Yoni Goldstein: Postmodernism is coming to a natural end

There is no specific date on which to pin the advent of the postmodern age. The term was coined in reference to painting in 1870, and first cited as a descriptor for contemporary social and cultural thought in 1939. In 1960, the sociologist Daniel Bell published “The End of Ideology,” heralding a “post-industrial society” and laying the groundwork for postmodern thought as a guiding light in academia. Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault followed from the mid-’60s, cementing the philosophical base for postmodernism and popular derivatives like Edward Said’s postcolonial theory.

However you want to define its origins, it’s safe to say that by the 1990s postmodernism was the dominant school of thought on Western university campuses, and that by the 2000s, its students had made their way into all aspects of society, bringing postmodernism’s dogmas along with them. Between then and now, those ideas and ideologies have come to dominate our culture in virtually every aspect, from art and architecture to politics and popular culture.

But philosophies and ideologies have shelf lives. Nothing lasts forever, and while it is not an exact science, the histories of previous ages of thought suggest that postmodernism has already passed its best-before date. The Enlightenment ran for around 200 to 250 years; Romanticism took the next 100 or so years; Modernism dominated for about 70 years. In all cases, dominant social and cultural ideas were borne out of a crisis of confidence in the school of thought that immediately preceded it. The same will happen to postmodernism, too. It is inevitable.

One might convincingly argue that it is already happening. Postmodernism is so entrenched in our lives today that its origins — no matter whether we date it to 60 or 80 or 150 years ago — are becoming less and less visible. Its foundations are no longer debated in popular culture and academia; they are seen simply as common sense. Postmodern innovation and institutionalization are far behind us, and it is hard to see how our culture could become any more saturated in its ideals.

Intellectual movements are successful because they solve problems created by previous frameworks. They flounder as new questions emerge, and ultimately give way to something new when they can no longer explain the world we are living in. Whatever ideas we do retain — and there are always a few — are folded into the successor. The Enlightenment destabilized the medieval period by rejecting inherited authority, divine order and the primacy of institutions, while holding onto the basic notion that the meaning of life is intertwined with larger moral and spiritual orders. Romanticism preserved the Enlightenment’s ideas of individual dignity and its focus on freedom and creativity, but rejected an excessive fealty to calculation and rationalism.

On the timeline of popular thought, we are nearing, or have already reached, the next inflection point, the moment when the transition truly begins — when exhaustion with current dogma gives way to dissatisfaction and ultimately something new. That change is always motivated by technology, from the invention of the printing press to the atom bomb to the Internet. The rise of AI and tech-aided misinformation may very well be the next stimulant of intellectual evolution.

So what comes next?

With history as our guide, a post-postmodern framework might retain sensitivities to the notions of power and exclusion, and a recognition that institutions are not neutral players, but restore stronger concepts of objective reality and confidence in empirical science. It would still pay attention to historical contingency, the idea that history is not inevitable, while exploring the possibility of shared civic narratives and the search for meaning beyond identity categorizations as a salve to the endemic loneliness of our times. The underlying claim that power shapes social knowledge and institutions could — and should — survive, but the postmodern notion that there is no basis for shared truth and meaning would disappear as society seeks shared assumptions that lead to more stability in our lived lives. Postmodernism taught us to be skeptical of truth; its successor will seek to uncover or rediscover truths that we can all believe in.

Some things never change, though. Racism always manages to adapt to the dominant ideas of the times. Antisemitism, for example, may change in form: today, it is rooted in the postmodern framing of anti-colonialism and anti-Zionism, tomorrow it could take a more technocratic form, where AI and an increasingly networked society drive an updated hatred based on conspiracies of the Jews as an elite unto their own. If postmodernism is replaced by a widespread return to religion, antisemitism will marinate in broader theological hostilities that are ages old. In some far-right circles where postmodernism has long been rejected, this is already the case.

Israel, the Jewish state, might no longer be judged along the colonizer-colonized binary, but it could face new scrutiny that is more legalistic and institutional in nature. A post-postmodern world may very well accept Israel as a sovereign nation-state, and judge it more harshly on the level of state performance, a country like all others, and subject to the same rights and responsibilities. Seventy-five years from now, a mantra that focuses on civilizational belonging could widely celebrate Israel as a beacon for everything that is right — the revival of an ancient language, the return to ancestral homelands and the preservation of distinctive civilization — while placing new pressures on diaspora Jewry.

We have a saying for this in Canada, where it often feels like we are subject to the whims of Western dogmas, rather than active creators of it: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. As we approach the next intellectual inflection point, there is an opportunity to lead rather than follow, or at least to devise a Canadian version that makes sense to us. History may be inevitable, but our place in it does not have to be.

National Post