Among the definitions
offered for Modernity and Postmodernity, I would argue that a definition
involving ‘nature’ gets to the core.
Modernity elevated science to the head of departments in the university.
Postmodernity has responded by rejecting the study of nature, with its objectivity,
and replacing science first with literature, a subjective study, and then with
the social sciences, investing group realities with political power (the ‘reality’
of power). The literary turn marked early
Postmodernity, whereas late Postmodernity has sought to privilege groups that
undermine earlier groups that held privileged status. The Postmodern turn in both cases, however,
is a defiance of nature. The movement champions
local reality and constructed truth.
Postmodernity began as a
challenge to modernity in the 1960s with architecture. In 1966, Robert Venturi argued for the
richness rather than the clarity of meaning in buildings in Complexity and
Contradiction in Architecture. He
said, ‘less is a bore.’ In 1977, Charles
Jencks wrote, The Language of Postmodernism. As a deconstructive movement, it has been
difficult to define in itself. The
curators of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum put together an exhibit on
postmodernity in 2011 that identified four characteristics: quotation,
metaphor, plurality, and parody.
However, the museum’s website posts this about postmodernism:
From
about 1970 to 1990, Postmodernism shattered established ideas about design and
art. A brilliant mix of theatrical and theoretical, Postmodernism ranges from
the colourful to the ruinous, the luxurious to the ludicrous. It is a visually
thrilling multifaceted style which so famously defies definition.[1]
Why ‘so famously defies
definition’? This is because Postmodern deconstruction is non-essentialist. This would explain the characteristics of ‘metaphor’
rather than literal and ‘plurality’ rather than uniformity. Deconstruction may ‘quote’ what came before,
but it will do so playfully, with ‘parody’ rather than sincerity.
Postmodernity did not,
however, arise only in the 1960s. It was
simply the form that Existentialism took once it had won the argument for the
time being against Modernity.
Existentialism is the philosophical outlook that posits existence prior
to essence. Existentialists spoke of the
‘thrownness’ of existence, as though one were thrown into being with no
definition, no pattern, no essence. One
was ‘nothing’ until one acted and, by acting, one created one’s being or
essence. While Modernity celebrated the
advances in science as the study of nature yielded a more and more definitive
understanding of nature, Existentialism rejected all definition in favour of
amoral activity. There was no God, no
nature, no morality, no essence of a person to make one action better than
another.
As Existentialism gained
in status in the university in the 1960s, proponents managed to isolate
scientific study from the rest of the academic departments. One could continue to measure the stars or
discover medical treatments, but no such certainty could define the
interpretation of a poem or the politics of groups or the self-understanding of
clients in human psychology. Thanks to changing sexual mores, drugs, and the
undermining of ideology on college campuses due to the demise of European
Empires and the Vietnam War, the 1960s turned from established realities to
expressions of freedom.
This challenge to defined
existence held through the 1980s, reaching a major mile marker with the
crumbling of the Soviet Union in 1989. The
Soviet Union represented ideology, anti-freedom, power, and science in its own
way—but so did the United States in its own way. Would the West not also crumble in the
expansion of Postmodern thought? The biggest
challenge to its expansion was in that area of the university that still
operated under the rules of science. How
could one ever deny the biological facts of nature in favour of personal
choice?
The answer to this
question was political. Facts of nature
that were seen to be unjust could be challenged. This challenge came first by manipulating
science for a desired outcome. While
antiquity practiced certain types of birth control, the invention and legal use
of ‘the pill’ for contraception in 1960 in America marked a major victory for
those wishing to gain more control over nature. This scientific development
also allowed couples to ‘design’ their families and women to control their
lives to a great extent, compared to previous generations. Marriage itself could be reconceived: it was
not an institution that located sex in a safe place where children could be
conceived and nurtured. Sex could be had
relatively safely without marriage, and the institution of marriage was only
required when one ‘chose’ to have children.
What, however, of those instances
where children were conceived despite the pill and when one had not chosen to
bear them? Nature posited value for
human life. Postmodernity needed a way
to challenge the inherent value of life.
Advocates chose to do so by advocating that unborn children were not ‘yet’
human life, and the term latched onto was ‘viability’. Ignoring, for the time being, that babies
were not any more viable than fetuses without the care of an adult, the unseen
child was deemed unviable. As scientific
methods improved so that babies could survive birth at increasingly early
periods of gestation, and as discoveries about the life of the unborn—their feelings,
their hearing, their responsivity, their development—the challenge of science
became increasingly problematic. The argument
of ‘choice despite science’ did not gain in clarity but did become more shrill
as partial birth and even post-birth killing was sanctioned by advocates of a
Postmodern worldview. Who better to
advance this than politicians, those perpetrators of social rather than
scientific definitions for human existence?
