Okay, Steve Ersinghaus, we gotta talk.
You said two things last Thursday that reminded me that I am from another planet. A pre-postmodern planet.
You certainly reminded me that we are in a postmodern world.
What a crazy term “postmodern” is. All my life, “modern” was a term for new, exciting, different. Suddenly, that is all passe, and now everything new, exciting and different is “postmodern.”
But it is real. I pinch myself but I am already awake. Everything is a story in this postmodern world. Rhetoric is dead. Logic is dead. Whoever tells the best story, wins.
And the second thing you said that is ever so postmodern: “There is no such thing as right or wrong.”
Oh my God, if that were true, how could my uncle who was a marine on Okanawa do what he did. He was a Lance Corporal when the battle started. He was commander of his company, what was left of it, when the battle ended. All the officers and noncoms had been killed. Who knows how many people my uncle killed or saw die.
Was all of that a waste? Was there really no right or wrong, and it didn’t make any difference who won?
If there was no right or wrong, then what the Hell was he doing there?
What rough beast, its hour come round at last, has convinced the world that there is no right or wrong? Why in this generation has reason given way to storytelling. Is it just too hard to think, or does the entire world have ADHD?
There is right and there is wrong. Absolute right and absolute wrong. I certainly have no confusion on that score. And the storytelling has got to end. We have to get back to hard core thinking. America, as I have said before, is going to Hell on a bobsled.
All the great civilizations of the past have ended, and I suppose America will be no exception. Rome must have been like this at the end, orgies, slaves to do all the work (for us, computers), and morality disintegrating. I look around me and I see Rome everywhere.
There is such a thing as right and wrong, damn it! Ethics are not culturally relative. There is a right way and a wrong way. There is a good and a bad. There are things worth dying for.
But if everybody is right, and nobody is wrong, how do you tell? Was the Mayan practice of human sacrifice justified because it was right in that culture, or were the Mayans just a bunch of savages? Was Hitler just doing what he thought was right? Was Charles Manson just misunderstood?
Postmodernism has brought with it some good things. But it has also pulled us further from our roots than we can afford to be. If only we could take the good without the bad. Why does it seem to be the human condition that everything has a dark side?
If we are evolving, then what are we evolving into?
