A very brief but helpful explanation of pre, extant, post and post-post modernism.
In the pre-modern era the intellectual community existed in the Christian milieu and its presuppositions started with ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’; its moral underpinnings were the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount.
Some would say the modern era began with Isaac Newton, a devout Christian, and the publishing of his monumental work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), commonly known as the Principia. Philosophers like Immanuel Kant were convinced from reading this work that Newton had laid the foundations for a Deistic worldview in which God was not entirely distinct from the universe itself, which was considered infinite and eternal, and (if personal) did not intervene in its ongoing operation.
This time was also known as the Enlightenment. Theistic advocates produced the American revolution and representative form of government. Atheistic advocates produced the French revolution and the Reign of Terror. Religion was considered to be mostly superstition.
Atheistic modernism got its intellectual footings from Charles Darwin and his work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). Yes, that title is a shock to most people. Darwinian evolution also purported to explain why white Europeans were genetically superior to all other races especially people of African descent.
He presumed to have shown how the rise and diversity of life on earth occurred with his famous tree of life (a Biblical inference that could not have been missed by his readers). Check this website under the category Darwinism for any number of superb posts showing the overwhelming weakness of Darwinism or neoDarwinism as a valid scientific theory and how it was used to justify racism and abortion.
With various German philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and the death of God movement modernism had grown up. If Darwin has shown, which he did not, that life can arise without intelligent input or even that one species gives rise to another, then what need is there of a creator, especially if, as Kant incorrectly believed, the universe was eternal.
Modernism as a motto might be that man is the measure of all things. Throwing off unnecessary presuppositions of God as Creator the next step was to disparage and throw off the shackles of the Bible and restrictions of Judeo-Christian morality. What need of God and ancient scriptures when man can forge a new and better existence by himself.
The beginning of the end of modernism was the discovery in the early 20th century that the universe had a beginning. The loss of an eternal cosmos started tolling the bell for the end of modernism. Many top minds in physics, including Einstein and other physical scientists, were Obama’s ‘bitter clingers’ to the Steady State model of the universe. It took until the discovery of the cosmic background radiation for these scientists to finally admit the universe, including the dimension of Time, had a beginning and hence a Beginner.
Two world wars, Stalin, Hitler and Mao further crushed modernism into the dustbin of history. But rather than repent and believe the Gospel the world’s Leftists pushed on with postmodernism. As communism and other forms of collectivism showed their disastrous results in the real lives of hundreds of millions of people unfortunate enough to live and die under this form of government it became necessary for the useful idiots (a term famously coined by Lenin) of the West and the communists themselves to find a way to salvage their way of life. This was impossible to do with the facts as they are so they decided on a new way of thinking that did not require facts. Hence postmodernism was birthed.
This called into question the rules of logic and language and began a cautious defamation of experimental science and its fantastic successes in improving and enhancing the lives of billions of people. Capitalism set free from the non-competition of American labor unions through the entrance of Japanese quality made electronics and automobiles became an undeniable blessing to free people all over the earth. Even the Red Chinese embraced it and finally turned their country from a third world hellhole into the second most prosperous place on earth.
Postmodernism could only take hold on college campi and in the federal government but through dogged determinism to dominate and subjugate free peoples and especially the dreaded middle class they invented Women’s studies and other such nonsense. It was really a rebellion against Christianity, capitalism and the freedom of the West and its way of thinking about the world. The patriarchy, white people and western logic needed to be replaced with some ill-defined intuitive way of thinking allegedly inherent in women, children and tribal people. Circular thinking was now to be applauded. Women were inherently better than men, native medicine was better than modern western medicine, machines were evil and vegetarianism was the wave of the future. All things natural were better than anything manmade.
But people can only live under such nonsense while someone else (parents, the taxpayers, student loans) is paying the bills. Once real life rears its ugly head and frightens those who have been living like children to either grow up and accept reality or continue to live on campus as a professor or perpetual grad student.
So with postmodernism’s failure to convince the masses it became necessary to get rid of logic and facts and reality altogether. Emotion and victimhood became the new rallying cry of non-thinking.
Now we have post post-modernism which is the lunacy that grips the democratic party. Without any intellectual foundation whatsoever it is the thinking and action of the mob. Not the very organized and logical Mafia mob but rather the mob that roams the streets, riots, burns cities and beats up innocent people such as we saw with the lies about George Floyd and the subsequent evil and destruction of the summer of love riots in 2020.
It is the ultimate in irrational, gut-reaction feelings. It has no basis in fact or reality and is simply a declaration of demands, wants and reparations. Whatever is wrong or unpleasant or unwanted in the world is all the fault of Christianity, white men, western culture, mathematics and the patriarchy. There is simply no understanding in post post-modernism of how anything really works – economies, industry, farming, the family, governance, energy generation, medicine, freedom, justice, mercy – nothing.
Post post-modernism motto is ‘who you gonna believe, me or your own lying eyes?’
It is what much of the world suffers daily in North Korea and under communism everywhere and in every, large democrat-run city in America especially San Fransisco. It is the stated goal of the democratic party in America and the west. It is hell on earth.
One thought on “My essay on postmodernism”