In our era of cancellations and topplings, censorious declarations and virtue signaling, recantations and exorcisms, it’s almost possible to feel nostalgic for the days when PoMo reigned supreme.
PoMo? Yes, or more formally, postmodernism — a set of suppositions about the world that once inspired the academic priesthood and shaped the cultural landscape. In its early phase, postmodernism rode in on the iconoclasm of the 1960s, rejecting reason as the fundamental arbiter of matters great and small. For PoMo, truth is an illusion; it is merely a form of opinion. “Objectivity,” for PoMo, is a prejudice. “Truth,” for PoMo, is a sociological phenomenon. The literary scholar Stanley Fish compared the establishment of scientific truth to a game of baseball: The outcome is determined by the game’s rules. The spirit of postmodernism allowed no absolutes, no transcendent principles, no moral compasses, except for one: that there were no absolutes, transcendent principles, or moral compasses.
In the arts, postmodernism combined camp and comedy and irony and playfulness and even a bit of nihilism, creating an attitude of knowing negativity. In 1971, when Philip Roth first visited Czechoslovakia — then under Soviet domination — he was struck by how different that literary world was from his own. He noted, “I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters,” while for a Czech writer, “nothing goes and everything matters.” Everything goes and nothing matters: Such was postmodernism, the spirit of the late-20th century.
PoMo didn’t lose ground until the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath made its arguments seem somewhat quaint. Today, they seem almost grotesquely dated. No overarching standards? Nonsense! Race and gender are so fundamental that they govern cultural and political debates and guide the drumbeats of the media. No hierarchy of values? Ridiculous! Now, if you violate any of the fundamental principles of Woke religion, you are subject to a ceremonial exorcism requiring formulaic apologies and professional exile. …Source
