Introduction
There is no shortage of Christian books attempting to discern and classify our culture. From the Emergent steam, to mainline denominations, there seems to be an endless flow of authors telling us what is happening around us, what the cultural thermometer is reading. And for good reason. It is only by knowing the culture that we live in that we can effectively communicate to people. And communication is of primary importance if we want to share with people Christ and the Cross. So pastors and teachers write books for other pastors and teachers, and they tell us what the predominant culture is. I have personally read many of these books, and have been greatly influenced and helped by them. I in no way want to discredit them or take away from the work they have done. That is not the purpose of this book. The purpose of this book is in fact right in line with those other great Christian writers of our time. Why then am I writing? Because I think those authors whom I have read are wrong. Maybe wrong is too harsh a statement. Some of them are wrong. But more often I find they are incomplete or dated.
Let me explain what I mean. If you were to pick up any book on culture today, Christian or not, you will most likely find the word Post-modern somewhere in its pages. This, the students of culture say, is the culture we live in. Here is where I begin to disagree with others. We are not living in Post-modern times anymore, but rather something like postmodernism, but wholly other. Today’s culture is something I will call Après-Post, or “after post”. It is a culture that is distinct from post modernity, but is birthed from it. It is in direct succession from Postmodernism. Après-post, as we shall see, is both a reaction to, as well as an embrace of, Post Modernity. We will find Après-posts roots in both what it accepts questionlessly from post modernity, as well as what it castes off.
One of the hallmarks of post modernity, as any student of culture will agree, is its love of the relative. Relative morality, relative likes, relative truth. As a reaction to the Modern Age’s absolute, the relative became the center of post modern culture. The modern age, so full of promise and promises, failed the West so drastically it had to be cast off. Science, the epitome of absolute, seemed to hearken in a new age. Disease and death were on the run. Poverty and hunger were ready to be crushed. All of man’s problems seemed on the brink of being solved. Through study, categorization, and the discovery of external truths, it appeared that the human race was at the dawn of utopia. As with anything as fluid as culture, it is hard to place an exact date on the beginning or end of modernity. It is generally agreed that the beginning of Modernity was around the time of the Enlightenment, and after the Second World War it was over. This is sticky though, especially the timing of its fall. It could be argued that it was in decline as early as the Terror (the time after the French Revolution), but I would argue it really began its demise at the outbreak of the American Civil War.
I place it there for a number of reasons, the main being that the movement known to us as pragmatism has its historical roots in events surrounding said war.[i] Pragmatism is anything but modern. Modernity stressed ultimate truths. There were laws and principle that existed apart from us. They were eternal and external. Pragmatism as a political theory rejects this. We were no longer guided by principles, save the principle that we are to do what ever works. And here we have the roots of post modernity.
Post modernity can be seen in music, art, and philosophy well before the Great Wars. But like everything else that needs to be communicated, it took time to spread throughout Western Civilization. Some people, because of education or profession are closer to the cultural shift (if not guiding it) than others. Culture seeps. It creeps. It does not affect all areas equally, either in speed of infection or seriousness. This is one of the reasons it is so hard to pin down. For every example of modernity’s decline, we can also find places it thrived. But what is important is that the great wave of post modernity crashed upon us. What began as a small swell out far at sea, eventually turned into a tsunami that swept us all away with it. The Great Depressions of the world slowly but surely shook humanities faith in the science of economics and agriculture. The First World War, mostly due to the invention and use of weapons like chemical gases, machine guns, and tanks, began to chip away at the fantasy of scientific progress as morally benevolent. The Spanish Influenza of the 20’s forced society to re-examine its faith in the promise of mastery over disease. Discrepancies in sex, race, and class in all countries lead to social upheaval and crushed the dreams of idealist that a perfect society could be created. The atomic bomb, the culmination of modern hubris, gave man control over the most powerful force known in nature, but also sealed the coffin of Modernity. What the modern age and scientific truths had given us were Fascisms, holocausts, genocides, and destruction. The myth of progress had been demolished.
As I already said, artist, philosophers, and yes even pure scientist, had abandoned truth long before. Curiously as Modern Man woke up and shrugged if his modernity, he looked to the “experts” to tell him what to believe. As he begins to shrug of absolute truths, he will hold onto the truth that scientists, artist, and philosophers know better than he. What they have been working on since the mid 1800’s he will grab hold of to stop him from drowning in the sea of despair the modern age created.
