Post Post-Modernity and Progress

"There is another proverb, "As you have made your bed,
so you must lie on it"; which again is simply a lie.
If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.
We could restore the Heptarchy or the stage coaches if we chose.
It might take some time to do, and it might be very inadvisable to do it;
but certainly it is not impossible as bringing back last Friday
is impossible. This is, as I say, the first freedom that I claim:
the freedom to restore. I claim a right to propose as a solution
the old patriarchal system of a Highland clan, if that should seem
to eliminate the largest number of evils. It certainly would
eliminate some evils; for instance, the unnatural sense of obeying
cold and harsh strangers, mere bureaucrats and policemen.
I claim the right to propose the complete independence of the small
Greek or Italian towns, a sovereign city of Brixton or Brompton,
if that seems the best way out of our troubles. It would be a way
out of some of our troubles; we could not have in a small state,
for instance, those enormous illusions about men or measures which
are nourished by the great national or international newspapers.
You could not persuade a city state that Mr. Beit was an Englishman,
or Mr. Dillon a desperado, any more than you could persuade
a Hampshire Village that the village drunkard was a teetotaller
or the village idiot a statesman. Nevertheless, I do not as a
fact propose that the Browns and the Smiths should be collected
under separate tartans. Nor do I even propose that Clapham should
declare its independence. I merely declare my independence.
I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the universe;
and I shall not admit that any of them are blunted merely because
they have been used." -G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World

I have come upon something of an epiphany about this mortal life this morning that I thought I ought to share, rather than keep to myself.

[The whole notion of blogging, in fact, is sharing those thoughts that, in many instances, one might have previously kept to himself due to the cost of distributing them (having a physical conversation with everybody one knows is a high distribution cost; so is putting them into print). But the beauty of blogging is that distribution costs are zero. Consequently, if my marginal revenue from distributing my idle thoughts was high (conversations, books, printed materials) and my marginal cost was zero, I would not share. Now, however, my marginal cost is zero, thus matching my marginal revenue, and so I am free to publish and distribute thoughts which may or may not ever be read, and likely will not be remembered. But I get some sort of overall satisfaction for having shared them, and so it merits the brief amount of time required here to do the sharing.]

For some time, I have contemplated what would come after post-modernity. Post-modernity, essentially being the rejection of everything, could not sustain itself in perpetuity. It leaves a vacuum and a void. Chaos, historically speaking, always gives way to order, though frequently to bad order. The Post World War II Era has been philosophically chaotic. Skepticism reached its ugly extreme, where if Descartes had been writing in our present day, he would have never gotten past his First Meditation. In the wake of such philosophical (and thereby ethical) anarchy, the human race has splintered in its retreat to some ethic. Looking at the degeneration of society, the Left has retreated into two directions: Humanism and Environmentalism. The Right has retreated into Moralism and Religiosity. The Chinese have tried to retrench Marxism; the Middle East has embraced Radical Islam; the vestiges of genuine Capitalism have staked their claim in the camp of Individualism. Everybody has an ethic these days; the rejection of ethics could not last forever.

Yet, we have not found any new ethics, just old ones recycled. Environmentalism is nothing new; many cultures throughout history have worshiped the earth. Certainly the rise of Western religious fundamentalism is several iterations along. And so on. This, though, is what brings me to the purpose of quoting Chesterton. He was precisely right. "Progress," properly defined, is not about what is new, but rather what is right. This is why so many people embrace the term "progressive" when talking about their particular pet cause. What counts as progress is in fact the entirety of the ethical debate. Once that is defined, the other issues are minor.

In this light, it is interesting that King Solomon, in Ecclesiastes, talks of things being as they always have been, and that they will always be, and there is nothing new under the sun. He certainly was not speaking of inventions or gadgets or contraptions, but of the human condition itself. Perhaps Longfellow accurately sums up Solomon's counsel when he writes "Trust no future, however pleasant; let the dead past bury its dead." Chesterton, I imagine, would agree with that.

So the nature of the question, then concerns what we can in fact expect from the future. If it is not going to be some Brave New World and global Utopia, then what precisely will it look like? Well, if we focus on what it ought to look like, then it will be an amalgamation of the past. Those things of the past that worked pretty well, in different eras and cultures, for different people, all mashed up into one beautiful historical melting pot. That is the entire notion, in fact, behind America's "melting pot" mentality--assimilate people from all different cultures and backgrounds until you come up with the best practices, foods, etc. from all parts of the world. It has worked relatively well. It is the people who want to disassimilate who are the true regressives.

But we cannot be denied the tools of the past, as Chesterton points out. If we are to create this cultural-historical melting pot of perfection, then we have to have access to all of the ingredients. We cannot get rid of our religion simply because it is old any more than we can reject our computers simply because they are new. We should not excoriate the notion of family because it has existed for thousands of years any more than we ought to decry the expanded definition of what counts as a family merely because it hasn't existed for thousands of years. To again quote Chesterton, he accurately notes that "The whole modern world has been divided into that of Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

We must fill the post-modern black hole with something, lest we all be sucked into its void. But what we fill it with should be a carefully considered mashup of the things we have observed to work that is free of the things we have observed that do not. Simply reverting back to old ways and old theories and old dogma while calling them new does not progress make.