Ah, yes, POSTMODERNISM
The most hated of all obscure philosophies.
The “postmodernists” like Lyotard, Baudrillard, Foucault etc were big in the 80s then drifted out of fashion…
…only to be Streisand effected back to life by their haters, not least Jordan Peterson, who shrieked about the Evils of Postmodernism so long and so hard that he basically resurrected it from the dead.
But also a lot of people on the Marxist left who hate postmodernism because it attacks “meta-narratives”…and Marxism is one of the all-time great meta-narratives.
But. Here is the problem with hating postmodernism. PM is DESCRIPTIVE. It is describing a state of reality, and the description is accurate.
Imagine hating someone for telling you your house has termites. Or that a tidal wave is coming. They’re giving you bad news. But the bad news is real.
So what is the bad news postmodernism delivers?
MODERNITY is a stage of human development that begins, approximately, with the Enlightenment, the emergence of modern science, the invention of the printing press, and the decline of the church and the rise of the liberal democratic nation state.
Which is a lot. But what pins all that together is that modernity is made of big stories and big ideas that almost everbody agrees on AKA meta-narratives.
Postmodern philosophy is the OBSERVATION that through the 20th century shared belief in those meta-narratives collapsed, creating the era of “postmodernity” we are all now caught in.
MODERNITY = belief in meta-narratives
POSTMODERNITY = incredulity to meta-narratives
Consider Marxism as an example. In the 19th century Marxism had millions of believers. Because almost everbody had the same information, and Marxism’s meta-narrative made sense to them. Today Marxism still has some believers. But to most people it just sounds bonkers. They are incredulous to it as a meta-narrative.
Or take a scientific narrative like medical vac*na*ion. By the late 20thC this had near universal belief. Now here in 2026 millions or even billions of people have such corrupted information sources that they reject life saving medicines.
Crucially, Lyotard and Baudrillard did not CREATE this situation. They simply described it, accurately, long before most people saw it coming.
Ironically, Jordan Peterson, the arch-hater of postmodernism, is one of the most postmodern humans alive. His entire career and persona are built on exploiting our shattered meta-narratives to generate clicks.
JP also features in my video essay on The Postmodern Destruction of Star Trek, which analyses how Trek went from being a peak meta-narrative of modernity, to a battle ground for competing ideologies in the era of postmodernity.
🔗👇👇
Damien Walter 