1.

The Goal: The Means is the End

We intend to restore the fundamental necessities and environmental awareness of the species through
the advocation of the most current understandings of who and what we truly are, coupled with how
science, nature and technology (rather than religion, politics and money) hold the keys to our personal
growth, not only as individual human beings, but as a civilization, both structurally and spiritually. The
central insights of this awareness is the recognition of the Emergent and Symbiotic elements of natural
law and how aligning with these understandings as the bedrock of our personal and social institutions,
life on earth can and will flourish into a system which will continuously grow in a positive way, where
negative social consequences, such as social stratification, war, biases, elitism and criminal activity will
be constantly reduced and, idealistically, eventually become nonexistent within the spectrum of human
behavior itself.
This possibility is, of course, very difficult for most humans to consider, for we have been conditioned by
society to think that crime, corruption and dishonesty is "the way it is" and that there will always be
people who want to abuse, hurt and take advantage of others. Religion is the largest promoter of this
propaganda, for the "us and them" or "good and evil" mentality promotes this false assumption.
The reality is that we live in a society that produces scarcity. The consequence of this scarcity is that
human beings must behave in self preserving ways, even if it means they have to cheat and steal in
order to get what they want. Our research has concluded that scarcity is one of the most fundamental
causes of aberrant human behavior, while also leading to complex forms of neurosis in other ways. A
statistical look at drug addiction, crime and incarceration statistics, finds that poverty and unhealthy
social conditions comprise the life experience of those who engage in such behavior.
Human beings are not good or bad... they are running, forever changing compositions of the life
experiences that influence them. The "quality" of a human being (if there is such a thing) is directly
related to the upbringing and thus belief systems they have been conditioned into. This simple reality
has been grossly overlooked and today people primitively think that competition, greed and corruption
are "hardwired" elements of human behavior and, in turn, we must have prisons, police and hence a
hierarchy of differential control in order for society to deal with these "tendencies". This is totally illogical
and false.
The bottom line is that in order to change things for the better fundamentally, you must begin to
address root causes. Our current society's system of "punishment" is outmoded, inhumane, and
unproductive. When a serial killer is caught, most people jump up and down and scream for the death of
that person. This is backwards. A truly sane society, which understands what we are and how our value
systems are created, would take the individual and learn the reasons behind his or her violent actions.
This information would then go to a research department which considers how to stop such conditions
from occurring through education.
It is time to stop the patchwork. It is time to begin a new social approach which is updated to present
day knowledge. Sadly, society today is still largely based on outmoded, superstitious dispositions and
resolutions.
It is also important to point out that there are no utopias or endings. All evidence points to perpetual
change on all levels. In turn, it is our personal actions every day of our lives that mold and perpetuate
the social systems we have in place. Yet, paradoxically, it is also our environmental influences which
create our perspectives and hence world views. Therefore, true change will come not only from adjusting
your personal understandings and decisions, but equally from changing the social structures that
influence these understandings and decisions.
The elite power systems are little affected in the long run by traditional protest and political movements.
We must move beyond these 'establishment rebellions' and work with a tool much more powerful:
We will stop supporting the system, while constantly advocating knowledge, peace, unity and
compassion. We cannot "fight the system". Hate, anger and the 'war' mentality are failed means for
change, for they perpetuate the same tools the corrupt, established power systems use to maintain
control to begin with.

2. Multiculturalism, dehumanization and the self

Postmodern culture, like any other culture, is a series of distinct characteristics of a society or a social
group, in spiritual, material, intellectual or emotional terms.
Besides the specific communicational codes (gestures, words, writing, arts, mass media,
interactive media the telephone), this legacy is also transmitted by new communicational technologies
specific to the information society (the Internet, the world wide web) and defined by a series of societal
transformations marking the transition to a new type of society, dependent on extremely complex
electronic information and communication networks.
