'A World Without a World View: the condition of post-modernity'

a world with view the postmodern predicament what happened from the 1970s in the West and gathered strength in the next two decades is not a shift to a new world view or paradigm but rather the dissolution of any integrated worldview at all it's different from all previous changes which were from worldview a to worldview B it's very essence was an attack on the possibility of having a worldview or meta-narrative as it is often called it's the realization that the speed of change especially in politics and communications means that there could not be any shared vision either in the West or the rest this explains why it is an attack on all large theories it takes the form of arguing that we are past them all can abandon them we are post or after them so structuralism is dead because it had suggested a fundamental basic structure of the human mind since there are no basic and universal categories we are now post-structuralist the old political order of a colonial world has vanished with the end of European empires so we have post colonialism the certainties of feminism which suggested a basic equality and even identical nature of men and women is challenged so we have post feminism Marxism with its unified vision of based determining the superstructure is no longer tenable theoretically and is clearly unacceptable morally as we learn the inner history of the years of Stalin Chairman Mao and Pol Pot so we have post Marxism the Enlightenment belief in the triumph of human reason and of the inevitable progress of society and knowledge is untenable especially after the horrors of the Holocaust so there is post enlightenment which can also be called post rationalism above all we enter an age of post modernity closely associated with the rejection of the modernist tradition in art which flourished between the world wars the rejection of modernity which was thought to be the ever increasing rationalization of life into discrete institutional areas religion politics economy and society leads to post modernism and post-modernism economies based on consuming rather than producing from factory to services we now have a post-industrial world likewise though laboratory science is still essential it is no longer thought to be infallible an objective search for unassailable truths but rather a constructed imagined invented pursuit subject to fashions and filled with counterintuitive contradictions so we are post scientific furthermore the period of the nation as an entity is over there are no real nations just imagine communities which no longer have much meaning in the global flow of capital and electronic communication we live in a post nationalist world a sign that something odd has been happening is that there is no agreement at all about what post modernity is yet whatever it is it is clearly a threat and the new views have been attacked vehemently by those who believed in one of the old meta-narratives either by the left who felt it as a final trick of late capitalism to destroy the good parts of Marxism or socialism or by the right who think it is a plot of left-wing intellectuals to spread relativism multiculturalism and generally undermine Western dominance so what happens after post the difficulty is that the only definition of post-modernism is that it is against all meta-narratives and hence is so amorphous that nothing can be against it it's composed of thousands of simultaneous and contesting paradigms perhaps like one of the current cosmological theories which envisages the world as consisting of a dozen dimensions many of them tiny curled up invisible coexisting with the ones of which we are aware there is an infinite regression those against the various forms of post who want not to return to some earlier vision but to replace it with something beyond it and move beginning around 2005 as after post-modernism are trapped in an impossible situation so it seems unlikely that a new paradigm or worldview will ever again emerge there are too many centers of knowledge too little established and acknowledged leadership too much information about a world which is changing too fast for anything to become routed the intellectual landscape is like a bare rocky reef over which the waves pound as the tides creep back and forth there is no depth for ideas to germinate for powerful new philosophies need a lifetime in which to establish themselves what are the costs of post modernity especially for the young and for China the obvious one is uncertainty we now do not really have doubts about what the answers are but even what questions we should ask for there is no theoretical framework of normal science to generate them a thronging set of ideas which includes relativism constructivism anti-realism anti science anti objectivism is hardly likely to cohere around a new framework it is a rich brew but not a clear one also it's difficult to build a theory unless you have something to react against part of the change has been the undermining of all authority parents teachers professional specialists of all kinds including politicians and religious authorities are no longer revered this loss of authority is both a cause and a consequence of the end of a world with an accepted worldview another cause of the fragmentation is clearly a fairly obvious and humdrum one namely the thousands of television channels between which people hop back and forth and the thousands of possible communications people can choose from and which constantly interrupt any settle thought by way of mobile phones social networks Twitter there are constant interruptions in a way which is not to be found with the older print technologies ebooks may stare accusingly at one but they do not beep another factor is the effects of the change in the possibility of becoming an author the potentials of self-expression offered by the new media for example YouTube Twitter Facebook democratizes knowledge and makes everyone more or less equal there is again no authoritative figure and the availability of huge sets of resources with online lectures libraries Wikipedia subverts Authority and unity it's a rapidly developing Darwinian