Postmodernism: A Declaration of Bankruptcy

Only within the last two decades has the word postmodernism appeared as a label to identify the prevailing philosophy of the late twentieth century. The word “postmodernism,” however, does not reveal anything about the intellectual content of that philosophy. The word merely states that this worldview follows modernism chronologically, thus announcing the demise of modernism. Not introducing something new, it is simply a declaration of the bankruptcy of modernism.

Postmodernism declares that the basic belief of modernism—trust in human reason to lead to truth—is no longer tenable. Modernism with its rationalistic base has been the dominant philosophy of Western culture since the seventeenth century. From the time of Christ until the seventeenth century, the traditional Western view was theocentric/ logocentric, believing that God the Logos had revealed truth in Christ, in the Scriptures, and in nature and that words actually represent and connect with the things we talk about. God Himself was with the man in the Garden of Eden when words were first used. Thus, the Christian worldview believes the universe to be patterned by God who gave us minds—though not absolute like His—but sufficiently capable of grasping real meaning inherent in experience: revelation from God was the ultimate source of truth. Evangelicals still hold this view.

Even before Christianity, the classical Greek world claimed this to be a meaning-laden universe, its meaning to be available by reason and intuition according to Plato, to be available by reason and logic according to Aristotle.

But in the seventeenth century, Descartes’ radical disjuncture of revelation and reason led away from the prevailing theocentric worldview and initiated trust solely in human sense-preempted reason—a strictly anthropocentric worldview—later known as naturalism, humanism, or modernism. Reason, thus, freed from God, became master of human destiny; sense-preempted reason had all the answers—at least eventually! The scientific method of modernism—observation and experimentation —exemplified the right use of reason: what is “out there”/the real/the sensible particulars are fixed and give valid objectivity. As Bertrand Russell put it, “What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know.”1 Postmodernists, however, say such faith in scientific objectivity is an impossibility. There is no such thing as objective knowledge/reality; science reveals no “facts,” no truth; we have only linguistic constructs. There is no reality “out there”: the world is a fiction.

Thus—as so aptly expressed by the title of an essay by Wilhelm Wurzer, “Postmodernism’s Short Letter, Philosophy’s Long Farewell,” in one fell swoop postmodernism wipes out all previous philosophies— Platonic epistemology with its trust in intuition and reason, Aristotelian trust in logic and reason, Christianity’s trust in revelation and reason, and modernism’s trust in sense-preempted reason. What is left? Only the word itself; nothing “out there” to write about, even no self, only the word.

But how then did language originate? Human beings playing word games with each other, enjoying a playful itinerary of words only, answer the postmodernists, for the imposition of meaning on a thing is really only an illusion, nothing more than an interpretation of some other thing. This in turn will be seen only as an interpretation as well: not mirrors (re)presenting reality as the modernists had said, but a labyrinth of mirrors reflecting neither the outer world of nature nor the inner world of subjectivity, reflecting only endless circularity—an ex-centric worldview. There are no facts, remember; the world is an illusion. Derrida, the most popular exponent of postmodernism, has said: “There is nothing outside the text; all is textual play with no connection with original truth.”2 “Reality,” thus, is formed by the powers of language/the word. As an example, notice the slippery use of the word “free”:

“I’m free.” TGIF day—free from the week’s work.
“I’m free.” Single person—not married.
“I’m free.” Divorcee—marriage was a bondage.
“I’m free from pain”—I don’t have any.
“He’s free with his money”—liberal, generous.
“A free translation”—not literal nor exact.
“Free verse”—not using traditional poetic structures.
“Free admission”—doesn’t cost any money.
“Free from slavery”—emancipation.

Another — rather humorous — demonstration of deconstruction: a new computer owner wanted to sue the manufacturer because the computer used language that was not politically correct; he said that the computer called him an invalid (invalid!!!).

By demonstrating in this manner how words “deconstruct,” the postmodernists shredded the modernists’ belief in reason’s ability to (re)present by words the reality “out there.”

So, postmodernists concentrate on how to express—or celebrate the destruction of old forms—their apprehension of a meaningless, irrational world of incoherent particulars. Hence, the incoherent, garbled gobbledegook of contemporary literature, the random collage of art and music, the subjective/ egocentric/nonjudgmental educational system with its attendant reader’s response, the dismissal of a traditional morality and the accompanying rising violence, and the alarming collapse of traditional jurisprudence. Let’s take a deeper look.

