The Enlightenment elevated individual self to the centre. Rene Descartes’ autonomous, rationality combines with Newton’s mechanistic world. In modernism, it became the goal of the human intellect to unlock the secrets of the universe in order to master nature for human benefit and create a better world - management of life in order to improve human existence through technology. It assumed that knowledge is certain (absolute faith in reason), objective (we are not merely conditioned participants), and good (science + education = freedom from vulnerability to nature, optimism, progress!)

Postmodernism questions these central assumptions.

• We are no longer all convinced that knowledge is inherently good - there is pessimism.
• Young people are no longer confident that humanity will be able to solve the world’s great problems or that even their economic situation will surpass that of their parents. Life here is fragile.
• The post-modern mind refuses to limit truth to its rational dimension and thus dethrones the human intellect as the arbiter of truth and adds emotions and the intuition as important factors.
• Knowledge cannot be merely objective, because the universe is not mechanistic and dualistic but rather historical, relational, and personal. Reality is relative, indeterminate, and participatory.
• In the work of scientists, knowing is historically and culturally conditioned and operates with a community-based idea of truth.
• This relativity extends down to this: there is no absolute truth; rather truth is relative to the community.

Consensus on PM

PM marks the end of a single, universal worldview. There is respect for difference and a celebration of the local and particular at the expense of the universal.

• A rejection of the emphasis on rational discovery through the scientific method
• A new quest for spirituality in the marketplace and the juxtaposing of different styles in the clothes many people wear - an array of cultural expressions that call into question the ideals, principles and values that lay at the heart of the modern mind-set.

The quest for a cooperative model and an appreciation of non-rational dimensions of truth lend a holistic dimension.

• Post-moderns do not seek to be wholly self-directed individuals but rather ‘whole’ persons - affective and intuitive as well as cognitive.
• Consciousness of what lies beyond ourselves, in which our personal existence is embedded and from which it is nurtured... involves the community of humans in which we participate... extends to the spiritual aspect.
• Conviction that each person is embedded in a particular human community, leads to a corporate understanding of truth.
• They reject the Enlightenment quest for universal, supra-cultural, timeless truth in favour of searching out truth as the expression of a specific community... truth consists in the ground rules that facilitate personal well-being in community and the well-being of the community as a whole. Thus we have many different truths.
• They make the leap of faith that this plurality of truths can co-exist. This pluralism was highly individual; ‘to each his own’ and ‘everyone has a right to his/her own opinion’.
• But PM thought focuses on groups, each with its own language, beliefs and values.
• PMs are less concerned to think logically eg one might affirm both classic doctrine and say reincarnation. Beliefs are a matter of social context: ‘what is right for me might not be right for you’, ......

The information age

The global village - global communication network with almost instantaneous access to data; mass culture; global economy - ‘McWorld’. Yet erosion of national consciousness, retribalisation, toward increased loyalty to a more local context. .... ‘think globally, act locally’. Now a fragmented ‘taste culture’, which offers an almost endless variety of styles - bevans, gothics, alternates, ravers, alternates...

There is no clear shared focus ... no longer any common standards to which people can appeal in their efforts to measure, judge, or value ideas or opinions or lifestyles.

Gone are old allegiances to a common source of authority. Gone, commonly regarded and respected legitimate power. Now we have smaller social units ... ‘heterotopia’ [Foucault] the architects of modernity sought to design the one perfect human society in which peace, justice and love would reign - utopia. But PMs no longer dream of utopia.