Skiffle It Just a Little Bit

skiffle it just a little bit...

Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo

Even in seminary, I don't encounter many people that recognize the core insights of postmodernism. There is a tendency to reduce postmodernism to a few current cultural manifestations. Postmodernism is about authenticity. It's pragmatic. It's relative. It's organic. It's tribal tattoos, ambient jazz, and t-shirts with 'tude. But postmodernism is really about something much more important and subtle. Postmodernists believe that change and diversity are fundamental to reality. Our world exists in a perpetual cycle of evolution and devolution, generation and degeneration, living and dying. Beauty and truth aren't imposed on reality. They emerge out of the process of fermentation and cross-pollinization that is integral to how life develops, grows, and reproduces. The process of change is at the very heart of what it means to be postmodern. Postmoderns don't fixate on any one form of culture, because as soon as one becomes bound by form or trapped by the single, static moment in time, one ceases to be living in harmony with change - one ceases to be postmodern.

In the eyes of postmoderns, modernism isn't bad. It just suffers from a limited design that prevents it from staying relevant in a culture dominated by an accelerating rate of change. The insistence of modernists on defining all of reality in terms of systematic frameworks is their Achilles' heel. Our culture changes too quickly for anyone to be able to develop a systematic explanation that is actually relevant. By the time they have ironed out all of the inconsistency from their frameworks, the culture has changed so much that no one even cares about the questions that the systematics are trying to answer. Modernists are forever chasing the culture, falling further and further behind, victims of their over-engineered approach to coping with reality.

Single, monolithic, systematic approaches just don't work anymore. No one system can ever adapt quickly enough to keep up with all the new developments of life in the twenty-first century. Those of us who consider ourselves postmodernists don't have to worry about battling modernism or waste time trying to convert people to postmodernism. Modernism is doomed to obsolescence by its very nature. But that doesn't mean that postmodernism isn't doomed either. Postmodernism may show some potential as a philosophy that could withstand the radically shifting sands of a culture in perpetual motion. But really, if we're honest, postmodernism is still half-baked. It's a design that isn't even finished yet. We don't know what this loaf will look like when it finally sets up. We don't know for sure if the design will actually be something that will work in the real world. Until we start testing our theories and iteratively