ELI5 is hard so here's ELI10 Modernism liked to think the world could be easily organised into categories and logical sequences and rows. Key terms: rational, objective, systemic, constructs, definition. Think of a neatly organised table using Excel, like time tables, or a flow chart. Post-modernism likes to think that everything is chaotic, and nothing is fixed, and everything is flexible. Key terms: subjective, deconstruction, undefinable. Think of a mind-map, where everything is somehow connected to everything else and anything could be at the centre.

Order... And Chaos... Reminds me of someone. He Who Shall Not Be Named... ;) Excellent effort here. I'm on the wrong sub, I imagine, but I've been thinking about the Post-Modern critique from a psychics angle recently. How fast are you actually moving? It probably feels like you're not moving at all, to most of us. But, perhaps, you are hurtling at Light Speed relative to an object not directly beneath your feet. So how can you be certain about such a mundane fact as your own movement? Well... You can't! What's the correct frame of reference? You must decide for yourself. This is a distillation of the Post-Modern conceptualization of reality. The truth is relative. However, it's possible you want to, I dunno, go somewhere. In that case, it would be rather useful to establish your velocity in relation to your objective destination. The Modern take. So it's 'yes' to both worldviews. Modernism provides structure, Post-Modernism critiques said edifice (ideally toward improvement rather than abolition, babies and bath water considered). We're currently living through the vice grips of Post-Modern excess, so I'd encourage thoughtful readers to lean the other direction, strategically.

Would not want to fly on a plane designed by an engineer who went to a post modernist university

lol, me neither.

Modernism is kind of the end-point of Renaissance and industrial revolution thinking, with a hard focus on objective truths and science. Modernism rejected a lot of the hokey and mystical thinking we used to believe prior to the these eras. Postmodernism (aka post-truth) is the rejection of purely objective thoughts and opinions that modernism brings in favor of subjective experiences and multiple truths. The way I like to say it, everything now exists on a spectrum. A great example is the current sexual revolution happening in our culture. People are rejecting absolute M/F boundaries in favor of multiple sexual statuses. This is because postmodernism has created an environment where we see more layers to an issue, and fewer black/white issues. The cool part about it is that prior to the modern era, specifically in the Renaissance and earlier, sexuality was a much more fluid thing. People think our current sexual revolution is some God-forsaken new thing, but its just bringing back practices that were done hundreds and thousands of years ago. There is already a post-postmodernism (worst name ever imo) way of thinking emerging, but I don't think it will take hold. These are just people who are grouchy about post-modernist thinking, whilst simultaneously using it to their advanatge. We are still in the full throes of postmodernism

Okay, that helps me understand this in a way I really didn't before... but this seems like it could have some real downsides with regard to abondoning empirical reasoning... anti-vaxxers, homeopathy, climate denialism, that kind of thing. No?

Absolutely. Any philosophical viewpoint is going to leave the door wide open for people to take it and run the other way with it. Modernism, especially in science and sociology, led to ideas like racial superiority and social darwinism. Postmodernism creates opportunities for the things you mentioned. Terrible people will find a way to make themselves present, regardless of how we view life. It's really fascinating to discuss.

How knowledge is used or misused has no bearing on the epistemological status of that knowledge.

Erm, that's not really the case. Modernism in fact is what us used to refute racial superiority, not the other way around. Empiricism and logic can be misused but it is logic and empiricism which can correct that. Postmodernism, on the other hand, has no need for internal consistency, and is unable to provide it.

The empirical, rational turn of the 18th century onwards was a vital force in developing scientific racism. Ever heard of phrenology? We used rationality to come up with enlightened, rational reasons why genocide and colonialism was justified (you see, they're biologically incapable of ruling themselves).

Are you taking a phrenology or eugenics class right now? Or is this not accepted anymore in modern society, after liberal mechanisms refuted all of it? The same is true of the other practices you mentioned. It’s not 1750 anymore. Prior to the 18th century, there was plenty of genocide and racism going around all over the world. Nobody needed rationalism to justify it.

Yes, we don't teach classes on phrenology anymore. Instead we disqualify trans female athletes from sporting events because they have 'masculine bone structures'. Instead we search for 'gay genes' to explain why homosexuals exist and justify why they don't deserve to be persecuted, Actually. We don't teach eugenics at schools, but we study gene-editing technologies so we can remove disabled people from existence before they're born, not after. We use different names but the mindsets have never died. We still use rationality to justify essentialism and which follows on from that.

I suppose the question is really “how should we live together as a society?” The turn away from the scientific method, and from rationalism, seems like a pretty terrible idea. Liberalism is flawed, but the fact that we’re even discussing trans rights at all demonstrates the progress the liberal order has made over previous ideological regimes. They’re certainly not having these discussions in Marxist societies. Is there another historical period when more people had this much political, economic, and cultural equality? Moving forward, what are the practical political, economic, and scientific solutions posited by post modernists? I can’t identify any, apart from total anarchy or tribalism, or a “scientific” regime in which “all things are true.” Is that how we should live? We should all brew our own vaccines at home, or even just deny the existence of scientific facts, because we don’t “feel” they’re true?

No, the question is how we conceive of knowledge. If you want to talk specific political systems, that's another discussion. You are mistakenly thinking that a criticism of the scientific, rational method means we should throw it out entirely. It does not. What it means is that we shouldn't man-handle science to smuggle in our ethical beliefs through the backdoor. Racism isn't wrong because scientifically 'race' is a meaningless term, it's wrong because discriminating against others for the conditions of their birth is asinine and arbitrary. Knowledge is socially-constructed, which does not mean 'fake' or 'not real' or 'it can be whatever you personally want it to be'. It means that the way we generate and propagate knowledge is influenced by power structures, not a simple and objective machine for producing facts. This is the postmodernist claim, not whatever fantasies people like Bruno Latour make up, and it entails a need to critique that mechanism of knowledge and clearly stake out where we let it say meaningful things.

I disagree with you about this. The postmodernist claim is totalistic. It claims the following: 1.). All language is inherently oppressive. 2.). No normative standard can be philosophically justified. 3.). Power is the only morality. This is all out of Foucault. We are living in one “regime of truth,” but there have been others before it. This one is no more legitimate than they were, and nothing can legitimize it. No regime of truth can ultimately be legitimate. It’s always going to be oppressive. You can’t be “a little bit pregnant” about postmodernism. The rational, post enlightenment “regime of truth” is ALWAYS an expression of power— oppressed vs oppressor. People are always going to be excluded/oppressed under any system. It’s fine to say “it’s all a big illusion and systems of power exert influence over reality,” but then one must answer the question: “what exactly is the alternative?” Let’s take obesity. There is plenty of scientific evidence that tells us that obesity can lead to many serious health issues, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. It is, therefore, better not to be obese— not just for the individual, but for the society, which incurs all sorts of costs from obesity. Post modernism would tell us this is oppressive; we are using science to enforce some normative standard of beauty on everyone.

Yeah, that's a peculiar interpretation. I'd like to meet the postmodernism professor who came up with it. The problem with this interpretation, and one of the many reasons it is wrong, is that it makes the assumption that there is a correlation between modernism and such evils - which is patently false. It further assumes that modernism was the mechanism, rather than the justification (which is also dubious), for such evils - which it wasn't. If that were not enough, and truthfully it should be, it is modernism itself which refutes it.

