Where Did Post-Modernism Come From?

“In this short essay, I will argue that there were three factors, which contributed to the emergence of post-modern culture.”

Introduction

Post-modernism is one of the most hotly debated issues among the reading public today, provoking reactions ranging from fierce denunciation to enthusiastic embrace. I have spent some time discussing what post-modernism is, along with describing its consequences for contemporary politics. Most notably, an earlier monograph and a forthcoming collection entitled What is Post-Modern Conservatism: Essays on Our Hugely Tremendous Times for Zero Books discuss the influence of culture in framing reactionary politics. But comparatively little attention is paid in these works to why post-modernism emerged. In this short essay, I will argue that there were three factors, which contributed to the emergence of post-modern culture. The first was liberalism, which established an individualistic politics separated from meaning-giving traditions. The second was capitalism, which generated a commodified lifeworld oriented by self-interest rather than commitment to transcendent values. And the last, which has been paid too little attention by many progressive commentators such as myself, was secularism. The declining belief in God (or at least traditional religious commitments) established a culture increasingly unmoored in the universe that had to find new sources of meaning. I will discuss each of these in turn, while signposting where they overlap.

Post-Modernity and Liberalism

It is very difficult to appreciate the dramatic shifts in how human beings have understood themselves and the world around them. This is as true in the liberal era as any other, and a failure to appreciate the past and how liberalism makes for a dramatic break with history contributes to a misunderstanding of its influence on post-modern culture. Ancient theorists such as Aristotle in the West and Lao-Tze in China implied that human beings existed as a part of nature; they stressed the need to look past the illusions of crude desire and recognize our integration into the cosmic order. While their interpretation of our role in this cosmic order and its characteristics differed widely, this was fundamentally a holistic vision where every human being had a defined purpose applied to him. Christianity maintained many of these positions but also postulated a more ontologically split reality, where the ensouled individual existed in a temporal world which was a reflection of the more real eternal world. Christianity also characterized human beings as possessing divine qualities, which distinguished them from the other entities in existence.

This thinking was radicalized with the advent of proto-liberalism from the 16th to 17th centuries. When reading Machiavelli, Bacon, or Hobbes, we see people beginning to regard nature—and even other individuals—as existing to service collective human needs. At the same time, God began to play a less central role in determining the individual’s actions. These positions were further accentuated with the thinking of Locke and later Kant, who were perhaps the most significant thinkers to argue that the human mind only had access to phenomenal ideas rather than things in themselves. The world was, thus, to be apprehended nominalistically. Consequently, Locke and Kant also developed moral and political theories stressing the banality of naturalistic arguments for authority. Instead, they emphasized the importance of the individual will in establishing social arrangements—for instance, through contractualism.