The Post Modern
March 29, 2002

Here are some sketched notes on the "Post Modern": I am energised to write on this tricky topic by my enthusiasm for 19th Century American thinking, and for a Baby Boomer's interest in (and rejection of) the likes of Foucault. Oh, and I think New Labour is most interesting for being a PM government.

There is something absurd about the term. Every age is the "modern", and no age could so get ahead of itself as to be "post" modern. It implies a sort of "end of history" finality, as though the "modern" was locked down in 1930 or some other arbitrarily-defined time, and thereafter we needed a new term.

Still, it has some meaning if only because people vaguely know that they are talking about something fairly specific when they use the word. They are talking about a sort of crisis, a problem, and about a response to that crisis. Of course, it may be a phoney crisis.

So, what is the perceived crisis? It is the problem - identified by Kant and others - that science and rationality have led humans to a condition of alienation. This alienation takes several forms. Most of them have to do with the understanding that the "environment" of man is now mental rather than physical. Man is no longer merely (as in Pope) the measure of man (the Enlightenment perception). Man is the milieu of man. 

The "real" is not what it was. There are two substantial elements to this: the manufactured and the mediated. We live in a world which we have made, and with which we communicate through sensory intimediaries (television, etc.) Note that it is the degree of human agency which is new.

1. We are "only" part of nature. For centuries men have believed that they were playthings of the Gods - or of God - in a special kind of way (Bersntein is good on this). The Enlightenment followed a long intellectual trend of realising that we were not that special. We are mechanical, chemical, electrical entities of a remarkable kind, but we are not divine.

2. We are set apart from nature. For centuries, man was struggling to master nature sufficiently to thrive. Now he fears that he has subborned nature (the Green movement). He knows that natural laws are apart from, and more powerful than, him, but he knows that he is capable of altering important features of the natural (think of Lovelock's Gaia for this tension). He is simultaneously "only" natural whilst being a prime agent in the natural.

3. Man no longer lives in the "real" world. Our history is of dealing with "natural" things in a hands-on way. Farming, mining, transport provided our livings in a way which employed people directly on natural objects (soil, animals) and in natural rythms (climate, season) and delivered products in which the natural was still obvious. That has changed gradually over centuries and now has reached a pitch in which the manufactured has triumphed over the natural. (Even a farmer is in an air-conditioned tractor cab). Geography is history, in two senses. Geography used to make history, and now geography has been consigned to the bin. (Landes is useful here.)

4. Everything is now mediated. This is different to everything's being manufactured. Now, everything real has been preceded and superseded by an experience - an image, often - which heralds and interprets it. (A person goes to the Alps.They are wonderful, but he has seen them from the airplane before he touches them, and has seen them in ads long before that.) For most of us, the reality of a rainforest is marginal, even if we are in it. We won't be in it for long, and we are sheltered from its real features (danger, fear, etc).

5. Everything is now reflexsive. For hundreds of years, people looked about them and saw people and things outside them. Now, people look at people and things and see themselves. In seeking to understand themselves, people now look out at the world (at films, interviews, landscapes) not to understand the outside world, but themselves. Monica Lewinsky, Victoria Beckham and others display themselves, and we are fascinated to watch, but we are mining them for understanding of ourselves. Antarctica lies revealed in awesomeness, but we stare into it to consider what we (not it) have bceome 

6. Perception now matters more than reality. Partly because of democracy and because of consumerism, what large of numbers of people believe now matters more than what is the case. A belief that tapwater is dangerous may be false, but it produces the effect that there is a bottled-water industry of great size. The new industry is premised on a perception which is at odds with reality, but the industry is an important new reality. A belief that Britain is in the grip of an elite is untrue but it determines that politicians will generate arguments against old-style education. 

7 Democracies can't be wrong
The power of The People is now equivalent to the effect of Pragmatism in philosophicl inquiries of the truth: there is no truth beyond "what works" and what people espouse. Similarly (as Menand writes when describing American constitutional belief): "The right outcome is always the outcome democratically reached. Otherwise we cannot know if it is right." This goes beyond the pragmatic value of a decision (which might depend on its utilitarian outcome). It says, right or wrong in its effect, an act is right if democratically arrived at. It isn't even that democracies tend to produce acts of positive moral effect: it is that they can't do wrong, because being democratic is the rightest thing we know. 

