The End of Postmodernity

There is a whole underwater mountain range somewhere in the Atlantic which, one day, may fall into its surrounding waters, so displacing them that devastating waves will criss-cross the Atlantic. Everyone knows it is there. The mechanism by which, one day, it will fall, is well elaborated and clear, though some believe it to suffer from hyperbole and panic. With some strange irony, a precursor of the effect upon which it could rely was suffered in 1929.

At least no-one has yet built an entire economic system to reward the super-rich upon it, and then pretended that the saps who construct intellectual arguments around its solidity should be employed or honoured in their folly.

For a brief while, but with pernicious effects in what passes for intellectual life in the west, many thought that history had been deconstructed, relativised, subjectivised and vanished like some mentalist card-trick.

According to the various critiques, the nineteenth century, and the centuries preceding it, had reached into the twentieth with contrasting ideas of materialism, historical progress, and recurrence based either around material foundations or the idea of meaning.

But postmodernists knew this was noise in the abyss. In the late nineteen sixties, they and their ilk had discovered the secret of re-imagining the world. All was relative. Technological forms and symbols would play about the heads of men and women for ever, and meaning would simply be something constructed, something that in truth any twit with a silver tongue or leaden pen could give the lie to.

Others, not postmodern but who walked with them, were obsessed by linguistic epistemology. For Habermas and his followers, society and reality itself were just constructed table-conversations which imprisoned with manners and with bars made from words. The only objective thing they recognised was a proposition, which was in itself funny, since that was the last thing one could imagine that they would get.

It's funny when history turns around and bites, isn't it? When you realise that your supposed radicalism has been a neutralising shill for big interests that existed, as such interests will always exist, perched within the piles of commodities and financial instruments with which power has forever surrounded itself to try and fend off God. When you realise, for all your putative iconoclasm, that your navel gazing and picture painting has left only a dull icon on the wall of the city of the sun?

It's funny when you realise that the narcissistic thrill of denouncing all meaning, all depth, and all truth as something made up, whilst forcing your globalist fads and environmental fancies on the world, just let those who were successful in a rotten system get richer whilst holding down workers and cheapening life?

The crisis that is coming could do some good. People who truly seek the life of the mind, and not some nepotistic parody, should make themselves over to think, rather than to follow for once, in the knowledge that some things might be true. That insane greed and contempt for your fellow being, expressed in a grossly inflated financial carousel, has devastating consequences; and that such behaviour has limits.

God help me; maybe in his fumbling, strange and frightened way, Robert Bork once made sense. Now, when I agree with the likes of him, at least I know that we stand at Armageddon. And I write that with only half a smile.

Let's hope that those in the law, in politics, in art, can discover meaning again, and the necessity of engagement with the adventure that is other souls. Let's hope, while we are purging some of our excess, that life can be valued and that proper jobs and the discipline of family and the necessity of society can be heard and felt again.

Let's hope that an attempt to build a modern world of meaning, not to tear it apart and call the rubble under which you bury decent people 'postmodernity', is the pursuit of days. Pretension and silliness and superficiality in a coddled world have come very near to allowing greed and public licence--I make no claim to private morality--to overcome the west.

Perhaps, as we plunge into crisis, neither 'what everybody knows' nor 'what everybody wants' has to be the whole of the law. Now, near the crisis, could we save ourselves?