And what had these “better men” been working on since Darwin? Nothing less than Postmodernism. They didn’t call it that at first. In fact, at first they were extremely modern. The scientist of Darwin were trying to be scientific. They were attempting to find the truths that nature holds. The theory they came up with though, told them there were no truths. The guiding principle was chaos. Natural selection. This will have supreme political, legal, and social consequences. At about the same time the mathematics of statistics is discovered. Found by the same “classical” scientific method, it would later be interpreted to show that there need not be absolute truth. And finally Quantum Mechanics hits the stage, ushering in this new era.
Science, which began to unlock the secret Laws of Nature, found out that there were in fact no laws at all. What seemed to be rational and deterministic turns out to be anything but. Darwin’s evolution is anything but Deist. The driving force in evolution is environmental factors. More than this, two identical environments may create completely different creatures. There is no rhyme or reason to the science. We put reasons to the survival of species after the fact. There is no promise in Darwin that if we replicated precisely the adaptations that occurred we will end at the same results as previous. There is no rule governing survival. The rule is what ever works at a specific time and place is what works.
Biology, which used to be the realm of category, rationalism, and rule, was now the realm of chaos. So too with math. Math was once the realm of discrete facts. There were numbers and graphs and formulas and everything could be solved. Things were concrete, rational, Modern. The science of statistics was then discovered, and all of this changed as well. Statistics is a different type of Math. Yes there are formulas and graphs and data, but something completely other had been thrown in the mix as well. Statistics gave not discrete pieces of data, but explained why there were discrepancies between data. It told mathematicians and scientists alike that there was doubt and error in all measurement. Initially it was used to show that there was in fact a true fact being measured. The discrepancies were explained as instrument problems, collector error, equipment malfunctions. Once fully complete though, statistics actually disproves this. The “true” value of something need not exist at all. It is only an average of all other things being measured. The best way to understand this is with example. If we were to give a 100 question test to 100 people and grade each test we can then come up with the average grade. This average grade refers to the grade the “typical” person would get on this exam. But no one needs to actually have this grade. If 50 people got 90’s and 50 people got 70’s, the average for the class would be 80. The average person should score this. But this grade is mythical, as is the man. No one in fact received an 80. The statistics point us to a reality that doesn’t exist.
And add to all of this Quantum Physics. Just as Newtonian mechanics was the guiding science for the Modern World view, so would Quantum Mechanics define a new culture. Under Newton the world was ordered, rational, knowable. There was a divine clockmaker. Everything could be known. His equations were deterministic. What this means is that if we knew the speed and position of everything in the entire Universe, we could know everything. There is no mystery. Quantum Physics changed all that. Quantum mechanics is the science of the very small, or more precisely only matters on the very small scales. That is why it was not discovered earlier. With the discovery of the electron though, the world of the very small was brought to life. And what was found was that the very small was unpredictable. It did not work in the Newtonian way. It was statistical, not deterministic.
In Newton’s Universe if we knew where an electron was and how fast it was going (its velocity), we could follow it forever. In Quantum Mechanics, not only could you not know where it would be (you could know a probability of it being in a place), you couldn’t even know its potion and velocity at the same time. There was a property, described by the physicist Heisenberg, called the Uncertainty Principle. This said that is was impossible to know some things simultaneously, like position and velocity.
The statistics that seemed only to apply to our measurement, now seemed to govern nature itself. And this wasn’t due to equipment or operator error. It was intrinsic in the new science. No matter how hard we tried, no matter how clever we were, we can never know both the position and momentum of a particle at the same time. This means we can never know for sure where it went or how it got there. We can only talk about the probability of it taking a certain path and landing a certain place.
When we shoot a stream of electrons across the room, we can know very little about where each one lands. This is radical and different. If I shot bullets across the room, I can know where each one will go. More than this I can predict and follow them. We can’t do this with Quantum Mechanics. Not only do we not know where and electron will land, we don’t even know how it will get there. All we can know is a probability of an electron landing somewhere. The Universe, that once seemed rational and ordered, at once becomes unknowable and illogical. We still today don’t fully understand the very small. In a moment, an electron shattered our knowable reality. Soon elementary “particles” will be both particle and wave, and both at the same time (don’t think to hard about this, I have a physics degree and haven’t met a person whose head doesn’t hurt by this). Quantum “fuzziness”, Uncertainty will be the rule. This is the science for the Post Modern age.