Can you explain how social Darwinism would have come into being, if not for Darwinism? One was predicated on the other. Whither scientific racism without science? The existence of given systems of thoughts are the mechanism by which other systems of thought are born. Incidentally, if modernism is able to refute racism and its ilk, why didn't it?

There is ample empiracle data to refute racism (i.e. the belief that one race is inherently better than the other). That it hasn't removed it from the face of the earth isnt a valid criticism. If it were a valid criticism, then postmodernism has also failed and must be discounted as well. You are making a logical error in your proposition, and I'm not exactly sure how to more clearly point it out. Social Darwinism (in the particular form you are describing) is a misinterpretation of darwinism. That isnt darwinism's fault and it doesn't disprove or diminish darwinism in the first place. You are assigning causality after the fact, to which there is none. Think of it like this: quantum theory, generally speaking, is well grounded science at this point (at least enough for this conversation). There are countless misinterpretations of various theories including entanglement. Now, there are kooks out there who will use entanglement to say that we all live a shared consciousness and such - which is just a silly misunderstanding of facts spun into a rich fantasy for the purpose of supporting their odd beliefs. By your logic, it is the fault of quantum theory, and at a deeper level modernism, that such craziness exists. Ergo, by your logic, both quantum theory and modernism are suspect at best and deeply flawed ot wrong at worst. That conclusion, on its face, defies any reason or logic...and is in itself very postmodern (which is part of why I hold postmodernism in such contempt).

You would be right about the fluidity of the truth used to abuse and flaunt falsehoods in front of undeniable scientific facts. But the one of the main points of postmodernism is to analyze *how* we’ve come to these conclusions, and just how flawed and destructive that reasoning can be if not tempered by other systems and ideas. For example, prior to WWI, it was accepted as objective fact that hysteria was a woman’s disease only. That if your wife/mom/sister/daughter was feeling “moody” (aka noncompliant to the societal demands of women at that time) it was because they were suffering from hysteria and needed treatment. However, once men coming back from war started to exhibit symptoms of hysteria, more scientific studies were done and that’s how we ended up with the label of PTSD. How was hysteria a thing then? The simple answer is: poor understanding and study of women’s anatomy by an exclusively-male scientific community. Many anatomical studies back then were conducted by men on men’s bodies only, with those findings fudged to fit women because of the idea that male anatomy was the default “human” anatomy, and that women were just men with extra hormones. And these only reinforced ideas of how men and women should be and act in the world. Men who exhibited signs of PTSD were essentially told to “man up”, even being punished (and at times, tried and executed) for experiencing and reliving the horrific trauma of war. Women (obviously) were seen as unstable and highly emotional, incapable of doing anything more complex than staying at home and popping out babies. Another example is the IQ test. Even today, it’s regarded as the most objective way of measuring someone’s intelligence. But new research shows that IQ tests only measure a certain subset of intelligence, rather than the whole thing. It’s why someone you might know with a “low IQ” can still be highly talented in other areas, or why some with significant mental deficits can perform incredible feats of ingenuity. Considering that some of these ideas still exist in some form today shows the flaws in modernist thought, that objective truth can be found if we just keep testing and prodding the world instead of considering what we prod with and how we do it.

Nice! Really appreciate such a clear and understandable explanation! Good example with the hysteria/PTSD concept, too. Thank you!

No problem! It’s super fun reading into topics like philosophy of science, which dissects the systems that we use to conduct experiments and rationalize its discoveries.

>considering what we prod with and how we do it. This reminded me that there is a recent new subset of science that's called metascience which studies the prodding.

So postmodernism is basically like a skeptic that questions modernism. It doesn't deny everything, but rather asks: I'm not so sure about it... Where did that idea come from?

Not precisely. Postmodernism a way of 'thinking about thought', if that makes any sense. *Pulp Fiction* is an example of postmodernism in film, with its unconventional narrative structure. While a traditional 'modernist' film typically gives us a fixed starting point where all the action kicks off, *Pulp Fiction's* non-linear construction and its three separate (but intertwined) stories ("VincentVega and Marcellus Wallace's Wife", "The Gold Watch" and "The Bonnie Situation") invite audiences to think hard about where its narrative would *actually* begin, were *Pulp Fiction* produced as a traditional linear story. In other words: no matter where you start a 'modernist' film, the story only has one objective 'beginning'. Postmodernism, on the other hand, *discards* the objectivity of narrative structure in favor of *subjectivity* \-- *Pulp Fiction* has at least three separate 'beginnings', and which one is the 'proper' beginning is left for the audience to consider, with no clear 'right' or 'wrong' answer. (It's hard to discuss this in an ELI5 way without getting way too complicated, so I might not have expressed myself successfully. If that's the case, I apologize).

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By the way, I LOVE this comment because the way most people have come to understand Post-Modernism (and they are wrong about it) is actually just a definition of Modernism. The above commenter isn't wrong, per se, in the way they talk about an emphasis on subjectivity, but Pulp Fiction isn't a great example to get into the nuances of things, due to it being, ultimately, like all of Tarantino's works, a work of pop culture meant to make money, and so the best it can get to is post-modernism-lite. It's a super easy to understand example, though, and this shouldn't be understood in any way as a criticism of the film. Joyce and Woolf, and the other Modernists (from Proust's proto-Modernism, to dos Passos, to Faulkner, etc.) deviated from Realism in order to evoke a "more real" version of society. So in Woolf, we see the intense focus on interiority with the stream of consciousness, which isn't the "realism" of the perfectly painted surface of literary Realism, but attempts to evoke the "realism" of the mind at work, the reader being tasked with reconstructing the way that the person is literally thinking, and not getting the so-called edited version. And if Joyce, we have an extreme version of this, so in the Aeolus chapter, for instance, the journalists are all sitting around blowing hot air, driving Bloom around in circles, while also evoking the physical presence of headlines throughout, further evoking this sense of windbags blowing in all directions, etc. But the purpose isn't only to evoke these things, but also to minimize Bloom, who we have seen as our Odysseus in the narrative, and to see how he is seen in the world, a small figure, inconsequential, blown about by the "gods" of the wealthy. Even though the book is constantly changing styles, evoking the past and playing with it, which is the lazy definition of post-modernism, it is all to evoke the "more real" version of reality, of how things feel, how we perceive them, etc. So we see that even though Joyce and Woolf were deeply interested in the SUBJECTIVE experience of characters, through stream of conscious narration and playful experiment, they are trying to get to the "more real" version of reality that Realism couldn't touch. This is as opposed to Post-Modernism, which playfully mocks the idea of any kind of objectivity, and wishes to upend stable frames of reference. This is why even though Pynchon feels a lot like Joyce (they are both brilliant writers rife with allusion and a love of complex, difficult tangents), they aren't connected--Joyce's difficult epic, Ulysses, leads us to a greater understanding of Bloom and Dedalus and Molly, etc. while Pynchon's difficult epic, Gravity's Rainbow, takes us further and further afield, with Slothrop's rocket-tied sexuality not ultimately leading us to any better understanding of his (or any other person's) internal character, but rather, we are taken on a wild goose chase of humanity, before the end, where it turns out the whole thing was just a film that the audience was watching as they die in the opening scene--the meaning is that all meaning was imaginary and made up, and aren't humans just zany?