8. Pluralistic and pragmatic philosophies now rule. Centuries of philosophic activity sought to understand where moral and logical truth lay. The enterprise has been found interesting but fatally inconclusive. Moral truths have turned out to be in the eye of the beholder and logical truths have turned out to be commonsensical. Or rather: professional philosophers have turned out not to be perfect guides to moral truths (though they are useful in manfully hacking at thickets of self-servng nonsense) and nor have they found ways of describing what knowledge is (though they can innoculate people against abusing language). The precursors of "post modernity" realised that human minds make what have to pass for truths and that human cultures make those minds. (See Ayer, or OUP "Continental Philosophy")

9. The individual is now manufactured and mediated. In his history, man has been divine and merely human by turns. But in either case, he was superhuman or animal in a solid way. Now he senses himself to be the creature of other human interventions: he is what has happened to him, and what has happened to him is mostly by human agency.

10. Our material wants no longer interest us. Most of the material wants of our history have now been met so succesfully that our main issue is to have the strength to resist the evolutionary urges which drive us to want more of them. Less food and heat; fewer clothes and possessions; less leisure and more exertion; less entertainment and more quiet: these are what we want now that we have more than we need. Minimalism is the aesthetic of affluence. 

11 Everything is now personal. This is the logical fall-out of pragmatism and pluralism. All authority must make itself convincing to individuals. Moral authority now attaches to the individual and not the system. Power may still reside with institutions, but it will be challenged. Institutions remain crucial, but they are seen - at best - as organisations which enshrine, service and deliver the right sort of individuals. Individuals have responsibilities, but will be sceptical of these unless individually persuaded of them. (Carney is good here: see AMVI) 

To be Post Modern is to face up to these rather chilling features of modern life. Most belief is bankrupt. Most certainties are empty. The "real" has been superseded. What we want matters more than what we need. Our "needs" are now emotional not material. Less is more. The world is the personal writ large. The human mind is the most important agent in nature.

Responses to the Post Modern.

1. Denial

One can pour scorn on the PM and insist that its features are over-egged, that there is nothing here which is new or shattering. This denial asserts PM is self-indulgent twaddle for a few spoiled fortunates. Instead of this pernicious cult of the individual and his perceptions, one should consider the needs of society and its real problems.

2. Escape

One can live thoughtlessly anywhere, and simply avoid worrying about the PM crisis. Or one can perhaps seek out the old, the poor, the rural, the sick (at home and abroad) and thus shelter in the places where the Post Modern has least reached. Either approach is a distraction, deliberate or not, from the problems of the modern "examined life". 

3 Interrogate

One can aim to get a handle on the strengths and weaknesses of the idea that the PM is real and powerful and thus negotiate between the recognisable world of the past and the unchartered terrain of the PM future about which one is cautious and a little suspicious. 
Such an approach is true to the scepticism which reasonable people ought to have, but is not entirely dismissive of PM. 

3. Challenge

One can say that the PM is real and that it ought not to be. This view asserts that the PM amounts to a failure of will. There are methods of understanding and values of morality which are either real or worth treating as real, and the PM seeks to fudge these in a way which is dengerous. This is different to the denial position. It says, not that PM is not happening, or is only happening on a tiny scale, but that it is serious but flows from weakness of will.

4. Relish

One can insist that the new situation is more fully human than any previous, and that we should grow into it rather than seek to avoid it. One need not abandon scepticism, but neither need one be antagonistic to the PM. This position suggests that the self-invention which the PM posits for mankind (as a whole and sociologically, if not individually) is a fulfilment of human destiny and potential which may yet go much further. It looks for signs of the self-invention and seeks to see or make them positive.

I tend to the 4th proposition, though elements of all the others are important. 

