Emerging Africa

I came across an interesting book recently that sheds light on the virulent criticism by many of all things postmodern: 'Postmodernism in History: Fear or Freedom?' by Beverley Southgate (available free at questia). Here is an insightful extract, especially read in the context of recent attacks on the emerging church conversation in SA and the return to extreme forms of fundamentalism described by Estelle:

"It is, at least in part, the loss of personal and public certainties that results in pomophobia. The condition was foreseen by, respectively, T. S. Eliot and Rainer Maria Rilke, when they explained poetically that 'human kind/Cannot bear very much reality', and that we apparently 'don't feel very securely at home' in what is seen to be only an 'interpreted world'. Postmodernism has served to confirm Rilke's perception that the world we inhabit is a world that we (not God, nature or some impersonal force) have constructed, or 'interpreted', from a range of possibilities; so that it could be interpreted (and thence experienced) quite differently. That 'reality' of the contingency of ourselves in relation to the world, and of our own responsibility for choosing our own interpretations, is what is hard to bear; and it's at least a part of what induces pomophobia.

Confronted by the crisis of personal insecurity induced by recognition of our situation in postmodernity, we may, like David Hume (some two centuries earlier), escape to the pub for a pint of beer and a game of backgammon, to take our minds off sceptical 'reality', but more likely we stay behind morosely in our studies, lashing out in what is best described as 'fear' - quite literally a 'phobia' in the face of what we can no longer tolerate. Minor outbreaks of such pomophobia have been detected for some decades, but the problem seems now to be reaching, as they say, epidemic proportions. As postmodernism intrudes ever more obviously not only into academic life, but even into the wider public consciousness, so does a fearful resistance build up against it. Forced to take cognisance of what they had assumed and hoped was to prove merely a short-lived intellectual fad, an increasing number of traditionalists now find themselves impelled to get off their fences and take up arms against the barbarian hordes that threaten them - and threaten them not (as is now clear) with just some passing trend, but with the prospect of a permanent condition.

'For a time', says a character in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, 'I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long'; and with those words he expresses well the feelings of those modernists who have long continued to believe that they live in 'a world of straightforward facts', but who have now been challenged by the increasingly insistent questioning of postmodernists. The security of 'belonging' to a world where 'facts' can be ordered in a 'straightforward' way is not to be lightly given up; but there is some consciousness now that that security will 'not last long'. The result is an anxiety, and even fear again, which is often manifested as aggression.

That fear is ultimately of a reversion to primitive chaos. Christian and Greek creation stories recount the triumphant overcoming of the chaotic formlessness of which the world originally consisted. In Genesis 1.2 we read of how 'the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep', before God duly created light and distinguished one part of the universe from another, giving the whole enlightenment and structure. In the words of the seventeenth-century believer Thomas Browne, the Christian God is 'the ordainer of order'. And for early Greek thinkers similarly, 'verily first of all did Chaos come into being', from which day and night and the distinct parts of the earth were subsequently formed; or in Plato's later words, 'out of disorder he [God] brought order, considering that this was far better'. Indeed, in his enormously influential work Timaeus, Plato goes on to describe how:

"When all things were in disorder God created in each thing, both internally in relation to itself and externally in relation to other things, certain harmonies in which were included all possible harmonies and proportions. For in those days nothing had any order except by accident; nor did any of the things which now have names deserve to be named at all."

Human intellectual history starts with that victory over chaotic formlessness: order prevailed, with units of the world individuated, defined and described.

But as Max Weber reminds us, that order was not (pace Plato and post-Nietzsche) in fact God-given: all systems of ideas represent attempts 'to bring order into the chaos of those facts which we have drawn into the field circumscribed by our interest'. So our interest determines the centre from which some order can be constructed from what nevertheless remains essentially disordered; and it is, as Hume saw, in our further interest to retain our faith in our chosen foundations, since it's only that that makes any knowledge possible. But in Plato's terms we remain in a pre-creation situation where any order that prevails is only 'by accident' or faith, and can be challenged at any time. And, of course, our interests do change, so that any intellectual victories we win are never final, but only ever provisionally secured. The order imposed (and the language which that order makes possible) remains always in danger of falling apart again, of dis-integration, of dis-appearing to reveal primeval realities once more. So again, as Rilke saw and felt (and as pomophobes recognise but cannot accept), we are never very securely at home in our ordered world, where the order depends on what is only an interpretation, and so is itself contingent and constantly under challenge."