The contemporary multicultural forms are assumed by many expert voices as characterizing a
continuation of a major crisis of the 20th century, that of the spirit, hence of humanism, perpetuated in
the new millenium via remakes of all kinds, reconfiguration and conceptual re-definings, with elements
such as the fragmentary, the hyper-text, the influence of the media on the masses, with television as a
double-edged weapon, leadership, hackers and an Internet globalising but also robotising us, with
Americanism vs. Europeanism.
All in all, in postmodernity, everything having to do with communication warns about dehumanization. With a mass media allowed to function as a second God, we implicitely come to live in the
non-culture of a lobotomising entertainment and advertisement industries, while the artificial character
of the mind circus on the move becomes a huge threat. This code of existence in what came into being
after modernity (involving post-feminism, post-colonialism and Islam, globalization, publicity, virtual
reality) is one also defined by the mall, the hypermarket, the pc or the cell phone and signals a radical
change of paradigm (the cultural one included), and is in close connection with technical progress and
social movements.
This gradual dehumanization was effected by the degradation of the spiritual world as we knew it,
by its moving in the street, while the individual, looking for their identity, becomes a mere consumer of
reality, of trends, models and mostly pseudo-models to which they are connected.
Modernism investigated the foundation of experience in the self and focused on a self in search
for its integration. In other words, the focus of modernity on subjectivity was still within the dominant
humanist framework, although the obsessive quest for the whole already suggested the beginnings of
what was to become the radical postmodern investigation, a challenge born from the splitting of the
postmodern discourse into an underlining and an undermining of the notion of coherent, autonomous
self as source of significance or action. The human being has been displaced from the centre of the
universe, in the same time as traditional humanism has been demolished (mainly by Nietzsche). Both for
Nietzsche and Heidegger, the being is no longer a fixed, unchangeable plan, a reference point for the
real world phenomena, but a fluctuating, contextual, contingent entity. From the postmodern
perspective, as the complexity and expansion of society grows and its pace becomes faster and faster,
the identity becomes less and less stable, more and more fragile, closer to a myth or an illusion. The
autonomous, self-constituted subject (an important acquisition of the modern individual and of a culture
of individualism) becomes fragmented, decentered, unbalanced, even disappears, due to social
processes determining the standardization of individualities in a rationalised and bureaucratized
consumer society and in the cultural media.
In Against Interpretation (1966), Susan Sontag gathers all these elements in the syntagm new
sensitivity and strongly believes that the immediate and easily noticeable consequence is the blurring
of the borders between high/elitist culture and low/mass culture, a process triggered by the proliferation
of alternative cultural forms and practices such as the television, the cinema, the videoclip, virtual
reality or publicity, all questionning the very status of art; however noxious we think their extraordinary
impact upon the receiver or even the creator might be, what is clear is that we can neither ignore nor
minimize them. The newly acquired commercial dimension of art, the obvious kinship between pop-art
and show-biz, the emergence of a mass advertisment and entertainment culture, all this mentain
deliberatelly the confusion between the image and the real object, any event depending more or less on
its reflection in the media.
Furthermore, though a promoter of canonical democratization and supporter of the necessity to
revigorate art through derridean impurity of genres, and, unlike mass media cultivating the passivity of
the receiver, postmodernism rejects the model of an inert consummer, ready to unconditionally accept
everything s/he is offered, comfortably backing out from, unwilling to take over the necessity of a
personal perspective. The assimilation of forms characteristic to mass culture by postmodernist
literature and art, in general, does not mean giving up evaluation criteria or suspending the differences
between the categories of receivers as the aethetic dimension is never eluded. T. W. Adorno says: [o]
experien artistic foarte intens i contient este accesibil numai celor pe care viaa nu i apas n
aa fel nct s-i doreasc, n timpul liber, o eliberare simultan de efort i plictiseal. This type of
receiver will never turn to Barths novels, but to the extremely rich offer of magazines or Danielle
Steeles, Barbara Taylor Bradfords or Sandra Browns novels, as postmodernism also defines itself
through a permanent challenge of the receivers horizon of expectations, inertness and prejudice (the
2

same as modernism, in fact), while the other kind of approach, the mass culture, addresses and exploits
exactly their passivity.