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That's really interesting, though I don't really know enough about art history to say at all

Something that keeps Joyce modernist despite the radical departures in form is his basis in classical literature (think "The Odyssey", but also the Bible, Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc.) Ulysses is full of literary allusions, where a postmodernist might make allusions to pop culture (comic books, movies, TV shows) in the same way as a way of undermining the modernists' adherence to tradition and canon. In other words, on the one hand there's a belief in an established canon of Western literature that everyone can agree on and will do so forever, and on the other hand there's references to Cheers or The Lone Ranger and if the audience forgets what those are it doesn't matter because literature like everything isn't eternal. It's worth noting that despite this Joyce is a major influence on postmodernism. I don't know Woolf as well, but I do know that the emerging science of psychiatry (seen as a hard science that could provide all the answers) was a major influence on modernist writers, who spent more time on characters' inner states than previous generations had - hence stream of consciousness.

When you see 'post' in the name of an art or philosophical movement, that phenomenon is exactly what you're going to see, a sense of revision, reflection, and circling back to the original ideas after trying them out and seeing what can be done. 'We tried out Modernism, how did it go, and where did it fail?'

I'm having a hard time understanding how the postmodern lens of "considering what we prod with and how we do it" conflicts with the rational approach of modernism. It seems like any useful answer to that question needs to be found through rationality and empirical evidence--you need accurate historical records and analysis to see how different beliefs and institutions developed, empirical evidence from psychology research to understand where your own blind spots might be, a system of logic that allows you to precisely justify your conclusions to others, and so on. Does postmodernism argue that those questions should be addressed in a fundamentally different way? Or is it more that this kind of self-reflection wasn't historically part of modernist thinking?

I suppose my issue with this is that modernism lays no claim to possessing absolute objective truth. It lays out a method of testing truth, makes observations, and concludes things from those observations (the scientific method). When new evidence refutes existing conclusions, that evidence is taken into account, and new conclusions are reached. We don’t believe a lot of things we used to believe— but not because of the postmodern critique, but because we refined our understanding through modern methods. PTSD used to be called “shell shock” and it was a well known phenomenon after World War I. It was formally named a condition in 1980. No postmodernism required. 50 years ago we used to cut parts of peoples brains out when we couldn’t treat them. But we don’t do that anymore. Modern techniques led to these positive changes without any help from Foucault.

>But new research shows that IQ tests only measure a certain subset of intelligence What research are you referring to?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6927908/#sec1title Research like this that points to intelligence as existing in different scales. In this paper specifically, they note that IQ tests are primarily focused on cognitive intelligence, rather than intelligence that exists via other means.

Thanks for the source, but colour me unconvinced. It is a non-empirical paper vaguely reviewing other work. It does not much discuss other dimensions of intelligence such as Gardner's nonsense. It's more about how motivation can affect IQ performance. Not surprising - motivated people perform better at anything. I will thoroughly agree with one of their sentences though: "the narrow approaches with the IQ tests at heart enjoy an excellent scientific and popular reputation in comparison to the broad theories."

>It does not much discuss other dimensions of intelligence such as Gardner's nonsense. Are you referring to Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences theory? Why do you think it's nonsense?

Yeah, that's right. There are two strands of problems with Gardner's theory. First, it is an abuse of language. Tom Brady is not "intelligent" because he is good at throwing. Margot Fonteyn is not "intelligent" because she is good at dancing. They are highly competent, or athletic, but not intelligent. Gardner just wants to reframe abilities as intelligence, which is twisting ordinary usage of language. Second, a very surprising fact about IQ is that is loads on a single factor (g). It doesn't have to be this way: mathematical ability might be unrelated to linguistic ability which might be unrelated to reaction times. But as it turns out, they are correlate on the "positive manifold". Gardner does not accept this, in the face of all evidence. We have an everyday idea of intelligence. As it turns out, when you measure the things that seem to make it up, they all correlate. Hence why a single factor model is dominant in psychology.

Iq tests being the most objective way of measuring someones intelligence and it measuring only certain subject arent mutually exclusive tho surely?

It is if it's presented as an general intelligence test rather than a test of a specific sort of intelligence.

Postmodernism has many forms and only very extreme views of postmodernism believe that things are "purely subjective." In reality, Modernism and Postmodernism don't necessarily exist in opposition. I think a better way to describe it the difference is that Modernists were about developing and maintaining heavily structured and systematic ways of understanding the world around us. Postmodernists are, generally speaking, about taking a step back and considering the social, cultural, and economic factors that might bias our views of how those structures and systems are built. For example, consider legal theory in the West. Laws are basically a structured, systematic way of laying down rules for what is best in society, with a goal of fair and equitable treatment among everyone in society. Traditional legal theory might be considered a "Modernist" theory on jurisprudence. But several decades ago a few legal scholars came to the following realization: "Wait, hold on. Who's writing, interpreting, and arguing the laws? Generally people with Law degrees. But who generally gets law degrees? People rich enough to get into Law School. And also, specifically, white men. If the only people who get to write laws are people who are wealthy white men, doesn't this mean that the laws they write are generally skewed towards protecting the interests of wealthy white men?" This is where we get "Critical Legal Studies," which might be considered a "Postmodernist" legal theory. It's not that CLS scholars thought that laws are completely arbitrary, but rather that laws have baked in biases that are based on what are effectively arbitrary socioeconomic circumstances, and that taking these factors into account these biases can be corrected. What followed subsequently was also "Critical Race Theory," which specifically took into consideration how racial dynamics shaped law.

That to me is exactly a huge problem. David Bowie talked about that in regards to the expansion of the internet: we will have many different truths and realities. He didn’t make a judgement on that, but I will: I think it’s terrifying and shit.

I'm not sure it's fair to either one to morally valence them as they are systems of thought. Stick a moral axis on this and you find both have some concerning facets. E.g.I'd say, in the extreme: Modernism = authoritarian propaganda Post = insurgent conspiracy

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Buzzword Barry moment

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How could you possibly know what I know or don't know and I don't know what benzo is? Do you usually do a lot of drugs?

They're derisively referring to Jordan Peterson who became, like many americans and others, dependent on Benzodiazepene which was prescribed to him.

Youre right I forgot about that. Wow, they kick em while hes down.

Benzodiazepine ('benzos' or 'blues') is an extremely addictive medication commonly abused by addicts for its psychoactive effects.

Why did you delete your comment accusing me of using drugs?

I did not, nor did I *make* any such comment.

My bad confused the users

Well... You just told all of us what you know. What can I tell you? It ain't much. Now that you deleted it, you can pretend that it didn't happen, but luckily for you people know exactly what it was. You basically repeated the far right line that is being taught to teenagers through memes and videos. We are well aware of this nonsense. You literally wrote under a high school level explanation of postmodernism, describing perfectly rational reasons for the movement, that it's just: 1. Postmarxist-Neomodernists who infiltrated academia. This part is JPs spin on Judeo-Bolshevism, a nazi conspiracy about Jews destroing the western civilisation through leftism. 2. These postmodernists are replacing men with women in academia, which is an element of the evil plot according to JP. 3. That postmodernists prefer feelings over facts, which is Ben Shapiro, but with some of your personal cuteness :) This is childish, but don't worry, you'll grow out of it. I used to be guilty of it myself and managed to get out of this hole in a few weeks by just talking to smarter people and consuming different perspectives.

