Postmodernity: When Progress Becomes Poisonous

Explaining the shift from collective self-confidence to jadedness

Photo by Camille Brodard on Unsplash

It’s a pretentious cliché to talk at all about postmodernity, let alone about how late-industrial cultures incorporate cynicism and apathy, implicitly taking truth to be relative and subjective. It’s another cliché to say that postmodernity was only a fad, and that we’re living in post-postmodernity, or in some new era such as “metamodernity,” dreamed up by pundits and pompous intellectuals.

What’s so striking, though, is the contrast between the essential plausibility of the postmodern thesis, and the pretentious way in which European intellectuals have presented that thesis. Jean Baudrillard, for example, wrote the most obscure, over-complicated prose poetry which was supposed to be academically meritorious. This was the literary style, though, that differentiated so-called “Continental” philosophy from the Anglo-American, “analytic” kind that’s more pragmatic and deferential to science.

In any case, I’ll explain here what seems to me the simple yet revelatory truth of postmodernism.

Modernity, humanism, and progress

To understand the transition, you need to know what modernity is. Modernity is partly an illusion of progress, as…