Heavenly Father, we want to thank you for this day. We praise you that you are the Lord of every day. And we ask now that the words that I speak and that all of us speak in the words, the meditations of all of our hearts may be acceptable to you. And Lord, we ask this not because we know that anything we offer you is acceptable in itself, but because you delight to hear us and to receive from us because you look at us through your Son, Jesus Christ and His mercy and forgiveness. So Father, we pray that our words and our thoughts may be pleasing to you. Father, help us to think your thoughts after you. We ask for Jesus's sake, our men. Now this morning we are going to start going through a section on postmodernism. And then we're going to look at some biblical material, what on evangelism. What I hope to do is create such attention in you as we look at postmodernism that you will be very excited to find some answers to the problems that we are being confronted with from our culture. So that's why I want to start the class this way round, rather than starting directly with the biblical material, I want us to begin by reflecting on some of the challenges we face from the culture in which we live here in North America at the present time. And not only here because it's a culture that is increasingly a worldwide culture. Let me get me begin with a little story before we get to this outline on the board. I guess four or five years ago now a friend of mine was working for university at Washington University here in St. Louis. And he came to me in my office one day and he said, Jeremy, explain something to me. I am just so bewildered by what I'm facing. So I was on the campus at the university down here in the city this morning. And I was talking to a group of students there. And as you know, Washington University is regularly comes in the top table, the top 15 or so universities in the country in terms of its academic standards and excellence. So these students were very bright, very thoughtful, very articulate, having had excellent educations. And he said, this is how I would describe them to you after I'd sat with them for an hour or two in the coffee shop just chatting with them. He said they were without idealism. They were reluctant to commit themselves. They were irreverent to anything sacred and disrespectful of all authority. They were apathetic. They were skeptical and they were bored. And then he said, after I was there, this friend works also as a member at New City Fellowship. And he said, I was down at the church office, which is in Hamilton Heights, one of the poorest areas of the city. And I got chatting with a group of young men who were there outside the office. And who were part of a gang there, had dropped out of school early. And were involved in taking and selling drugs and in all sorts of petty crime. And he said, as I talked to them, I realized that I could describe them in exactly the same way that they were lacking in idealism, reluctant to commit themselves to anything or anybody. They were irreverent about anything sacred and disrespectful of all authority. They were apathetic, skeptical and bored. These two groups of young people so radically different from each other. From outside and in terms of their exposure, to let's say the philosophical life of a great university today, and yet they were exactly the same in their approach to life and their understanding of the human condition. So he said, help me to understand this, help me to understand what's going on here, why young people are like this. And of course it's not true only here in the United States. This has been true in Europe, in Western Europe, already for 30 or 40 years or more. This was true of my experience in high school and in college, back in the 60s. A few of you can remember back that far, just a bat. But that was my experience in Western Europe right then. Exactly where this culture is today. And I've had the privilege of going to Korea several times over the past 15 years to South Korea. And each time I go, I see that young people are more and more like this there too, facing exactly the same kinds of challenges with the same kind of view of life. And as I've gone to Korea, I've had several pastors ask me the question, for a hundred years, the church has been growing very rapidly in Korea. The first Presbyterian missionaries went to Korea in the 1890s. And for a hundred years, the church grew at an astonishingly rapid pace to come today to about a quarter almost of the population. And yet suddenly, within the last few years, Korean churches have found that it's becoming suddenly very difficult to reach out to young people, that they're not responsive, because they can be described in the same way as I described those two groups of young people here in St. Louis. I have a friend to use another illustration who works in Slovakia, in part of what was formerly Czechoslovakia before the fall of communism around 1989, 1990. And he has, he has, he's an Englishman, he's been working into Central and Eastern Europe for the last 30 or 40 years, long before the fall of communism, as a consequence spent some time in prison during those years, before the end of communism, as he was taking Christian books and Bibles into Central and Eastern Europe and teaching God's word, constantly being searched and stopped by the police and sometimes arrested and having all sorts of difficult experiences. As soon as communism fell and Czechoslovakia, after the velvet revolution, he moved immediately from Vienna to Slovakia, it was the first time he had been able to live there and has been carrying on his ministry there ever since some of you met him when he was here visiting us just over a year ago. And he has wonderful ministry there involved in publishing, Christian books all over Central and Eastern Europe and a teaching ministry as well. And he said this to me last year when he came to visit and he's been writing some papers about this problem as well. He said, when I first moved to Slovakia in 1990, he lives in Bratislava, the capital. Young people in high school were not at all, most of them like people in Western Europe and in North America. They weren't postmodern. But now they are. In less than 10 years, they have changed completely. As they have become exposed to the culture of Western Europe and North America more