A Response to Postmodernism

At some point in the twentieth century, largely due to historical forces and the novelty-propelled trajectory of modernism to its logical ends,  the concept of meaning was discarded as meaningless.  In the face of worldwide bloodshed on a previously unimaginable scale and the coming of age of a scientific world view in which materialism and reason relegated God and his heaven to a sideshow curiosity, we humans experienced "the shock of discovering that the universe was not made with us in mind."¹  Enter despair.  Enter postmodernism.

With the hope of universal truth summarily dispatched, all that was left was a plurality of local truths.  The absolute conceded to the relative, and the human impulse for exploration was distracted from the heavens by what was underneath the unturned stones at its feet.  In either view, whether heavenly or earthly in perspective, humanity had overlooked the most important feature of orientation - the horizon.

Humanity tends to take a throw-out-the-baby-with-the-bathwater approach to most things.  The synthesis of two extremes is rarely an accomplishment it can claim.  Existence is either meaningful or meaningless, either familiar or alien, either hopeful or desperate.  Realizing that we may not be able to know everything, we have chosen it as our lot to know nothing.  Having the equipment for knowledge but choosing ignorance has led us into a labyrinth of paradox and tautological dead-endings.  In short, we have lost our way.

Now I will be the first to admit that I am postmodern to the core.  Postmodernism has influenced and informed my life in a multitude of ways.  It has shaped my deeply rooted agnostic approach to the world, in which I question everything and accept nothing until it meets a rigorous standard of verity.  I question everything to the point of compulsiveness.  Yet, while consumed with this obsessive tendentiousness to doubt, I have refused to restrict my gaze from that which lies beyond my experience or knowledge.  I have chosen to continue looking outward.  I refuse to accept that a unit of anything lacks meaning outside of itself, whether it be a text, a theory, or a flower.  I abjure solipsism.

No matter how far we can reduce an entity of any kind to its most essential elements, that entity remains a symbiotic part of a system much larger than itself.  A human being can be reduced to atomic particles, but those particles are not a human being.  It is their specific organization and relation to one another, in the forming of atoms, elements, chemicals, molecules, cells, tissues, organs, and systems of organs, which ultimately comprise a human being.  Furthermore, the human being is nothing without the air she breathes, the earth upon which she walks, the teeming throng of other species with which she shares her earth, and the cosmic radiation within which that earth bathes.  Ultimately, we are the stuff of the stars, and the stars are us.

The point is that nothing exists without something else.  Cause and effect are real.  Context is real.  Though we can not yet comprehend causality and context in their totality, it does not follow that they are not there or not worth exploring.  It is in the grand, contextual web of all things in which we can and will find meaning.  It simply won't be the meaning which we had anticipated.

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1. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, p. 47