Post Modern Philosophers would point to this quantum uncertainty to “prove” their thesis that there is no absolute. Unsure of what all the science and mathematics behind quantum mechanics meant, people set about to describe this new world. Many interpretations of Quantum Mechanics emerged, the Copenhagen Interpretation is the one that mostly won out. One of its tenant is that the act of measuring does something. It collapses the wave function. I don’t want to go into what this means in too much detail, but basically it is the process by which the wave know as an electron becomes a particle known as an electron. What is important for us is that the particle has no “reality” before it is measured. It is in a superposition of states, meaning anything the particle could be, it is it before the measuring. The most famous illustration is Schrödinger’s Cat. In this experiment there is a cat in a box with poison. There is a 50/50 chance the glass holding the poison will break and kill the cat. Until we open the box (measure), we can’t know if the cat is dead or alive. In fact, he is both dead and alive. When we open the box, we measure its state and find it is either alive or dead. At this point the cat’s wave function collapses. This is the standard academic interpretation of Quantum Physics.[ii]
And this is important. This philosophy will be the science that Post Modern Man will point to, to justify his thought. The fact that measuring changes something is far from the Modern. It means there is no truth in the particles themselves. They are functions of us. By measuring one way we can alter the particle in way A, and my measuring another, we alter the particle in way B. The particle has no definite existence apart from us. If this is true for the smallest of particles (it is not necessarily true, it is just the major interpretation of the Quantum Mechanic equations), then it will be argued that is must also be true of our morality. If the physical realm has no true reality, if everything in the material world is in flux and malleable, why is this not true of the moral? And so Post Modern philosophy finds a scientific foot hold.
Art at this time is also tending away from the Modern and towards the Post Modern. It begins with the “abomination” (as it was thought to be by the artist “in the know”) of art know as Impressionism. The highest goal of the Impressionists were the absence of lines. Color and form were supreme. With the rise in popularity of Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, et al, was the waning of the Renaissance. The crisp, sharp, defined edges of Da Vinci and Michelangelo, had run their course. The true essence of the thing was now seen to reside is its relation to others, in shadow and light, rather than it its true “Platonic” form. Once it had been accepted as a legitimate art form, it did not take long to morph. Impressionism quickly lead to Cubism and the terribly named Modern Art .
I say Modern Art is terribly named because it is anything but modern. Modern art, that is art that shows off traditional Modern values is the art of the Renaissance and Neo-Classical movements. Modern art was definite, real. There as not abstraction. People tried to capture what they saw. Portraits became lifelike, perspective was discovered, still-lives were born. There was an intrinsic reality to the object being painted or sculpted, and its nature was tried to be captured. Modern Art as an artistic movement is the absence of all of this.
Cubist and then the “Modern Art” movements are distinctly Post Modern. They throw off traditional “truths” of the object, choosing to define their subject in the artist terms. Perspective is thrown off in favor of either its absence, or the inclusion of many perspectives. True colors of objects, the way we actually see them, are questioned and replaced. Placement of eyes, ears, noses move to anywhere and everywhere. In surrealism we see melting clocks, dreams come reality, objects out of place. Reality as reality is cast off, and a new reality, the artist mind is put on. This will culminate with some of the more contemporary artists like Pollock, who in his late phase merely drips paint onto the canvas, to the artists always in the news for their next big stunt, like using feces as a medium. But these movements have their roots over a hundred years previous. It is my assertion that we will see a decline of “modern art” soon. I in fact think we are already seeing it. As I stroll my local coffee shops, most of what I se on the walls are again recognizable objects. More than this, there is pictures and video used alongside the typical artist medium. As we will see, this is a very important cultural thermometer, as I suggest (along with many others) that television (or less specifically, video) is Pagan in nature, and therefore part of Après-post culture.
Philosophy too followed this road. During the Enlightenment we have the great assertion by Descartes, “I think therefore I am.” Later in the same work we will be given proof of the existence of a benevolent God. And it seemed this was philosophy’s job. It was to find the internal truths, while science found the external. Systems of logic were set up to test assertions and surmise their truthfulness. This was not to be the path of the mother of sciences for long.
Philosophy will soon “show” that there is no truth. American Philosophers soon openly give up their belief in God, and following a road carved by Emerson, embrace the internal self as the only thing trust worthy (this too will eventually be tossed). Rejecting absolute truth, they try to make sense of the Universe, and make a living. Pragmatism is born. It is the belief that all inherent beliefs are bad. We are to do what seems best at the time. There is no truth to compare to. Its greatest champions are men like Dewey, and Supreme Court Justice Holmes. Philosophy will eventually come to the point it is now at. The greatest question facing philosophers today is how do we knew we know, or can we even know to begin with. The vast majority of contemporary philosophy professors will most likely tell you, you can not know anything. A far cry from Descartes!
As is often the case, the philosophy comes first, and it finds a science to cling too. This was true of the Ptolemaic Universe, of the Enlightenment, the Social Darwinists, and the Post Moderns. What is ironic of Post Modernity rejects the truth of science, yet bases this rejection on science itself.