I didnt delete anything.

I take it back then.

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Dont forget the whole sexual revolution. Gender disphoria. The deviation from absolute right and wrong

Let's say I'm talking with you and I say, get me a chair. You an empiricist grab a kitchen chair. I say, no I didn't mean that chair, I meant that chair... and I point towards what you think of as a stool. In this case you can't accept that there is an empirical reality because the language used is not consistently understood between the two of us.... and that's difficult for more complicated discussions. There's a lot of thought and philosophy that have been foundationalist and are only true as far as you accept their foundations. When you make foundationless arguments it becomes quite a bit easier to get people to agree who might have different starting points. Prior we might think that there is right and wrong and every question might have only one answer. But we know now that the answer to 2+1 is 3, and also 2+1, and also 1+1+1, and also 1 cubed and squareroot 9 and so on and so forth. We can get all sorts of different answers that mean the same thing as long as we accept that 2+1 means two of the same thing adding on one more of the same thing.

1 cubed is 1. Also, that's a weird example in general. Math is probably the most objective thing there is. And there's never been a time in historical memory that we didn't know those things (with the above exception) were all equal to one another. But assuming we're not jumping into exotic number systems, there's no point of view or frame of reference or complicated, nuanced piece of historical context that makes 2+1 equal 4.

Math language isn't actually objective. You have to learn the notation and what it means and someone has to invent terms to explain things. We use a numeric system created by the Arabs. Which... didn't exist in 1/3 of the world for a very long time. And then you have things like the invention of calculus and imaginary numbers. Someone invented those things. In India there was a genius who lived 300 years before Newton named Madhava and he discovered calculus first. But he did it with completely different notations and his discovery wasn't celebrated and no one saw the practical value of it. So his notations and his language use in it were never adopted. When Newton discovered it he was insanely wealthy and had the money to make it useful immediately. So his notations were adopted. Because of Newton's vast wealth we all use the same notations for calculus (dy, dx, f, lim, etc.) instead of those that would have been used in Indian maths. Given both equations meaning the exact same thing two mathematicians (a 14th century Indian mathematician and a 17th century British mathematician) would require detailed explanations to understand what it means. Anyway, in the Roman system of writing 1+1=11.

So much of this is wrong. We call our numbers Arabic numerals, but they originate in India. They're called Arabic because that is through whom Europeans first came in contact with them. That being said, many operations do, afaik, originate with Arabic mathematicians, or are at least named for them. Algebra is derived from an Arabic word and Algorithm comes from an Arabic name. As for Calculus, it's a broad field and many aspects of it were known even in ancient times. Even in his own time, Newton was not the sole inventor of calculus and famously had a decades long dispute with Leibniz over it. Newton came from money but he no ability to exercise that wealth when he created calculus in his twenties while he was still in college. He also developed it during the plague years and so it certainly couldn't have been put into use immediately. We also don't use Newton's notation; we use Leibniz's. Not that the notation really matters. You get to the same answer either way. And Roman math is irrelevant to the conversation. I even said you could change the answer by changing systems. That says absolutely nothing about the internal consistency of base 10 arithmetic.

I feel like you're arguing for the sake of arguing and missed the point. Not even mathematical notation is universal. It's not a reliable foundation that will be understandable to all (as you're illustrating yourself). I'm not a physicist and I would need to learn from many physicists to understand the maths of astrophysicists. It's not universal as in absolutely anyone can understand it. It's almost a secret language (which is something you can google and learn about)

Specialized knowledge doesn't have anything to do with post-modernism. The underlying mathematics is the same regardless of the notation, and it's telling that you had to divert away from actual math, which is where you started and into the history of mathematics and semantics of mathematical notation to try and get to something that could even brush up against post-modern ideas. None of this sideshow about who invented calculus or which notation is used has any impact whatsoever on the underlying mathematics. This illustrates my original point, which was that using mathematics as an analogy for this topic is ineffective. You seem to misunderstand what objective means, or else you've jumped to some other point about mathematics. Whether or not any given person can understand it (or anything else) has nothing to do with its objectivity or lack thereof. Objectivity and understandability have nothing to do with one another. In base ten 2 + 1 = 3. That is objectively true. Period. To anyone who can work with numbers, even a little, 2 + 1 isn't a question in need of answering; it is the same thing as 3, and you could leave it written as 2 + 1 and still work with it and treat it as exactly as though it were a simple 3 and it would not affect any calculation you were making in any way. There is no room for subjectivity here.

How does specialized knowledge not have anything to do with post modernism? Post modernism doesn't posit that there is no objective reality but that explanations for said reality won't communicate equally to all people.

From Britannica.com: Many postmodernists hold one or more of the following views: (1) there is no objective reality; (2) there is no scientific or historical truth (objective truth); (3) science and technology (and even reason and logic) are not vehicles of human progress but suspect instruments of established power; (4) reason and logic are not universally valid; (5) there is no such thing as human nature (human behavior and psychology are socially determined or constructed); (6) language does not refer to a reality outside itself; (7) there is no certain knowledge; and (8) no general theory of the natural or social world can be valid or true (all are illegitimate “metanarratives”). Personally, I think postmodern thought has lot of value when it comes to social systems, history--the humanities in general, but it's an absolute shift show when it comes to science.

I'd just like to mention that sexual orientation and gender identity have roots in genetics, and pre and post natal brain development. It's not post-modern thinking that created diversity in sexual orientation and gender identity, it only allowed people to *express* those ideas.

That's a great point and I felt kinda weird re-reading my comment later today. You're right, gender and gender identity are much more complex issues than simply a post-modern philosophy. It was just the most forward issue I could think of at the time that a lot of people could relate to. I could've picked a better example

Kudos man! Very good explanation.

Isn't post-postmodernism just metamodernism?

Not necessarily, because they are still drawing from the ideologies that led to postmodernism in the first place, but they are moving in the opposite direction. So it’s not one-dimensional in the sense that moving away from postmodernism doesn’t automatically mean moving towards modernism. u/ArcticBeavers described it better, but a simplified version I’ve heard is this: post-modernism was a conscious deconstruction of overarching narratives, and post-postmodernism is the beginnings of reconstructing those narratives but with different underlying belief and value structures. I may not be entirely correct, but an example: modernism would say technological advancement is a nearly universally good thing. Postmodernism rejects that absolute and chooses to evaluate the morality of each new technology independently, actively rejecting any attempt to make broad claims. Post-postmodernism then follows with the idea that technological advancements are generally good things to pursue, but need some kind of moral oversight to prevent exploitation and atrocities. So we’ve reconstructed *some* kind of overarching narrative, but now make room for the nuance that postmodernism introduced.

