Facing the Post-Modernist Threat

Ever once in a while, I get riled up and rail against post-modernist philosophy. Given that the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences last week managed to lose  20% of its TV ratings for this year's Oscar ceremony after it presented another dismal panoply of post-modernists film, I thought it time to speak up again. The only Oscar winner that most of us cared about was Gary Oldman's best actor award for playing Winston Churchill in "The Darkest Hour".

Have you noticed lately that, Sir Winston has been showing up everywhere on TV and in movies. It's like there is this sudden need among people for some kind of throwback hero like Churchill to step up and lead; to do the hard things we need done that the simpering diplomats of the past 20 years have been unable to do. It would explain the 2016 American presidential election anyway and the anger over the 2020 one where we got the opposite of a leader. And I hear Mel Gibson, hot off last year's hero biopic Hacksaw Ridge, is all set to resurrect Jesus in film with a sequel to The Passion. This should drive Hollywood's post-modernist establishment to the edge of insanity, which is after all where those guys like to build their mansions.

Someone in our online poetry group on Goodreads, apparently searching for something to believe in that could guide her poetic efforts, was trying to find out what post-modernism was the other day. Sadly, I can tell her for certain that the post-modernist intellectual philosophy offers no such guidance.Which is good news for bad poets who don't want to work very hard to create poems with rhyme or reason, I suppose. It means you can write crap and still be popular with the cool kids.

To understand what post-modernism, is you first must understand modernism. Throughout man's long history, up until pretty much the 19th century, life went on for everyone. If you were wealthy or a member of the nobility, you could count on remaining so for the most part. If you were poor or one of the rare members of the middle class, life would go on for you the way it did for your father. Then, at the end of the 18th century, America came along. People who came here or grew up here discovered that they could better themselves.

Then, a technological explosion began in the early 1800s and by the time the American Civil War was done people began to believe that technology and progress could make their lives better than that of their fathers. Soon by the early 1900s, people came to believe that life WOULD inevitably get better. Philosophers, in a fit of "wait for me I'm your leader" began to preach that now that man was making strides toward the ancient fantasy of a human-built utopia, that such a utopia was inevitable and God is an outmoded concept; a crutch we no longer needed as a race.

Modernism, as a philosophy, tells us we can expect that things will inevitably get better for us than they were for our parents. Never in human history was that so. Before the era of modernism, the best you could expect was the same short life of hard labor and poverty that your ancestors lived. If you were born to the nobility, you might rise in rank if you plotted against your peers successfully and enjoy a short stint as king or emperor before someone out maneuvered you and you lost your head over the deal. Modernism, then, was the belief that you'd be better off than your folks and your kids would be better off than you. All of this was entirely too cheery an attitude to the academic/philosophical complex, who, with the help of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, decided it was time for a change.

In order to prove they were out ahead of everybody, writers and philosophers like Nietzche, Kierkegaard and Lyotard had to come up with something more advanced and cynical (not to mention depressing). A couple of world wars helped their ideas along and post-modernism began to be advanced as the go-to philosophy in a world riddled with post-war PTSD. Post-modern philosophers began selling books to intellectual snobs who bought them in order to impress other intellectual snobs. They told these effete dandies that words mean whatever they want them to mean and that there is no such thing as objective truth. CS Lewis warned about the dangers of this philosophy in his essay, Men Without Chests which I highly recommend you read. It explains a lot about what went wrong in academia and education that brought this generation to this sad condition..

Post-modernism rejects the idea that there is any meaning in life at all. Self-proclaimed post modernists see themselves as bravely embracing the monumentally depressing idea that, not only is there no God but that there is no meaning to life at all. The mantra of post-modernism could well be "Shit Happens and Then You Die!"

The effect of post-modernism can be seen in the spate of dismal books and films put out by those educated in the last part of the twentieth century - films with no point, no plot and no happy endings. Oh, they still make the older variety because it makes money for them so they can make "important" films that lose money. It's little wonder that no one except "artists" and film-makers gave a rat's hoo-hah about the movies that have won Oscars pretty much for the last two decades. Most of the award-winning films were post-modernist exercises in meaningless misery and depression.
Ratings for this year's Oscar ceremony were down again this year and the whole thing appears to be sliding into utter irrelevance with the movie ticket buying public,

So, I think it's high time I do a little more preaching about it. Post-modernism is killing a significant portion of the movie industry even as more and more cynical producers and artistes embrace the philosophy. Were it not for less "intellectually gifted" film-makers producing a lot of throwback block-buster paeans to the idea of heroes and lives that have meaning, Hollywood would not have had the money to roll out awards for the dismal lineup of post-modernist misery that was on display at this year's Oscars. Significantly, few people saw this year's Oscar winners with one notable exception - Gary Oldman's brilliant turn as Winston Churchill, a figure most progressives despise.