There is still another area that cannot be ignored due to the effects and the consequences of the
movements in it: small local cultures make themselves known to the rest of the world and take part in
the cultural pluralism without which the postmodernity of the world we live in would remain a
meaningless concept. Once the danger of nuclear confrontation ceased and the Iron Curtain fell, most
part of the worlds population either chose democracy or dreams about it as an unreacheable ideal: a
world in which war and famine no longer exist, everybody have a prosperous life, tolerance plays an
ever important role, making room for all styles and ideas. It is easy to see that the road to all these
becoming real for each and every individual is long and difficult. More than that, beyond the unsatisfied
primary needs of the citizens in many parts of the world, one can as easily notice the pattern of the man
faced with intense, profound psychological experiences, some of which serious and traumatizing;
Crtrescu mentions here sentimentul de depeizare, de dez-inserie a omului din lume prin pierderea
treptat a simului realitii, disorientation in a world characterized through disintegration of authority
and relativization and incertitude of traditional values (the same as Vattimos).
The existence of the other, of otherness, remains a constant value and an angle from which
postmodernism defines itself as modernism projected to another scale: if the modern other oposed the
individual self, its postmodern equivalent becomes the opposite force of a collectivity ethnically,
religiously, politically and nationally defined, according to gender, race etc. criteria.
If postmodernist features (as well as modernist ones) are historically and culturally specific, they
are not culturally hermetic. Consequently, one of the most convincing descriptions of postmodernism is
McHales: a change/mutation determined by social, economic and technological changes inside the
heteroglossia of intercultural change, one that serves as a vehicle for the confrontation and the dialogue
of the poliphony of voices, where idioms and the dialogue between art and the academic sphere, on the
one hand, and them and popular/mass forms, on the other, are mixed, dissolved in and contaminated by
one another. Under these circumstances, postmodernism becomes its own syptom of dissemination and
difference.
The connection between culture and capital is a frequent one, and the postmodern phenomenon
is considered a cultural dominant, at one and the same time an aesthetic and a political one, with the
relation between the socio-political dimension and the aesthetic one differently constructed from one
culture to another, from one continent to another, the result of the combination between the cultural
reaction to institutionalised modernism and de final movement from monopol to multinational
capitalism, the latter characterized through the expansion of the global market and the development of
the means of electronic communication at all levels of existence; another, rather similar, approach to
postmodernism (in the same vein of Marxist criticism) might be that of Terry Eagleton, who describes it
as mutation or even series of mutations at the level of a culture in which postmodern features like
cultural relativism and moral conventionalism, scepticism, pragmatism and localism, disgust at ideas of
solidarity and disciplined organizing, lack of an adequate theory regarding political action, vehemently
speak against it.
In short, the transition from modernism to postmodernism leads to a surface model of literature
and culture, to the detriment of a depth paradigm. Whether this is a matter of worry or of joy
(depending on the approach to the phenomenon), what is beyond any doubt is that it produces not only
a world of consumption, but also modified psychic and social conditions:
In this depthless society of the image [...], old distinctions and orientations are abolished:
objects no longer relate at all to their processes of human production, there is a loss of emotional
content and of objective or critical distance. The past is recoverable now only as pastiche [].
The individual, formerly alienated under monopoly capitalism, now becomes schizofrenic, all
sense even of a lost authenticity gone.
From the neo-Marxist perspective, postmodernism appears as weak discourse, one that has very
little in common with Vattimos pensiero debole, a discourse characterized by platitude, weakness or
lack of moral standards, political actions, historical depth and, underlining all these negative categories,
by subjectivity. An empty subject, divised, fragmented and politically neutral, the subject as lack,
claims to become the true postmodern subject. Precariously constituted round the margins of his interior
void, this subject manifests itself through the continous assertion of its lack au authenticity; it appears
like an intertextual phenomenon, as collage, agglutination of styles, expressions, pieces and parts
belonging to other cultural identities.
