On Post-Modernism and Meta-Narratives

Post-Modernism, which has its origins in the works of philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, is associated with the rejection of rationality as a means for understanding reality, giving rise to subjectivity and ‘perspectivism’. In some sense, this is also deeply Socratic as it rejects the possibility of absolute knowledge. This commonly is juxtaposed with the objectivity and order of Enlightenment thought. What characterized modernity is the belief that reality operated in ways which could be understood and brought to light by human reason. There was a sense that man could conquer nature through his faculties and scientific inquiry because the universe operated in a predictable manner. Post-Modernism rejects these claims and the base of objectivity on which they stand.

Although post-modernism is often criticized by advocates of rationalism and universalism that it collapses into moral relativity and nihilism (a critique I do not think unfair), I do think that as a movement it offers many valuable and important suggestions which aid in 1) recognizing the limitations of reason and 2) the way in which we as a collective culture impose subjective stories which masquerade as truth. The latter is referred to as a “meta-narrative”, which is defined by John Stephens as “a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience". The post-modernist treats such overarching stories with skepticism as they are oversimplifications which are commonly used to perpetuate an existing power structure.

Put differently, this world is your world: it is shaped by our language and how we bring our language to bear on what we conceive as reality. In the process, we as a society (and in particular, those in power) create stories regarding history, society, and values. These narratives not only situate participants within a polity, they create a shared yet subjective meaning. This includes national narratives, collective symbols, and ideas which serve to build a common culture and political structure. But these stories are also subjective in the sense that they depict only one way of viewing history. They do not so much describe the past as they create a vignette or characterization of history from one vantage point. They are stories about stories, and ‘yours’ due to the fact that they lack any third-person objectivity. Throughout Anglo-American history this has had the effect of idealizing the founding fathers and marginalizing minorities, the oppressed, and divergent political systems in order to garner a collective acceptance from generation to generation. We elevate these stories to the detriment of issues such as equality, global poverty, etc.. But notice that there are other narratives that are socially constructed which form our expectations about the way the world operates, how we should act within society, and who we should be. These all comprise an invisible, yet ponderous layer upon our general understanding.

The largest meta-narrative according to the post-modernist is the myth of the triumph of universal reason and logos over chaos, the victory of science over irrationality. This is gestured towards interestingly in Nassim Taleb’s 2007 book “The Black Swan” in which he posits that we neglect rare events because we underestimate our ignorance due to the collective illusion of objective truth or knowledge given by the progress of the science. We our misled by a narrative of absolute truth, but in fact such objectivity is a fiction. This can also be best described in his sardonic style by Nietzsche in his book “Philosophy and Truth”. He writes,

“Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of the universe…there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history”…” (p.79) “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.” (p. 84)