world of random variations and selective retention this is all happening at an increasing rate people's lives are not any changing fast but every day at an increasing rate since I'm elderly I can look back and see this happening over 70 years the 1940s 1950s saw great changes in Britain but the 1960s seemed even greater and so it went on and since the 1990s it has been faster and faster all this leads me to a state of psychological instability so I can hardly imagine what it is like in a place changing so much faster whether in China or many parts of the non West there are also the effects of the switch from writing printing and books as the main vehicle of thought all of them slow to produce and absorb a form of narrowcasting and any reaching small mainly academic audiences these are the new media broadband taking much less effort to produce consumable across cultural barriers and ages easy to read at a satisfying level for anyone from a baby upwards and potentially reaching millions in a few seconds the decline of Western hegemony for example the loss of reputation and relative economic power of Europe and America the end of Western imperialism correlated with the rise of Japan China India South America also has its effects ideas now come from all over the world not just spreading out from one Center just to note two obvious examples more films are produced in Bollywood than in Hollywood more peer-reviewed academic papers produced in China than in America another change has been that previously ideology was very closely tied to politics the ideology of the ruling groups fitted with their political agendas as in Imperial Britain communist Russia Confucian China or capitalist America now they are becoming separated with the rulers and elites increasingly unable to control what goes on in an electronic age of mass education another factor following Durkheim is that since ideology reflects as well as creates society then the increasing fragmentation of societies around the world the increasing confusion of ethnic class occupational and other groups is bound to lead to a fragmented superstructure of ideas putting it in another metaphor we have moved from a set course dinner to a cafeteria mix and match' world from one where each person is served by a waiter to one like a good Chinese meal where the many dishes revolve on a large circular platform where one helps oneself to small bits as the dishes past so we fill our plates with a scrap of this and that rather than a meat and two vegetables as in the stereotype of the old British lunch or putting it in another metaphor previously an individual looked out through two or three large windows onto the world books the radio conversations with friends now he or she looks out through hundreds of smaller windows all with tempting glimpses television magazines websites mobile phones there's endless choice another change is from a world of certainty in philosophies to one of probabilities and likelihoods this is present increasingly in mathematics computing economics and other disciplines things are not true or false but more or less accurate or true the watchword for our times is the best is the enemy of the good good enough roughly right rather than precisely wrong it is all a constructivist world which is generated by each individual we make our worlds rather than just receiving them passively hence everything is remade constantly and always open to challenge it's a world of extreme individualism of thought one aspect of this is the rapid expansion of Education for example when I went to Oxford in the early 1960s only a small percent of the population of the UK were going to university now the aim is to reach at least 50% of the population in Britain the same thing is happening even more dramatically in China among other things this means the end of a distinct and ruling literati a small elite of professionals who have been to university who organized the rest everyone potentially and many actually are the literati thus no one has the mystique of a semi priestly caste like figure with access to a privileged stable but to most of the population secret knowledge the boundary maintaining devices are still used for example impenetrable jargon or membership of privileged intellectual clubs yet they are less effective any school child can have access to good basic knowledge in any field through the internet and being a free market in ideas the obscure or difficult to untangle is often driven out by the clear or even the over simple so if someone writes in impenetrable prose or speaks in a boring or unintelligible way the public the customers as they are now go elsewhere this is particularly interesting but it because it seems often to be a feature of paradigm setters that they increasingly mystify their knowledge in order to protect it against rebuttals and also to prevent it becoming out-of-date too quickly this was a problem noted by the philosopher Montesquieu in the 1720s he deliberately left bits out of his writing so that the coffeehouse society so quickly accepted and then forgot new ideas would have to work on his and so his reputation would last more than a season I have always believed that those who have a strong new message of a logical and coherent kind can afford to be planed and many of my teachers were exemplary in this regard the same point was made by Einstein and later by Ernest Rutherford namely that if it is not possible to explain an important new idea in simple and clear terms to an ordinary person it is worthless those who write in an impenetrable way might answer that if you are trying to write about really complex matters the prose will be complex it is of the nature of post modernity that it is full of hybrids ironies quirky contradictory inconsistent multidisciplinary multi vocal multi-level multicultural a cacophony or polyphony a jarring impenetrable sound like some advanced modern music as a result those who become the spokespersons or pivotal figures often write impenetrably exacerbated perhaps by the nature of the abstract French language so when I ask my friends or students as to whether they really think they understand much of what Foucault Derrida and even