I like talking about social trends. I think I’ve hidden this well beneath my constant babble about… um… video games, but, no, really, I like it. I like it because, whether or not I am right, I can usually make what appears, on the surface at least, a reasonable and sensible argument for why things are what they are socially.

I have to warn you, though, that most of what you hear is so much theorizing without the courtesy of actual research. And you suckers buy it! But perhaps you don’t. Perhaps instead of listening to peoples opinions, hearsay, and circumstantial observations, you only take into account documented, heavily researched, statistically significant data that points to a conclusion.

I know I don’t.

Okay, so today’s topic is Post Modernism. To understand Post Modernism, you have to get an idea of what preceded it. Keeping in mind that what I am about to say is a rather arrogant and oversimplified analysis of former mindsets, here we go. First people felt that they had very little control or understanding over those things that drove the universe. This, people felt, was the realm of the gods and they focused their intellect on the day-to-day tasks of farming, or warring, or whatever it happened to be that they did at such times. This mindset we will call, in our arrogance, “Superstition”.

So, you know, time passed, and people started figuring certain things out and writing them down, and by gradual degree there developed the thought that there are a very basic set of rules that governed all of existence. More important, people began to believe that the human mind is sufficient to figure out these rules, or to find a singular rule that could explain everything. If you’re playing the Secrets of the Universe home edition, you can tick off another buzzword: “Grand Unified Equation”. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?

This mindset, known as “Modernism” consisted of two very important ideas: first, that there was one, fundamental truth governing all of existence, and secondly, that we could figure it out.

Then something very strangeStrange: we are all strange, so it is no surprise that strange happens. happened. We can start with Einstein. He was a smart guy. Had a lot on the ball. And he figured out a principle that, essentially, said that the rules of time and space will appear to be different depending on your perspective. You could look out from a point on, oh, say, Earth, and from that point you could construct a model of the universe that had it orbiting YOU, and that that perspective would play out mathematically to be correct.

Then all sorts of absurd, relativistic mathematics started to emerge regarding mostly the subatomic world. One stated that you could observe the position or the orbit of an electron but once you observed it, you changed its position or orbit. Another seemed to indicate that light was both a wave and a particle depending on how you looked at it. Still another seemed to say that subatomic forces existed in two contradictory states until observed, at which time the other state ceased to exist and it collapsed into one state or the other.

These sorts of notions challenged and dismantled the idea that there was one, concrete truth that governed the nature of the universe, and that we could define that. How can you define the universe when it keeps changing its nature whenever you take a good look at it, and when its doing stuff behind your back that it won’t let you see?

And from that stew immerged the idea of Post Modernism.

By its very nature, Post Modernism is contradictory and defies a simple explanation. One way to look at it is humanities desperate attempt to maintain that feeling of control that we had back in the Modernist era. Because one of the concepts of Post Modernism is that we, the Observers, alter the nature of the universe by observing it. In essence (it says) we create our own truths simply by choosing a perspective and then seeing the universe from that perspective. Its intellectual anarchy. Of course there are any number of offshoots from this. One is that there’s an emerging concept that the universe is built almost entirely out of the language used to define it. Language becomes almost magical at this point. We believe we can change the world and people using the right combination of words.

Another offshoot, and probably the most noticeable, is that people increasingly have the belief that their personal beliefs are sacred things, no matter how often they are challenged or changed. We are never wrong, we just choose to believe new and different things. Of course this also means that everyone else is right, also. We cannot challenge their personal beliefs because that’s their truth, their universe, their own personal godhood that is sacred to them even if it means nothing to us.

I would wrap this lesson up with a practical application, but what’s the point?

This entry was posted on Monday, July 3rd, 2006 at 9:39 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.