Consequences of relishing the Post Modern

1. Technology is OK and is not to be blamed for human failure to use it well. We will go on engineering more and more devices, but they will tend like all others in the past to be turned to human use or abandoned as dysfunctional. Military tools in non-democratic hands are the only obvious exception, not yet seen on a large scale, but constantly threatened.

2. Charisma rules, and is not to be blamed for the charlatanism which prevails. Charlatanism is the new threat, constantly to be guarded against, because technologies can reinforce charisma. The Beckhams may matter more than bishops, and Lewinsky more than an ex-President, or NGOs more than governments. But their appeal may be trivial, not substantive and it is the robustness of discussion which will unmask them.

3. The Enlightenment guides, because it is the movement which discussed the responsibilities of autonomous persons. The primacy of the individual is at the heart of civilisation's progress: the PM merely takes this to new levels and requires that the Enlightenment innocculation against tyrannical individualism also needs to be advanced.

4. Bio-engneering can thrive because we know most of what is worth preserving, we know that we can risk creating. Mankind already vastly influences nature and himself: bio-engineering increases this authorship and needs to be watched, not because of fear of the authorship, but watchful awareness of the consequences.

5. Nature nurtures: we know that the natural is important because we celebrate the challengingly new. The new has always been challenging, and man has always sought sanctuary in the traditional and enduring (in nature and the "Heritage Industry"). That backward glance should be used to propel us into the future, not to drag us back.

6. Service is fine: the personal sphere is now seen to be important to the point where it need not surprise us if modern, intelligent and motivated people find one-to-one service more interesting than the bigger scene of management in one form or another. Personal service would once have been thought bizarre in a talented indvidual, who should put himself into a wider sphere of influence or usefulness. The PM so accentuates the personal as to legitimise the work a person may do personally and directly with even a few or one other person.

7. New qualities of institution will be required. They will need to demonstrate that the institution (its impersonal enshrined habits, rules, hierarchies) is delivering what it says it does. But they will be under constant challenge as serving their own structured interests, not "The People". 

8 The State faces a new tyranny. In democracies, the State will be under constant challenge of having failed to accomodate The People (namely, any individual and his wish-list). States will do their best to seem like persons, but risk failing if they succeed in this: institutions exist to reconcile differences between persons: they cannot please everyone as they abitrate between people. 

9. Populism is the new engine of power. It is a consequence of the new status of the individual, any individual, that "The People" is now any person who can attract attention. The lone person can now become what was once the most feared unit in society: "The Mob". Victims and celebrities are now very important as arbiters of what is just or desirable. There will be a risk of a rush to the bottom, dumbing down, the tyranny of the feeble, sensitive or charismatic (worse if all these combine in a person). But the PM does not dictate that individualism be unbridled, only that it be very important. The PM might develop into being quite "communard" - no-one can tell where man's self-invention will lead.

10. Campaign groups are the face of the PM because they trade in and they institutionalise the personal. They are the voice of the person writ large. They take victims and confront the State, institutions and firms with their suffering, needs and rights.

11. The paradox of empowerment. The PM person often sees himself as a victim, condemned to affluence, moral squalor and life as a clever machine. But he should see himself as uniquely free and uniquely empowered. The PM forces one to see one's aloneness in an ocean of powerful forces (consumerism, the Mob). It forces one to see, too, one's responsibility as a self-creator: the buck stops here, especically for one's own behaviour. That can seem a responsibility for which one is ill-equipped. But it is perfectly possible to see these conditions in a far more positive light. One can reach for options of service and agency and interiority - one can be useful and potent and spiitual - in new ways. This is the challenge that Emerson and James threw down.

12 The transcental individual. The person self-creates at least to some extent. He is "self-made" in more than getting a living and assuming a new social status. The person is the location of his own value: he cannot seek validation from God or even other people. The person is powerful if only he will reach for his own strength to be so.These are the tenets of the PM. The individual is infused with value, and is transformative. To portray peopleporperly, both these properties should if possible be seen. Ray Carney says that it is their success in dealing with their subjects in way that Henry James and Robert Capra and Thomas Eakins have in common as creative geniuses.