Assignment: No 1

Module Code: HM4001

Module Title: Humanities I
Name of the Lecturer: Prof. Premakumara
Date of Submission: 01.04.2016

ASSIGNMENT: 05

Name: K.A.L.P.Abeykoon
Student ID No. 2014093CL1
Advanced Diploma Level Stage II
Post-modern society

Social structures into which the more privileged people of the world are moving offers a
remarkable mixture (hybrid/pastiche/mosaic) of the pre-modern, modern and postmodern. New
communities are being formed that in some ways resemble the pre-modern villages of olden time
and yet these new communities are formed around electronic communication systems and the
new digital economies of the 21st Century. Now we are returning to bartering systems, but now
negotiating exchanges over the Internet rather than down at the Town Square. The big businesses
of the modern era continue to exist, but now competing or cooperating with the small e-
commerce businesses of the postmodern world. We are returning to pre-modern rituals and
spirituality, while proclaiming our modern day independence from superstitions and dependence
on science and technology.

In the historical sense, postmodern society is simply a society that occurs after the modern
society. A postmodern society engages several of the definitions of the postmodern we have
discussed thus far. Many of the elements of a society like this are reactions to what the modern
society stood for: industrialism, rapid urban expansion, and rejection of many past principles. As
such, historically postmodern societies favor examination or rejection of these principles, such as
an examination of the social characteristics of industrialism, urban expansionism, and principles
of earlier eras.

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Views and concepts

Characteristics of Postmodern

There is no absolute truth

Postmodernists believe that the notion of truth is a contrived illusion, misused by people and
special interest groups to gain power over others. There is no absolute truth and truth is relative.
Postmodernism asserts that truth is not mirrored in human understanding of it, but is rather
constructed as the mind tries to understand its own personal reality. So, facts and falsehood are
interchangeable. There is no such thing as absolute truth. All things are relative here.

Truth and error are synonymous

Facts, postmodernists claim, are too limiting to determine anything. Changing erratically, what is
fact today can be false tomorrow.Postmodernism rejects Western values and beliefs as only a
small part of the human experience and often rejects such ideas, beliefs, culture, and norms.

Self-conceptualization and rationalization

Traditional logic and objectivity are spurned by postmodernists. Preferring to rely on opinions
rather than embrace facts, postmodernist spurn the scientific method.

Traditional authority is false and corrupt

Postmodernists speak out against the constraints of religious morals and secular authority. They
wage intellectual revolution to voice their concerns about traditional establishment, they
sayreligion causes moral friction and division among people.Postmodernism prefers to dwell on
the exterior image and avoids drawing conclusions or suggesting underlying meanings associated
with the interior of objects and events.

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Ownership

They claim that collective ownership would most fairly administrate goods and services.

Disillusionment with modernism

Postmodernists rue the unfulfilled promises of science, technology, government, and religion.
Postmodernism sees human experience as unstable, internally contradictory, ambiguous,
inconclusive, indeterminate, unfinished, fragmented, discontinuous, "jagged," with no one
specific reality possible. Therefore, it focuses on a vision of a contradictory, fragmented,
ambiguous, indeterminate, unfinished, "jagged" world.Postmodernists believe that the Wests
claims of freedom and prosperity continue to be nothing more than empty promises and have not
met the needs of humanity.

Globalization

Many postmodernists claim that national boundaries are a hindrance to human communication.
Nationalism, they believe, causes wars. Therefore, postmodernists often propose internationalism
and uniting separate countries.

All religions are valid

Valuing inclusive faiths, postmodernists gravitate towards New Age religion. They challenge
the core religious and capitalistic values of the Western world and seek change for a new age of
liberty within a global community.

Liberal ethics

Many prefer to live under a global, non-political government without tribal or national
boundaries and one that is sensitive to the socioeconomic equality for all people. They denounce

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the exclusive claims of Jesus Christ as being the only way to God. Postmodernists defend the
cause of feminists and homosexuals.

Pro-environmentalism

Defending Mother Earth, postmodernists blame Western society for its destruction.Most
believe nationalism builds walls, makes enemies, and destroys Mother Earth," while capitalism
creates a have and have not society,

Conclusion

Post-modernism is the term used to suggest a reaction or response to modernism in the late
twentieth century. So postmodernism can only be understood in relation to Modernism. At its
core, Postmodernism rejects that which Modernism champions. While postmodernism seems
very much like modernism in many ways, it differs from modernism in its attitude toward a lot of
these trends. Modernism, for example, tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity
and history, but presents that fragmentation as something tragic, something to be lamented and
mourned as a loss. Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn't lament the idea of fragmentation,
provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. In literature, it used to describe certain
characteristics of postWorld War II literature, for example, on fragmentation, paradox,
questionable narrators, etc. and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist
literature.

Meaning, morality and truth do not exist objectively. This is at the heart of the postmodernist
worldview. Truth, with its attendant concepts of meaning and morality, are constructed by
society. Everything centers around the story that the community has created to establish its
validity. The community in which a person places himself creates their own versions of these

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things. Thus, what is truth for one group is not necessarily truth for another. Rewriting history
for the good of the story is the basis of truth.

Individuals are shaped by their culture. Culture is created by language, and we are trapped in a
prison of language. We are trapped because language does not communicate; it obfuscates.
This is one reason that some philosophers consider postmodernism to be only the logical end of
modernism, for in modernism, language began to change. In modernist theology, for instance,
terms that had one meaning historically began to be used to mean something else. Washington,
DC, language has a long history of obfuscation.

People exist as members of a group, not as individuals. This is a major distinction between
postmodernism and modernism. The individual has no place in postmodernism.

References

http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/postmodernism.htm
http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/characteristics-of-postmodernism-faq.htm
http://www.literary-articles.com/2013/08/what-is-postmodernism-what-are.html