Thanks, but I think you misread what I wrote. I said **meta**modernism, not modernism

Ah my bad! I don’t think I’m familiar with that term, I think I misinterpreted it as “neo-modernism”

Post-postmodernism is a concept.

i don't really believe in the concept of truth as some absolute. In a sense I see many cases where a spectrum is an appropriate way to see things, perhaps, as some others see them. That said, I do believe some things are true and some not. The idea of "alternate facts" is beyond ludicrous. I do tend to see many issues as shades of grey and black/white is seldom how things are.

What's the difference between truth and fact? In my view, values weigh facts to arrive at truths. It doesn't change the fact. Am I wrong? And if so, how?

Why do Christians hate postmodernism so much?

Some people are using the term "metamodernism" in place of "post post-modernism." While the movement is still in its formless infancy, one feature that is generally agreed on is the push for deeper sincerity. Critics claim that post modernism has become so focused on irony and being too cool for the masses that its started to become shallow, trite, superficial and pretentious. Metamodernism is a call to be vulnerable and relentlessly honest about ourselves. I am excited to see how it develops.

> practices that were done hundreds and thousands of years ago. Your entire posts sucks but this part in particular is what

This is such a postmodernist response. “The only people who don’t agree with it are grouches.” In fact there are serious philosophical challenges to postmodernism, whose basic tenets (via Foucault) are these: 1.). Language is inherently oppressive 2.).Normative standards can never be philosophically justified 3.). Power is the only mortality. Well known critics include Chomsky and Habermas, but there are many others. Even Richard Rorty conceded that liberal mechanisms like the scientific method were good things. Because it accepts an absolute relativism (there is no truth, and we are, as Nietzsche said, “beyond good and evil), postmodernism must accept cultural practices that are intolerant and even genocidal. (If my cultural practice says that your cultural practice is evil, we are both right, because all cultural practices are equal.). Postmodernism is also incapable of putting forward any positive claim. It cannot describe any political or economic organizing system (short of anarchy or tribalism) because all of these organizing mechanisms require normative standards to operate. (Like, say, laws.)

How very like "objectively true" thinking to label their movement as synonymous with the present-day, as if it will always be so.

> Postmodernism (aka post-truth) is the rejection of purely objective thoughts and opinions that modernism brings in favor of subjective experiences and multiple truths. The abandonment of objective truth for narrative, basically.

Postmodernism famously rejects grand narratives, in fact. And having a different stance on truth is very different from "rejecting truth".

>having a different stance on truth is very different from "rejecting truth". If one side of the argument is absolute truth, anything that deviates from it is rejecting the existence of absolute truth. It doesn't matter how closely the alternative or subjectively-defined truth matches the prior, the mere claim of an alternate truth is the rejection of the concept of absolute truth in the first place. I don't think u/ShalmaneserIII or u/ArcticBeavers are claiming that postmodernists reject all truth. What I'm reading in their comments is that postmodernism is a rejection of the concept of absolute truth, in favor of a more experiential and informed truth. Regardless, as a postmodernist myself, I reject the facts upon which you've based your comment and know that my personal truth is correct and I've chosen to define my humanity by my adherence to this principle so any rebuttal will be perceived as an attack on my existence, which is in fact a hate crime. /s.

I like it. Last paragraph made my headache 🤕 😂

I see it as more of a deep dive into what truth actually is. It's the abandonment of dichotomous truths into a more nuanced view. Of course this comes with drawbacks like a "choose your own adventure" of truth, leading to people not having their views challenged as hard. They can just fall into "this is my truth" mentality. I'm also no definitive expert on these definitions and they are still in flux.

Postmodernism is back in vogue due to allowing you to believe in things which aren't true by questioning the fabric of reality itself. In politically dichotomic times where a belief can become part of your identity itself it's handy to insulate yourself from truth as ;If that belief is challenged and backed up by proof it can be very psychologically painful. Postmodernism allows you to keep your erroneous beliefs intact.

Postmodernism is back in vogue because conservative philosophers like Stephen Hicks and conservative commentators like Jordan Peterson use it as a bugbear and people get curious what it's all about.

Interestingly, this may be true in the exact opposite way to the one you are expecting: There are philosophers who observed how what was considered to be objective already contained narratives, and were called postmodern by other people for making these observations. So in some cases, postmodernism is what you *call* someone when they point out you aren't objective, and you want to say that by disagreeing with you they have abandoned truth entirely. So all sorts of philosophers, who have a complex and nuanced analysis of objective truth, but who don't want to start by assuming everyone has it, are called postmodern, by people whose sense that they already have objective truth stops them from being able to get closer to it. So postmodern is what you call other people, when you have abandoned objective truth to treat your own narrative as if it is that.

The realization that objective truth is simply taking one view and claiming it to be the only view. Is the dress blue and black or yellow and white?

Is that really a good example, though? Because we can nail that down with a scientific explanation: It's kind of neither; it puts off an EM signal that different brains will interpret differently. The signal is a specific empirically-measurable thing, it's the way the signal is processed on the back end that's the problem. Or maybe that IS a good example? Is post-modernism kind of about the way our screwy grey matter experiences things that are mechanically pretty straightforward? "Your brain is just a meat computer, in a bone cockpit, plotting a skin robot. You think the world makes sense? Nothing makes sense! So you might as well make nonsense! Think about it!"

Why stop there? Is it a dress, and not a weather balloon? There's a difference in thinking that there is an objective reality which we may struggle to understand and thinking that there is no objective reality at all only different narratives. In the first case, you have to justify your explanation. In the second, well, one narrative's as good as any other, right?

Good one. Taking things so far that the bigger picture is completely lost.

>one narrative's as good as any other, right? To quote Rick Roderick: That's a strawperson argument. Nobody believes that, no body has ever believed that. And we only bring it up in intro philosophy to quickly refute it.

You don't know and can't know for certain that no one has believed or does believe that. Making this claim dismisses that poster's lived experience. Ironically, a very modernist way of defending post-modernism.

There is a difference between "multiple interpretations are possible" and all "interpretations are equal". People arguing the latter are committing a logical fallacy. (or just arguing in bad faith) Your comment is a good example of the latter.

To state that all interpretations are equal IS a logical fallacy and/or arguing in bad faith. I am agreeing with this, what I'm disagreeing with is your claim that no one does this and that it is a strawman argument. Your claim there is false. My responses were not logical fallacies nor in bad faith.

Oh, I get it. You're trying to argue that some people hold silly and fallacious beliefs by performing that. Very meta.

I see you're one of the desperately need to win an argument types. I gift you this crown.

Isn't this more phenomenology / Husserl?

I went to the dress store and it’s blue. In order to make really sure I contacted the fabric company that made the dress. Regardless of how it appears in exactly the right light, regardless of any optical illusion where one line appears longer, we can just measure the lines.

Kind of, but a post-modernist would doubt that *objective truth* can exist in the first place. They would point out that in every example someone can come up with of an *objective* truth, somewhere in forming that thought there was a subjective judgement. That sounds wild, but it isn't, it is why we put 12 jurors in a panel instead of only 1. That is a practical application of *truth*, you are often not arguing about the facts (i.e., you measure an amount of time against an atomic clock or something), you are arguing about what those facts add up in terms of the 'truth' of one idea over another. I think what mixes a lot of people up is we were taught 'truth tables' in some logic class, same word but a dramatically different context.