In a similar note, professor David Harvey approaches the problematic of postmodernity as social
condition in The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Social Change (1997). In the
cracked postmodern surface of reflexion, Harvey sees the ground allowing for new angles and
perspectives, the only question being whom they represent. The source of inspiration for the social
commentator willing to identify a future ethics is the new social movements and changed attitudes to
race, peace and ecology; this gives him confidence in a historico-geographical materialism
contributing to the accomplishment of the re-oriented project of Enlightenment. The main preoccupation
3

of the post/neo-marxist Harvey is economic and geo-politicall themes, the new casino-economy, as he
calls it, leading to a new culture, attentive to the symbolic capital, fashion, design and the quality of
urban life, on the one hand, but also to the otherness of the poor, the shelterless, powerless and
hopeless.
Due to the rather contested relation between (French) postmodern theory and politics, the one
between feminism and postmodernism is also cautious. Many feminists regarded with impatience the
philosophical arguments hard to understand that surrounded the epistemological basis, and
concentrated instead upon studies of historical inspiration about social conditions. Nevertheless, such an
approach derives ultimately from the French theory: the hostility of Western thinking towards and the
fascination with the other (Derrida), the social constituance and the discipline of the sexual identity
(Foucault), the interpretation of the feminine sexuality (Lacan).
In the essay, Feminism: the Political Conscience of Postmodernism?, Laura Kipnis, critic, essayist
and professor of media studies at Northwestern University, gives a short presentation of the differences
between Anglo-American feminism, essentialist and traditionally liberal, and continental feminism,
which, after operating a radical structural analysis (falogocentrism=falocentrism+logocentrism),
withdraws from the implications of its own analysis in textual autonomy, clinging to the modern rejection
of the signified. The author considers that French feminism is postmodernist but fails to fulfill its political
potential because it turns its back to the popular, about in the same way as Western Marxism turned its
back to the masses. Whereas commentators such as Callinicos see in postmodernism the cultural
expression of a new middle-class and of a new conservatism, Kipnis brings forward arguments in favor of
the idea that deconstructivist, feminist and leftist postmodernism can and must fight against this new
elitism, specific to modernism, and which it has not been able to detach from yet; this, in her opinion,
would mean to give up the luxury of textual and theoretical preoccupations that continue to ensure the
dominance and priviledge of the First World. The same as Baudrillard but going in a different direction,
Kipnis takes as a basis the subject, fragmented, talking, gendered, socially constructed or just a
linguistic effect. In modernity, with the flag of Enlightenment waving, the subject was centered and,
through its synecdochical relation with the political centrality of the West, the rest of the world became
the object for conquest, knowledge or plusvalue. The decentered postmodern subject hides from the
decline of the great imperialist powers of modernity, from the traumatizing loss of hegemony, creating
compensating fantasies sometimes (of the Rambo type in the United States). The authors bitter-ironical
tone is obvious, she disapproves of the de-politicization of a Western Marxism inclined towards
aestheticization, theoretical autonomy and distance from political practice, the conclusion being that
what postmodernity lacks is a postmodern political discourse.
While reading the following quotation, remember it was written in 1989:
[i]n the current hysteria over international terrorism [] the reaction to any decentring telos is
symptomatic blindness rather than insight: [] unwillingness and inability to fully comprehend
this phenomenon of shifts in power and spheres of influence, and of new forms of political
struggle in which civilian tourists are held responsible for the actions of their governments. When
retaliation is taken [] for American arrogance, this is the postmodern critique of the
Enlightenment; it is, in fact, a decentering; it is the margin, the absence, the periphery, rewriting
the rules from its own interest.

