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Post-What?

© Blake Atwood

A friend of mine at school once asked me what I meant by the term "Postmodern." I had been reading so many books and articles on it that a singular and concise definition eluded me at the time (as it continues to do so). He made the rather astute observation that nothing could truly be post-modern, as everything in existence now is "modern." Of course, this friend had no idea of the history of the term, or what the term means today.

As stated, I cannot give you an easy definition. There are some definitions that skyrocket out of cyberspace into a no-man's land of nomenclature. These are the theorists and philosophers. As for myself, my mind tends not to work like theirs. For instance: "For postmodernists, categories of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ are not fundamental aspects of human experience. They are merely artificial appearances which conceal the underlying mythological core of every human experience – a mythological core of experientially based awareness that is antecedent to reflection and action, to subjectivity and objectivity, and to the distinction between humanity and nature (unfortunately I do not have the author’s name at the moment).”

Part of that loquacious definition (sidebar: Have you ever noticed that one cannot help but to be loquacious when one uses the word ‘loquacious?’) entails one of the major shifts in the way we as humans relate to the world around us, through experience first, and not reason, as our ‘modern’ parents and grandparents did. The echoes of this shift are just starting to resound off the walls of the Christian church.

Defining postmodernity is like trying to see the last fractal image, or seeing what the inside of a molecule looks like. The closer you get to the essence of what it is, the more you lose sight of the bigger picture.

Postmodernity is best thought of in a number of terms. Experience over Reason. Loopy thinking over Linear thinking. Two contrasting ideas are not either this or that, but are both this and that. To use an illustration from Leonard Sweet, a light wave is both a particle and a wave, both an individual and a member of a much larger team. Connectivity and the digital age play a very important role in postmodernity as well. The rate of accelerated change (as a consequence of new technologies) forces the world to change at an ever-faster rate. (I am indebted to Dr. Sweet’s ebook The Dawn Mistaken For Dusk for some of these comparative terms.)

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