Quotes About Postmodernism

This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products

in the latter half of the twentieth century, postmodernism upended everything. Universal truths were no longer accepted. "Truth" (postmodernism loves quotation marks) was instead a social construct that depended heavily on cultural context. Nothing was either true or false, but was instead open to interpretation.

Prior to postmodernism, it was all but impossible to claim that one was a cultural Christian, Jew, or Muslim. There was no such thing. Now, being culturally religious is a widely accepted stance.

By exclaiming that "there are no absolute truths" the postmodern stance is also claiming that the statement it just made is an absolute truth—trying to have it both ways, rejecting absolutism with absolutism.

Today, religious fanatics and scientific rejectionists flourish under the protective wing of postmodernism, claiming that theirs is just one more valid viewpoint—a form of mental aikido (using the opponent's strength against him).

We attend a postmodern meeting, and everyone leaves happy because everyone at the meeting was able to express himself or herself, even if no decisions were made. We give equal awards to our kids so nobody feels left out. Our news media is more concerned with the question, "How did that make you feel?" than any other.

postmodernism asserts the liberating insignificance of art

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.

Here, I put it as an assertion: If the criteria for the choice are rootedness in human experience, seriousness of purpose, and intellectual depth, choosing the classic aesthetic tradition over postmodernism is not a close call.

Finally, the loss of moral authority in the law means we have forfeited the rule oflaw and reverted to arbitrary human rule. The rule of law cannot survive unless there is an unchanging and transcendent standard against which we can measure human laws. Otherwise, the law is whatever the lawmakers or judges say it is-which can only result, eventually, in the collapse of free gov- ernment.43 The postmodernist assault on objective moral truth has put us on the road to tyranny.

Premoderns placed their trust in authority. Moderns lost their confidence in authority and placed it in human reason instead. Postmoderns kept the modern distrust of authority but lost their trust in reason and have found nothing to replace it. This is the crux of all postmodern thought.

here is the nub of the issue between Christianity and postmodernism: what is freedom?

In the eyes of postmoderns, then, modernism has failed, both as a prediction of progress and as a moral framework for culture. As a result, postmoderns take distinctly anti-modern views on the deeper questions of human life: social, political, moral, and spiritual questions.

Postmodernism is not a theory or a creed: it is more like an attitude or a way of looking at things. It didn't drop out of the sky—it showed up at this juncture in history, in Western culture, for specific reasons that have to do with the history of the West.

For traditional Christians, the refusal to believe in moral absolutes is perhaps the most distressing aspect of postmodernism. The distress lies at the heart of what I called "the moral concern" with postmodernism in the first chapter. How should a Christian respond?

Christians ought to be troubled by the postmodern rejection of moral absolutes. But in responding, the first task is to get our own house in order.

For postmoderns, no knowledge is fully reliable and no concepts are absolutely indispensable.

postmoderns have lost faith in the idea of objective verification. Instead, they focus on the persuasive power of the stories we tell

Postmodernism involves the loss of any hope that some larger-than-human force—be it God or History or Progress or Science or Reason—is going to come to the aid of humanity and make everything all right in the end. Postmoderns believe that we make our own bed, historically speaking, and we have to lie in it; and that's all there is to say. Except, maybe, that we're not such good bed-makers.

Our current higher education system is steeped in a philosophy that doubts our ability to even perceive the physical world. That philosophy is called postmodernism.

Postmodernists have been at the leading edge of promoting the view that reality is socially constructed.

One of the most outstanding conclusions of some postmodernists is that all of reality is socially constructed. They have even taken issue with the conclusions of Newton and Einstein, on the basis that the privilege of those scientists is obvious in their equations and, as old white guys, their biases inherently prevented them from knowing anything real of the world.

Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.

Stroll on. When the going gets tough, the postmodern analyst goes shopping.