Are We Postmodern Yet?

And Were We Ever?

Reinhold Kramer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030305697
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

In this book, Reinhold Kramer explores a variety of important social changes, including the resistance to objective measures of truth, the rise of "How-I-Feel" ethics, the ascendancy of individualism, the immersion in cyber-simulations, the push toward globalization and multilateralism, and the decline of political and religious faiths. He argues that the displacement, since the 1990s, of grand narratives by ego-based narratives and small narratives has proven inadequate, and that selective adherence, pluralist adaptation, and humanism are more worthy replacements. Relying on evolutionary psychology as much as on Charles Taylor, Kramer argues that no single answer is possible to the book title's question, but that the term "postmodernity" – referring to the era, not to postmodernism – still usefully describes major currents within the contemporary world.

© The Author(s) 2019

R. KramerAre We Postmodern Yet?https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30569-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Contemporary Era

Reinhold Kramer¹

(1)

English and Creative Writing, Brandon University, Brandon, MB, Canada

Reinhold Kramer

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

When his 13-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son began to grill celebrated American novelist Michael Chabon in 2005 about his earlier use of marijuana, they hit a nerve. He had stopped toking only two years before the interrogation, three years if you subtract the single, potentially tragic incident (more on this later) that firmed up his commitment to abstinence. About Chabon’s marijuana use, his son asked, “How many times?” Chabon, just north of 40 years old, replied, “A number of times, but I don’t do it anymore.” A truer answer, he admits to readers, would have been “one million.” Chabon didn’t want his children to smoke marijuana, but he had difficulty explaining why: “It’s just not something I’m ready to do anymore. And it’s not something you guys are ready to do either. Right?”¹

Chabon isn’t alone. We cannot live without ethics—the values and practices that limit our self-interest and self-indulgence²—and, although the term “postmodern” has fallen out of fashion, it’s still useful because it signalled a sea change in the way we approach ethics. Religious traditions gave us firm but sometimes very unsatisfactory reasons behind moral obligations and ethical dilemmas. Yet as tradition waned, modernity often couldn’t step up to the plate with acceptable new reasons. Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter sum up the moral dilemma of contemporary pluralist societies: “we lack any common measure of ‘the good,’” and must learn to live in deep disagreement, about crucial matters, such as “the value of family, the existence of God, the sources of morality.”³ That’s a bit overstated, since human rights have become a common measure, but Heath and Potter are mostly correct . In the case of marijuana, several American states and Canada have legalized it, though the US federal government still treats it as illegal.

It isn’t just disparate views about how we should limit ourselves. With the rise of individual freedoms, says Gilles Lipovetsky, the strength of moral obligations declines.⁴ Experimental evidence suggests that the greater the freedom, the weaker our sense of obligation. In “ultimatum games,” one player (the proposer) is given money, say $10, to divide with a second player (the responder). The proposer offers a split and the responder can accept, or can reject the deal, in which case both players get nothing. Typically, proposers offer between $2 and $5. On a purely rational level, responders should take any offer, no matter how low. In fact, however, responders usually refuse deals under $2, and will even pay $1 in order to punish selfish proposers. When Joseph Henrich tried the game out in a variety of small-scale cultures, he found a few universals—mean offers ran between 26% and 58%—but also a great deal of cultural variation in what was perceived as a fair offer.⁵ If no punishment is allowed (i.e. the proposer gets the share no matter what), the proposer effectively becomes a dictator. In this situation, some benevolent proposers will still irrationally offer almost half of their $10, sticking with the moral values they trust outside of the game—yet some proposers will offer nothing, attuning their moral values to their new level of power. When proposers are asked to divide the money between two responders, proposers tend to offer a total sum even less than what they would offer a single responder. In other words, when punishment decreases in effectiveness, self-interest grows.⁶ This supports Lipovetsky’s contemporary fear about moral obligation: although the responders may feel that the proposers are morally obligated to make a reasonable distribution, the more freedom we have—which in the postmodern era turns out to be a lot—the less strongly we feel obligations to others.

