Quotes from Walter Truet Anderson

The new polarization is a split between different kinds of belief, not between different beliefs. It divides those who believe from those who have beliefs. It pits fundamentalists—who may be fundamentalists of religion, science, ideology, or cultural tradition—against an opposition called relativists here, secular humanists there, religious liberals somewhere else.

In order for the postmodern worldview to emerge fully and mature, it needs, among other things, a better sense of history—an idea of what it is the human species has found out about itself in recent centuries, and what effects that discovery has had on us. It is not hard to find some of that in the public record. The postmodern worldview has been a long time in coming. And in recent decades it has been anything but shy about proclaiming its imminent arrival.

This polarization has an unmistakably global dimension to it. Even in the small towns where folks bicker with one another about how to run the schools, the local issues and rivalries are overshadowed by a general feeling that all social orders—definitely including small-town America—are being drawn into something much larger.

Everybody knows there is a global culture—an ever-growing web of ideas held together by the majority of human beings. Yet nobody has much of an idea of what it is. No team of social scientists has yet gone forth to do the global opinion survey that would tell us (at least those of us who believe in opinion surveys) what knowledge and values the world's 5.2 billion people share in common.

Consider, for example, the image of a young Palestinian soldier that a reporter I know saw standing guard in the hills of Lebanon. He was fighting to preserve his ancient culture and its identity. He wore sneakers, blue jeans, and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. He carried an Uzi.

We are indeed seeing in our time the birth of a global superculture that pours together bits and pieces of many different cultures. But it is not just a combination of pieces, and neither will it be merely an homogenization; human beings are far too inventive for that, and the human mind is far too complex. We

In order for the postmodern worldview to emerge fully and mature, it needs, among other things, a better sense of history—an idea of what it is the human species has found out about itself in recent centuries, and what effects that discovery has had on us. It