Post-modernism as Repentance

Modernism's "Jacob's Ladder" promise of a golden future of technology-enabled man, of an endless treading of unknown into known, subduing the earth and heaven alike, has faded from the minds of most people. Scientists and engineers, medical people and economists who believe their abstractions increase the truth of their models are good candidates to believe in this - to see themselves as part of rationality increasing itself, and bringing more and more of the found world to heel.

Post-modernism is no single thing, but arises from several critiques of individuals within modernism, to wit:
- a 'so what' / 'why should i?' existential critique. Hume says it is no irrational thing to prefer 'the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my little finger' (meaning that desire is independent from reason and cannot be argued with). Similarly, loathsome teenagers prefer stupid films to growing up and appreciating great art, and you can't convince them they're wrong. Given that Nazism and Stalinism (and even arch-boob Mussolini) saw themselves as modernising powers, modernism can't simply be ultimate human good.

- a power critique, that points out that power will be unequally distributed, and that the great stair to heaven is made at the expense of those who will never walk it, that those with power are telling each other a pleasing story and ignoring out of existence the less capable, instrumentalised humans who fail to raise themselves over the threshold usefulness.

- an epistemic critique, which asks for a basis for the articles of modernist faith: all men are created equal (not true). Anything not proved by science is hokum - commit it to the flames (this statement cannot be proved by science). (I am lumping in the linguistic critique - that systems of knowledge expressed symbolically are only systems of symbols and maintain only internal coherence with no necessary reliability in the world. This is not a great critique, and to the extent it is just, Wittgenstein and Heidegger have made it and answered it.)

All of these are calls to repentance. Be better, much better for people, or stop pretending to be the full flourishing of humanity. Satisfy real hungers, not just hunger. Justice for some is no justice. Don't pretend it's grounded in absolute reality when its grounded in a local pocket of some behavior that has proved functional so far.

Repentance means that something which seemed it would be your pride and joy must die. Modernising brings many goods, but they aren't the Good.

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