Postmodernism Pt. 2

So we left off with something pretty insubstantial, but still potentially consequential. Before we jump too far ahead, Let's take a minute to pause and wave good-bye to the modern mindset as it passes...

To understand exactly what made us modern (that is to say, the patterns that we tried to hold on to as a culture while still ultimately moving away from), we can look at the ways that we organized thought and did things after leaving Medievality. Moderns love to put things into mechanical terms, and rightfully so, this being the most advanced age of mechanical understanding yet. For every input, there should have been an output. Law of physics were secure, economics had set rules and formulas, democracy was broken down into group, percentages, and fractions. Our understanding of ideas and words fit snugly into this paradigm. The modern age was the most legalistic age by far, not only in the everyday world, but vastly in the world of the church. Christians believed that the Bible was truth, so truth must only come from the Bible, an equal and opposite reaction. It was all very secure in its structure. Never before (nor again) had any epoch in humanity made so much sense, mechanically.

So why are we not in this age anymore? I think we can all feel it, but let's go deeper. Quantum physics and Einstein and Hawking's theories are uncovering every day how vastly unpredictable the universe is, on micro and macro levels. The wiki-age has made our nice columns of information in tangible hardbacks a thing of the past, and bringing along a new definition of truth. Christians are starting to see truth (that is, beauty) in things beyond the walls of their own Bible, which was Modern heresy. We can find the Quran moving and the poetry of Sufi elegant and heartwrenching. There is no longer one output for one input, the age of empiricism and nationalism is dying, the world is shrinking, we are forging new social norms, new mores and folkways. We obviously can't define postmodernism at all yet, the name alone is evidence, we are simply beginning to understand that it is something after-modernism. We are still the ashes that will give birth to a new phoenix after the slow burn of the Modern worldview, but that is a start.