Postmodernism

Richard Appignanesi and Christ Garratt’s Introducing Postmodernism, is probably the most difficult and frustrating book I have read. The concepts, to some extent, are foreign to me, a 47 year old white evangelical mother of two teenagers daughters and required what a good novel demands, a willingness to suspend disbelief until the author has had his say. All in all a good exercise for me- it pushed me to understand something outside of my usual purview and to dig deeper for the truths buried there. The underlying theme of postmodernism, or hypermodernism, as I believe it is most accurately labeled, is the Ideal of the Enlightenment/Modernity taken to its logical and natural conclusion. If Descartes’ first principle is “I think, therefore I am” then hypermodernity first principle is “I am”. Two parts of the book that illustrate this vividly for me were the four successive historic phases that representational image-sign (art) goes through as posited by Jean Baudrillard and it’s application to the development of the theory of Virtual Reality. Using various images of shoes as portrayed in history to illustrate how shoes have progressed from an object designed for work, our God-given task not incidentally, becomes an image product that becomes a substitute for the image of God that we are called to bear. This Virtual Reality, along with its driving forces of free market capital-fed consumerism and pathological bent toward disbelief predicated not on knowledge but deceit and fraud brings us to a point of where we begin “ the demolition of the past” in order to prepare for “the coming of the artificially engineered human”. We move from being the steward to producer to the consumer to becoming the product. And in doing so lose our humanity, all in the name of creating our own reality. This book did help me to understand much better C. S. Lewis’ prophetic warning of this predicament in his work Abolition of Man and in That Hideous Strength in which he masterfully clothes his prophecy. So we have arrived at this point isolated from one another and less human for a number of reasons not the least of which is a commitment to not cooperate with Reality. By trying to rip our lives from Reality we end up not with Nihilism but with Absurdity. We have, as far as we are capable, tried to create some reality that has no mooring due to an insistence on rejecting what has come before, both tradition and revelation. Which make the author’s suggestion of remedy for this loss of reality all the more ironic. They call for a return to romanticism, a movement that looked to man’s heightened experiences and elevation of nature’s healing balm to provide that mooring that is lost. Man’s answer to the virtually reality he has tried to create is to go back to an era of real experiences.
C. S. Lewis also gives us a better antidote to hypermodernity than a return to romanticism. He states of the Tao (First principle; general revelation), “as long as we remain within it, we find concrete reality in which to participate is to be truly human: the real common will and common reason of humanity alive, and growing like a tree, and branching out, as the situation varies into ever new beauties and dignities of application.” But make no mistake this Tao is not an abstraction; it is the very character of God as evidence in both the created universe and his chosen image bearers, man. And its fullest expression possible is seen when believers love one another and others in a self-sacrificial manner.
What has amazed me most about reading and thinking about this book is that I was able to learn from it. It was humbling to go from complete frustration with this book to having to admit that it did help me to see how others could view life and make choices. My oldest daughter tells me that, indeed, people her age are all about experience and knowing that helps me to be much more patient with their searching and more focused in ways to minister to them.