I am, of course, in great sympathy with them. I also regret, not so much the end of science per se (since I think science as a technique continues apace), but rather philosophy. The end of the idea of something fixed that underlies rational pursuits (scientific or otherwise). Science, under postmodernism, is merely the handmaiden of motivated political thinking. As is philosophy. And that seems a tragic and even dangerous loss.

While sharing their regrets, I can’t help but also wonder whether there is some curiosity in the fact that postmodernism has only produced exactly the sort of conditions that modernism should lead us to expect. To put it another way, to what degree is the rise of postmoderism merely a natural function of the failures and consequences of modernism? And to what degree do those who regret its fall fail to apprehend modernism’s role in producing its own downfall?

It’s not, after all, as if it wasn’t predicted. Having spent decades and even centuries carefully disassembling all the mechanisms that supported human rational and social structures and showing them to be arbitrary and ungrounded and the result of animal prejudice and survival instincts, when suddenly everyone has finally understood and agreed sufficiently that they’re willing to embrace it, suddenly the modernists cry foul. They didn’t expect you to take it all that seriously. They didn’t expect such skepticism to actually take hold in the place in was generated, the university. Having deconstructed all religion as irrational, they’re suddenly surprised by the emergence of an openly irrational religion.

It’s as if they assumed people would just keep on with the old Western traditions they had debunked simply out of good old decency, rather than embrace a creed based on their own personal motivations and prejudices (which is what they were told they were doing anyway). In a way, all people did was take the modernists at their word. Enough that they realized there was no grounds for holding on to the traditions of modernism, which had effectively undermined its own foundations. If thought is just prejudice and survival instincts and practical fictions deep down, if it is all merely the motivated processes of organisms struggling to assert themselves, then what prevents you from embracing it? What, essentially, is the point of being rational?

The curious fiction of modernism is that it seems to argue that “this is what we are, so we must rise above it” to some imagined plane of higher truth that they give us no reason to believe exists. It is a fictional holdover, a set of prejudices inherited from religion, this idea of a pure god’s eye view (and all the baggage and assumptions about what we should want or should do or how we should think that that view comes with).

Postmodernism argues “this is what we are, so let us embrace it”, and it disposes of the prejudice toward the old fictions in favor of newer ones. It loses the baggage. In fact it openly opposes it. Perhaps not because what it preaches is (in some cosmic sense) right, but because nothing essentially is. And the instinct to tear down false tyrranies is very strong. When you’ve just found out that everything is just a construct, that there’s no essential reason behind them, your first instinct isn’t to just leave everything in place and keep on with it all. We just found out that the world is an open battlefield that favors no one except those who can wrest the terrain to their advantage. What do you expect people to do with that notion?

Modernism also steps away many of the most meaningful and sustaining concepts of human meaning and then somehow just expects us to love with it. As the book Sapiens explains, putting a pinnacle on the endeavor of modernist mythmaking, we are all just algorithms, and the future belongs to whoever can wrest control of those algorithms. Only concrete objects really exist. All our concepts are merely fictions, constructions, adaptations for a survival machine with no fixed purpose or meaning.

What do you expect people to do with a guiding mythology like that? Give postmodernism some credit, they have the virtue that they took it all seriously and were willing to walk into the consequences and start openly living in that world. For all that modernists complain about postmodernism, it’s the complaining of parents about their own children. The children merely listed to what you said. Maybe they disposed of your particular prejudices and traditions, seeing them for the arbitrary historical artifacts they are, and went a different direction. But the line from modernism to postmodernism is clearly drawn over the last couple centuries. It just took, as with the Roman Empire, a while for the whole thing to actually come down.

After all, as much as you might like it, all the fetishes of modernism are just as much constructions as all the previous value systems it deconstructed. Modernism wielded the tools of liberation to free itself from past prejudices as arbitrary, but failed to realize that it itself would eventually become a historical artifact subject to deconstruction by its own tools as well. And in knocking down the walls that held up societal prejudices toward such religious ideas as objective truth, fixed moral purposes and regulations, and a cosmic purpose and meaning for humanity, they seem to assumed that people would just live with it. That having debunked it all as arbitrary, that people would just live with the lack of something fundamental and sustaining and ineradicable to human nature.

