Why I am not a Postmodernist (I Think)

Photo credit: Evan Dennis at Unsplash

More and more people seem to be under the impression that I am a postmodernist* or, at least, that I take a postmodern approach to understanding reality. Further, the expectation of my postmodernism comes from very different ideological positions. I have had theological and political conservatives worry that I have "bought into postmodernism" and I have proudly self-identified postmodern friends who are convinced that my analysis of social, theological, and political subjects is postmodern. Usually these are friends who are well informed and have an informed understanding of what postmodernism entails (and for the record, here is a link to the Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on Postmodernism). And yet I do not think that I am a postmodernist and have resisted that label for as long as people have wanted to apply it to me.

Before I go any farther please allow me the grace of a big caveat: I am not writing under the impression that I have anything particularly original to say on this subject; the post is meant to be read as a reflection and not as a wild new attempt at either debunking or validating postmodernism. I am not really even trying to persuade anyone with this piece, nor am I ready to assert that I have understood the central terms with total accuracy; I am merely hoping to explain why I understand myself not to be a postmodernist. If you are convinced that my reasoning is based on a flawed understanding of postmodernism then that is definitely a conversation I would love to have with you in comments.

I think that the reason I am often confused for a postmodernist is that I essentially accept the postmodern critique of modernism. Because of this, insofar as postmodernism consists in nothing more than a critique of modernism, I could be categorized as a postmodernist (he typed anticipating some early reactions to this post). The problem with that line of reasoning will, I hope, become clear in what follows.

The analysis of the relationship between modernism, premodernism, and postmodernism which I find most persuasive is one which focuses on the relative importance of epistemology (the study of knowing, what it means to know, and how/whether knowing takes place). Throughout the history of Western philosophy* epistemology has always been relevant to the greater philosophical project**. It comes up a lot. However I would describe the shift from premodern to modern philosophy in terms of a paradigm shift in which (thanks to Bacon, Descartes, and a few medieval philosophers) the epistemological question "how can we know anything?" became the primary question of philosophy. By "primary" I mean that "how can we know anything?" became a question which "had" to be answered before any further philosophy could really be done. It became the first question, and because of the way the shift occurred, it had to be addressed in a certain way.

Descartes

Before that shift (and the reasons for it are fascinating enough to merit multiple books) thinkers certainly asked questions about epistemology—they still wanted to know how we know things—but epistemology wasn't necessarily the starting point. Some began with ethics (the study of morality), some began with ontology (the study of being and existence) and some began with theology (the study of the Divine). You could really sort of start where you wanted to and work your way into other parts of the the philosophical project from there.

I pin the actual shift to modernism on Renee Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy. In Meditations Descartes manages to single out the most rigorous definition of "known truth" which humanity has managed to produce so far as I am aware: indubitability or un-doubt-able-ness. Descartes refuses to claim that he knows a thing as true unless he is unable to doubt it. His method is to pare away all of the truth-claims he has provisionally held as true up to that point until he finds some core indubitable truth, and then he rebuilds his entire understanding of reality (including the legitimacy of reason and of observation) on that truth. He is essentially trying to take the scientific method and apply it to the whole project of human knowing. It is an elegant and initially persuasive approach to the philosophical project. After all, how can we make any claims about anything until we first determine that knowing is even possible, what it means to know, and what criteria can be justifiably used to test a claim?

The postmodern project has done a remarkably effective job of critiquing the modernist approach. The postmodernists have taken on modernism and demonstrated that indubitability is an impossible bar, and that treating empirical data and Aristotelian derived logic as the lone methods for determining truth value necessarily leads to contradiction and to oppression. Essentially the postmodernists have shown that Decartes' methods for determining truth are at best seriously lacking and at worst entirely ineffective. I very much agree with and will cheerfully cite the postmodern critique of modernism and I suspect that that is why people tend to think that I am postmodernist myself.