bored ear are saying they look uncomfortable it's felt that the world is now so complex so multi in every way but if the thinker is providing a reflection of it language has to become so complicated that no one can follow including sometimes the author and indeed of course in the new view there is no author at all each reader reconstructs the text including films and becomes the real author the discourse is like a crowded pub or bar many voices snatches of this and that so much whirling around that we have to be the interpreter ourselves afterwards we remember bits and pieces at the time it resembles my plight as half deaf I hear people talking at the top of their voices in an echoing room all this is bad enough for an elite French audience who are used to the tradition and know some of the roots if not the flowers of the philosophy is poured on them it becomes fairly intolerable for anglo-saxons and Americans even though again if well-trained they have some idea of the background but how can it possibly be interpreted by young Chinese or people from other civilizations the temptation is either too pretentious parroting or a sense of deep bewilderment this will engender a theory a sense of inferiority of the Kings new clothes feeling that everyone else sees something marvelous in a book or article but to me it looks like nothing at all or mere rubbish I must be stupid and they are wise in fact as with much modern art what one is being currently encouraged to engage with Audemars is often empty yet the artist if challenged might say that is the point the shrine is empty there is just a mirror the text in which we can scrutinize ourselves through rewriting or organizing it as we wish there is no author just haunting voices echoes in a cave it is a state of vertigo places like Silicon Valley with a concentration of technological change suffer it particularly badly some look on it as it an existential or hermeneutic plague which spreads and infects all knowledge systems perhaps this is enough to give an idea of what 500 years after the opening of the world through Science and Technology when combined with globalization we have come - there are four states of what Thomas Kuhn called paradigms there are periods of normal science that is when there is an accepted and largely unchallenged worldview people are agreed on the rules that is on the nature of the questions and the acceptable form of answers most of human history has been like that then there are periods when world views or paradigms shift paradigm revolutions or collisions these periods characteristically lasts for a few years until according to and others that the adherents of the old paradigm die or retire sometimes their death or retirement is precipitated by an actual revolution usually the system morphs a favourite word into another then it is back to normal science all of human history has been in one or other these states steady conditions or transformation from one to another what is new from the 1970s and particularly from the 1990s is a period when normal science collapses in the face of many challenges but does not just evolve into a new paradigm but into a paradigm free zone we could see this as in the following diagram several points can be observed about this diagram firstly the length of time a paradigm lasts gets shorter and shorter until it almost immediately dissolves secondly the river gets wider and deeper as knowledge accumulates thirdly the first vertical waterfall has discernible if fragmented columns of ideas but as it travels faster and further it disintegrates into mist floating bits of knowledge hanging in the air impossible to challenge or absorb we are now in the mist stage moving nowhere drifting in our own little pockets of shared space but with very little in common with others except at a superficial level in this phase we cannot share answers because we do not share questions everyone's opinion is equally valid there are compensations it's a free world in the sense that hierarchy and authority is abolished it has the freedom of driving around a dodgem Park each person at the wheel bumping it to another able to go in any direction it is creative and exciting full of intellectual fireworks new ideas that shoot up into the sky burst and dazzle for a few seconds and then are gone it is producing solutions to many problems and it is increasing affluence and comfort for many yet it's also deeply unsettling leading to loneliness and confusion the game changes every day and people do not understand what the rules are intellectually it is not as in earlier thought systems ascending a mountain of knowledge with a ridge gained as one masters part of the system with further ridges ahead it's more like scrabbling up a sand bank crumbly insecure sliding back a huge effort to gain something which soon dissolves you

Channel: Prof Alan Macfarlane - Ayabaya

Views: 32,558

Rating: 4.8528996 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: OIrnud6X2qU

Length: 30min 45sec (1845 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 15 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/Liquid_Blue7]

Thanks for posting, hopefully it actually gives a holistic definition, because everything I've looked at seems to define postmodernism as a deconstruction/critique of modernism (which it is of course, but ya'know, I'm lazy and don't want to read more on it)

Edit: After listening to this, I can understand where Peterson gets some of his ideas about postmodernism from, although he's wrong in his method of critique and analysis. I definitely disagree with a lot of the 'assertions' put forth by this speaker, assuming they are representative of postmodernism. He gets a lot of things wrong.

[u/LykatheaAflamed]

We don't hate post modernism, do we boys?

[u/DiscreteChi]

The problem I have with the concept of post-modernity is it's relativism. Wasn't the modern era just post-classical? And the classical post-ancient? And wouldn't by definition all of those eras have been in a sense post-modern?

In this regard post-modernism is a misnomer for evidence driven progressivism.

[u/gobuu]

It sounds like they guy is behind me breathing down my neck, slurping in my ears.