Why we live in a postmodern world

Postmodern and postindustrial are synonymous. They both evoke a past era by symbolizing the present.

Postmodernism has not only changed the sensibilities and lifestyles of society on the whole but also between the sexes. The Atlantic magazine recently did an article on "The End Of Men: How Women Are Taking Control - Of Everything". As the article points out, The Great Recession in the US has caused more unemployment among men because the traditional jobs they hold in construction and manufacturing have been the hardest hit. Also, the economy is changing from a basically industrial one to a service one in which women are favoured. For the first time more women are employed than men. Also, more women are graduating from universities and more parents are choosing to have girls, even in societies that once favoured boys. This situation has upended the modern world which was more industrial, patriarchal and controlled by men. With these changes women are bring a new perspective to the world, something postmodernism is all about.

In His book “Consilience” Edward O. Wilson writes, “Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis of the Enlightenment”. He is referring to the academic side of postmodernism. It was The Enlightenment that gave us modernism and the idea that there is truth and progress in human endeavour. Enlightenment thinkers believed that science would advance the world. And it has. However, an element of postmodernism particular to academia, and generally resentful of the powers that be, have preached antiscience, that science is arbitrary, depending on who is in control.

The Enlightenment also gave us democracy, which begs the question, is postmodernism anti-democratic?

Not exactly, but Fredrick Nietzsche (1844-1900), considered one of the first postmodernists, disliked modernity because it espoused democracy. He saw democracy as empowering the masses, something he despised because he felt that mass culture would smother individual achievement. Individual exceptionalism wouldn't survive in a sea of mass equality, he believed. However, Nietzsche must have been thinking of the illiberal version of democracy offered by Marxism rather than the liberal democracy of today's open societies where individual exceptionalism flourishes.

It is in academia that postmodernism has been most polemic and problematic, teaching things like science is an ideology and not necessarily ‘science‘, but one truth among many. In other words, there are other ways of knowing about nature and the universe. In this respect postmodernism did a disservice by effecting people's ability to comprehend reality.

It is said that postmodernism is dead because those who most promulgated it are dead, like Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Perhaps in academia it is but not in the real world or in retailing, as The Economist pointed out in its article "Post-modernism is the new black", the new cool. The Economist used the London department store Selfridges as an example. In the early 1990s Selfridges was near collapse, following the fate of many other department stores. Its merchandizing style had grown stale and unappealing to shoppers. Niche marketing was become the norm. Selfridges wisely adopted the niche merchandizing style where retail departments within its store became independent from each other. Under the old management system departments stores were run from a central office and as a result lost touch with changing tastes. By decentralizing itself and giving its departments the freedom to make decisions, Selfridges remade itself, becoming the toast of the department store world, so much so that its postmodern formate was adopted universally as a means of retailing survival.

What modernists believed, to their detriment, was that once the world had adopted the rational of The Enlightenment things would fall into place. It hasn't quite worked out that way because modernists didn't take into account that their ideas wouldn't satisfy everybody. They hadn't considered that humans would still be unruly and behave independently, having their own ideas about how to lead their lives. For instance, modernists believed the world would be structured in a hierarchal manner, run by men, ‘white’ men. Modernists believed in maintaining the status quo. It was more about colonization and uniformity. The backlash that mounted against this mindset in the 1960s is what helped pave the way to the postmodernism of today. Today it's about globalization while maintaining diversity and flexibility.

Perhaps this simple narrative might help explain why we live in a postmodern world and why it will remain so: An aspect of postmodernism had been to constantly deconstruct (Derrida) systems and centres of power to examine and find fault with them. If in the process a system is found wanting but has sufficiently redeeming qualities, it is reconstructed, with improvements, and put back into service. With this in mind, let’s compare liberal democracy's governing style and to its opposite — communism, which has ostensibly collapsed. Simply put, liberal democracy has survived as a governing system because when deconstructed and examined it was found at its core worthy of something to built on. In comparison, when communism was deconstructed and examined it was found rotten at its core and thus discarded.

Foucault would have agreed that postmodernism is basically about decentralizing authority and emancipating the individual, helpfully enabled by technologies like the iPod and the Internet.