and more, they have become completely shaped by it. And so he would describe young people in Slovakia and across the rest of Central and Eastern Europe. This is actually the same way as my friend from here in St. Louis described them. And as any pastor who works with young people in Korea would describe them in this same kind of way, lacking idealism, disrespectful authority, irreverent to what is considered sacred, apathetic, skeptical and bored. And we could add many other words to that too, but you get the picture. And that's the way people, our young people are all the way across Eastern and Central Europe right now, as well as everywhere in the Western world. And increasingly all over the rest of the world as well, wherever our culture starts impacting the lives of people. Western culture in general and the culture of the USA in particular are, among other things, the most powerful force of secularization that the world has ever seen. Our culture is an extraordinarily powerful secularizing force. And one of the fascinating things about the time in which we live, and one of the particularly challenging things is that the intellectual culture of the universities and the popular culture of the music and films and TV shows, et cetera, are precisely the same. In fact, in many ways, we are in a time where popular culture is the sort of leading edge of where our culture is going, rather than the university cultures. But basically they are in lockstep marching alongside by side. You don't have to have read philosophy. You don't have to have gone to university to be postmodern. This is the air we breathe in the culture in which we live. You cannot turn on your television. You cannot walk down the street. You cannot open a newspaper. You cannot turn on the radio. You cannot talk to another human being, including Christians, without being affected by postmodernism. So today, I want us to start looking at postmodernism. Now the word is used in all sorts of ways. We should notice first just the word itself, postmodernism. Post simply means after, after modernism. And I'll explain a little bit more what that means a little later. But that's the basic meaning of the term. We are living in a time after the triumph of modernism. That's what the name is saying. Now I want to look at postmodernism just briefly under three headings before I look at some of the particular challenges a postmodern setting creates for us as we seek to reach out with a gospel because that's the purpose of this study. If we think about postmodernism technically, rather than at a sort of popular level of what a postmodern spirit is, the term postmodern is used to refer to three things. It's used to talk about style. It's used to talk about the nature of language and literary criticism. And it's used to talk about philosophy, especially the philosophy of knowledge, of histimology, and we know things. I'll explain these as we go along so that you don't get lost. Now we're going to begin by thinking about postmodernism and style. And what do I mean when I talk about style? I made several points here. Number one, postmodernism is completely indifferent to questions of context. Consistency or continuity itself consciously splices, genre, attitudes, and styles. Now before you think that I'm just talking about something completely vague, which I'm sure many of you do at this moment, let me explain what I mean by giving you some illustrations. I'm sure one or two of you have been to Paris. I had the privilege of being there last summer. And if you haven't been to Paris, some of you will have seen photographs of the buildings I'm just going to describe to you. While we were there, we were staying, I was taking leading this trip. How should we then live trip across Europe, in Italy, and Switzerland, and France? And we finished in Paris. And we were staying in a hotel right near the most famous museum in France. It's called the Louvre, L-O-U-V-R-E, the Louvre. And it's a spectacularly beautiful building, or series of buildings. It's these lovely buildings built in this beautiful mellow, light-brown, yellowish stone, gloriously made. I mean, anybody would recognize them as a beautiful example of architecture, a huge buildings. And they have one of the greatest collections of artifacts from around the world and throughout history that you can find anywhere in the world. You could spend days, you really need a little motorcycle going around the Louvre. It's so big to see it. And you have to, if you go to a place like that, you just have to choose to see one little part of it. Otherwise, you just get your mind starts being destroyed just by, you all have this experience going to museums. If you try to see too much, you start getting weary, you start getting a terrible headache because you become way down by just the power of all these marvelous human artifacts. Just so much beautiful things, creative things together, your mind stops being up to take it in. So you have to make some choice and say, I'm going to go and look at the atraskin room or I'm going to look at the Roman remains or whatever it happens to be. Or I'm going to go and look at Impressionist paintings. You make your choices about what you're going to see rather than trying to see everything. Otherwise, you really just get destroyed mentally. But there in these beautiful buildings, the main part of the museum is set around just a lovely square with these flagstones in between the buildings. It's beautifully designed. Now, what's postmodern about that? Nothing. But what's postmodern is the next thing. A few years ago, it was decided to build a new entranceway into the museum and it is set right in the middle of this lovely square. And it's completely out of place. It looks ridiculous in the context. That's postmodernism. What they have done is built an enormous glass and steel pyramid, modeled on the great pyramid in Egypt. They built this enormous glass and steel pyramid and they've stuck it down in the middle of these beautiful buildings in this square and it's the entryway and it just looks absurd. It is totally out of place. That's postmodern architecture. A total disregard for the original meaning of something, for the context in which it came, this burial tomb for a Pharaoh in Egypt at the desert, total disregard for its context, just plucking it up, total disregard for