Post-Modernism

Bright Mhango
Outline
• Internet as Post-modernism
• Cultural Unlearning
• Humans in Families
• Defining Bodies
• Humans and their Surrounding
• Humans and Authority
• Values and Worldviews
• Easternizing in Western Thought
Rectification of names
• Modernism
• Post-Modernism
The Internet as post-modern
• With no centre
• No one in Charge
• Knowledge blend into conviction (flat-earthers, Q-Anon, birthers)
• Directionless (Can teach and deceive)
• Note: These views of the internet do not apply to China
Cultural Unlearning
• Enter J. Derrida and Zhuangzi
• ‘Language is dead’
• Derrida: Semiotics, Phonocentricism, Logocentrism, Deconstruction
• The world only becomes cut up when human start using language
• Zhuangzi: The Dao is everywhere not in (this side/that dise)
• Wisdom cannot be attained by western-style reasoning but by
meditation
• Language and Dao are incompatible since Dao seeks/is wholeness
and language seeks to fracture
Post-Modern Ideas of Family
• Half of US marriages collapse
• Kids have to grow up with step-parents and rely on youth culture for
guidance (Post-modern)
• Same sex Marriages: challenges gender, marriage as vehicle for
procreation and Judeo-Christian tenets.
• What will marriage and husband mean in future (See Post-
Modernism)
Post-Modern Dying: Euthasia
• Against Hippocratic Oath
• Against longstanding Western Law
• Against Church teachings
• Pros and Cons
Post-Modern Science: Chaos Theory
• Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
• Natural Laws?
• Chaos Theory : See Butterfly Effect/ fractals
• Nature hard to read
Supra-National Authority : EU
• West was born of conflict
• Nation-States and nationalism and patriotism always ruled
• Formation of EU is a break away from ‘Agon’
• Author was too optimistic : The EU has weakened Europe, divisions
abound and some are already fleeing the Union. Crises such as the
migrant crisis, freedom of movement, one currency and relationship
with Russia.
Post-Modern Study of Humanity:
Anthropology
• Athropology = study of people
• P.610
• Post-modernists seeks to see the power relations in ethnographic
work
• Mordenists used Hermeneutics post-modernists see interpretation as
intuitive and doesn’t think objectivity is possible.
• Deconstruction, epistemology and metaphysics
Pros and Cons of Post-modernism
• Punched holes in modernism (imperialist, exclusionary, overly
scientific and over-confident)
• Gave us semiotics
• Cons: Too can plurality of text affect post-modernist texts too?
• Also offers no solution and as David Hume said it is not something
one can live by
Easternising the West
• Carl Jung used the Yijing
• Eastern Ideas are looked down on
• Enter George Lakoff
• West insists on reason (I think, therefore I am) and objectivity..
• Lakoff expands on Kant : Human shape the world we perceive
• Lakoff says as bodies move around the world, they create ideas, not
from priori
conclusion
• From capital T to t
• Objectivity must be abandoned
• Universality for cultural postulates but be abandoned
But what about ethnocentrism
What about Globalization?
What about Huntington?
What about the CCP?
Where is Post-modernism in Chinese civilization?