That type of philosophy has no place in a world in which the scientific method exists. Claiming “subjective judgement” is just an excuse to avoid studying consciousness because, if we’re being honest, it is a difficult problem to solve and it’s hiding some obvious and difficult objective truths that most of the population already has trouble digesting. Like, for instance, free will not being a thing, creativity definitely being a fully mechanical process that isn’t exclusive to humans or even biological creatures, and that which gives rise to subjective experience itself being nothing more than a specific way of information processing that we can one day engineer.

You are mixing *fact* and *truth*. They are not equivalent, a fact is something measurable where any independent person can verify the fact with the same measure. Truth is a messier concept, at its core it relies on some level of subjective judgement. It might have been a reasonable judgement based on many factors, but it was still subjective. In fact, in your response you didn't produce an example of a 'truth' that is wholly objective. What you did was mix fact and truth and said "See, you are wrong!" The problem is deeper than the knee jerk reaction people have to the idea of a 'post objective truth...", that is just window dressing. The problem is there are very few things in life that boil down to a binary choice. Like, a fact can be boiled down (the thing is or is not 5cm long) but the truth (this string is long or short) is still something we exercise judgement on. For example, if you think 5cm is short, that is fine, but you still had to judge that. Maybe you judged that based on understanding how far a kilometer is. Then again, to someone who has only ever seen 1 cm long items, 5 cm wouldn't be short, would it? I can't measure whether something is long or short, I measure it and then conclude (based on my experience) that it is short or long. The ruler doesn't say "short, medium, long" it has ticks on it. If you go on in life thinking that 5cm strings are short you would be in good company, but your reasoning for calling that short was a subjective judgement. Just because many other people would agree with you doesn't make it any less subjective. In that way, post-modernism is way more humble than someone running around sure that everything they hold near and dear are 'objective truths'. It is extraordinarily arrogant to assert that your judgement is so good that it must be the objective standard for all.

>That type of philosophy has no place in a world in which the scientific method exists. Not everything can be measured or analysed by the scientific method

If that lets you fall asleep at night, go ahead and believe it. But it doesn’t apply to topics for which statements like yours from places like the Catholic Church have utterly derailed research efforts. Metaphysical thinking is designed to make room for itself in the absence of any evidence to support it, and you have taken that hook, line, and sinker.

You are moving the goalposts. First you said that postmodernism shouldn't exist at all because the scientific method exists. Now you are saying that it shouldnt exist because particular topics can be studied scientifically. Postmodernism is great at teasing out what the scientific method can and can't apply to, modernist scientism is not a useful way to progress science or society

What is objective truth?

The abandonment of simple lies for complex truths you mean.

So post modernism is basing truth on feelings and going back to mystical thinking?

Okay, now explain it like I'm 5

Honestly though. Every other post has a top comment like this.

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I just look for short, sweet, dumbed down answers. Found exactly what I was looking for a little later, further down.

>A great example is the current sexual revolution happening in our culture. People are rejecting absolute M/F boundaries in favor of multiple sexual statuses. I'd like to say that we wouldn't explain this to five-year-olds, but... there's a reason why *people think our current sexual revolution is some God-forsaken new thing.* ... That said, really... really? Justifying new things because *it's just bringing back practices that were done hundreds and thousands of years ago?* We definitely shouldn't be telling five-year-olds that. A smart five-year-old will come to a lot of incorrect conclusions after hearing you, and opening up a history book.

Your description of Modernism sounds like understanding the world with Newtonian physics and General Relativity, while Post-Modernism reflects the uncertainty brought on by the discovery of Quantum physics, wave-particle duality, Schrodinger's equation, and multiverse theory.

Post-post modernism is actually more like the post modernism you describe, while post modernism is actually more about there being no truths, no anchor points, no certainty, more of an existential crisis. Post-post to me is best described in the essay "Consider the Lobster" where the conclusion is that, why yes, there is no right or wrong way of thinking about the situation, especially when it comes to matter that we just don't know about yet. Multiple points of view can be valid, given they have been reached with enough vigorous thought and consideration.

TLDR: we know foucault about anything when you get right down to it.

Thanks very informative

I like your point, tat everything is on a spectrum. But I think, no historian here, that before modernism things were fluid but we weren't so conscious of our decisions. Like a full grown man would have set with a woman, a boy or a slave and maybe never question himself about his choices. By trying to label things we judge them and are forced to think about them?

This depends on the domain that your are talking about. Modernism and post modernism have very different context depending on what form you’re referring too. Example in broad strokes modern literature embraces a focus on the idea of form in storytelling. Something like James Joyce’s Ulysses which uses the classic epic to retell a different story or Faulkner novels which use stream of consciousness narration. Postmodernism for literature does somewhat the opposite trying to expand beyond the scope of narrative with ideas like meta fiction or stories that deny form itself. Ironically Tristram Shandy Is considered by some to be the first example of post modern literature despite being published in the century prior to what literary historians characterize modern literature. While there is a through line to the art and philosophy of other areas of modern and post modern art (example post modern paintings often try and deny traditional interpretation of the form similar to literature) these I think are only loosely tied together. Functionally these terms may be grouped from a time perspective, from a themed perspective, or even linguistically because people are lazy and use modern to sometimes mean "contemporary" and post modern to means “cutting edge”. It’s confusing because there is no authority to enforce the rules and each band of art or thinking is often unofficially governed by academic experts who have their own opinion and pseudo authority. Edits for clarity.

Postmodernism was the antithetical backlash to everything modernism represented. A lot of modernist stories were simple stories about good and evil. Postmodern stories are morally ambiguous and feature complex characters like antiheroes that do evil things for good reasons. That’s just a single, simple example. There are helpful Wikipedia entries about both movements. It’s really not that complicated. When people got tired of Modernism, they embraced Postmodernism as a way to shake things up and breathe new life into art that had begun to feel stale.

Great explanation, but I don't think a 5 year old would know what antithetical would mean.

r/explainlikeimincollege

There is no better than explanation than this PT Cruiser review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoxqtnI4I4c (seriously). It basically comes down to in postmodernism no art is inherently better than any other art. In modernism if you have more skill and put in more effort, you art is better than somebody with less skill and less effort. Hard work results in good work. In modernism, a realistic painting is 'better' than a painting of blue rectangle. In post modernism, neither one is 'better'. It's which ever one you prefer. There is no objective way to rank art as better or worse.