See, the thing is, there is more to having a philosophical position that concurring in a critique of a particular school of thought. I also have critiques of postmodernism, at least as it is frequently understood and manifested. First, I fault postmodernism for not going far enough—postmodernism critiques the modernist belief that the scientific method (empirical observation + Aristotelian derived logic) is sufficient for understanding reality but tends to tacitly accept the fundamental modernist premise that epistemology is the first question. Second, I am not a reductionist—I do not believe that the full meaning of a given thing is finally reducible to its constituent components (physical or otherwise). Finally I am not a postmodernist because, when it comes to postmodernism, I don't really think that there is any there there—I take postmodernism to be a critique of modernism and not a distinct school of thought in and of itself.

On reflection, I think my first reason for not identifying as a postmodernist is contained within the next two. If you were to imagine the human philosophical project as a number of people exploring the world seeking to find Truth, then I would locate Descartes as a specific fork in the road of western philosophy. Most western thinkers took the modernism fork and, after overcoming some obstacles and wandering down a variety of side trails and dead ends, our society has found itself in the cul-de-sac at the end of Modernism. Postmodernism is little more than an exploration of the cul-de-sac itself and a rigorous, thorough determination that "this road doesn't go anywhere else". While many modernists insist on denying the post modern critique and want to pretend that the road goes on in some direction, some modern and postmodern thinkers have, instead, declared themselves to be perfectly alright with that conclusion. They seem to want to be saying that the entire project of philosophy has hit a final dead end and that we need to just sit here in the cul-de-sac, insisting both that truth can only consist in indubitable knowledge derived from observation + logic and simultaneously insisting that it is finally impossible to derive indubitable knowledge (and therefore truth) from that source. They tell us that we were correct to take the modernist fork and that as a result of our exploration we may now safely conclude that there is nowhere to go and no Truth to find.

And I don't accept that. I am grateful to the postmodernists for showing us the failings of modernism and I very much appreciate the gains in human knowledge and (frankly) power which modernism's particular approach to exploring the physical world has allowed—it is, after all, modernism which led us to the great technological breakthroughs of the last four hundred years. But I think the conclusion we need to draw from postmodernism's discovery that modernism is a dead-end, is that we ought to go back and explore other paths. My own philosophical approach is to back track to late premodernism and take the other side of the fork. I do not mean by this that I want to forget all that we learned exploring modernism; there is a very real sense in which it is impossible to "go backward" and even if it were possible, it would certainly not be advisable. I want to move froward from the point of departure with the full history and benefits of modernism traced on my philosophical map. Truth still beckons, the project of philosophy remains and the road goes ever on.

What that more radical break with modernism means to me is, primarily, a decentralization of epistemology. I am not at all convinced that we are obliged to start with epistemology and I am fairly convinced that starting from epistemology leads only to a dead end. It is entirely possible to start by asking what things are and what things mean, before we worry overmuch about whether knowing the thing is possible. So far I have been calling my approach neo-premodernism to distinguish it from premodernism (which operates without recognizing the developments of modernism and post modernism). But I really hate the term so I am open to suggestions. How would you describe my approach to Philosophy?

In case anyone in interested in what this looks like in practice, I would say that THIS post on the myth of America and THIS one on art are still broadly representative of my thinking.

Footnotes

*I am mostly focused on Western philosophy throughout this piece since I believe that both modernism and postmodernism are essentially phenomena of Western philosophy.
** I am inclined to define the philosophical project as an attempt to wonder about reality.

What Happened to My Deconstruction?

In my last post I started with the observation that, while much of my personal "faith journey" maps well onto a common faith deconstruction narrative, I haven't actually experienced a deconstruction—at least not it the way that experience is usually discussed. I offered (got sidetracked by) a short analysis of the difference between a modernist and a premodern approach to understanding reality and indicated that my tendency towards premodernism might account for my lack of a typical deconstruction experience.

In this post I want to pick up that thread and give a few more reflections on how my tendency towards a premodern understanding of reality let to my having a different experience with regard to deconstruction. The really short version is that I never had a deconstruction because I am always deconstructing and always reconstructing. But explaining what I mean by that might take a few more paragraphs.

I have mentioned that I was raised in a fairly typically conservative US Evangelical household. My parents helped to found a non-denominational Protestant church, I spent time both being home-schooled (using a really conservative curriculum) and at a private Christian school. But there is one, really important way in which my experience growing up was non-typical for conservative US Evangelicalism of the late 20th century and it has everything to do with my parents.