Humans need to tell stories.
It's in our nature to ascribe meaning
to our lives and to what we do with them

Human beings have an innate need to tell stories about ourselves; stories in which we are the heroes and which ascribe some meaning to our lives. Post-modernists seem to think this is weak and cowardly and that we should simply accept the idea that life has no purpose as all truly enlightened people do. We evolved, we kill each other a lot and there's no point to it. At least that's the story. After all, one day the sun will explode and kill us all or an asteroid will drop on our heads. There's no point to life they say other than to, as Solomon presciently described this vacuous philosophy, "Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die!"

I think many of us are still modernists or old-style Christians at least. Sadly, I fear we are becoming an endangered species, though. Christianity was probably the greatest of the precursors to modernism in that Jesus taught us to believe that life has a point and that, at the very least, we should be getting better as human beings. Christians have the temerity to believe that we have a purpose and that purpose is to leave the world better than we found it. Christians have always believed that things could get better and would get better at some point. At least that's what Christians believed who were allowed to read the Bible rather than being forced to submit to having scripture interpreted by the ancestors of the post-modern philosophers, the priesthood. Fortunately those guys couldn't burn Bible printers fast enough, and the Good News managed to get out there in spite of the intellectual oppression of the medieval era.

Why is it that people who are supposed to be intellectuals have such a dismal view of life? It probably has something to do with the whole "Thou shalt be like gods," philosophy first proposed to a gullible naked woman in a garden. It's a tragedy that our university system has devolved into the sex, drugs, rock n' roll mess we currently see on campus. It's not everywhere yet, but if the philosophers of this post-modern anti-enlightenment have their way, future generations will thoroughly embrace the "Live fast, die young, and be a handsome corpse" approach to life and, I fear, the last generation of Earthlings will die with a needle in their collective arms while playing apocalyptic video games in their mothers' basements while eating Ho-Hos and drinking Red Bull.

The irony will be that the thorough-going post-modernists will only be able to do this because their mothers were pre-post-modernists and kept feeding them hoping the kids would one day snap out of their funk and become better people! But Abraham Maslow, creator of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs  was wrong. Taking care of a kid's basic needs (food, clothing, shelter) does NOT lead to self-actualization after all. It appears to lead to a profound post-modernist funk and smelly basements.

We can only hope the next big blockbuster we see will be the actual Second Coming. Otherwise we may truly be without hope after all.

Tom King © 2018, 2023

I Blame Jean-François Lyotard

He's French - 'nuff said!

I have an ongoing irritation with post-modernist philosophy and the philosophers who preach it and the movie makers and novelists who make works of supposed art that are characterized by their thoroughly unhappy endings . I first encountered the post-modernists in my studies of literature. My thoroughly fundamentalist religious college did not encourage trips into post-modernism, but me being  curious as to what I was arguing against, I began to study up on the subject. I never did a lot of serious reading in post-modernist thought because being a follower of Christ, it rang so utterly false for me that I could only stand very short exposure to it. I've left theaters in the middle of post-modernist movies, turned off the television and threw away whole books full of it and I NEVER throw away books willingly. Okay, I can hear you relentlessly gloomy post-modernists now."But how can you say anything against post-modernism if you don't give it a chance.

I'll tell you how - the same way I can tell you I don't like Brussels Sprouts.  Oh, you can dress 'em up pretty and my wife, who is chronically depressed, loves them. She actually makes mildly edible Brussels Sprouts, but it is significant that she always eats twice as many of the little cabbage-like things as me every time. Now, I used to dislike onions until my sweetheart forcibly introduced me to them. It was eat onions or starve, so I ate the onions and learned to love them - rather like some of the commandments that were less easy to love than the other ones.  Like Brussels Sprouts, however, post-modernism always leaves a bad taste in my mouth and I've never been able to love it.

