Postmodernism

In the film, “Master and Commander,” Russell Crowe’s character Captain Aubrey, describing a new piece of technology, says, “What a fascinating modern age we live in.” The joke works, given the film’s setting in 1803 at the beginning of the Modern Age. This time of technological advances, which seemed to come quickly and often, paved the way for our current cultural moment and its struggle with the concept of truth. 

Most historians identify 1789 as the beginning of Modernism, with the storming of the Bastille and the French Revolution, and its end 200 years later with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism. The era between featured a great and growing faith in human ingenuity. Confidence was high that, given enough time, effort, and advances in technology, science, and productivity, most of the problems that plagued humanity could be solved. In short, the Modern Age was defined by hubris. Though the solutions varied, they shared a certainty that a solution would be found. 

That confidence collapsed in the face of ongoing wars that were fuelled by industrialization and destructive ideologies like nationalism, scientific racism, and Communism. The combined bloodshed unleashed in the twentieth century was on a scale unprecedented in human history. In the end, the Soviet Gulags, Nazi concentration camps, and threat of global nuclear destruction turned Modern optimism into despair.  

Few explained this turn of events as well as the late Christian thinker, Francis Shcaeffer. In the “How Should We Then Live?” film series, Schaeffer showed how art and literature abandoned the pursuit of beauty and transcendence for what he called “fragmentation.” As Modern optimism devolved into Postmodern hopelessness, confidence in truth waned. Postmodern philosophers suggested that the very notion of truth was a myth at best and a lie designed to privilege the powerful at worst. All that remained was “your truth” and “my truth” to be preserved through calls for tolerance. 

As it turned out, Postmodernism was far less liberating than advertised. To borrow a phrase from George Orwell, all truths were equal, but some were more equal than others. If the motto of Modernism was Descartes' “I think, therefore I am,” the motto of postmodernism became,  ‘I feel, therefore you must affirm me.’”  

A central feature of humanity, because we are made in the image and likeness of God, is the drive to seek truth. Even those who believe truth doesn’t exist are compelled to treat the ideas they create as if they are true and then force those ideas on the masses. Like all ideas, these too have had their consequences and, like all bad ideas, their victims. Just as the hubris of Modernism collapsed into relativism, the promises of Postmodern tolerance have collapsed into despair. 

Back in 2001, Richard John Neuhaus reacted to the emerging cultural crisis that now defines of our age: 

The darkness of the culture of death encroaches on us, but it is our confidence, our strength, and our indomitable hope that the light of the culture of life will never be put out because the light came into the darkness in Jesus Christ, as the Gospel of John tells us, and the darkness has not overcome it. And the darkness will not overcome it. Never, never, ever!

For all the chaos of this cultural moment, God has called us to this time and place. The theoretical predictions of Schaeffer, Chuck Colson, and others are now existential realities. We must ask again the question they asked, how shall we then (or now) live as followers of Christ in this moment to which God has called us?