My parents are politically heterogeneous as people. Where my Dad has a generally conservative approach to life; my Mom is has a pretty liberal* approach. Further, I would say that both of them are bad fits for those terms. My Dad's conservatism is nuanced by deep wells of reflection and a phenomenal appreciation for the stories of other people. Where the typically conservative response to unfamiliar stories is one of fear, anger, or rejection, Dad has always responded to new stories and data with interest, excitement and attempts to generate new models and theories about the world. In a parallel way, my Mom's liberalism is nuanced by razor sharp critical thinking and a strong empathy for those who found beauty and security in tradition and the past. At least—and this is what determined my experience—that is how I thought about them growing up. I should note that while these general tendencies did map onto their respective politics and theology to a significant degree I am speaking more here of their approaches to life in general than to any particular policies or beliefs they espoused.

I don't think, though, that simple constitutional heterogeneity accounts for everything that I ascribe to the way I was raised. My parents didn't only have different approaches to life, politics, and theology, they were cheerfully open about them. My home was one where finding the right answers was important but so was thinking about the question. Until I was in Bible College, I assumed that every church going family spent time after church discussing the sermon—disagreeing with some parts and agreeing with others. I always knew that my parents had different politics; and while I was somewhat more inclined towards my Dad's, I understood that these things were debatable and that there was value in having the debate.

On top of this, I grew up as a third-culture kid. My family moved to Turkey when I was seven and I stayed there through the end of high school. Due to the many cultural differences between Turkey and

Turkey photo by Samuel Giacomelli at Unsplash

the US, and thanks to my parents' and Grandmother's deep enjoyment of cultural diversity and exploration, I ended up with a pretty well developed understanding of the fact that the world is a complicated place, that lots of people have strengths and some weaknesses in the way they do things and the way they go about understanding the reality of their world, and that it is unlikely that anybody has things "just right". The conservative part of my makeup had (and still has) me convinced that it is almost always worth supporting the model of truth I found most compelling at a given point, while the liberal part of my makeup (one which was the weakest in me while I was in high school) reminded me that that I still had plenty to explore and learn.

The net effect of all of this was that when I went off to Bible college seeking to find all of the final answers to all of my questions, I went with a really robust understanding of what that would entail and a still (somewhat) flexible understanding of what reality might turn out to consist in. That said, I went to Bible college with the full expectation that I would find proofs and demonstrations which would allow me to concretize a final model of the world. I genuinely believed that the answers (and logically unassailable proofs of those answers) to all my questions were going to be found during my time in undergrad. And it seems likely to me that, were I going to have a deconstruction experience, mine would have started there. What I realized slowly over four years as an undergraduate was that, we still don't have final answers to "life the universe and everything"—we are still building our models of reality even while we are living in the world.

There were other factors too. I have been a fan of fantasy, fairy tales, and mythology since I have been reading and, in many ways, those genre are themselves an immersion into a pre-modern approach to the world. I also discovered philosophy during my last year of high school and focused heavily on that subject in college as a part of my attempt to finally "get the True answers". Most vitally I had a series of experiences which began to center my experience of Christianity more on a relationship with the person of Jesus and less on the lists of things people believe about Jesus. (I have written about that aspect of my thinking HERE)

None of that is to say that I "abandoned my faith" or even made a particularly significant change in the tenets of my belief structures while I was in college—I didn't. What I do think happened though is a sort of final shift in my overall approach to understanding reality. The experience of finding more questions than answers in college shifted me, or maybe just finally determined my psychological development, away from a modernist approach to a pre-modern approach to understanding reality. On a strictly historical level, it was over the ten or so years most directly after Bible college that my theological shift from functionally conservative white Evangelical to functionally progressive Christianity took place. But I am pretty convinced that it was the experiences which I have outlined hear which allowed that theological transition to happen in the way that it did—that is to say, that prevented me from experiencing a deconstruction in the way that it seems to typically occur.