The political challenge
to biology continued in the case of homosexuality. Advocates of homosexual practice could choose
between two types of argument, as with abortion. One could argue that homosexual orientation
was natural, taking a Modernist approach to the issue. Years of searching for a homosexual gene or
some basis in biology have turned up nothing definitive, although some
advocates continue to hope for a biological defense of homosexuality. In light of the Postmodern turn in Western
culture, however, such an argument seems antiquated and unnecessary. Why not rather argue that people may define
their sexuality in whatever way they choose?
This Postmodern approach allows one to dismiss arguments from science
altogether, and it allowed people to posit an indeterminate number of gender
identities despite biology’s binary genders of male and female.
When homosexuals began to
push for ‘marriage’, Postmodernity’s general interest in ‘metaphor’ turned ‘marriage’
into a metaphor and celebrated the parody of natural marriage. Recall Postmodern architecture defined in
terms of metaphor and parody. The Merriam-Webster
Dictionary defines a metaphor as ‘a figure of speech in which a word or phrase
literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to
suggest a likeness or analogy between them.’[2] It also defines a parody as ‘a literary or
musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for
comic effect or in ridicule.’ Homosexual
‘marriage’ and transgenderism provide examples for both of these. With all of life no longer considered natural
but simply a stage, the actor, living in a world of metaphor and parody, was also
no longer considered merely an actor but now the only reality there is.
For example, in a case
involving female, high school athletes having to contend with males identifying
as females, a Connecticut judge has tried to silence the girls’ lawyers from
referring to the males as ‘males’.[3] He has urged that they be identified as ‘transgender
females’. This is an example of how a Postmodern
mindset challenges reality at two levels.
First, one’s ‘identity’ is not defined by nature and can, in fact, be
held over against nature. By the same
logic, a person identifying as a dog would be considered a dog. Second, one’s chosen identity can be enhanced
by taking drugs and having surgery to ‘correct’ biology. By the same logic, a person with average
muscles could take steroids to build muscle and compete against those who have
not taken drugs. Moreover, one can
imagine persons choosing embryos or editing DNA to produce genetically modified
children who would be better competitors in athletics.
A move to genetic modification
will allow earlier Postmodernity to progress to late Postmodernity. As the old Existential value of choice per
se gives way to a new perspective on what choices are made, late
Postmodernity can unashamedly value certain kinds of life over other. In Iceland, for example, it is not enough to
have the choice to abort a child or not.
It is now accepted that choosing to abort children with Down Syndrome is
the right choice. Columnist George Will
has called this Iceland’s ‘program of genocide’.[4] This is, however, only the beginning of what
is possible. Gene splicing may, on the one hand, offer a ‘cure’ for inherited
abnormalities, but it also offers genetic ‘improvement’. The definition of what constitutes ‘improvement’
is more than scientific. As we have
already seen in horrific practices in the 20th century, biological,
religions, social, racial and so forth definitions of ‘better’ have led persons
with power to commit genocide. The
question is not whether people will pursue such agendas but by means of which
worldview they will advocate that such practices are ‘good’.
Look to China today to
see how such policies play out for an atheist oligarchy. Look anywhere—the West included—to imagine
how they will play out in the future with science as a tool in the hands of
late Postmoderns to manipulate and modify nature to conform to its own
definition of ‘better’. One of the
inventors of CRISPR technology in 2012, Jennifer Doudna, has voiced concern
about the ethics of the ability to modify DNA in light of a Chinese scientist,
He Jianku, creating gene-edited twin girls.
Doudna says that the ability to make any change to any genome with
precision will soon be possible.[5] Her concerns with countries like China and
Russia doing ‘unethical’ things with CRISPR are believable, but they are likely
too narrow: the West lacks the worldview to handle this technology in a way that
could be defined as ‘good’—the politicians and sociologists, not the ethicists—will
define ‘good’ in a way that suits them.
In the antinaturalism of late Postmodernity, science does not ‘heal’; it
‘creates’ for political ends.