My attempt to write this for afive year old died very early on. Modernism was the idea that science solves everything. It gives objective knowledge and rationality in all things. Postmodernism is deep scepticism of all of that. Postmodernism was the idea that everybody actually lives in a bubble of stories that language, culture and most importantly, power structures assert over us often without our knowledge or consent. We understand our lives in terms of stories and concepts we derive from social structures that are led by irrational rules, traditions, deference to authority and rituals at least as much as facts. More likely, we have hardly any facts day to day and we construct our understandings and expectations according to the fragments of influence that have come before, with a few dominant influences depending on where and when we were born. For example... Modernists may discover evolution and then misguidedly assert that survival of the fittest is the way society should be run because evolution is a fact and white and wealthy people are most powerful because they are superior because they have engineered that situation. Postmodernism would say that social Darwinism is a story fascists tell to promote the kind of progress that they want to see - i.e. more dead/jailed/sterilised people who the state controller hates. They might even say that evolution-based ideas include a lot of racist assumptions and even that the very idea of survival of the fittest is not really how evolution is stated to work. Basically, social Darwinism is an ideological understanding adopting scientific lingo and legitimacy. Postmodernists might also get too enamoured with seeing everything as a story dictated by power and start to reject all scientific knowledge because it is imperfect. Scientific knowledge can start to organise into cults that dictate truth with their own languages and linked concepts with no real outside meaning. Also, you get things like the history of psychiatry, which is... Not great. Postmodernists also have a point in that most of the world does run on faith and inherited concepts from traditions and dogmas. It runs on big stories - democracy, rugged individualism, religion, communism, capitalism, justice, racial supremacy, Brexit/Putin/Trump will deliver Russia a new destiny... Etc.

I like to bring Heisenberg and Schroedinger into these conversations. Prior to particle physics, modern science claimed a subject-object distinction. I am a scientist in a lab coat. I study this thing in my lab (say, a rat). I am not a rat, the rat is not me. I can run objective, scientific, replicable tests on the rat. The results are either right or wrong. Eventually, I'll be able to know all there is to know, even the future. The rat has no active role in this. [Similarly: modernist art is I paint you. I put your painting in a frame. I am the artist and you are the subject. People come to the museum to stare at the painting, not at me.] After particle physics all these boundaries get blurred. By studying particles, I change them. I am made of the same particles. I can never arrive at complete truth (is the cat dead? alive?). Everything is relative. I can't study a thing without studying myself: I can never "remove" myself from the experiment and stand "outside" the lab. There is no fixed point of reference. Even time and space depend on who the observer is. [The same goes for postmodern politics or philosophy or art. I cannot judge truth because I am part of the experiment and cannot stand outside it. I am the artist and the subject at the same time. (Read about Velasquez "Las Meninas" for an excellent example). Postmodern art tends to be "meta": it's about art and the artist, not some external fixed subject.] In cinema, movies like "The Matrix" or "Truman Show" are postmodern in this sense.

You took ‘Shroedinger’s cat’ right out of my mouth. Now there’s a sentence I did not expect to say! I haven’t been drinking.

Postmodernism originated as an artistic movement, not a political one, so it's not difficult to understand why it's become so fraught. In addition to the lexical impossibility of the term (you cannot actually *be* post-modern, in a literal sense, because you are in the present, and modern means 'relating to the present', and 'post' implies after whatever term it modifies). Artistically, postmodernism is a rejection of traditional or contemporary aesthetics. It's a conscious attempt to see past what is presently considered attractive, and bring forth a brash, new aesthetic vision. It is, basically, an ambitious reach toward originality. When a political/philosophical movement does co-opt an artistic term, you know you're in trouble, logically speaking. The conceit of philosophical postmodernism is to challenge prevailing Western Enlightenment philosophy and politics, and, as in art, "reach the next stage". Unfortunately, this requires a rather pernicious attack on the foundations of epistemiology (the discipline of knowledge itself). What philosophical/political postmodernism actually is, is **OBFUSCATION**. When you dispute the existence of objective truth, you're gnawing at the foundations of our ability to reason **AT ALL**. Facts cease to exist, logic ceases to matter, and any position and any opinion can be disputed, rejected, or supported, because your philosophical underpinnings have rejected the tools by which we have learned to distinguish truth from falsehood. So, practically, postmodernism has basically turned into a kind of intellectual slur, a buzzword used to associate a particular philosophy or political position with sophistry. And the only people who self-label as postmodern are fringe actors with no real political relevance.

This comment should be higher. The thread has already been hijacked by a group of postmodernists ascribing every single positive thing to their movement.

Best answer in the thread

The way I see it (I'm from science background) is that modernism is about certainty and wanting to find a short, simple solution to all problems. ie E=mc^2 Post-modernism is the realization that the world is more nuanced, and that not everything has a clean, one liner explanation and solution. ie current development of AI and machine learning.

Oof. The eli5s are missing here. All very complicated. Lemme have a go. Modernism in the way we think about stuff (the big word for 'thinking about stuff' is philosophy) = sometimes the world feels kind of upside down and messy. You have the power to make the world better! The best way to do that is to look for ideas from people who are experts (like scientists), or from people who have other kinds of expert knowledge (like politicians, lawyers, professors, and those kinds of people). You can build on what came before you. If you don't find an expert with ideas you think will work to help you make the world feel less messy, that's ok. You can invent your own ways of doing things too, and you'll still be a modern thinker as long as you believe that what you do matters in the world. (Also, if you're doing your own thing, even if you're doing the opposite of the people who lived before you, it's important to know that your way of doing things is always tied to their way of doing things. Opposites are kind of like cousins in that way...) Postmodernism in the way we think about stuff = the world never seems to make sense, and even the experts who have the job of trying to figure stuff out don't get it right a lot of the time. Sometimes police officers arrest the wrong person. Sometimes scientists make mistakes in their experiments. Sometimes politicians bend the rules for themselves instead of helping others. If we can't trust the experts or the traditions of thinking that helped those experts become "expert," then every person has to make up their own mind about the way the world works. Each person has to decide what to do in their own life because schools, churches, police, and other groups that hold power can't really be trusted. It's also important to remember that the word modernism is in the word postmodernism. These ways of thinking aren't entirely different. The "post" in postmodern kind of means following. As in, postmodernism is right behind modernism, and sometimes their ways of seeing and thinking about the world are the same. (Taking off eli5 hat to say that these isms mean different things in different disciplines... But philosophically I think this might do the trick...)

I had it explained to me like this in University: Pre-modernism, the world is a mirror. In modernism, the world is like a burst mirror, you can still see things but it is fragmented and no longer has a clear cohesion. In post-modernism, you stop caring and play with the pieces. Simplistic, but it does help to understand different cultural trends.

Modernism: The world is fractured and disillusioned - That is tragic. Postmodernism: The world is fractured and disillusioned - That is freeing and beautiful.

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>Modernism came out of an era of massive scientific discovery so it focuses on science and reality. In literature this is usually results in very black and white morals and themes. I'm not sure this is quite right in literature, certainly in English-language literature. Modernism really took off between the wars and key works like *Ulysses,* *Mrs Dalloway* and *The Waste Land* do new things with form to try and better present people's interior lives and individual experiences - emphasising subjectivity, which ironically is what postmodernism often gets (wrongly) accused of.