By the time I really began taking out and examining or questioning those tenets of my faith and of reality itself, my understanding of reality had shifted from the strong-yet-brittle modernist "wall" to the more complex, less easily defined, and less thoroughly interdependent pre-modern symphony or dance. If a piece (a tenet) was discarded (as my original beliefs in gender complimentarity, LGBTQ+ exclusion, young earth creationism, Biblical literalism and others were) the total edifice did not shatter. It was affected, certainly. Each piece I removed had played a role in constructing the whole, each piece resonated with many other pieces. The whole, therefore went through a process of "re-tuning and re-orientation" each time something was removed. The ideas, beliefs, facts, convictions, and tenets I replaced them then necessitate further re-tuning—both of the idea itself, and of the edifice as a whole. But far from experiencing this as a crisis, I find great fun and even joy in it. When I discover that I now think a new thing to be true, I am thereby promised the opportunity to work through the rest of my beliefs, ideas, opinions, etc... and to find out how they are influenced by this new idea, and how they influence it in turn. Sometimes I will try ideas out, just to see what impact they will have on the edifice and what impact it will have on them.

I wish that I could end this with a recommendation for how one could choose to experience deconstruction in a modernist or premodern way—I suspect that mine has been slower than the modern one but that it has also been far gentler—but I don't have any certain prescription for how that might be accomplished. Modernist Christianity has gone to great lengths to wall out the whole philosophical tradition (postmodernism) which was built as a critique of modernism and as a result, most Evangelicals will probably experience a softening towards postmodern critiques of modernism as a de facto deconstruction in any case. There may be a back-door if an Evangelical were to start reading as much as they can of the Christian mystics, of the Inklings (try Lewis' essays, Tolkiens Silmarilion and On Fairy Stories, Barfield's Poetic Diction, Sayers' Mind of the Maker, Willaim's The Descent of the Dove) Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, and MacDonalds At the Back of the North Wind and other premodern thinkers with an open mind and without merely trying to mine them form apologetics or for aids in evangelism, but I am not entirely sure whether that will work. The simultaneous strength and brittleness of Modernism require both great power and great gentleness to undo it without shattering it. I suspect that in most cases the shattering may well be inevitable. And maybe that is another reason that community is needed. We need to be there to help pick up one another's pieces—maybe even to keep a few safe for a time while our friends are rebuilding their world. If it is a good piece they will find a place for it in due time.

Footnotes:

*I use the terms liberal and conservative throughout this piece in a horrendously oversimplified way but I haven't worked out a way to get around that in a blog post. Maybe someday I can write a book and luxuriate in the nuance and complexity that medium affords. In the meantime, by liberal here I am using the loose political definition of "an outlook which tends to welcome change and improvement" whereas conservative "indicates an appreciation for tradition and stability with an attendant skepticism towards change".

Deconstructing as a Legacy of Modernism

As a heads up this is a particularly in-the-weeds post about my relationship with exEvangelicalism and some of the minutia of Christian theology in the United States.

Stories of deconstruction are a pretty solid way to get a blog post to go viral on the Christian internet these days. The haters (mostly conservative white Evangelicals) get to hate and break down your story into a million little warnings about the danger of doubt, Progressive Christians cheer you on and leap to your defense (sometimes after a little checking to make sure that you aren't harboring any problematically oppressive views which you haven't quite managed to deconstruct away just yet) and and since nothing drives site hits so much as controversy, your blog stats spike nicely. If you are really lucky you might even get invited to do a podcast with one of the more influential progressive Christian conversation leaders. 

All of that probably sounds cynical so let me follow with this: aside from the vitriol which tends to work its way into these things, I think this is a really good thing and a natural outgrowth of the desperate need so many Christian and Christian-adjacent people in the US have to know that they are not alone, aren't insane, and aren't going to hell because of their doubts, thoughts, and concerns. I do not think it would be accurate to classify white Evangelicalism as a cult, but I do think that it has in common with cults, the need for those who are trying to leave it to find a way to deprogram ourselves from ideas and thinking patterns which are so ingrained that they still shape our lives and reactions even though we no longer accept them on a cognitive level. "My Deconstruction" stories can be really helpful towards that end—which is probably also why Conservative Evangelical leaders make such a point of attacking them and the people who pen them. 