Late Postmodernity is
also interested in saving the planet. So
stated, this is a scientific concern, but the articulation of the concern still
lies in the hands of politicians. In
other words, environmental science has been politicised. This raises two problems. On the one hand, what is the science and how
should we respond to it? Science is not itself
political and yet, in matters that concern the shape of society, the two are
inseparable. This means that scientific clarity
for the question, ‘Is global climate change a reality and, if so, a danger?’, is
virtually impossible, and, in a search for clarity, average people who do not
understand the science are faced with the terrible choice of trusting a
scientific oligarchy or remaining suspicious of them when there is, perhaps, a
real danger.
We are, right now,
experimenting with what this dilemma involves as scientists guide public policy
during the covid-19 pandemic. Their
guidance regarding the facts has been often enough been incorrect, but their
guidance regarding what should be done has been and will necessarily be
political. In a Postmodern context, society
is much more likely to manipulate scientific data for political purposes than
to attempt to take a disinterested posture towards scientific research.
Therefore, on the other
hand, climate change is, whatever the data, as much about politics as anything
else. It is one thing—and somewhat
frightening—to imagine the scientists in control; it is another thing—and even
more frightening—to imagine politicians in control, manipulating the science. An alternative, not really on offer, is for a
stewardship of nature that aids it for what it is rather than manipulates it
for what we would like it to be. Neither
those for or against the climate change argument are likely to do anything of
the sort.
Christians occupy a
dangerous position in such a society. On
the one hand, Modernity sets science up as a way to attack religious belief (although
the Cartesian programme of doubt leading to foundational certainty was initially
meant to establish faith), but Christians were not opposed to science in their
worldview. They believed that ‘all truth
was God’s truth’. The agreement that existed
between the early Christians and Stoicism, with the latter’s desire to live ‘according
to nature’, was like Christianity’s affirmation of scientific enquiry during
the period of Modernity. In both cases, ‘nature’
was accepted and affirmed. Christians just
added that God created nature. The rub
came when scientific observation in the Modernist period crossed the line and
became speculative, such as with regard to the origin of life (science does not
study first causes) or an insistence on a process of simple to complex chance, evolutionary
development rather than development according to design (DNA).
On the other hand, Postmodernity
is decidedly anti-Christian—or it has, over time, proven itself to be so. There may have been some initial hope during
early Postmodernity that, if voices from the margin were to be heard,
Christianity, too, could have its audience in the public square. Yet its origins in Existentialism were
antagonistic to natural and creational views, and it quickly turned out that
Postmoderns still held Christendom against Christians and viewed them as part
of the problem. Moreover, Christians
hold that there is truth—real truth, not manufactured or personal truth. Postmoderns are, of course, thoroughly inconsistent
on this matter in their day to day lives, but in theory, they despise anyone
who claims that there is truth. Their ‘personal
truths’ parody truth. For a Christian to
argue from God’s design, His creational intention, to what is right is opposed
at every level. ‘You cannot derive an “ought”
from an “is”,’ argued R. M. Hare already in 1952 (The Language of Morals)—and
he believed that this was the view taken by the Scottish Empiricist, David
Hume.[6] Possibly so, for Hume’s Empiricism, as George
Berkeley understood, lacked the concept of ‘God’. If naturalism is defined as an understanding
of the world as a ‘causally interconnected system, without “gods” or systemic “purposes,”,’[7] then it is deficient. Hume could not establish the certainty of the
relationship between cause and effect, and he most certainly could not
establish a moral imperative from a creational cause. Still, he was a naturalist in the sense that
his empiricism confines itself to the examination of phenomena and denies the
existence of, or at least the relevance of, God. This broken bridge of an atheistic naturalism
from ‘fact’ to ‘imperative’ is just one step away from the antinaturalism of
the Existentialist’s denial of essence and the Postmodernist’s denial of
objective truth and ethical arguments from nature.[8]
One further thought on
such matters has to do with the result of a denial of the natural. If there is no objective reality,
constructions of ‘reality’ are merely tentative, like sandcastles. If they are tentative, then they are insincere. Where Postmodernity becomes playful in the
absence of truth, Christianity maintains sincerity in its presence—a protruding
rock on the beach. Postmodernity is the
Middle School cad who mimics the teacher, lies for his own gain, lets others
take the fall for what he has done, and champions the cause of anyone who undermines
authority. The present culture is
insincere. Socially constructed truth is
interested in no facts, only the political function of discourse. Its playfulness, however, may turn into
ideological discourse, which is exactly what has happened from early to late Postmodernity. If so, insincerity may turn into
subterfuge. The rise of critical discourse
analysis in this era is understandable: it turns from questions of truth and
falsity to how discourse functions with respect to relations of power.[9]
A Christian mission to
such a culture cannot speak directly to the issue—to the reality of nature. It cannot offer sincerity to persons who have
learned to be insincere. It can,
however, find those who have fallen off this merry-go-round, those who have
found Postmodernity wanting. Perhaps
this has always been the case in evangelism: a direct challenge to those in
control of the culture is likely to fail.
