Mark at Protestant Pontifications notes in a wide-ranging post that postmodernism is just the death gasp of modernity, and that, unlike the true anti-modernism of authentic conservatism, rails against the age without much in the way of alternative:
The notion that religion and politics are two separate spheres is an entirely modern one, post-enlightenment. This is not a defense of theocracy. Theocracy, in a real sense, doesn’t work in a democratic age. But neither does a political philosophy which makes no reference to the transcendent. Modernism is the product of this artificial separation. In the words of Makoto Fujimura, postmodernism isn’t a new phase, but rather the tail end of modernism. It is modernism’s natural conclusion.
What is postmodernism? A simplistic answer might be that it is the rejection of the enlightenment project. This project culminated in the boomer generation following WWII. It is said that bad ideas can only bear the weight of reality for so long, and the children of the boomers are evidence of this. Postmodernism screams a void. It decries failure. It paints emptiness in bold strokes. Secular humanism has failed; it has been tried and found wanting. Postmodernism stares into the Nietzchean abyss and refuses it. But it has nowhere to go.
We see this as an act of confusion, an attempt to make sense of the world that only concludes that failure has occurred but is unequipped to respond. So instead, it is left to merely pointing out our glaring hypocrisies. One can observe this easily in our movies. Films like No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood don’t have a positive moral teaching. They are exhibitions of virtue in relief.
Our culture has been self-centered for so long, obsessed with the individual for so long, that by the time it realizes it cannot morally hold itself up by the bootstraps it has forgotten how to operate otherwise. We have glared too much into our own false light that we are blind to the glow of natural law.
Modern society stands at a crossroad. The echoes of emptiness bounce off every part of our community, but what or who will fill the void?
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