I looked up some post-modernist philosophers out of curiosity, just to see where all these dismal films and books were coming from.  Jean-François Lyotard jumped out at me as a suitable post-modernist villain for me for a lot of reasons.

1. Jean-François Lyotard spent his whole life trying to explain why socialism always failed so badly. Hey at least he was honest about it having failed and didn't try to rewrite history to cover up the catastrophic mistake that is socialism. Lyotard's criticism of the practical implementation of socialism was that the men who influenced the socialist movements, despite being avowed atheists to a man, were too heavily influenced by religion.  Karl Marx, who was Jewish and baptized Lutheran, Lyotard says was too catholic. Freud who was also Jewish, Lyotard says was too Jewish, even though Freud mostly worshipped at the church of sexual deviance. Lyotard, himself, as a self-procalimed expert on the subject, thought he could figure out a better way to make socialism work. Hitler thought the same thing too as I recall and look how that worked out for the rest of us.
2. "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” - Jean-François Lyotard.  The man said stuff like that all the time. What he meant was that there are no absolutes; no truth. I would not recommend spending an afternoon reading Jean-François Lyotard quotations. He didn't think much of those of us who search for truth and beauty or, worse yet, for God. Such "metanarratives" were beneath him.
3. In Jean-François's world, nothing is absolute. Everything is seen and experienced in relation to everything else - only limited bits of everything else; no more, no less moral; no less, no more right and proper. Lyotard's is a relative world in some ways like Einstein's, but without the systems within the chaos which give a reliable meaning to the universe so that one might muddle along in it with some sense of security. Lyotard thinks that having no generalized ideas, no ten commandments and no moral absolutes sets us free.  Personally, I think that if JF's world was the one I had to live in, a B.F. Skinnerian nightmare of humans as nothing more than stimulus programmed robots, I would not feel free at all. 

I watched an old Danny Kaye movie yesterday called "Me and the Colonel". The theme of the movie was that there were always at least two choices.  A Polish Colonel played by Curt Jurgens is in Paris just ahead of the Nazis. He is trying to get to England on a mission for the Polish government. In a conversation with the Danny Kaye character, the Colonel argues that if one were a man of honor there is only one choice in any difficult situation. Danny Kaye, who played a resourceful Jewish man on the run from the Nazis argued that if there was only one choice, he was left with no room to maneuver and without room to maneuver, he would already have been dead long ago back in Poland. In the end, the Colonel decides that there might indeed be more than one choice in a difficult situation, even for a man of honor.

They don't make movies like that anymore.  Instead, at the end of most movies - at least the ones that are considered for Oscars these days - either (a) everybody dies, (b) most everybody dies and one person is left to contemplate the futility of his own survival or (c) everybody just wanders off to do whatever comes next. We don't always see those endings, but directors film them all the time. We don't see them because they don't test well with audiences who want some resolution; that and the directors have producers who think their films ought to make a little money.

Jean-François Lyotard would see the need of the proletariat for sappy endings as a weakness brought on by our failure to reject religion and moral principles.  You know I'm kind of happy God made us long for happy endings and for closure. I think He made us storytellers for the same reason. I believe, B.F. Skinner notwithstanding, that humans do possess free will. I believe we also have a powerful need to resolve things; to find meaning in our lives here on this planet.

It's why we build things and finish them. Unlike beavers and bees and ants who never stop building, people like to get through with things. We may do maintenance or someday a remodel, but we like to come to an end at some point and then step back and admire our work. In that way we are like God, who built the world, we are told, in 6 days and then spent the 7th day leaning back in his celestial Barcalounger smiling with satisfaction at what he had made. We are, I firmly believe, made in His image. We're like our Dad in that we like to see a project finished.

Jean-François Lyotard would have us muddle along without resolution, without core beliefs or moral absolutes and would convince us that by denying our fundamental mental makeup, we would somehow make ourselves free.  Moses warned us about guys like JFL in the first book he ever wrote. Lyotard's philosophical father told a naive young woman in a garden that obedience was passe' and that, in fact, disobedience would make you like gods.

It always comes back to the lie about how we can become gods.  All the perfect man-made societies that ever failed, all the utopias that have crumbled to dust and all the best-laid schemes to end war, poverty, disease and suffering and didn't, stand mute witness to the devil's false premise. Every misery, every injustice, every life ended too soon can be traced back to that pernicious lie. 

Even so, come Lord Jesus.

Tom King
(c) 2015