Post-modern, what is it ?

After modernity What ?

“ It is obvious to all that the world around us is changing dramatically. But what is the character of this change? What is it significance? And why should we even care?

In recent years, scholarly discussion about such matters has been shped profoundly by talk of the “post-modern”. But what is it?

“Modernism”, it is widely agreed, was rooted in the belief that truth in human understanding, and justice in political order, would be progressively and universally realized upon the foundation of human reason. In “post-modernism” that belief is no longer plausible: the very idea of truth is reduced to perspective, justice becomes a matter of who has power, and the promise of science and technology to liberate human beings delivers new forms of oppression.

What we are left with, in the wake of modernity failure, is “indeterminacy”. The implications of this in academy have been especially important. In philosophy, for example, indeterminacy takes shape as a lack of coherent agreement about the significance of texts or the “canon”. In historical study, indeterminacy takes shape as doubt about the objective reality of the past. Underneath all of this, there is a rejection of any foudation by which coherent agreements could be reached. The foundations of traditional authority and of scientific rationality are “deconstructed”, as they say; reduced to rubble, in any case. And so we are left whith indeterminacy.

But if there is a shift from the “modern” to the “post-modern” in philosophy, literature, and the arts, to what extent does this transformation take concrete institutional form in ordering of public life and in the moral frameworks of people’s personal lives? The question this transformation poses are as basic as they are urgent: What kind of society will now take shape? And what are the implications of these changes for American social life?

These questions, while academic in nature, are by no means limited in significance to the ivory tower. They concern the nature of our personal lives as individuals and our common life together as citizens. For example, the playful deconstruction and irony of the post-modern temper clearly challenge the normative foundations of the modern social order, yet such a pose does not address the institutional pessures for some kind of general uniformity in public culture ( e.g. consistency in law, coherence in public education, substance in arts policy, and so on). So too, the “aesthetization” of morals” - the reduction of morality to taste-leads to an expansion of individual liberties, but it also raises serious questions about the possibility of sustaining obligations in the fabric of even the most intimate social relatioships.

The questions keep mounting: Upon what grounds will the government establish legitimacy for its actions among an increasingly pluralistic citizenry? Will jurisprudence be transformed from the task of seeking to uphold a universal ideal of justice to simply mediating among a collage of disjointed agencies, each operating with its own standard of justice? And how will children be socialized in a context where parental presence is less and parental authority is weak or non-existent? Will the moral order of religious faith abandon inherited structures of authority altogether in preference to ones for which the individual’s “felt-needs” are at the center? On these questions and many, many others, speculation abounds.

All of these questions tie into a single stream of inquiry: How do we make sense of the changing World around us? This question defines the intellectual mission of the Post-Modernity Project. As a coordinated, multi.perspective examination of the nature and consequences of contemporary social change, the Post-Modernity Project undertakes an investighation into what are arguably the most pressing questions of our time. (...)


James Davison Hunter ( University of Virginia )