Postmodernity: When Progress Becomes Poisonous

Explaining the shift from collective self-confidence to jadedness

It’s a pretentious cliché to talk at all about postmodernity, let alone about how late-industrial cultures incorporate cynicism and apathy, implicitly taking truth to be relative and subjective. It’s another cliché to say that postmodernity was only a fad, and that we’re living in post-postmodernity, or in some new era such as “metamodernity,” dreamed up by pundits and pompous intellectuals.

What’s so striking, though, is the contrast between the essential plausibility of the postmodern thesis, and the pretentious way in which European intellectuals have presented that thesis. Jean Baudrillard, for example, wrote the most obscure, over-complicated prose poetry which was supposed to be academically meritorious. This was the literary style, though, that differentiated so-called “continental” philosophy from the Anglo-American, “analytic” kind which is more pragmatic and deferential to science.

In any case, I’ll explain here what seems to me the simple yet revelatory truth of postmodernism.

Modernity, humanism, and progress

To understand the transition, you need to know what modernity is. Modernity is partly an illusion of progress, as each society might suspect it’s doing something better than its predecessors or is at least carrying the torch from a more golden age. In the ancient world, most cultures were what we would call conservative or traditional rather than progressive. They thought that some paradise lay in the distant past, and that subsequent societies were only spinning their wheels, passing through cycles like planets orbiting the Sun. Real kingdoms were only pale imitations of an ideal found in the spirit world. History was a state of declining from that divine source.

Great civilizations and empires, though, with their profound inventions and vast geographical unifications often seemed not just like pale imitations but like embodiments of those spiritual ideals. Kings and emperors were sometimes identified with gods and worshipped as sacred or were at least deified after their death.

The concept of historical progress, then, was implicit in that idea of a close correspondence between natural reality and a spiritual, moral, or aesthetic ideal. Zoroastrianism and the Abrahamic religions which informed modern Europe drew upon that potential in their formulations of historical progress. Each thought paradise would be found or perhaps re-established at the end of history when good would triumph over evil or when God would judge humanity and rule more directly over us.

Jews, for example, implicitly satirized the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian empires they resented, by juxtaposing them with a more absolute atonement and with a realization of holiness that surpassed all idols. The one true divine empire would make a mockery of the earthly, human ones, although we could hardly even speak of the former without blaspheming. Consequently, progress was faithfully anticipated but always just out of earthly reach.

Modernity, then, was the secularization of that religious longing for progress. For various reasons, including the impact of Greco-Roman philosophy on medieval Catholic theology, and the Copernican Revolution which challenged the authority of Church dogmas, a humanistic vision developed in the Protestant Reformation, the Italian Renaissance, and the Scientific Revolution. Essentially, humans replaced God, and Everyman replaced the aristocrats and priestly elites.

The revolutionary conception was that natural personhood itself is sacred and is indeed the basis of all evaluations. We needn’t defer to the gods but could ascertain by our cognitive powers what’s real and what’s right or wrong. We’ve been doing so all along, our religious misconceptions notwithstanding, and the discovery of the New World, the advent of the scientific method, and the political and economic revolutions in North America and Europe demonstrated that earthly progress was possible. We needn’t merely trust in supernatural salvation but could improve our lives here and now, using reason and summoning empathy for the similar, “existential” plight of all people.

In short, a progressive secular myth replaced the conservative, defeatist one that prevailed in the ancient and medieval worlds. Deference to the gods and the fatalistic concession that a primordial paradise could never be regained on the material plane reconciled the masses to their enslavement. Only the tiny minority of nobles and priests enjoyed the divine life, as they were celebrated for being at one with the highest gods while women, common labourers, and slaves were treated like livestock.

The modern myth was that everyone could and should live like a king or a god, and that reason rather than religious faith could make it so. Science, democracy, capitalism, and fearless modern art were so many expressions of that dawning self-confidence.

Postmodernity and hyperrationality

What, then, is postmodernity supposed to be? Has modern progress ceased? Are we no longer rational? Has religion won the war between faith and reason? Has science stopped working? Have we lost all confidence in ourselves?

The word “postmodern” is somewhat misleading, I think, because it suggests the phase that we’re in now is no longer modern in the above sense. There are crucial differences between, say, eighteenth and twenty-first century Western cultures, but the transition should be viewed as an intensification of modernity. The modern world overcame itself, which is to say that we were perhaps too rational for our good.