Manifestations of Postmodernism in Our Society

Contemporary fiction writers and playwrights have littered the literary landscape with the seeds of postmodern influence and philosophy. Notice an early manifestation from Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano:

Mr. Smith: Dogs have fleas, dogs have fleas.
Mrs. Martin: Cactus, coccys! crocus! cockaded! cockroach!
Mrs. Smith: Incasker, you incask us.
Mr. Martin: I’d rather lay an egg in a box than go and steal an ox
Mrs. Martin (opening her mouth very wide): Ah! oh! ah! oh! Let me gnash my teeth.
Mr. Smith: Crocodile!
Mr. Martin: Let’s go and slap Ulysses.3

Or take a look at John Barth’s short story “Title” in his anthology of postmodern pieces, Lost in the Funhouse:

Beginning in the middle, past the middle, nearer three-quarters done, waiting for the end. Consider how dreadful so far: passionless, abstraction, pro, dis. And it will get worse. Can we possibly continue?

Plot and theme notions vitiated by this hour of the world but as yet not successfully succeeded. Conflict, complication, no climax. The worst is to come. Everything leads to nothing: future tense; past tense; present tense. Perfect. The final question is, Can nothing be made meaningful? Isn’t that the final question? If not, the end is at hand. Literally, as it were. Can’t stand any more of this.

I think she comes. The story of our life. This is the final test. Try to fill the blank. Only hope is to fill the blank. Efface what can’t be faced or else fill the blank. With words or more words, otherwise I’ll fill in the blank with this noun here in my prepositional object. Yes, she already said that. And I think. What now. Everything’s been said already, over and over; I’m as sick of this as you are; there’s nothing to say. Say nothing. What’s new? Nothing.4

Notice the willful randomness of language, its ambiguity, its “cheap, narrative collage”—unreadable fiction. As someone has said about this sort of literature: “One feels like a bafffled child watching lunatics.”

Or observe another early manifestation of the postmodern “philosophy” in Ionesco’s drama Chairs. Two old people have hired an orator to deliver to an audience—which isn’t there!—a message that will save the world, which the old man has spent his lifetime in writing. When the orator arrives, we discover that he is deaf and dumb.

[He turns around again, towards the invisible crowd on the stage, and points with his finger to what he has written on the blackboard.]

ORATOR: Mmm, Mmm, Guene, Gou, Mmm, Mmm, Mmm, Mmm. [Then, not satisfied, with abrupt gestures, he wipes out the chalk letters, and replaces them with others, among which we can make out, still in large capitals.] AADIEU ADIEU APA5

As he exits from the stage, the drama ends—significantly, I think!—with the words: “The main door is wide open onto darkness.” I use the word “significantly” to point out that even those who deny a God-given universe laden with inherent meaning recognize that they are in the dark. “The message of the play is an antimessage,” according to Rosette Lamont, “an ontological void”;6 as Ionesco himself told Claude Bonnefoy, it is about the absence of people, the absence of God, the absence of living meaning, metaphysical emptiness.7

We would be remiss if we did not mention what is perhaps the ultimate dramatic expression of postmodernism’s belief in nothingness—Samuel Beckett’s ultimate drama, untitled of course. It has two acts. But in the first act the curtain rises on a bare stage; there are no actors. It runs for half an hour, still no actors. And in the second act, the curtain doesn’t rise at all.

T. S. Eliot’s short lyric “The Hollow Men” was a very early recognition of where we now are.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpieces filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.8

Consider postmodernism’s influence on art: it is an expression of complete autonomy, an insistent banality which is nothing more than an “absurd conglomeration of debris.” No longer does art represent the external world.

Consider postmodernism’s radical effect on art criticism:

For the sense in which a work of art has no content is no different from the sense in which the world has no content. Both are. Both need no justification; nor could they possibly have any.9

Further, consider postmodernism’s influence on music— the atonal, dissonant, even silent, perpetual variation, and sheer noise of contemporary mindless “music” with its non-resolution— “a rock band that sounds like a lawn mower with a beat.” Or consider John Cage’s “prepared” pianos jangling with inserted household items, a percussion orchestra of pots and pans—anarchic harmony and happenings—or his silent piano piece 4’33” where he sits for the designated time on a piano bench with the keyboard closed. As Solzhenitsyn has written:

If visitors from outer space were to pick up our music over the airwaves, how could they ever guess that earthlings once had a Bach, a Beethoven, and a Schubert, now abandoned as out of date and obsolete?”10

What about postmodernism’s effect on education? Consider the new strategy of outcome-based education to deemphasize content in favor of programs of experience and growth, to replace formal classroom instruction with informal group activity sessions. Or a high school teacher’s stating that what her students say in class is just as important as what she says. Or a literature professor in a state university telling his class that since words do not really communicate, they were, therefore, pursuing nonsense.

The collapse of traditional morality and the rise in violence, attacks, shakedowns, and robberies in the nation’s public schools every day are indicators of the social effects of philosophical change. Even without instruction in the “philosophy” of postmodernism, our young people have caught its horrendous message “blowing in the wind”: the absurdity, the nausea of life. Their natural—and logical—reaction is to “live it up,” or why live at all.