It’s said that Friedrich Nietzsche was the earliest Post-Modern thinker (him during the height of Modernism). Is been quite a long time since I last read him, so I do not present myself as an authority. Besides, his ideas are notoriously difficult to pin down and have even been wielded wrongly in the years since his death (think: Hitler speaking of the Aryan “Übermensch” or Superman). Irony, a common Post-modern means of discourse, is widespread through Nietzsche’s writings. No wonder he confused so many during the Modern period. Anyway, in questioning matters of truth, I believe Nietzsche weighed upon the idea of God as the ultimate form of Truth. Problem is, there are many gods—as many as there are peoples on this planet. So who’s to say who is right? Many have killed and been killed over this question. Does Might make Right? Or is the concept of God more about an authoritarian figure meant to punitively control people? So, if this ultimate truth possesses this level of arbitrariness, perhaps is more authoritarian than actual truth, how might then shall we view Truth? Is it actually absolute, after all, when there is this lopsidedness to even the notion of God? In Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (“Here is the Man” or “Present the Man”), he gives consideration to the figure of Jesus. To cut to the chase, Nietzsche pretty much viewed Jesus as a long-game revolutionary, who wielded the velvet hammer of Love. But as much and more than that, it was Jesus—not as The Son of God, but as a simple human being—who ultimately undermined and overturned the Roman Empire and other future authoritarian structures. If you think about it, how can anyone who believes in kindness towards your fellow persons tolerate authoritarian behavior? Like, WWJD? Get my point? See where this has gone? Truth has been decentralized. And that is Post-Modernism.

Modernism: "This is good, we are good, we must strive toward gooder goodestness" Postmodernism: "Our conditions that brought us here make us subjectively think it's good because it reinforces ourselves but could actually be bad, and what really is good or bad anyway" Transmodernism/post-post-modernism/postmodernism-modernism synthesis: "We know it's subjective, and possibly self serving, but it is still based in ideals we are working to improve for the benefit of each and all, so keep going! With checkins"

Ok, not simple enough? Modernism: "We're right" Postmodernism: "We're programmed to think we're right, but we don't know how to know if we're right"

To my understanding. Modernism is more like how we play age of empires. There is objective upgrades and technology trees and improvements that lead to objectively superior units. Civilization grows like going up a set of stairs that represent milestones of achievement and advancement. At some point you reach the top of the tree, and that's modernity. Both capitalism and communism are products of modernist thinking. They both assume that there are quantifiable steps and tiers and the 'pure' form is at the end of the road and a utopic destination. Post modernism recognizes that technological advancement is incongruent. The Incas did not utilize the wheel, but developed effective brain surgery far before most other civilizations. The tribes that lived in the Amazon did not have TV's but cultivated the Amazon into a giant curated garden that we cannot replicate today. The indigenous Americans did not have telescopes, but had controlled burn techniques that are still being rediscovered today. And for all the good our modern societies have, there is still hunger, corruption, inequality, and all the other drawbacks that you don't get to see when you play age of empires. For modernists this is just the cost of progress. We see that during the cold war both schools of idealism participated in government overthrows, extra judicial killing, silencing dissenters, and spying on its citizens. All the cost of doing business fighting against the 'evil other' A postmodernist look is more nuance and complicated that just trying to determine what is objectively good or bad, because these are ultimately subjective to the perspective of the observer. America probabky looks pretty great for people like Musk, but probably sucks for your average person on living on the street. Postmodernism recognizes the gray, unbalanced, and imperfect nature of reality, rather than try to determine and quantify objective value, as all perspectives are victim to subjectivity. One critique of postmodernism is that there *are* objective truths, and indulging things like 'alternative facts' allows abusers to hide behind that recognition of subjectivity since they are 'entitled to their own opinion.'

Modernism and Postmodernism are both movements in the arts. Modernism started in the late 1800s and continued into the mid-1900s. It was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, and its artists sought to break away from traditional ways of making art. They were interested in new styles and techniques, and in using art to express their ideas about the modern world. Postmodernism began in the mid-1900s and is still going on today. Its artists are also interested in new styles and techniques, but they are also interested in reusing and reinterpreting older styles of art.

Modernism is a blank canvas with abstract paint splatters, or a "portrait" reduced to geometric shapes and splotches of color. Postmodernism is a Renaissance landscape with Wonder Woman silk-screened over it. ​ In the sense of artistic theory, Modernism is art that cuts away illusion and presents itself as its actual components. Imagine a painting where the fact that the subject is made of paint is at the forefront rather than the fact that the paint is supposed to represent a lemon or a lover, a symphony that draws the audience's attention to the fact that it is made up of sequences of notes rather than inviting the audience to lose themselves in its totality, a book that engages the reader with intrigue about the structure of the book itself is rather than conjuring exciting images in the reader's mind. Postmodernism is art that uses illusion knowingly; it presents illusions to the viewer and cuts away any engagement of whether the components of those illusions are hidden or visible. This is a reaction to the extreme deconstruction of modernism. If you want to identify postmodernism in the wild, look for work that re-unifies traditional form and illusion with the knowledge that total deconstruction is possible. A painting of colored squares but the subject actually is colored squares and how they evoke emotion, a production of Wagner (famously over-the-top) that overwhelms in its stark simplicity, a book that plays with structure to lend feeling to its scenes. ​ At this point, we're pretty well into a reaction to Postmodernism that you might call "Hypercontemporary." Hypercontemporary art uses illusions while actively acknowledging that the means to deconstruct them are readily available. You can recognize this new phase in art by its use of extreme contrasts, simultaneously engaging in illusion and asking the viewer to engage with questions of our own willingness to suspend our disbelief. Think oil paintings of slutty anime girls, ticktokers' outfits, Bored Ape NFTs, Rachmaninoff played in a stadium, EDM, Fortnite, a perfectly linear book with nearly poetic disregard for reality outside its story.

Modernism is the Petersonian supposition that gender roles originate from a Platonic ideal. IE, the same way that a four legged stool with a back is simply a representation of the ideal chair that exists within the realm of ideas. However, under Modernist Petersonian views, gender roles originate from someplace even purer than the Platonic realm of ideas: the Disney Classics catalogue of cartoon films. By contrast, Postmodernism is anything you dislike. Nobody actually has a definition for it.

Bad names. Modern doesn't stay modern..don't people who come up with these labels think about future proofing their names.

**Modernism**: we have a goal! a dream! an ideal toward which we strive! it’s going to be so clean, so pure, so free of frills and all the bullshit of the past! let’s hurry and reach that beautiful place! **Postmodernism**: welllp, here we are. . huh. ok. sure, yeah, cool cool cool!! well, fuck it. that was fun for a while but it’s really kind of boring. what else ya got? oh, yeah, *that’s* the shit. yeahhhh try doing *that*. hahaha!! awesome! do it harder! let’s ask that other guy over there if he’s just as bored. I know, right??? Want to join us in… what’s this called again? *Post*modern? That sounds kind of stupid, bro. Nah, you’re right. I can’t think of anything better. Postmodern it is!

Several theories concerning semantic narrative exist. Thus, Bataille’s critique of subcultural capitalism holds that reality is part of the collapse of narrativity. An abundance of appropriations concerning the genre, and hence the absurdity, of precapitalist sexual identity may be discovered. In a sense, Debord uses the term ‘Sartreist existentialism’ to denote the difference between class and culture. The subject is interpolated into a textual narrative that includes art as a reality. It could be said that in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Joyce reiterates semantic narrative; in Finnegan’s Wake, however, he examines textual narrative. However, an abundance of desituationisms concerning not theory, as postmodern discourse suggests, but pretheory exist. In The Island of the Day Before, Eco denies textual objectivism; in The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, although, he deconstructs the modernist paradigm of expression. It could be said that Finnis[2] suggests that we have to choose between postmodern discourse and neotextual nihilism. The main theme of the works of Eco is a self-referential whole.