And so Post Modernity was born and spread. And we are left with the problem we have today. There are a lot of books talking about Post Modern Man. And I have already said the premise of this book is that Post Modernity is dead. Before we move forward though, we need to have one more piece of the puzzle. Since Modernity was founded in Nature being rational, it was assumed that all laws, both physical, spiritual, and moral, could be discovered. It was assumed they were there. Morality was thing bigger than you or I. They generally accepted the Morality of Scripture as supreme and good. They agreed with Paul that all people had an innate knowledge of good and evil, as well as God.[iii] But Modernity failed. Post Modernity took its place. Having rejected absolute truth in the physical and psychical, it was not long until it was also rejected it in the spiritual and moral.
We could argue about when this rejection of morality entered culture, if it has peaked, and if so when, but let us instead just say it has. More than this, it has peaked a few times, the 1920’s, 60’s, 90’s, the present. We have seen multiple waves of immorality because, as I have already said, culture changes slower some places than others. At present we see a culture that most of us as Christians would call immoral. We see pornography running rampant, sexual promiscuousness as the rule not the exception, drug use and violent crimes in the youngest members of our society. We see videos on YouTube showing us the brutal beatings of schoolmates. We see a decline in youth in Church. We hear throughout our culture that there are not Spiritual Truths, that all roads lead to the same place, that we cant possible know the truth (since the is none), that Jesus can’t possibly be the only way. We see all this and we call it Post Modern. That is why there is so much literature on the subject. But I think we are mislabeling some of it.
Certainly there are still post modern strains in America, especially with those after the Greatest Generation, and ending with Generation X. It is here that the Post Modern thought, that began with the end of the Civil War, in art, science, and philosophy, comes together for the “Common Man”. It is in these classrooms that the teachers of Post Modernism are serving. It is to these masses that Modernity truly dies. The elite of culture finally won and drove their new philosophy into the minds of the West in these years.
We look at culture and still see Post Modernity because these are the generations still in power. They are the writers and directors of film and television, they are the school board members and teachers and principles, they are the novelists and newspaper editors. They are not the ones on You Tube, and Facebook, and MySpace though and this will become very important later.
We see movies like No Country for Old Men, and we cry, “This culture is so Post Modern.” And this movie is Post Modern to the core. There is no one good in it, and no one bad. The most evil character of the film _______ has his own guiding principles, his own morality, that he is at least true to. All the other neglect or compromise their morality at some point in the film. It is the serial killer that is most consistent and “moral”, if we can call it that. There is no redemption. Everyone will be murdered in the world it creates eventually, even if we don’t see it on camera (the cop for example). Good doesn’t triumph; in fact it can’t because no one is good. There is no such thing. There is no innocence, no morality, no redemption. It is Post Modern.
And so cultural anthropologist and pastors watch it (or read a synopsis) and come to the conclusion that since it is Post Modern and did really well at the box office and award ceremonies, that the culture must also be Post Modern. And as I said before, they are not totally wrong. Most of the culture is post modern, but there is a rising tide that we are ill prepared for, and that is what the remained of this book will be about. While we sit and try to crack the Post Modern Code, society is moving forward, and if we don’t move with it, we will be lost. I am not saying stop reading about post modern culture. In fact, if you are trying to reach certain populations in our culture, those over 35, (maybe 25) those in more traditional communities, those in other countries, you may do well to put this book down now and read some of the better commentaries about Post Modernity. However know that culture is not static. It is viral and infectious, always mutating as it enters the new host. Soon this Après-post will sweep through all of post modernity, and 10, 50, 100 years from now Post Modern Man will be as antiquated as Modern man is today.
The quick history of Modernism and Post modernism just given are by no means meant to be all inclusive. I don’t have time here to go into the rise (and fall) of modern medicine, the distrust of Authority, the Founding of America ( a triumph of Modern Man), the Industrial revolution, rise of Labor Unions, etc., etc., etc. The intricacies and delicacies that drive history are better left to historians. It is important though to remember where these movements came from. They are not isolated in history, but rather the culmination of it. I am glossing over most of what these world views hold mainly because there have been great work dedicated to just that. Only the main tenants are necessary for us here to move forward. We will see more details of Post Modernity as we move on, especially as I hold contemporary culture up to Post Modern thought to both compare and contrast it to the present time.