Instead, since the revealed truth of modernism is that such motivated behavior is described, not prescribed, people will simply keep doing it, but however they wish, without the imagined fixed foundations. Telling people that their mind is really just electrical and chemical signals bouncing around inside a fleshy mass won’t stop them from thinking. It simply removes any illusions that there are any fundamental constraints of deep purpose, meaning, or universal structure to which they are beholden. And it means that the existing hegemony is itself arbitrary and can be siezed by whoever has the gumption to do so.

So postmodernism sets out to tear down the fixed walls and false hierarchies modernism takes for granted (but itself undermined) and set up a more egalitarian ecology of competition that more closely reflects the unfixed and arbitrary nature of humanity and the universe. There is, after all, no special reason why we should favor one way of being or thinking in such a universe, and we know that advantage and the future belong to whoever can wrest the fictions we construct to their ends. So why not do it?

Having stopped the world of all fixed meaning and debunked all grand narratives as fictions, did modernism really expect people to live without them? In so doing, they didn’t remove those fictions, they merely redescribed their nature. They are not fixed, objective, necessary, rational objects. They are dependent, motivated, reducible, biological and psychological artifacts. Postmodernism, having come to terms with and accepted that new description, simply embraces it and takes it seriously and makes use of that knowledge.

The arguments made in Sapiens basically retread the familiar ground of old philosophical arguments that ask why the world (and humanity) is the way it is. And the possible answers are: God (some fixed, transcendent reason), logic (something fundamental to the structure of the world itself), or nothing. Having already disposed of God as an answer, one falls back on logic or nothing. Since there is nothing inherent in the structure of the laws of nature themselves that makes them necessary (they are descriptive, not prescriptive), logic also fails as an explanation. So what then?

Some old fashioned conceptions of physics and evolution held on to the religious concepts of some necessary order or progression in the universe. But later theories disposed of such fictions and fancies. Physics and evolution have no end goals, per se, that structure them and make their development necessary. They simply describe what happens. And whatever comes next isn’t better or worse or somehow more in alignment with any cosmic purpose that haunts the atomic world, it’s just whatever comes next. It can be whatever it wants to be, whatever it happens to be.

The idea of progress presupposes some standard outside the processes themselves against which they can be measured and some goal toward which they are proceeding. And that’s simply another fictional construct, a ghost haunting our motivated mental calculus.

The proper answer to “why are people and the world the way they are?” is “no reason, they just are”. And the grand history of Sapiens is simply a catalogue of history viewed from this perspective. It takes for granted this answer and then explicates a modern mythology based on it.

Having observed modernism lay out such a landscape, then, postmodernism steps into it, ready to do battle on its own terms. To be the next thing. And if it has any clear advantage, it is that the debunking of the modernists and its willingness to embrace that debunking has freed it from doubt. Having seen through the whole charade, it is free and willing to wield the levers of the power mechanisms of that charade in any way it sees fit, unconstrained by the troubles and concerns of the superstitious.

Is postmodernism itself any less prejudiced and superstitious, deep down? Not really. But it knows it, and knows that there is no other alternative mode of being. Thus it is freed from doubt and can embrace its own instincts freely. The other gift of modernism it takes and develops is resentment. Resentment for the chains arbitrarily placed on it by previous modes of being and thinking. Resentment for the loss of any systems of objective meaning and structure and a willingness to embrace a structure that suits and fulfills its desires and prejudices as being as real as things are going to get (and as real as they can successfully make them, necessitating political action).

If the social reality of value and meaning structures is not conditional on a relation to some fixed objective reality, but rather depends on your ability to enforce and realize it through the motivated political and intellectual processes, if evolution is not structured or defined by some fixed ladder of progress toward some predetermined end, but is simply whatever comes next, determined by whoever can make it be what comes next, then the smart thing to do is to sieze the political and intellectual mechanisms to make your “what comes next” become true.

In viewing the confusion of modernists over the strange behavior of the postmodernists, I rarely hear them question what modernism might have failed to provide, or what doors it might have left open, that postmodernism steps in to fill. Neitzsche lamented the death of God, slain at the hands of modernism, and questioned what we would construct to fill the void. He anticipated the problem, that the answer for certain would not be “nothing”. That void had to be filled by something of sufficient and equal strength. Explaining it doesn’t stop it from existing.

