernism is what we call modern science. The methods of modern science with its requirement of empirical verification and/or falsification of statements of meaning called scientific laws or theories have been very successful in creating all of the technological products to make our lives better and easier.
But has the modern era only been better and easier? Post-modernism has arisen as intellectual and social movements to challenge the supremacy of the outcomes of the so-called progress of modern science. Post-modernism is not the denial of modernism; it is critique of modern progress being seen as only positive, salutary and recommendable. Post-modernism represents a disillusionment with some of the results of progress. Modernism has been so progressive that one of our chief achievements now includes the ability to destroy, quickly or progressively, human life as we know it at our own hands. One of the chief achievement of modernism is the military industrial complex which has given us the bombs to destroy the planet. A slower death of the planet has become obvious because of our poor stewardship of the environment.
In American culture, the beat cultures and the hippie cultures of the fifties and the sixties were early protest movements of post-modernism against modernism. The sixties highlighted wrong-headed achievement of science resulting in controversial wars; technology had brought us to the place of being able to go to war because we "could" and not because we needed to defend ourselves for some life threatening enemy and many began to note that we could be very inconsistent for the reasons of our military intervention in other parts of the world. "Our interest in the region" became a rather convenient and pliable interpretive principle for foreign policy.
We did have a seeming idealistic bubble in the 1950's when because of television we believed or aspired to believe that everyone was or could be a "Ward and June Cleaver" middle class family living in the nice home with the white picket fence. Such a world had an undercurrent which we did not care to highlight because it was too much a part of the "goes without saying" tacit background of the racial and socio-economic situation in our country. The bubble of our "naive" sense of being good or better than people of other countries had not yet been popped and we naively assumed that we were a Christian country and that we really knew what being a Christian country meant.
Ironically, there were a variety of Christian responses to the impressive truths of science. Various brands of fundamentalism expressed in various Christian confessional groups subtly embraced the truths of science by virtue of accepting the products of a thoroughly scientific industrial culture and life style and they regarded it necessary to begin to explicate all things biblical as scientifically truthful. So the virgin birth of church tradition also had to be understood as a modern biological understanding of child conception and birth. Embracing the the truth of radioactive dating the creation story had to be the understood as the creation of old rocks because Adam was created as an adult male and not a baby . Truly adult rocks were created and managed to fool the radioactive dating methods and appear to be very ancient while having been created but some 6000 years ago. This is the ultimate irony; fundamentalism was a product of modernism impressed by its truth and therefore fundamentalists had to conform biblical story to modern scientific truth criteria as a way to defend the ancient faith. After all, an omniscience God would have known about Cadillacs before they existed.
This truly anachronistic phenomena of fundamentalism was a modern phenomena but very poorly constructing unbelievable apologies for having faith in the modern era. One can truly feel sorry for those who suffered from nostalgia and so they attempted to wed details of ancient cultures with an incompatible modern scientific methodology.
Even while fundamentalism tried to present myth as actual history, the modern study of history resulted in a historical presentation of biblical peoples whose stories needed to be de-mythologized for modern people who held to causality based upon the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.
What was lost because of "historicism" and "fundamentalism" was the kind of seeing which comes from having one's constituted state of seeing "altered." So in revolt many people in this post-modern revolt against the effects of modernism sought for the ways of seeing and experiencing through "altered" states. People went East and gurus came West to teach "altered" ways of seeing the world so that negative effects of progress could be resisted, interdicted or given new direction. Both historicism and fundamentalism had locked off a kind of seeing which was present in the lives of those who wrote the Scriptures. Some people found refuge in even more visionary literature of Eastern Religions. Some found a way to alter their states of being, living and seeing through the discipline of meditation and other yogic practices. Others found a way to alter their seeing through hallucinogenic drugs. Some found that to challenge their sound and rhythm environments with new hybrids of music deriving from Blues and Rhythm of African-American culture gave them a music of reaction, protest and resistance. But the new sound environment also became a significant new way to alter the state of seeing life; social, cultural, political and religious lives. This also included a reaction against fundamentalism's puritanical controlled holier-than-thou restrictions upon the libido. The altered states of the sixties and seventies included an orgiastic revolt against the previous order for the libido whose main "punishment" of pregnancy was beginning to be dealt with because of modern medical science.