All of that said, I don't have a deconstruction story. Or at least, if I do, I certainly didn't experience my own story in a way that felt particularly like deconstruction to me. It mostly felt like growth. And yet, I get asked about my deconstruction and the people whose theology and life/faith experiences I identify most closely with are people who speak fairly regularly about their deconstructions. I was raised in solidly conservative white US Evangelicalism. There were a few quirks (and, as I will point out later, they were pretty important) but on the whole I can tell an honest and accurate version of my childhood which fits the deconstruction narrative really well.

I have attended Evangelical churches my entire life*. I was home schooled in elementary, at least in part to protect me from the "New Age agenda" (look it up); I attended a Christian private school; my parents were part of a church start-up/planting team; I attended a conservative southern Bible College, I have—on more than one occasion—thrown away collections of "secular" media; I debated classmates and teachers as a staunch young-earth creationist; there is a picture of my still floating around the internet wearing a "straight pride" t-shirt while attending a Christian music festival (LGBTQ+ friends, I am so sorry for that); the list could go on and on. Now I could probably be accurately described as a Progressive Christian (I am a Charismatic Anabaptist and my politics are unorthodox but that term probably fits better than any other) so how did I transition from the one to the other without a deconstruction?

I think the answer lies in the way I understand the project of understanding reality—I have tended towards a more pre-modern than enlightenment modernist approach to understanding the world. I could be very wrong here and I would love to get feedback from people who have gone through a deconstruction (and maybe their own reconstruction process?) to let me know whether I have understood y'all's experience accurately, but my impression is that—for a lot of folks—deconstruction is a bit like messing with a house of cards. Over time, they start to worry more and more that some aspect or tenet of their faith may not be all that accurate. This leads to a period (short or long) wherein they are internally wrestling with whether or not it is "safe" to examine that bit of their faith structure. The worry frequently seems to be based on a conviction that all the parts of their faith need all the other parts of their faith. This often seems to be related to their understanding of the Bible and its relationship to the truth value of much or all of their understanding of reality as a whole. White US Evangelicalism deeply inculcates its adherents with the conviction that the Bible accurately describes reality. If a proposition contradicts "the Bible" then it is necessarily wrong and the job of good intellectual Christians becomes finding a way to demonstrate that wrongness. Of course there are many, many problems with this approach to understanding realty (the Bible is a text which needs to be interpreted, there is no structure for determining an "absolute" interpretation of the Bible, the Bible doesn't actually speak about every aspect of reality etc...) but that hasn't deterred its near-total integration into the very meaning of Evangelical. 

Back to the house of cards. 

Eventually, the person in question will either repress their concerns, avoid a deconstruction, and go back to being a good (if somewhat defensive) Evangelical or they will bite the bullet and take a good hard look at the tenet which was giving them all the trouble. In my experience—and this is part of what makes being in a supportive relationship with doubting Evangelicals so tense—they almost always find that they can't really support a continued adherence to the tenet they are examining. Whether it is young earth creationism, LGBTQ+ exclusion, gender complimentarity, a particular reading of the "texts of terror", the historicity of the exodus, the authorship of Isaiah, or something else entirely, a doubt which had to be so painfully resisted almost always turns out to be a pretty legitimate doubt. This then seems to usually presage entry into "full deconstruction". It doesn't always, some folks (and I suspect that this has a lot to do with the specifics of the denomination and the tenet in question) manage to maintain themselves as slightly unorthodox Evangelicals but it seems that often the removal of the this tenet starts a cascade of other tenets the total removal and examination of which amounts to what Progressive Christians seem to be talking about when they talk about their deconstruction: a semi-systematic examination of much of their worldview with a subsequent rejection of many aspects of it. 