the materials that, of course, the pyramids are made of stone, beautifully carved. This is made out of glass and steel and it's set in a situation where it totally doesn't fit. It's also kind of ironic. You go inside and if there's any sun at all, it's just like being in a cauldron. It is so unbelievably hot because it's glass and there are thousands of people in there. Everybody has to go through there to get into the museum. And so as soon as you walk in this, if it's sunny at all, it's absolutely stifling. Total disregard for human comfort as well was obviously a monument to some architects delight in his own capabilities. And it might be interesting in another context, but right there, it's totally out of place. That's postmodernism. Let me use another example. And more of you will be familiar with this. How many of you have been to Las Vegas? A few of you will admit that you have been to Las Vegas. And all of you have seen many films of Las Vegas. Well, if you go to Las Vegas, Vegas, and I often do, not to gamble there, but because when we live in England and now here in St Louis, it's often the least expensive place to fly. When we're going to visit, my wife's parents sat in California, so we often fly there and then rent a car and drive because every flight there is subsidized. We don't gratify anybody by gambling away a few days in the hotels there. We just immediately went to car and drive off, but it's absolutely fascinating to drive through the place. And Las Vegas is the kind of shrine to postmodernism. It has every possible kind of style, all mixed up together, and all completely out of context. And let me use another example of the pyramid there. One of the newer motels that's been built in the last five years or so is an enormous black glass pyramid, it's a huge hotel in Casino. Built to scale to the great pyramid of Chiop, some Egypt again. And so there's this sort of black shining glass object just set in the desert there, enormous. And then in front of it is an enormous kind of black ceramic or glass, it's difficult to tell what it's actually made of, stinks also as a model, on a model size, it's huge. It's the entryway into the hotel and gambling casino. And then in front of that, there are a couple of those clear patterns needles, except these are made of glass, stone, glass or ceramic, as well. Now again, this is an example of postmodernism. You've taken something which in Egypt had a very particular meaning in the history of the people. You think that's an interesting design. So you set it in Las Vegas as a place for people to stay and as a place for people to gamble their fortunes away with a total disregard for whatever it might have meant to anybody else, whether it's original significance matters to anyone or not. You just use it in a completely different setting. That's postmodernism. And you can't imagine anybody doing such a thing before the last 20 years or so. This is postmodernism. Take another example. How many of you have been to the Galleria? We're getting a little bit closer to home here. Well, most of you have been to the Galleria. Well in the Galleria, you'll find in one place there's a Mickey Mouse store, a Disney store which sells all sorts of artifacts and Disneyland and Disney World. Next to it, just along the mall, there is the museum shop. And I often go there to buy cards and other things and it's absolutely fascinating. And this is another example of postmodernism. You can go into the museum shop and you can find puzzles of famous paintings. It's okay. There's no problem with that. One of my sons loves to do puzzles so he bought him several of them. But if you look at some of the puzzles, you'll see, for example, that there are puzzles of paintings made by Van Gogh when he was about to commit suicide which express the awful tragedy of his life. And this has been turned into a game. Now that's postmodernism, a total disregard for the meaning of something. Something will be taken out of its context, out of its genre, a great painting and used with a complete disregard for that in an entirely different setting or another example. I didn't even need to ask you to put up your hands here if I were to say to you how many of you have seen on television or on billboards somewhere, a poster advertising something using the painting, the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, every single one of you in this room would say yes, because there are hundreds of commercials using the Mona Lisa to sell all sorts of different things. Now just think about that. Leonardo da Vinci regarded that painting as his greatest painting. It has been considered by many people to be the finest painting ever done by any human being. Now it's widely considered to be that. But you can see the Mona Lisa being used to sell deodorant, cigarettes, cars, there's anything. Now often her face will be made to move. That's most modernism. That's a total disregard for whether anyone thinks that this object is significant or matters or had a particular meaning to the person who painted it or to those who have admired it through the generations. And I could go on giving examples like this, but I hope by now you get the point that this isn't just a vague statement up here. Post-modernism is completely indifferent to questions of context, consistency or continuity. There is an ignoring of the historical and cultural significance of a work of art or of an architectural masterpiece or of a wonder of the ancient world. That's the point that I am making here. Now of course there's an element of this which is just fun. So I'm not simply criticizing this, not simply criticizing this because all of us have seen those commercials and been amused by them. That gets us to point two, point two in this outline. A second way to express this would be to say that post-modernism is like shopping through the arcades of history and through the history of different cultures. It's as if a post-modern person is a post-modern architect or a maker of commercials or puzzles or whatever is just kind of shopping through history, shopping through different cultures and just taking things from here and there. We live a post-modern culture, we live in a grab bag culture, that would be one way to put it. Where we just take things like the old lady out on the street and we just put them in our bag. Post-modern