We still have to deal with the burden of consciousness. God used to help us understand and explain and bear that burden. Debunking that solution doesn’t mean we don’t still need to understand and explain and bear the burden. It still exists as a problem. The problem that the solutions “God, logic, or nothing” propose to answer isn’t resolved or eliminated by the elimination of our best answers (God and logic). And if the answer is nothing, then we must attempt to solve those problems along that approach. And postmodernism is simply the attempt to bear the burden of consciousness, to explain and understand the world, using that answer as the defining starting point. What makes things have to be this way? Nothing. So let’s tear down these arbitrary structures we’ve built and remake things the way we want them.

Modernism, after having developed the conditions for the unconstrained vision of the universe and humanity, then complains about it. That wasn’t what we meant, science and society are going to collapse if we lose this grand narrative, they cry out. Which is exactly the complaint they laughed at when the premoderns and theists raised it. Now, all of a sudden, the evolutionary scientists find themselves in company with the theists, both trying to defend western civilization and its values and narratives and “rationality” from the torches of the postmodernists.

What are we to make of such strange and sudden bedfellows? How is it that modernists find themselves being labeled bigots and religious oppressors of an old religion, while arguing that the postmodernists themselves are a new competing religion? Who really are the religious ones? The old theists, the moderns, the postmoderns? They all seem to have a good case against one another. The theists are the only ones who openly admit their position. The moderns and postmoderns acxuze one another, and both with some good reason. If moderns had only listended to their own theories and realized that they were descriptive, not prescriptive, they would have had the postmodern realization that their own universal debunking and reductivization could be applied equally to themselves. Postmodernism follows closely enough on the spirit of modernism to not want to call itself a religion, but that may change in time. It has, as modernists point out, all the qualities and features of a faith. Modernists only failed to realize that they themselves were one, by their own explanations and metrics. And now they’re annoyed to see their own faith fall before the weapons they devised to cut down others, and to see themselves supplanted by a new, liberated postmodern faith. And they might even be a little confused to find themselves in company with theists whose faith they denied they had any share in, or that their own position was in any way a faith inherited from or dependent on that of the theists.

The real question is, can the modernists save themselves from the challenge of postmodernism without having to fall back on the foundations of the theists (the answer of God, or something transcendent and necessary that structures reality and its interpretation)? Can they make the kind of arguments they want to make without being overruled in practice or accused of hypocrisy by the postmodernists? Are they trying to reinstitute a “haunted” universe? How much might modernists need to let go of to square their approach with the consequences of their own conclusions? And will it be enough to preclude the option of such a letting go dropping you right out of modernism into postmodernism and the new faith?

The real question is, having climbed the tree of faith high enough that modernism was able to see it for what it was and cut it off at the trunk, was it reasonable to expect it to float in midair? Of was crashing back down to the viney morass of tribal belief the inevitable result? And don’t the postmodernists, who have fallen, but accept that the tree was only ever a false construct anyway, have point in asking the modernists what they think they’re doing still trying to hang on up there, with nothing holding them up? Isn’t their sitting up above others in a floating nest of branches, looking down on us from their impossible perch, rather offensive and imperious? Ought they not to be brought down to the level of everyone else?

And what can prevent them from doing so? If they try to rebuild the trunk of the tree that held them, don’t they risk reintroducing some objective heirarchy and direction and structure to reality? Don’t they risk letting back in purpose and necessity? And aren’t many theories in cosmology already a means to try to avoid this problem, or to solve it by fiat (yes, chance on some extra-universal level, but a chance that becomes necessity when applied to our universe)? In relocating chance in this manner, all you could hope to accomplish was to preserve your own faith in your inheritance of fixed ideas (God, necessity) while still getting to answer “nothing” to the essential questions of cosmology and humanity. Postmodernism solves this problem more neatly by accepting that “nothing” is a suitable answer and then proceeding in the knowledge that personal prejudice holds equal stance with the decrees of God himself (being identical with them).

It seems to me that modernism has got itself into a bit of a sticky situation and isn’t sure how to deal with it. Even in Sapiens, as in Neitszche, the author declares the death of God (transcendent, fixed truths or values), but seems to regret the loss in some way and warns about the consequences. Having cut the tether, they turn around and remark that the tether wasn’t really all that bad and had some good and useful things going for it (whatever that means, now), and warn us about the turbulent and uncertain waters we are about to enter into, taking us who knows where. And this is a constant habit among many modernists. And even those most determined to remove religion, as if scraping away a scum that has collected on the surface of a rolling stone, end up in their own way bemoaning its loss or even reinventing it.