3. Postmodernly mocking at authority(ies)

Actually, people nowadays are somewhat jaded by the term postmodern. Perhaps jaded is an
understatement, nauseated being more appropriate. Anyway, when the term is said to have appeared, back
in the 70s, many jaws fell and bounced off the floor several times, as for their owners it was utterly
inconceivable that anything could follow modern. Isnt the very idea of modern always associated with the
ideas new and now? Obviously, if there were to be a period of anything following the modern, it would
have to be called something other than modern, and postmodern was as good a name as any, especially
since its a bit of a joke on the ordinary meaning of modern. Obviously again, the Modern period was
misnamed(!).
Yet, this might be considered a pat answer, a more profound thought being that the modern period was
not misnamed. True, the ordinary word modern is associated with new and now, but the historical period
we call modern chose to associate itself with the new and the now in such a deep way that we actually
see the breakdown of the whole notion of periods. The modern period is the period that refuses to die,
consequently the world is now an odd mix of modern and postmodern. Oddly, its not just because the
modern refuses to die, but also because the postmodern refuses to kill it. Postmodernism includes modernism
as just another valid source of ideas.
Nevertheless, the postmodern refuses to kill anything completely. It pledges its allegiance to a
principle that could read as follows: Look at the big picture! Dont focus in on two or three things to the
exclusion of other things! Keep everything in context! Dont ridicule ideas merely because theyre not the
latest and greatest! Pick your own fashions! Dont let someone else tell you what you should like! Tsall good.
(by the way, this is too extended to be called a principle)
Still, how weird and disorienting can it be that in our postmodernist frame of mind there is no truth, so
ideas do not matter, and in our postmodern world issues are not the issue and no one takes almost
anything seriously anymore? If one can fathom that, perhaps one can learn a thing or two. This would bother
a modernist, because a modernist has to decide whether this is true OR that is true. The modernist believes in
OR more than AND. Postmodernists believe in AND more than OR, or even better, in AND/OR.
Our culture has undergone a basic shift, one that might be considered actually healthy. We used to
evaluate everything and everyone based on reputation or position, with the basic underlying assumption that
we all had to agree whether something (or someone) was good or bad. This has had the result that we are
actually free to evaluate things (and people) on the basis of what is actually good and what is actually bad,
rather than having to take someones word for it. More than that, we are required to make individual choices,
the assumption being that not everyone is going to agree, and that not everyone should be required to agree.
However, in trade for losing our monoculturalism, we are now required to discuss things. We are not required
to agree about everything, but we are required to at least agree to disagree. Since we are required to discuss
things, this has the effect that we tend to deconstruct the things we evaluate. Which brings us to
deconstructionism viewed as the bridge between modernism and postmodernism. The former, reductionistic,
tending to take things to pieces and then take one of the pieces in isolation and glorify it, the latter, holistic,
trying to show all the pieces at once, and how they relate to each other. The former showing the final, great,
shining product, a building for example (as postmodernism began in architecture), the latter leaving visible
the working (the ducts in the same example) and saying it is alright to be in the open, and it is alright for
different things to look different.
While arrogant modernism focused on the hammer of the authority of reason and truth 1, pounding
every nail (dysfunctional cultural/political/educational institutions) and attacking every problem,
postmodernism focused on the carpenter(!), allowing him to choose whether or not to use hammers, and
granting him some amount of free will and creativity.
But then, and strangely enough, after the several decades since its breaking-through appearance,
postmodernism, though having at its core an ardent need to de-center/-molish the old and make large,
(un)comfortable, tolerant, otherness-/difference-accepting room for itself, seems to lead/push us in the
opposite direction. Professor Valentine Cunningham, with maybe a keener insight of human nature, identifies
nuances when discussing the legitimation of truth, on the territory of literature and literary criticism, this time:

The thinkers of the Enlightenment project praised the idea of progress, and believed that through the application of
universal reason to every human problem, humanity could move steadily forwards the fully rational society in which there
would be freedom, prosperity and happiness for all. From this presumption, modernists built a culture that exalted
technological achievement and mastery over the natural order. Expansion-minded capitalism and liberal democracy,
outgrowths of modernist autonomous individualism, subjugated the earth to the Eurocentric, male dominated paradigm.