Hopefully we have arrived at a place of a more sanguine appraisal of the kinds of religious modernism, fundamentalism and de-mythologizing historicism. Perhaps the greatest opportunity we have in our Post-modern age is the honesty we can have about acknowledging language as the undeniable human absolute. We may refer to pre-lingual, a-lingual or extra-lingual, or post-lingual but we are always using language to do so.
With an appreciation of the supremacy and the fluidity and omni-reflexivity of language in human experience we can begin to understand that language performances arise in response to a variety of human experience and as language is produced it differentiates itself into discursive practices which are appropriate to providing meaning in different "language-games" or human scenarios of life. With an appreciation of language we can understand that the restrictions put on language products of the scientific method are not the same which pertain to the aesthetic appreciation of Shakespeare or a poetic work or Holy Scripture. There are works of writing which were produced from dream-like states of interior seeing and when such seeing is brought to text, it cannot be read or interpreted for the same meaning that we get from reading a reported event of current news. It cannot be read or interpreted in the same way in which a scientific experiment is being observed and recorded. We are variegated enough in our discursive practices so we need to be committed to surpassing ourselves into the fullness of manifold meanings. This means inner seeing can contradict scientific seeing even while co-existing in each person as a language practitioner. By nature we cannot avoid language craft and to accept the full vision of this marvelous language craft we need to avoid creating battles which we artificially create as being "out there...outside of language" because there is no such place. We need to let language honestly bear the contradictions and ambiguities involved in being fully true and honest to continual surpassing human meanings. We in communities of faith can embrace our variety of "altered state" seeing as handed on to us by our wisdom traditions and we do not blindly copy the details of applied wisdom in past cultures; we embrace the wisdom of "altered seeing" today which helps us with faith apply wisdom in the details of our lives today and do so with hopeful approximations of justice and love.
As a result theology was delegated to a very narrow field of morals and ethics or a practice of nostalgia for a different era when we did not know so much.
The crowning jewel of modernism is what we call modern science. The methods of modern science with its requirement of empirical verification and/or falsification of statements of meaning called scientific laws or theories have been very successful in creating all of the technological products to make our lives better and easier.
But has the modern era only been better and easier? Post-modernism has arisen as intellectual and social movements to challenge the supremacy of the outcomes of the so-called progress of modern science. Post-modernism is not the denial of modernism; it is critique of modern progress being seen as only positive, salutary and recommendable. Post-modernism represents a disillusionment with some of the results of progress. Modernism has been so progressive that one of our chief achievements now includes the ability to destroy, quickly or progressively, human life as we know it at our own hands. One of the chief achievement of modernism is the military industrial complex which has given us the bombs to destroy the planet. A slower death of the planet has become obvious because of our poor stewardship of the environment.
In American culture, the beat cultures and the hippie cultures of the fifties and the sixties were early protest movements of post-modernism against modernism. The sixties highlighted wrong-headed achievement of science resulting in controversial wars; technology had brought us to the place of being able to go to war because we "could" and not because we needed to defend ourselves for some life threatening enemy and many began to note that we could be very inconsistent for the reasons of our military intervention in other parts of the world. "Our interest in the region" became a rather convenient and pliable interpretive principle for foreign policy.
We did have a seeming idealistic bubble in the 1950's when because of television we believed or aspired to believe that everyone was or could be a "Ward and June Cleaver" middle class family living in the nice home with the white picket fence. Such a world had an undercurrent which we did not care to highlight because it was too much a part of the "goes without saying" tacit background of the racial and socio-economic situation in our country. The bubble of our "naive" sense of being good or better than people of other countries had not yet been popped and we naively assumed that we were a Christian country and that we really knew what being a Christian country meant.
Ironically, there were a variety of Christian responses to the impressive truths of science. Various brands of fundamentalism expressed in various Christian confessional groups subtly embraced the truths of science by virtue of accepting the products of a thoroughly scientific industrial culture and life style and they regarded it necessary to begin to explicate all things biblical as scientifically truthful. So the virgin birth of church tradition also had to be understood as a modern biological understanding of child conception and birth. Embracing the the truth of radioactive dating the creation story had to be the understood as the creation of old rocks because Adam was created as an adult male and not a baby . Truly adult rocks were created and managed to fool the radioactive dating methods and appear to be very ancient while having been created but some 6000 years ago. This is the ultimate irony; fundamentalism was a product of modernism impressed by its truth and therefore fundamentalists had to conform biblical story to modern scientific truth criteria as a way to defend the ancient faith. After all, an omniscience God would have known about Cadillacs before they existed.
This truly anachronistic phenomena of fundamentalism was a modern phenomena but very poorly constructing unbelievable apologies for having faith in the modern era. One can truly feel sorry for those who suffered from nostalgia and so they attempted to wed details of ancient cultures with an incompatible modern scientific methodology.
Even while fundamentalism tried to present myth as actual history, the modern study of history resulted in a historical presentation of biblical peoples whose stories needed to be de-mythologized for modern people who held to causality based upon the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.
What was lost because of "historicism" and "fundamentalism" was the kind of seeing which comes from having one's constituted state of seeing "altered." So in revolt many people in this post-modern revolt against the effects of modernism sought for the ways of seeing and experiencing through "altered" states. People went East and gurus came West to teach "altered" ways of seeing the world so that negative effects of progress could be resisted, interdicted or given new direction. Both historicism and fundamentalism had locked off a kind of seeing which was present in the lives of those who wrote the Scriptures. Some people found refuge in even more visionary literature of Eastern Religions. Some found a way to alter their states of being, living and seeing through the discipline of meditation and other yogic practices. Others found a way to alter their seeing through hallucinogenic drugs. Some found that to challenge their sound and rhythm environments with new hybrids of music deriving from Blues and Rhythm of African-American culture gave them a music of reaction, protest and resistance. But the new sound environment also became a significant new way to alter the state of seeing life; social, cultural, political and religious lives. This also included a reaction against fundamentalism's puritanical controlled holier-than-thou restrictions upon the libido. The altered states of the sixties and seventies included an orgiastic revolt against the previous order for the libido whose main "punishment" of pregnancy was beginning to be dealt with because of modern medical science.
Hopefully we have arrived at a place of a more sanguine appraisal of the kinds of religious modernism, fundamentalism and de-mythologizing historicism. Perhaps the greatest opportunity we have in our Post-modern age is the honesty we can have about acknowledging language as the undeniable human absolute. We may refer to pre-lingual, a-lingual or extra-lingual, or post-lingual but we are always using language to do so.
With an appreciation of the supremacy and the fluidity and omni-reflexivity of language in human experience we can begin to understand that language performances arise in response to a variety of human experience and as language is produced it differentiates itself into discursive practices which are appropriate to providing meaning in different "language-games" or human scenarios of life. With an appreciation of language we can understand that the restrictions put on language products of the scientific method are not the same which pertain to the aesthetic appreciation of Shakespeare or a poetic work or Holy Scripture. There are works of writing which were produced from dream-like states of interior seeing and when such seeing is brought to text, it cannot be read or interpreted for the same meaning that we get from reading a reported event of current news. It cannot be read or interpreted in the same way in which a scientific experiment is being observed and recorded. We are variegated enough in our discursive practices so we need to be committed to surpassing ourselves into the fullness of manifold meanings. This means inner seeing can contradict scientific seeing even while co-existing in each person as a language practitioner. By nature we cannot avoid language craft and to accept the full vision of this marvelous language craft we need to avoid creating battles which we artificially create as being "out there...outside of language" because there is no such place. We need to let language honestly bear the contradictions and ambiguities involved in being fully true and honest to continual surpassing human meanings. We in communities of faith can embrace our variety of "altered state" seeing as handed on to us by our wisdom traditions and we do not blindly copy the details of applied wisdom in past cultures; we embrace the wisdom of "altered seeing" today which helps us with faith apply wisdom in the details of our lives today and do so with hopeful approximations of justice and love.
