so what exactly is post-modernism and should we even care about it anymore indeed in the previous decades before us post-modernism was in vogue in the academic settings of our country and in the Western world it's not necessarily that way today you still find it in literary departments you still find it unfortunately sometimes in theology departments but in the natural sciences and philosophy departments and in other departments history departments you really don't have an obsession with this thing called post-modernism anymore it is however still very much alive in our culture for example the TV shows that you're watching probably right now the movies that you're watching probably right now the things that we're watching play out in our courts right now all have been deeply affected by this thing called post-modernism so while it may be waning in the Academy it is still very much got its grip on us in our culture so we do need to understand what it is and what it's about now it's complex and nailing down exactly what postmodern is people have said it's like trying to nail down jello and so that's true in many ways part of the difficulty is is we have a difficult time saying exactly when post-modernism starts so for example on questions about epistemology that is the the philosophical questions about our knowledge well you could trace it all the way back to people like Immanuel Kant but if you're looking for our views about what human beings are our anthropology man you'd have to come all the way up past Freud and so depending on the topic in question post-modernism seems to have these different starting points and so it's very very difficult for a lot of reasons I think the best way to understand post-modernism is to say something about modernism just very quickly modernism starts in the 17th century with people like Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon this is the move away from religious perspectives that sort of ground our knowledge in the past in the pre-modern world if you wanted to know something you look to the church if you wanted explain something you explained it with God this was the judeo-christian worldview prior to the 17th century well Descartes was a good Catholic and Bacon was a good Protestant but what they felt was wrong with the Western world was that ultimately we had some assumptions in the going about of our knowledge that were ineffective and so they wanted to start clean they wanted to step for themselves xiu'er in certain foundations that they could build our knowledge upon and so they cast aside religious perspectives as many of these modern thinkers did there's several themes that come up in the modern period so for example the idea that we can be completely objective in our perspectives we can sort of strip away our biases our dispositions our backgrounds our education and we can see it from quote a God's eye perspective that means a view from nowhere we won't be we won't be filtered by our perspectives or our assumptions or any of those things we'll just see things as it really is just the facts and in many ways you see that in the modern sciences and so this idea of objectivity Universal objectivity was an assumption of modernity they also had this idea of universal rationality they thought that there was one right way to think and everybody if we just educate them the right way would think that way everywhere in the world and we would find as we go around from society to society culture to culture we would find them using the same rationality well as modern anthropology and modern sociology emerged in the Western world actually what we found was just the opposite there isn't a universal rationality shared by all people everywhere and so that modern assumption gets blown up there's also the idea in modernity of in the idea that comes about called inevitable progress the idea that is we were going to get better and better and better and better sure our knowledge was getting better this is the age of modern science where our scientific discoveries and knowledge just explodes this is the age where we set aside the feudal system politically speaking and we move into democracies and things like that and so you can understand why people think that we're just getting better and better and better in theological circles we begin to think things like postmillennialism where we think we're going to usher in the kingdom of God and so those types of things are what you see there well all of that stuff may sound benign but understand this the moderns were explicitly rejecting these religious ideas as the bedrock of our knowledge that's what moved our knees doing post modernity is now going to reject all of those modern assumptions and ideals and to us that might sound like it's not that big a deal but here's the catch the way they reject was by getting rid of concepts of truth now postmodern certainly have ideas of truth but they don't believe by truth the same thing you and I believe so for example here's a statement we all think to be true I'm wearing a gray suit you think that's true because the statement itself corresponds to the way things really are that's got a correspondence theory of truth that had been the pre-modern and the modern assumption postmoderns reject that truth now is simply what works for us or truth is simply which is consistent with other things and so they have ways of defining truth but there is no longer anything like truth with a big t know what we call matter narrative that is meta meaning overarching narrative meaning story there are no overarching explanations around there's no truths so you shouldn't pretend to have one I shouldn't pretend to have one that's at least what they say but notice in our culture these people that dubbed themselves as postmodern what they're really after and what they're really against is our truth they want to substitute it with a different truth with their own morality and things like that so what one example of where you're gonna see postmodern ideals flesh out in our culture's really what you're seeing happening in this this sort of culmination of the sexual revolution and the the movement into transgenderism and other things like that we're now in a place where people will say things like I know I'm in a boy's body but I'm not a boy I'm something else underneath that and we're left to define not just truth out there anyway we want to we're now able to define ourselves in any particular way we want to and there's this getting rid of these classical traditional ideas that go well back before Christianity they would go back to the to the Classical period of the philosophers we Plato and Aristotle it would come up through the Christian tradition it would come up through the medieval traditions it would come up all the way through modernity it would even come up pretty far into the 20 and 21st century but now you're seeing it come to full fruition where we're going to redefine or get rid of definitions of what it means to be a human what it means to be a male what it means to be a female and we're free now to just define that any way we want to this is very much a good example of the way postmodern thought has infected our culture and shape the way we think about very very important things so in short that's a crash course on post-modernism it is still very much a lot our culture and we do need to know what it is you