In large part this happened because we shifted our focus from outer nature to human nature. Scientists set out to conquer the planet to empower humanity with technology. But philosophers and artists saw that reason has no inherent limits. You could be skeptical not just about the corrupt Church but about everything. You could even doubt the myths of modernity.

The early theorist of modernity, Jean-Francois Lyotard, put it well when he defined “postmodern” as incredulity towards grand narratives or metanarratives. There are the ordinary, first-order narratives we tell ourselves, such as that we need to go to the bank, we’re thirsty and could use a drink of water, or we feel ill and should see a doctor. Then there are the philosophical or religious stories we tell about those stories, the myths that are supposed to sum up all human experience.

It turns out that the more you apply reason, the less you’re able to take anything for granted. First, we question our intuitions and dogmas, and then we question the lofty creeds and articles of faith that hold together society.

For instance, was there ever much modern progress after all or did the rhetorical rationalizations of social inequality and injustice merely alter? Didn’t chattel slavery and colonialism continue into the modern world? Weren’t there global wars and a rise of fascist dictatorships, of secular kingdoms that re-established the ancient power dynamics? Aren’t most people still effectively enslaved because of their debt to banks or their low-paying jobs at transnational monopolies?

Aren’t technological advances two-sided, as we have medical techniques that enable us to live longer, even as we’re shunned in old age homes for our so-called golden years, or we’re cursed with guns, atomic bombs, and biological weapons that can commit mass murder with the mere push of a button? As relatively high as our living standard may be, compared to the ancient norms, thanks to science and capitalism, isn’t such human-centered “progress” destroying the planet’s ability to support life?

Postmodernity is hyperrationality, the redoubling of modern rationality, progress, and freedom until we realize that human life is absurd. We employ logic and science until we discover that reason is just a tool of our futile, transient empowerment. We seem to advance until we appreciate that human progress — whether religious or secular — was only ever a myth. We cherish our individual liberties until we recall that we need to live together, and that a society of self-serving individuals would be perfectly infantile.

Journalism as a case study

Even as I’ve tried to avoid academic jargon, this is all still abstract. The transition between the modern and the postmodern can be illustrated, though, by a familiar change in Western journalism.

In the middle of the twentieth century, there were only a few television channels, and most Americans got their news from TV, newspapers, and radio. News anchors, print journalists, and radio announcers were known only for their work. You saw the news anchor on the screen, you read the articles in the national or local paper, and you heard the disembodied voice on the radio. These presenters were typically white men, so the people who mattered in those openly racist and sexist generations trusted their news sources implicitly. Think of Walter Cronkite, Walter Lippmann, and Edward R. Murrow.

Then came computers and the internet and a revolution known as the Information Age. In hindsight you could see the beginnings of that age even in the inventions of the printing press, television, and radio. But as we’ve just seen, those relatively modern media still preserved the mystique of their contents and of the leading personalities they host. There was no peak behind the curtain, as it were, to spoil the illusion of the wizard of Oz.

Digital technologies have entirely spoiled that mystique, but only by fulfilling the humanist promise to empower Everyman. Think of the all the intermediaries these new media have eliminated. Music used to benefit from the advice of elites who specialized in music production, and songs were sold as hard copies. Now anyone can produce their own music on computers and stream it for free on the web. More to the point, you can film the news as it happens on your smartphone and upload the video to the cloud, and you can start your own television channel on YouTube, publication on the blogosphere, or radio program with a podcast.

Everyone’s an expert now, with an ocean of data at our fingertips, which is to say that modernity succeeded in empowering us. But paradoxically, this empowerment has been counterproductive, as we’ve not only shyly peaked behind the curtain but have ripped it from the track and taken a magnifying glass to inspect every disappointing inch of the phony wizard.

Crucially, a journalist is no longer known just for his or her work but is expected to be relatable as a real person. There’s no sense in pretending that the journalist is a superhuman authority since anyone can do that job now. You, the average viewer can know as much as the journalist or news anchor by googling the data, and you can write up your opinions and publish them just like anyone else. Journalists are competing with everyone now, so they try to form personal bonds with their viewers to gain their trust and loyalty.