The determinative word in my title—“postmodern”—lost its cachet by the end of the previous millennium, partly because some philosophers used it as a synonym for a suspect relativism, partly because it became politicized as the academic left’s personal brand, and partly just because fashions change. I’m less interested in coming up with the best name for our era than in understanding the effects of its practices. Alternative names—“liquid modernity” (Zygmunt Bauman), “hypermodernity” (Lipovetsky ), “digimodernism” (Alan Kirby), and “automodernity” (Robert Samuels)—imply that we have in fact accepted, and merely tweaked, the assumptions of modern rationality. There is some validity to this claim. However, if we accept the force of the naturalistic fallacy (that no matter how robust our rationality, we can never derive our ethics directly from nature) we must also recognize that we are indelibly postmodern. I have no inclination to argue against the newer, sexier terms, yet “postmodern” has the advantage of broad intelligibility. Bauman, Lipovetsky, Kirby, Samuels, and many other scholars, despite using new terminology, still agree that we’re in a coherent new period that has significantly altered modernity.

The philosophers of modernity most often assumed that, once we understood the logical and social failures of religious traditions, we could rebuild our meanings by understanding the rational design in nature (as the Deists thought), or by making rational calculations about where the most happiness lay (as Utilitarians argued), or by learning to correctly interpret nature’s inner voice in us (as Rousseau and the Romantics felt).⁷ Modernity’s line of rational calculation, especially in utilitarian form, has continued simplistically in scholars such as Sam Harris, who imagine that any moment now reason will allow us to agree on values, while the more expressivist Romantic lines of argument have found a home in what I will call postmodernity’s How-I-Feel ethics, the notion that the individual’s emotional responses are the best guide to interpersonal disputes, appropriate behaviour, and moral decisions .

Naming and Dating Postmodernity

To give a full account of postmodernity’s historical development would require another book. Not to sidestep the matter entirely, however, I offer a brief sketch of how such a question might be approached, provided that the answer remains broadly rooted in human practices, and not merely in theory, polemics, or a single discipline. Some scholars find the real beginnings of postmodernity in the Reformation, which allowed the individual, guided by the “light within,” to interpret the Bible. The more decisive weakening of grand narratives came with the scientific revolution and the rise of “higher criticism” of the Bible in the eighteenth century. Only in the 1960s did the antagonism between tradition and modernity tip broadly into postmodernity when a number of factors destabilized the grand narratives of tradition and modernity both: church attendance began its slow decline; influential continental theorists such as Foucault discovered Nietzsche and cast a cold eye on rationality; European empires crumbled as postcolonial nation after nation won its independence; social groups with strong grievances against tradition—women, people of colour, and sexual minorities—began to mobilize, not on the basis of scientific rationality, but on the basis of human rights . All these tremors opened the road for an ungrounded pluralism.

The tremors were above all moral, or ethically political. The social contract is an early modern idea that took nascent form in differing ways among the English Levellers and Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century, and among the French and American revolutionaries in the eighteenth. The twentieth-century framers of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights , appalled by the Holocaust, established for the first time a global agreement on the notion that the individual held a kind of sovereignty, the Declaration going much further than the UN Charter, which focussed on the sovereignty of nations. Expressed on a very practical level, commitment to the social contract and the new notion of sovereignty grew into a flood by the 1960s in civil rights marches, the battle for reproductive rights, anti-war demonstrations, and the Stonewall protests. For a leftist such as David Harvey, the failure of May 1968 to bring about revolution led to postmodernity,⁸ and he’s right insofar as group protests began to take on a very individualist cast. Strongly relativist theories also played a role, soon percolating not only into the academies, but also into popular culture, from David Bowie’s attempt to avoid a singular identity to Robert Altman’s multi-voiced Nashville (1975). But where Harvey, in his eagerness for a proletarian revolution, reports a tragedy, many would see the trickle-down effect of the 1960s protests as having created desirable social changes.

Individualism is rooted intellectually in the flowerings of Romanticism, but it reac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The Contemporary Era
• 2. Truth or Truths?
• 3. Ethics: “How I Feel at the Time”
• 4. Individualism: “I Believe in Me”
• 5. Adventures in Cyber-Culture
• 6. The Nation
• 7. Faith and Other Grand Narratives
• 8. Conclusion
• Back Matter