But modernism planted the seeds of its own undoing. The appalling wars, genocides, poverty, exploitation and injustice,
pollution, threats of nuclear annihilation and other horrors of the twentieth century have undermined the faith in progress.
Postmodernists say that the idols of autonomous reason and technological proliferation have brought the modern age to
the brink of disaster. The myth of progress ends up in a nightmare of violence, both for marginalized people and for the
earth. Every time somebody claims to be in possession of the truth, it ends up repressing people. Consequently,
postmodernists believe that what is wrong with modern ideologies is one part of humanity imposing its ideas and values
and control over other parts, one nation imposing on another, or one group in society imposing its values on other groups.

[o]nce discredited the idea of statements having a truth-value, or of the validity of truth leading to
discussion on reality, imagination, fiction, etc., we obviously stumble Once discredited the idea of the
writers duty to render truth the best he can, we come to an inevitable deadlock. Consequently, I think
it is dangerous to mock at the idea that truth is a goal, be it in literature or criticism. Fortunately, most
people guide their lives by other precepts and values than these sceptics
Howbeit, many people aspire to truth and greatness, which is not wrong if both concepts are properly
defined. True(!) greatness, postmoderns claim is measured by how much freedom you give to others, not by
how much you can coerce others to do what you want (see footnote 1). God is not a modernist. He does not
view us as nails. God expects us to behave like carpenters. Indeed, he gave us a carpenter as an example. So
maybe God is postmodern. He has his own ideas of what rules, and what does not, and he does not expect
everyone else to agree with him, although he probably likes it when people agree with him. God gives people
the freedom to go to the devil if they so choose.
On the other hand, one price to pay for all the generous ideas and principles of postmodern ideology is
that a growing number, especially among the emerging generations, believe that reason and truth are
inherently political and subversive. That may be why they are often so cynical: advised by voices in
contemporary culture (including many academics willing to make themselves visible as up-dated scholars) to
consider claims to truth as being clever disguises for the pernicious will to power (which, unfortunately too
often, are exactly that), they conclude that, rather than dominating others with our version of reality, we
should accept all beliefs as equally valid. Openness without the restraint of reason, and tolerance without
moral appraisal seem, again unfortunately, sometimes to be the new postmodern mandates. For too many
people, the postmodern outlook seems more absorbed rather than thought out. A vast majority came to
believe (and many of us even teach it, in good will, of course) that truth is relative. But only few know why we
think that way. Still fewer have any clue about how our beliefs practically relate to our own lives, that often
they are hopelessly contradictory or that we often live inconsistently with them. In general, we tend to be
ideologically confused rather than deeply committed to our convictions. So while we hear the rhetoric of
openness to everything and tolerance for everyone, it is rare to find someone who really understands what
this means. It has become the socially appropriate attitude to display. Thus, many postmodern ideologues
have been successful in transforming ideology into popular zeitgeist.
Paradoxically and ironically (if it were not sad), in an age of anti-dogmatism, this radical subjectivity
leads to the dangerously arrogant inference that no one can ever be wrong about what they believe. As
people living in a socially and morally fragmented age, free from the constraints of rationality, we are
confronted with the danger of not knowing truth from self-delusion anymore. The tyranny of truth has been
replaced with self-empowering stories, typically functioning at the expense of truth: authority as the truth
rather than truth as the authority.
But maybe its not this, either. Then what?
