The Irony Trap: How Postmodernism’s Jokes Became a Dead End
That’s why postmodernism is dying. It’s dying because it refuses to die.
When I saw a car in front of me with a bumper sticker that said, “I am speeding because I really need to poop,” it made me smile and cringe at the same time. I was reminded of a guy I knew in the early 2000s who turned everything into a joke. Literally, everything. Not a good-natured joke, but an irony bordering on derision.
Talking to him felt like reading that bumper sticker again and again — somewhat amusing at first but then cringeworthy. This guy must have been a postmodernist (without knowing it). After the suffocation of Soviet-era moralism with its purely modernistic underpinnings, postmodernism in Russia felt like a gust of fresh air. There was something liberating, even iconoclastic about it.
It helped young people to breathe freely after a long time of being forced into the stifling modernistic mold. Postmodernism, with its denial of objective truth, was an escape from years and years of being imprisoned by “an objective” truth that didn’t feel like truth at all.
Modernism is characterized by the belief in objective meaning and objective truth. But what do you do when you see little meaning and little truth in that “objective truth”? You deride it. You deride everything. Postmodernism was a proper reaction to the misplaced “truth” of modernism. It wasn’t a reaction against Truth; it was a reaction against the “idol of truth.”
The truth is that Truth is neither objective nor subjective. It is personal. It has a name: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” It is both inside and outside. It’s not propositional; it’s relational. You meet it, breathe it, hear it, touch it, and eat it.
Modernism couldn’t do any of that because it believed in propositional truth — a bunch of objective cognitive beliefs. Postmodernism couldn’t do it because it derided everything. You can’t recognize Truth even when you meet it face to face if you believe it’s a bunch of propositions. Similarly, you can’t recognize Truth when you meet it face to face if you believe there isn’t one.
Surprisingly, this guy I am talking about was very hard to connect with. How do you connect with someone who turns everything into a joke? After a while, it stops being funny. You want to say: “Can you be serious for once?” He couldn’t. For many, Postmodernism was a psychological wall of protection against the “truth” of modernism.
The irony of Postmodernism is that it shuts itself off from life through irony. When you deride everything you eventually run out of things to deride. When you ridicule everything, you can’t connect with life. If there’s no Meaning, your jokes eventually become meaningless. You crave connection with Life but can’t achieve it because life is not a joke.
If you laugh at everything, you lose the ability to laugh at anything. To experience life, one must be vulnerable. The wall of derision protects us from bad feelings, but it also shuts us off from experiencing good ones. Refusal to feel pain is a refusal to be alive. We put on a mask of derision to avoid being hurt, but eventually, we get bored to death.
By refusing to feel pain the postmodernist refuses to be wounded by Beauty. That’s why postmodernism is dying. It’s dying because it refuses to die. To be alive, we must be open to the possibility of being wounded. The only way to truly live is to embrace dying.
I am sure you know this quote. But for other readers it may provide context: "If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please." -Hannah Arendt
Great piece!
Reminds me of Psalm 1:
"Blessed is the the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked
nor stands in the way of sinners
nor sits in the company of scoffers"
It's the Psalmist telling us not to walk, stand, sit--or hang around cynics. They are, in the end--always a downer!