Post modernity, as I said throws off all truths and values. There are no absolutes. Everything is relative. The only guiding principle is to have no guiding principle. This is not what I find in the horizon of culture anymore. Après Post, as a reaction to post modern thought, in fact does have absolutes. There is a morality and a truth that is greater than us. What is even more than this, it is a system that Christianity is well suited to answer. Après Post is Paganism reborn. I will show through television, movies, the rise in the science of Cosmology as supreme, literature, art, celebrity, pornography, and the rise internet, as well as the material on it, that society is not guided anymore by a lack of morality, but by a pagan morality. Modernity assumed Christian Morality, Post Modernity no morality, and Après Post is assuming Pagan morality. To a Christian, unfamiliar with pagan culture, pagan morality looks like the lack thereof. It is immoral, in the Christian sense of the word, but we must not let its immorality have us assume there is unmorality. We see pornography on the internet and we assume that the people doing it do not have morals. I will attempt to show that they do have morals, they are just not ours. They are worshipping their pagan gods, and some (more likely the men) feel like good people. Post Modern thought would say that there is nothing wrong with porn because there is no truth in Christian morality. We can throw it off if it doesn’t work for us. Après post theology would say that we should encourage sex and sexuality because it is healthy (read morally right).
And this phenomena is not just present in pornography and sexuality (though certainly it must be most present there). We will see that the rise of violent videos on the internet, and well as Ultimate Fighting, violence as a means to good in both TV and movie scripts, as well as the rise of gangs in America Suburbs (a place previously safe from such organized violence), all point to the rise of a pagan value system. The rise of “Celebrity”, visual sensuality, and superhero legends will all also point to a shift in culture form Post Modern nothingness, to pagan truth.
In the next chapter I will describe what I call Après Post culture in more detail. I will be mapping out pagan values and morality and explore how this is both an extension of and revolution to Post Modern’s dogma of relativity. We will explore pagan themes from various cultures, traditions, and times, though we will go though this rather quickly. We will then take a look at the predominant cultural paradigms emerging today, seeing how they very easily fit into the long history of paganism on the world. Finally we will discus what has to be done to reach this new culture. Just as the churches of 70 years ago won’t fit in most places today, so too will our new church plants need to adapt to the culture surrounding it to survive.
As we proceed forward I will pull from such varied sources as The Bible, C.S. Lewis, Camille Paglia, Greek Myth, Mark Driscoll, Louis Menand, feminism, Marxism, pornography, television, film, contemporary literature, Harry Potter, Hannah Montana, Barak Obama, the Simpsons, Christian Literature, Comic Books, the internet, blogs, Tabloids, Disney, Augustine, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the list goes on. As a Christian book this may seem light on Scripture, and that is partly due to the nature of this book. For the majority of it I will be trying to describe and discuss culture, not proscribe a solution. For those looking for my Biblical grounds for discussion, they will be scattered throughout, mainly as counter points, and most dense in the first and last chapter. I will be constantly comparing Après Post to the Christian world view, but will be assuming the reader knows his or her scripture and I need not quote it all the time. Some of the authors I will be quoting are anything but Christian, like Camille Paglia, who I will be quoting often in the next chapter, even stealing some of her terms. I do this, not in promotion of them, I very often disagree with Paglia, but because I find their observations or opinions illuminating. Paglia, for example is pagan. By studying her and what she considers pagan in our culture (and like myself, she finds a lot), we can come to a greater understanding of both our culture and the pagan understanding of our culture, which, if we are going to try to combat (and indeed I am), we should have the greatest understanding of “the other” we can.
As I quote these taboo people, shows, and ideas know I am not promoting them. They are aids in our study. Although I find myself sometimes agreeing with some of their observations, again like Paglia’s assertion that Film is extremely Pagan by nature, and we are an extremely pagan society, I do not always agree with their conclusions. As you read this, remember this is a cultural thermometer. I am not trying to proscribe an action, but rather describe a culture. As such, I will pull from sources I normally would never condone. Know too, however, that Scripture is held in the highest regard. I view it as the Living Word of God, and although I won’t fill this book with it, my heart is overflowing.
I think it is safe for us to proceed. The first chapter, “What Happens After Post Modernism Dies: The Rise of the Après Post” will clarify some of the ideas thrown out in this introduction, as well as more clearly define the three main world views that exist right now: Post Modern, Christian, and Après Post. I realize there still are some Modern Men, but they are all either now Christian, Après Post, or such a small faction as to be left out of this discussion. We will see the historical roots of Après Post, and how it is beginning to lowly show its face. I say it has been in existence for a few years hence, at least, and is gaining momentum daily. Let’s see what it means to be Après Post.
1 comment:
Nate- this is exciting that you're writing a book! are you getting it published? or is it just for online reading?
I highly highly suggest you read Niebuhrs Christ and Culture. I read it for a class on Religion and Post Modern American Religious THough - it's good, and it's VERY interesting. I could recommend quite a few others too...
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