Postmodernity is a moment of cynical reason in which subjects no longer believe the official line
delivered by societys authorizing institutions; it is now taken for granted that governments routinely
dissemble and that advertisers perpetrate shams. But this disbelief does not bring with it a freeing from or
resistance to ideology. Instead subjects respond according to the fetishistic logic of disavowal: I know what
Im doing is meaningless, but I do it nonetheless.
iek, a Lacanian Marxist sociologist, psychoanalyst, philosopher and cultural critic, argues, among
other things, that
[t]he typical postmodern subject is one who displays outright cynicism towards official institutions, yet
at the same time believes in the existence of conspiracies and of an unseen Other pulling the strings.
This apparently contradictory coupling of cynicism and belief is strictly correlative to the demise of the
big Other. Its disappearance causes us to construct an Other of the Other in order to escape the
unbearable freedom its loss encumbers us with.
For all that, there is yet something else that postmodernism, unlike its predecessor, can and has: laugh
at itself and humor. Postmodernism is not afraid to laugh at itself. It is actually liberating to be able to be what
you really are, not what you should be or the others want you to be; be playful, mocking, nostalgic,
sentimental, retro, casual etc. It is entertaining, and if pomo is not about entertainment it is about nothing at
all. It is really liberating to be unserious, at least now and then. Modernism means being serious, which is not
bad if you are not serious all the time about everything and anything.
Modernism tried. It tried real hard. It really, really tried. It tried to get rid of conventions. It thought it
got rid of conventions. But all it really did was make its conventions invisible. At least to itself. It build the cult
of seriousness and objectivity, to which the postmoderns answer with the cult of subjectivity, more honestly
called cultural relativism. It is the notion that everything is as good as everything else, because goodness is
only a matter of opinion. It is like claiming that the only thing you can know absolutely is that you cannot
know anything absolutely, which is really just another form of modernism, a kind of existentialism in fact,
though unfortunately it has come to be associated with postmodernism. Which brings the study back to the
idea of truth and the extant to which this is relative. Strong postmodernism says that all truth is created.
But this really is not a problem for anyone who believes in a Creator. All truths are created relative, but some
are more relative than others. A universal truth only has to be true about our particular universe, so to speak.
It does not matter too much whether the universe itself is true or false, just as long as it makes a good story
and you like the Author.
6

In any case, Postmodernism, beyond its disturbing, confusing, maddening characteristics, may appear
as a blessing. It offers, with praiseworthy generosity a smorgasbord; the only question left is what are you
hungry for? Plus, it does not force anyone to come up with answers. It claims it is not the task of the
philosopher, writer or academic, for that matter, to act as the Big Other who tells us about the world, but
rather to challenge our own ideological presuppositions. All of the three categories above, plus many others,
depending on their life experience and domain of action, are called to criticize rather than try to find answers.
Pretty comfortable, isnt it?
Regardless of that, society needs people who are willing to be partisan on behalf of their chosen
culture, while remaining sufficiently non-partisan to keep in touch with the rest of the world. It is no fun to
create a new culture and then cut it off from the rest of humanity. One good thing is that, in this respect,
things have improved greatly, and the bridges across the gaps have gotten sturdier. Now people can send
their memes2 across wider chasms without getting crucified on one end of the bridge or the other. It mirrors a
postmodern sort of movement, with lots of diversity, and a certain amount of turmoil, about as good as any
movement gets nowadays. We have agreed to agree. Except when we do not.
Yes, Modernism fought against but also created a lot of dysfunction, nobody disputes that. We were
encouraged to revolt, deconstruct, cut apart our papers, run away from home, not get married, and so on.
Despite all this, it is really about being together. Nowadays, family is where you find it. Family is where
you create it.
The interesting thing is that postmodernism is propagating the dysfunction, because it actually finds its
meaning in dysfunction. For one thing, we should not fail to notice how one cannot rebel by being
dysfunctional any more. It is no longer interesting, we have done that already.
Postmodernism really is a result of Modernism. Tsall good. Except when its not.

Meme (< Greek mimema) originated with Richard Dawkins 1976 book The Selfish Gene, and defines the element
of cultural ideas, symbols and practices transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals etc. It is a
cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes.