Probably more often than not, when someone gives you an explanation on what post-modernism is, you will likely hear something like, “it is the idea that everyone has their own truth” or something to that nature. I think it is helpful to have more than this description.
It is helpful to know where post-modernism came from in order to give it less of an authority. If we know where something came from, then it seems to reduce the power that it has. This is why the word mystery exists. If knowledge is power, at least in some sense, then taking the mystery away gives some authority and/or power over such. One of my favorite quotes is from Jacques Cousteau, who said, “If we knew what was there, then we wouldn’t have to go.” He said this in speaking of the deep ocean. The mysterious is attractive, but is also sometimes nerve-racking. Think about it… if you find a cave, you might get a little nervous because you do not know what is in it, but once you go in it and explore what is inside and find that it is nothing but a bunch of insect moltings, shed animal fur, and dry bones, and you don’t find werebears and demon possessed men,[1] or something to that nature, you will have no fear in entering the cave again. It seems that post-modernity has many people lost in how to navigate it because of its dizzying and confusing nature (after all, what it teaches is that everyone has his own truth).
It seems that a good place for our navigation of post-modernism begins with the scientific revolution, which was the beginning of modern scientific thought, and from this, people started to see the results that scientists have produced from their work, and so the scientific revolution should be perceived as a sort of grandfather in the lineage that we are about to trace. The scientific revolution paved the way for the Enlightenment (a.k.a., the Age of Reason). It set the stage of science coming on to the scene of history and placed it in the spotlight. The Enlightenment (many would argue, falsely) enabled people to place their hope in the ability to reason because of the prior generation of the scientific revolution. Empiricism[2] had serious influence on such matters as well.
The grandmother of post-modernism, which is likely epistemology,[3] along with the grandfather of the scientific revolution, gave birth to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. In other words, the Enlightenment came about through the scientific revolution, and what seems to be the emphasis on what is knowable (thus, epistemology is perhaps the grandmother of enlightenment). So now we have the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution, which is the real focus of this discussion.
For people to be able to create machines in the Industrial Revolution, science is obviously necessary. The Industrial Revolution seemed to show people that things can work well, if we put time and thought into them. This, along with the Enlightenment produced what is called Modernism, which is the idea that people believed that humankind was finally at the place where we could discover the answers to all of life’s questions. This is important to understand because modernism is the father of post-modernism, or at least one of its precursors. At the pinnacle of Modernism, people started noticing that all of this knowledge and truth claims do not give us all the answers because there are often more facets to truth claims. For instance, I lived in Seattle and said that “It is always raining outside.” This claim would not be true for someone living in Arizona. This is where we get into subjective and objective truth claims.
As time passed on, somewhere usually delineated around 1950, Modernism has still left people hanging in that it didn’t answer all the questions that it was expected to answer. With all of the truth claims being made in the past from the perspective of those in the 1950’s, and some of these truth claims coming to be known as untrue, even after considerable amounts of work and thought were put into them, those in Modern thought came to the conclusion that everyone must have his or her own truth, since it was clearly seen that some truth claims were absolutely true for some people, but those same claims were not true for other people. Hence the name, post-modern. This is again, where we get into the issues of subjective and objective truths.
Objective truth is the only kind of truth. The way I explain this is through an analogy of the photographic time stamp. The idea is simple. Several decades ago, some cameras, and even polaroid cameras were able to take pictures and burn the time and date into the bottom corner of the photograph when they were developed. Today, this is automatically done with digital pictures if one were to right-click on them and select, “more information,” or “details,” or something to that effect. In any case, with the time stamp, we can see the truth of the contents of the picture frozen in time, essentially forever. For instance, if I said while visiting Fairbanks, Alaska, “It is cold today.” And my mother said, while vacationing in North Carolina, “It is hot today,” then which one of these statements would be correct? The answer is both, and they do not contradict. The reason they do not contradict is because of the time stamp, which also reveals the location in the picture. Now, if I were to go to North Carolina and vacation with my mother, I still might say that it is cold, perhaps because I haven’t eaten anything yet that morning, and my metabolism was running on empty. But with the time stamp, if I did say that, then it would be true for all the rest of eternity, and for everyone, that Nace Howell said in North Carolina while visiting with his mother that it was cold outside on September 9th, 2011 (or whatever date). This means that the subject (me) felt cold, but it would be objectively true that this took place in history.
The future of post-modernism is to continue to have people believe that every person has his or her own truth, which is not only unlivable, but is absurd. It is inconsistent to believe that some things are true for all people, but other things are only true for some people. It is inconsistent to say flippantly or randomly decide which things are true in life and which are false. I’m not talking about, for example, pregnancies. Some women are pregnant and some are not. That is true. What I am saying is that if there is a belief, such as Christianity, if it is true for one person, it is true for all people. A person is inconsistent when they believe that gravity exists for all people, and yet Christianity is only true for some people.
It is also absurd to believe that every person has his or her own truth. For instance, if I were to get pulled over by a police officer for speeding, and in defense I told him that it was his truth, but not mine, is he going to say, “oh, ok… you are free to go”? Similarly, if I go to the bank to withdrawal a thousand dollars out of my checking account but the bank teller tells me that I only have thirty-nine cents in my checking account, but I reply to her that “this is not my truth, but yours,” she is not going to hand me a thousand dollars. There is something to the principle of livability, which shows that there are livable ideas and unlivable ideas. Post-modernism is not only an inconsistent way to live, but it is also impossible to live this way.
In any event, post-modernism comes from modernism, that much we can be certain of, and the way that it comes from such is that it seeks to make up for where modernity fails,, much like adult children say things like, “I will never do to my kids this thing that my parents did to me.” Just like it is natural for descendants to want to create something better than the generation before them, post-modernism seeks to do the same thing to modernism. Let this new generational thinking do the same thing to post-modernism and try to extinguish this fallacious and inconsistent way of thinking.
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