The closing lyrics of Nirvana’s pop hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” were eerily prophetic not only of lead singer and Generation X antihero Kurt Cobain’s recent suicide, but representative of the malaise of his generation: “I found it hard, it was hard to find, oh well, whatever, nevermind.” Unable to any longer gain meaning from living it up, Cobain sadly chose to not live at all—the ultimate “nevermind” statement.11 Or as Squeaky Fromme explained to her captors when she tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975: “If you have no philosophy, you don’t have any rules.” And that insight had been previously expressed by French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre in his drama Flies. Orestes, having just killed his mother and his stepfather, is boasting to the populace:

You see me, men of Argos, you understand that my crime is wholly mine; I claim it as my own, for all to know; it is my glory, my life’s work, and you can neither punish me nor pity me.12

Finally, consider the enthusiastic embracing of postmodernism by our law schools embracing the concept of “popular sovereignty.”

Popular sovereignty as a motif emphasizing the energy and moral authority of will (and willful desire) rather than the constraints of a common moral order to which the will was bound to submit has “become the view emphasized today at most major law schools.” “Law is stripped of any moral anchoring” and “political institutions thus become the forum for the triumph of the will.”

But despite all the risks, this liberation from the myth of “truth” (whether understood as grounded in God or in reason), clears the way for a new, Godless kind of “civil religion” or “constitutional faith;” and it is this prospect that Mr. Levinson and his colleagues find so captivating… .

If there are no permanent moral truths, then moral “truth” becomes whatever history temporarily proclaims predominant.

… history in our time is hurtling toward disintegration of all the old verities that once held us together… .

… this book should be for all of us an alarm bell ringing in the night. Something ominous is afoot in the teaching of the law of this land.13

Why Postmodernism Came into Existence

And now why has postmodernism come into existence? What are the provocative causes? Though there were earlier harbingers of the demise of modernism, postmodernism—by that name—has been declaring bankruptcy of the old order for the past twenty years. But why? A number of reasons have been suggested.

1. The failure of sense-preempted reason as held by modernists to understand what quantum theory and microphysics have discovered: how can an electron travel two or more different directions simultaneously or move from one orbit to another without traveling the space between them? To try to find absolute truth is pointless.
   
   Thus we have the postulates of Heidegger’s “Begin,” Jasper’s “final experience,” Sartre’s authenticity (to mention but a few modern attempts)—none of which regained meaningfulness in life; none have led to truth. Hence, the change from classical physics provoked postmodernism’s emphasis on noncontinuity, noncausality, and nonlocality.
2. The conviction that (post)modern people can have a revelation of their own and not be dependent upon antiquated traditional expressions, not be forced into traditional forms which stifle individuality. To be relieved of a sense of cosmic purpose, freed from God controlled system of rights and wrongs, is exhilarating freedom, releasing the creativity of the individual, shoring up an eroded sense of the autonomous self. Not locked into merely mirroring nature, postmodernists can create their own unique realm of infinite possibilities and can never be duplicated.
3. The loss of faith in modernism’s belief in evolutionary progressivism, painfully evidenced in the mass slaughters of the twentieth century. Derrida himself was a victim of antiSemitism during the Nazi era.
4. The belief that cause and effect are illusory, intrinsically suspicious, hence the lack of sequence of plot in postmodernism’s fiction.
5. Two world wars, the death of 66,000,000 Russians in the Communist regime, and the extermination of so many Jews in the German Holocaust. The blankness of the postmodernists is a way of staving off anxieties produced by the unexpected for which there is seemingly no resolution.
6. A reaction to the dominance of a mechanistic/commercialized/technological culture, which dehumanizes human beings, wresting power from human beings and investing it in the things.
7. The desire to give up the idea of truth as something to which they are responsible.
8. The desire to express philosophically a multicentered cultural pluralism.

Criticism of the Postmodern Position

And what is the answer to all of this? Let us consider several.

1. Non-Sense. Postmodernists said it themselves in denying the ability of the senses to convey truth. “We are at one of those historic junctures where we can only wonder,” comments Charles Newman, “how our common sense was beaten out of us.”14
2. Contradiction! Their statement that all concepts are illusory affirms a trustworthy, prior knowledge. Also, if words no longer communicate meaning, why do postmodernists continue to publish? And if there is nothing to know, how do they know there is nothing?
   
   Obviously, the postmodernist’s theory about our being trapped by the word itself in a language game is an example of metaphysical truth standing outside language: to deny truth is at once and the same time to assert another truth. Total nihilism is an incoherent position.
   