Indeed, the cross of Christ presents the idea of power in weakness. Those who have been victims of Postmodernity—the
denial of nature and truth, the championing of insincerity and ideology—are persons
who might listen to the Gospel. Girl
athletes losing to males pretending to be female are the sort of persons who
will find Postmodernity to be the farce that it is. Our culture knows numerous other examples of
those marginalized by the Postmodern champions of the marginalized. With them, there
may be an audience for the Christian message that begins, 'We believe in God,
maker of heaven and earth.'
[3] See: ‘Lawyers can’t call male athletes ‘’males,’’ judge
rules in transgender track case,’ LifeSite (May 11, 2020); online
at https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/lawyers-cant-call-male-athletes-males-judge-rules-in-transgender-track-case.
[4] George Will, ‘The Real Down
Syndrome Problem: Accepting Genocide,’ The Washington Post (March 14,
2018); online at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/whats-the-real-down-syndrome-problem-the-genocide/2018/03/14/3c4f8ab8-26ee-11e8-b79d-f3d931db7f68_story.html. Will
reports statistics that 67% of Down Syndrome babies were aborted in America
between 1995-2011. The rate in France is 77%. Of those
who learned that the child they were carrying had Down Syndrome in the UK, the
rate was 90%, and in Denmark it was 98%.
[5] See ‘One of CRISPR’s Inventors
has called for controls on gene-editing technology,’ MIT Technology Review (Nov.
15, 2019); online at https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/11/15/102457/crispr-has-made-jennifer-doudna-rich-now-she-says-it-must-be-controlled/.
[6] See also R. M. Hare, Freedom
and Reason (Oxford, 1963). He says that he is ‘a firm defender
of Hume’s doctrine that one cannot deduce moral judgments from non-moral
statements of fact, and also of that particular application of the doctrine
which says that one cannot deduce moral judgements of substance from statements
about the uses of words or about the logical relations between concepts’ (pp.
186-187). Note that his objection to naturalism entails an objection
to analytic naturalism (next footnote). I would maintain that the
error in this antinaturalism is in ignoring the intentionality in nature—what
we Christians therefore refer to as ‘creation’. If there is purpose
in the facts of the created world, then there is moral
value as well. Naturalism is not, for Christians, simply
analytical. Arguments from creation are not simply about description,
evaluation, and application. Eve’s error was to adopt an (her own)
analytic approach (whether natural or not) to moral reasoning—eating from the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil—over against God’s intentional design in
creation.
[7] The words (p. 116) are from
Peter Lopson, ‘Naturalism,’ in The Edinburgh Companion to
Twentieth-Century Philosophy, ed. Constantin Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2007): 116-127. While noting that Thomistic
naturalist theologians do, of course, speak of God and God’s purposes, Lopson
limits his understanding of naturalism to the view beginning with the ancient
Greek atomistic philosophers, such as Democritus, who affirmed ‘the unity of
the world, the absence of guiding purposes or minds for it, and its operating
as a closed system of deterministic causal laws’ (p. 117).
[8] Robert B. Scott, Jr., suggests
five types of naturalism—the first of which is actually
anti-naturalism. ‘Eliminative naturalists deny the existence of
certain types of ethical entities (e.g., ethical properties), contingent
naturalists appear to hold as a minimum thesis that some moral principles which
connect ethical with factual predicates are at least contingently true;
methodological naturalists claim that moral principles are justified by roughly
the same procedures as are scientific hypotheses; reductive naturalists assert
identity between various ethical and factual entities; and finally, all
analytical naturalists hold as a minimum thesis (roughly) that some moral
principles which connect ethical with factual predicates are analytic’ (p.
261). See his article, ‘II. Five Types of Ethical Naturalism,’ American
Philosophical Quarterly 17.4 (October, 1980): 261-270. As
Christians, we need to speak of intentional naturalism—creation.
[9] See, e.g., N. Fairclough, Critical
Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (London: Longman.
1995). Look no further than the antics of the political left in inventing
‘Russia collusion narratives,’ championing false testimony in Supreme Court
justice hearings, scheming to get persons to lie, destroying evidence, twisting
others’ words, and so forth. Insincerity and subterfuge fit political
intrigue like a tailored suit. Imagine a culture devoted to it; don’t
imagine, just observe.
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