Or, at least, that is how it is often described. In fact (and I want to say that I think that this is inevitable given basic human psychology) it often seems to mean the systematic examination of a number of tenets of Evangelical faith followed by a reidentification on the part of the deconstructor as an ex-evangelical (or possibly as an agnostic or atheist) once a critical mass of tenets is reached. For some folks I know that critical mass has been a single tenet (young earth creationism), for others it took more that ten to reach the critical mass. However it goes though, the effect is that the person who is "going through the deconstruction" eventually rejects much of the structure and content of their previous faith. Depending on what is left afterwards (and this varies significantly but that is probably a subject for another post) the person may or may not follow this by a period of reconstruction in which they carefully build a new structure incorporating what survived the deconstruction. 

As best as I have been able to observe, all of that describes a fairly "typical" deconstruction process**. The thing is, it doesn't really describe the process by which I moved from there to here and after years of wondering about it, I finally have a theory. I think it has a lot to do with how we think about reality. I will take it as a matter of agreement that humans like certainty. We like to know and be confident about how things are. I am sure that psychologists have a lot of explanations for why—I am partial to the view that feeling certain about how things are gives us a sense of control and security—but at the end of the day it seems clear that we do. We also tend to cluster in ideologically homogeneous communities. As a result I suspect (and my conversations with many of my friends who go through deconstruction have borne this out) that we tend to build ideological structures which are both extremely strong, and extremely brittle. They are strong insofar as they are really resistant to change once they "set" and they are brittle insofar as the removal of any one part of them tends to represent a threat to the entire structure. 

That approach, the strength and the brittleness are, I think, representative of the great strength and

brittleness of western enlightenment modernism as a whole. Before the enlightenment, Western society tended to understand reality in terms of a great, intricate, complex, yet fluid structure (imagine a chandelier or a symphony). Premodern society tended to understand reality in terms of stories, music, and logic. When some new proposition was presented to a pre-modern thinker and accepted as true, the thinker would then cheerfully insert that proposition into the edifice which was their model of reality and then get to work tweaking assumptions, re-telling stories, and re-tuning harmonies, until the whole thing came back into some sort of resonance. When presented with evidence or argument that a previously accepted proposition was actually false, that proposition would be removed and the removal would necessitate years of discussion, argumentation, and re-interpretation in order to be re-tuned back to a resonant state. 

In contrast to that, the enlightenment model worked far more carefully to examine each proposition for it's truth value before incorporating it into the model as seamlessly as possible (imagine building a stone wall). The goal for any proposition was indubitability, (un-doubt-able-ness) arguably the highest bar for confidence we, as a species, have managed to devise. In fact, indubitability turns out to be an impossible bar—though many Enlightenment thinkers managed to stay in denial about that for several hundred year—but it has remained as the sort of "gold standard" or aspiration for people who build their understanding of reality under the influence of enlightenment modernism. For Evangelical Christians, the Bible worked dangerously well as a source of indubitable "knowledge". The only catch was that the Bible is not indubitable in and of itself—billions of people manage to doubt it every day—so it can only serve as an indubitable truth-source by an act of trust or a white-knuckled act of the will. As children who were raised in churches, we trusted the adults who just told us that the "Bible is true" and, for a time, that enabled us to treat it as a source of indubitablity. But as we grew we eventually faced the challenge of working out for ourselves just what it was that made the Bible indubitable. In my experience the answer comes down, not to an explanation but to the command to "not doubt". We are told that doubting the Bible is a sin and we might (or might not) be pointed towards some thinker or other who has scraped together an apologetic defense of the doctrine of inspiration (which can temporarily alleviate the tension but doesn't actually solve the problem in the long run). This amounts to the "white-knuckled act of the will" approach which cannot last. 

HERE is Part 2 of this piece in which I speculate more about why I didn't experience a more typical deconstruction.

Footnotes:

*With the exception that I am currently attending (and a member of) a wonderful open and affirming Mennonite church.

**I want to clarify that nearly every person I know who has been through this process would not want to use the term "typical" to describe their experience. It is a journey which requires significant personal and intellectual courage and I have great respect for those friends of mine who have been able to manage it regardless of where they "ended up". 

Resources;

When it comes to facing the importance of doubt I would recommend. Pete Enns' The Sin of Certainty and The Bible Tells Me So as well as Greg Boyd's Benefit of the Doubt.