So what is postmodernism, then? It’s a bit hard to pin down, since it refers to a broad range of ideas, many of which call into question traditional notions of language and communication. In some ways, it’s not so much a defined philosophy as an anti-philosophy, a way of questioning established systems of thought. So this will inevitably be a rough sketch, intended to give you a general impression of its typical characteristics and an overall framework for understanding it.
Firstly, the name “post-modernism” give us a clue. Postmodernism is what comes after modernism! But what’s modernism, then, and how is postmodernism different?
One of the easiest ways to understand the differences – and similarities – is by looking at how they treat the relationship between reason and faith. By “faith”, I here mean “trust” in an intellectual sense generally, rather than the Christian faith or religious faith specifically.
Modernism and Postmodernism both divide reason and faith from each other. Modernism seeks knowledge on the basis of human reason and investigation alone; you can work from a neutral starting-point and build upwards to truth. Accepting anything on trust is unnecessary and irrational.
Modernism is often associated with the Enlightenment and its optimism that human reason can discover or create universal ethics and morality. Its roots can be traced back to Descartes, who responded to the scepticism of his time by attempting to prove the Christian faith by reason alone. He wanted to get right back to a foundation that no-one could possibly doubt, and started “I think, therefore I am”.
What Descartes did, however, was to make the individual self the basis for knowledge, and removed any element of faith from the equation of how we know things. As you can see from my story, it’s easy for us as Christians to buy into this way of thinking, but our pretensions to such God-like knowledge is basically idolatrous.
Postmodernism deconstructs the modern self and its claim to objectivity. Marx, Darwin and Freud all cast doubt on the reliability of the self. How can we trust our reason if our beliefs are shaped by our material conditions, as Marx sought to demonstrate? How can we be sure we are objective if the desires and motives that drive us are often outside of our conscious rational awareness, as Freud believed? And how can we trust our brains if our minds evolved by blind evolutionary forces, as a naturalistic reading of Darwin’s theories would imply?
Postmodernism sees – I believe correctly, though postmoderns often push the consequences of this too far – that there is no neutral starting-point, and that the claim to believe something by reason alone is pretence.
But postmodernism then goes on to conclude that if there’s no way of stepping outside of our presuppositions and perspectives, then there’s no objective way of deciding between truth-claims. What you believe becomes a matter of faith without reason. So any choice is as justified as any other, working out on a popular level in attitudes like “That may be true for you, but not for me” (though academic-level accounts of postmodernism are typically more sophisticated!). Postmodernism is particularly suspicious of any universal truth-claims.
Both these two extremes allow us to operate autonomously. In the case of modernism, it’s my reason, my ability to think and investigate that’s paramount. In the case of postmodernism, there is no external authority to limit my personal beliefs and choices.
When reason and faith work together, you are looking outside yourself for answers, but are constrained to weigh up the possibilities as best you can, and in doing so, you limit your freedom, placing yourself under the authority of something external to you.
Of course, as sinners, we can still end up looking outside ourselves but misplacing our faith and reason. We naturally choose idols rather than the living God who reveals himself in Christ, because idols are easier for us to manipulate. But when we make ourselves our idol, declaring our self-sufficiency, that’s easier still for us to control than an external idol.
In many ways, modernism and postmodernism are two sides of the same coin. Both are strongly naturalistic, and share an idolatrous self-sufficiency. Both divide reason and faith from each other. Both take the autonomous rational individual as the basis of objective knowledge. But modernism says it works, while postmodernism says it doesn’t work. N T Wright described postmodernism as “a necessary judgement on the arrogance of postmodernism”.
Understanding the similarities between them helps us to see how people can be very modernist in some ways – “science has disproved Christianity” – and very postmodernist in others – “that’s your private belief, that’s fine for you, just don’t try and impose it on others”, often at the same time. We have divided public and private, sacred and secular. Religion, morality and meaning is seen as a matter of blind faith, confined to the realm of private and subjective; whereas in the public sphere, only that which is – allegedly – neutral, objective and rational is admitted.
That’s a very simplified bare-bones description. For some further explanation, I recommend the following books and audio lectures:
- The God Who is There, Escape from Reason and How Shall we then Live? by Francis Schaeffer.
Schaeffer recognised and responded to the postmodern mindset before it was given the label “postmodern”, and gives a good analysis of how we got to where we are now. - The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas
This gives a good overview of the history of Western thought to the present day in more detail than Schaeffer, though Tarnas’s own beliefs, which he discusses at the end, are somewhat odd New Age philosophy. - Lectures on Epistemology – What is it to know? by Andrew Fellows of L’Abri Fellowship from Bethinking.org
These lectures discuss the possible ways of relating reason and faith to each other, and also give a potted history of the relationship between the two faculties.
In my next post, I’m going begin looking at some of the big ideas that have become slogans or catchphrases for postmodernism, and to try to dig into them a little deeper to see how there might be more we can agree with as Christians than we might at first think.