   And though postmodernists lock humans into a “prison-house of language,” as Neitzsche earlier stated, with no objective reality of language to express, they do not address the question as to the origin of language. Derrida, for instance, sidesteps the question of origin, declaring that language seems to have been “always already” everywhere.
3. Ignoring a Universal Moral Law. There is a law written in all of our hearts, one that crosses different civilizations and different ages, stating that we ought to behave in a certain way. Why would we be complaining about violence, sexual deviation, crime, if there is no universal morality? The law of God is written in our hearts (Rom. 2:15). They had the knowledge of God but “did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind” (Rom. 1:28, NIV).
4. Freedom from Responsibility. If postmodernism insists on the demolition of the remaining remnants of traditional theocentricity and of modernism’s anthropocentricity—an ahistorical stance—then it has an obligation to show how its own narcissistic position of responsibility to no one is an enhancement of civilization. As it stands, its position absolves everyone of responsibility, even begetting an unrestricted licentiousness; it is in reality “permanent revolution” such as Foucalt’s postmodernism advocates. The end of that road is national suicide.
5. Dementia. “Depriving oneself of notions like rationality, objectivity, scientific method, rules of logic, is voluntarily to choose dementia since it is abandoning the only touchstone we have left to discriminate dementia from normality,”15 writes Bruno Latour. “By doing away with rationality, no reality is left… . There is no longer any possibility of distinguishing … between witchcraft and science. Everything is equal. All the cows are equally gray.”16
6. Relative Pluralism. Does anything that any individual “cooks up” go? Yes, says postmodernism. No, say evangelicalism and classical philosophy. Around 2,500 years ago Protagoras wrote that man is the measure of all things. However, “Not a single ancient Greek philosophy ever once defended Protagorean relativity.”17 Socrates and his pupil Plato declared truth was absolute—something people lived up to, not some concept they created. And if, as postmodernism asserts, life is a patternless, meaningless, created fiction, then why don’t postmodernists reverse this notion and impose order and coherence in their works?

Confirmation of the Bankruptcy of Modernism by the Greats

A significant number of contemporary observers have seen the great emperor of postmodernism, and he indeed has no clothes: Kathleen Agena: “The reason for the malaise is no integrating world view; the enlightenment has been undone”;18 Harvey Cox: “The liberal era has drawn to a close”;19 Maurice Valency: “We have come to the end of ‘an art that does not heal’”;20 Ihab Hassen: “Without some radiancy, wonder, wisdom, we all risk, in this postmodern clime, to become barren”;21 Wallace Stevens: “for the listener, who listens in the snow/And, nothing himself, beholds/Nothing that is not there the Nothing that is”;22 Charles Newman: “its [postmodernism] dirty little secret is that Demystification does not finally alleviate their human or aesthetic problems, but seems only to deepen and further conceal them”;23 Zbigniew Brzezinski: “a community which partakes of no shared absolute certainties … is a community threatened by dissolution.”24 Even three of the prominent postmodernists—Rorty, Fish, and Derrida—have backed off from being identified with an extreme nihilism. Derrida, for instance, responded:

Deconstructing academic and political discourse doesn’t mean simply destroying the norms or pushing these norms to utter chaos. I’m not in favor of that sort of thing.25

All that he meant to do, he affirmed, was to demonstrate the finiteness of the human intellect, its inability to gain the absolute by itself— “experiencing the impossible.”

“Great!” exclaims the evangelical. “Of course, we should always be humble, acknowledging our finiteness.” But evangelicals add that God has revealed absolutes in the Bible and through Jesus Christ, has written His law in our hearts, and has given us rational ability to see and to understand His eternal power and divine nature, “so that men are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20).

What Can We Do About Postmodernism?

Gertrude Himmelfarb in her book, Looking into the Abyss, states that we will outlive postmodernism, just as we have outlived other isms.26 This too shall pass. However, postmodernism has destroyed the very apparatus of criticism. As evangelicals we opt out and reaffirm a theocentric/logocentric world, accepting the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us, whose glory we beheld as that of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth (cf. John 1:14).

More diligently, more fervently, more prayerfully than ever before we need to keep preaching the truth of the Scriptures, inspired by God and suitable for instruction, correction, and reproof (cf. 2 Tim. 3:16). We must show the flaws of the postmodernist “thinking.” Recognize the lies of Lucifer in the Garden: “You will be like God” (Gen. 3:5). We have to diligently catechize our children, young people, and adults so that they really know what they believe. And we must make use of the plethora of multimedia available in our increasingly video-dependent culture.27 The medium may not be the message, but for the MTV generation and beyond the medium must be one that rivals the vehicles of delivery in the popular culture.

In summary, the Apostle Paul’s admonishment is ever the more relevant in dealing with the postmodern context: “when they will not endure sound doctrine” … then “hold fast the form of sound words” (2 Tim. 4:3; 1:13, KJV).

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Jul/Aug 1999).