Perhaps your favourite journalist will have a job on television or on YouTube as a news anchor or analyst, but she’ll also tweet her random thoughts and have a vlog to show you “behind the scenes.” You’ll see inside her home, what kind of car she drives, how quirky her husband is, and so on. Or if she doesn’t want to take the reins on social media, others will. There will be Facebook and Wikipedia pages run by fans, commentary on her work from the amateur punditocracy, and perhaps someone somewhere will create an indie documentary film about her.

Inevitably, the more we know about the journalists as people, the more they’re deprived of their mystique, and the less impressive their work will seem when it’s copied and deleted countless times in the digital stream of information. The modern grand narrative of journalism, that journalists are objective truth-seekers or rebels speaking truth to power will be a laughingstock, a quaint conceit of our naïve parents and grandparents.

We know all too well now that an oligopoly owns the major television and radio stations and newspapers, and that thanks to deregulation, American news is a business that sets out mainly to entertain, not to inform the viewers. There’s breaking news and there’s “fake news,” and no one bothers to distinguish them in practice because there are so many news sources that you can always find someone saying what you’d prefer to believe.

Do you see, then, how we’ve transitioned from trusting in the modern grand narrative of the heroic humanist dispersal of information for the common good, to worrying that because information technologies have apparently empowered us, we’ve become experts on everything, so the so-called expert journalists have been discounted as mediocre entertainers?

In a nutshell, then, postmodernity is a matter of seeing how the sausage is made, and this is so not just with respect to journalism but to all walks of life, including politics, business, religion, science, academia, art, pop culture, and sexuality. We look behind the curtain, see too much, and retreat to a cynical, mocking, apathetic perspective to soothe our nerves.

Evidently, too much of a good thing spoils itself. Lacking a moderate intake, the boon becomes a poison. Thanks to technological improvements, we have so much news now that the very idea of news is ironically meaningless. New stories quickly become outdated in a flood of data, and each fad is replaced by another.

It wasn’t that we decided arbitrarily to be jaded and bored. Again, the accumulation of modern progress has this downside, which is that it spoils us rotten; more precisely, narrow advances in science and technology can have deleterious social effects as they present the real world in all its confusing messiness and in its terrifying indifference to our self-centered expectations. No delusion withstands that “progress.”

The historic and cultural scales of postmodernity

Finally, a word about the scale of postmodernity. It seems likely that, although there was no systematic progress in history or a working out of some metaphysical logic or necessary, Hegelian Truth in social development, there were some identifiable patterns in our evolution.

Perhaps the most conspicuous development was our increasing technological empowerment. From the Stone Age onwards, technology was surely improved — not in any moral sense necessarily, but in enabling the user to achieve certain objectives, especially the domestication of the wilderness. We ourselves — our bodies and minds — were part of that wilderness, so we domesticated ourselves, and that happened as we came to live together in larger numbers, subject to the rules of a master class, like livestock.

We civilized ourselves, working our bodies to the bone to produce a surplus of goods to feed the growing populations. In the process we developed art, writing, and other technologies to manage civilization, which enabled us to accumulate knowledge and to transmit it to our descendants. That accumulation led to modern progress and to postmodern jadedness.

All of which is to say that that broad social development — the unfolding of the consequences of what anthropologists call “behaviour modernity,” and of what philosophers and psychologists call the traits of “personhood” or of the human mind (self-awareness, reason, freewill, imagination, empathy, curiosity) — looks like a species-wide reiteration of what happens at the individual level. That’s to say there’s a transition from the child’s naïvety to the overloading of the adult with memories and experience; collectively this is the growth from the simplistic traditions of what we call “prehistory” and “the ancient world” to the virtual omniscience of our late-industrial period.

Yet there’s another way to look at postmodernity, one which derives from Oswald Spengler’s relativistic view of cultures. He thought each civilization goes through similar cultural stages of birth, growth, maturity, and death. First, a society is enraptured by its founding principles, ideals, and myths, and then it devotes itself to elucidating and building on them. The civilization thrives on that collective self-knowledge and confidence. But eventually, that familiarity proves toxic, and the founding ideals come to seem stale and obsolete, so the culture enters a period of inevitable decline until the society collapses under its cultural weight.

The point is that if we’re speaking about postmodernity with respect to American society or to the late-industrial monoculture, we might have that local decline in mind since postmodernity could easily be interpreted as a sign just of that “Western” civilizational decay. That is, we can focus on postmodernity in the broadest, metahistorical sense, or we can talk about the equivalent of postmodernity in any civilization’s eventual overfamiliarity with its culture.