Trueman on postmodernism

I think this is a pretty insightful post, but I think it has reasonable answers.

Point 1 about Joseph Conrad is totally outside my expertise. I’ve read Conrad some and would have known he was post-colonial, but that’s about it. Thanks to Paul Duggan for addressing the issue.

Point 2: Dawkins is definitely counter-evidence. But even though he sells I don’t think modern atheism is a serious option for many people. I suspect it is more “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Those religious folks with their totalizing narratives need to be put down. On medical dramas, I simply don’t see them emphasizing science as much as Trueman perceives.

Point 3: This is an emergent church thing, I think. Youth culture and postmodernism should not be conflated. I’m betting Trueman’s book does that. I guess the theory would be that youth will tend to be more postmodern than older people, but I’m not sure that is really true either.

Point 4 reminds me of NT Wright, whose emphasis on story surely sounds postmodern. And yet Wright is not claiming that this is new. His claim is that all cultures hold their worldviews together with stories. Stories won’t exist without propositions, of course. But the emphasis on propositions in the modern period as the ultimate tool of analysis seems to have misunderstood human nature. In this sense, postmodernism is claiming to have found something that has always been true.

5 thoughts on “Trueman on postmodernism

  1. Steven W

    I took a Christian Education class on youth, and the book we used argued that youth are typically more conservative than their parents. It is only when they try to grow up and mature that postmodernism is adopted.

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  2. Ben G.

    Speaking as a “yoof”…

    I tend to think that the postmodern climate is best described as an environment of critique. That’s the essence of higher education these days – the canon is made up of those who were in their own time marginal and dissenting voices, and using that rubric in selecting the canon is deliberate and conscious. Conrad and Ibsen are canonical today not because they are necessarily “postmodern” (and the terms are hardly consistently applied), but because their work centered on a critique of their intellectual and cultural climate.

    I don’t know that I view Dawkins as evidence one way or the other on the generalizations – he’s certainly critiquing what a lot of people view as a climate in which faith is a dominant force in politics, and so in that way he fits into “postmodernism” fine. I think, though, that his appeal has more to do with contemporary tastes in entertainment than anything. He’s ardent in his atheism, and people like to see harsh disagreement in public discourse, because it’s just fun to watch.

    It’s only fair, I think, to talk about a “crisis of confidence in science” in contemporary culture if you mean by “confidence” the belief that “real” and “scientifically verifiable” are synonymous. In that sense, it’s absurd to think that a “crisis of confidence in science” should have anything to do with the level of popular interest in scientific topics.

    I’d say Trueman’s right on in his irritation with the concept of “youth culture,” and you’re absolutely right in saying that “youth culture” and “postmodernism” aren’t coextensive. It seems odd to me to suggest that you can characterize the way young people think, in any case – the 18-24 demographic has grown up able to take for granted all the features of thought we’d label “postmodern,” but that’s really about all you can say by way of generalization, as far as I can tell.

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  3. Jandy

    I’m not convinced that modernism in a philosophical sense and modernism in a literary sense are at all the same thing…I’m not an expert by any means, but Conrad, for example, was earlier than what is generally termed Modernism in literature (Heart of Darkness was 1902, and the Woolf-Lawrence-Joyce school of Modernism was 1920s, post-WWI). And the sorts of things that Woolf and Joyce developed weren’t negated by the 1960s move to postmodernist literature, but just taken to further extremes. It’s pretty much too late to change the terms at this point, but theoretically, I’d submit that Modernist literature is really proto-postmodern.

    And on point four, it’s interesting that his examples of stories throughout the ages are Homer (c. 800 BC), Robin Hood (legends date from the 1200s), Shakespeare (16th/early 17th century), and Friends (1990s), thus entirely skipping the centuries (17th-19th) that were the most concerned about propositional truth and the most influenced by Enlightenment thinking. Postmodernism isn’t coming up with anything new as far as its emphasis on story, but it is returning to an older form that I think was underemphasized for a couple of centuries.

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  4. Ben G.

    Yeah, I get the impression that the “modern/postmodern” distinction usually meant by books like those Trueman is reacting to refers more to the transition from post-Enlightenment positivism to a more cynical view of human nature and destiny. I think that happened earlier in literature than in mainstream thought – Conrad and his generation reacted to colonial society earliest, then the Lost Generation moved further in that direction after WWI, then (at least in the USA) Vietnam, etc. made a postmodern temperament much more a part of the overall consciousness of the West.

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