society is like a bag lady. We're just collecting things regardless of whether they might matter particularly to anyone or not. We say that to make fun of bag ladies, it's not a funny subject. But our culture is like that. And America in particular exhibits this aspect of post-modernism. And this is partly, of course, because here in the United States and it's one of the fascinating things about it, we live in a society which is so multicultural. We have people from so many different ethnic backgrounds and countries and languages and cultures. And America has been this way for a long time. When I went out to California, the first time I came to the States in 1967 to get married my wife, some central California, was absolutely fascinating to me because I came from a rural part of England where everybody I knew as a child growing up in the countryside had lived there for generations. And many of the people had never been further than 30 or 40 miles away. Many of them had never even been to London, which was just 60 miles away. So it was a culture that at that time was extraordinarily stable and settled and monocultural. And when I first went out to California in 1967, it was so remarkably different because there were people from such a vast diversity of cultural backgrounds right there in the central valley. There were lots of people, of course, who were Hispanic, especially from Mexico, part of my wife's family are of Mexican origin, just recently emigrated to the United States. There is a large Chinese population in that area and again part of my wife's family were Chinese. And there's a huge Armenian population, a very big settlement of Armenians who came there off the genocide in Turkey in the 1920s and settled in California. And there's the town right next to where my parents in all live is a Swedish town, which was settled at the end of the 1800s and so on and so on. One can just multiply the cultural and ethnic groups right there and many of her family come from a menonite background. Germans who moved to Russia to escape persecution in the 1700s and early 1800s and lived there for a couple of years and carried on speaking German and then emigrated on mass to first Colorado and then California around 1900 where my wife grew up in this little rural town. It has the largest church of menonites in the world in this little farm and community. America's fascinating in that way in terms of this extraordinary mixture of styles and of peoples and of cultures. And it's been this way for a very long time, Alexis the Tocqueville, one of the most thoughtful commentators ever on the United States, his work on democracy in America is just being republished I think this month or next month in a new translation, which I commend to you very highly. He was a Frenchman who came here about 160, 170 years ago and he wrote about American society and political life and culture with extraordinary perception and much of what he said still is right on the spot today, so long after he wrote it, but he described America's culture this way more than 150 years ago, he says it is a marketplace jamboree with amazing diversity, striving for recognition, a marketplace jamboree with amazing diversity, striving for recognition. Now in a postmodern time, this is even more so because of this issue of disregard. It's not just simply this extraordinary mixture of cultures which is of course a beautiful thing, it's a really wonderful thing and it's very important that Christians recognize the beauty of multiculturalism rather than simply being negative to it. I am delighted myself to have a multicultural family. My eldest son's wife is from the south of France and her father was from North Africa, from Algeria not an Arab but an African, a cabille. My middle son's wife is Filipino, her parents moved here from the Philippines around 1970 and my youngest son's wife is English. Now I delight in that multiculturalism in our family, if God delights in diversity, the book of Revelation ends with right at the end one of its statements is that all the nations of the world and all their rulers are going to bring the glory of their cultures to Christ to honor him and Christians should delight in that sense of appreciation for all kinds of different cultures and cultural artifacts rather than feeling threatened by it or as if there was something wrong with it or if it was just simply a matter of political correctness or something like that. It's nonsense. Christians ought to be the first people to delight in diversity and as well as that sort of delight in diversity in postmodernism we also see the recovery of historical figures and cultural artifacts that were ignored because they were not part of the dominant culture. Now that's another positive aspect of postmodernism and again Christians shouldn't be threatened by that. You know it's only very recently that America in general has begun to acknowledge that there were many African-American soldiers who fought in the Civil War. One of my favorite movies is The Movie Glory. I just thought it was a wonderful movie and that's one of the reasons why it's wonderful because it's recovering an neglected part of history completely neglected by the dominant culture for a long time as if it had never taken place. The marvelous acts of heroism and self-sacrifice that came from that black regiment in the Civil War. Now again Christians must not resist this, it is true, it is true that the dominant culture, the white male-dominated culture has ignored the contributions of other ethnic and cultural groups, that is a reality. And Christians ought to be the first to recognize that again as well as delight in diversity we ought to delight in recognizing things that should be honored wherever they come from rather than feeling that that's a threat in any kind of way. Now again it's simply a matter of being humble and faithful to what God's word has to say, to give honor wherever honor is due rather than to try to suppress the history of what others have done. So that's a second element of post-modernism. And this is quite a good one in all sorts of ways, a delight, a delight in different cultures and a readiness to look more carefully at history, to see not only what the dominant culture produced but what others produced as well, but that brings us to point three. In post-modernism of course there is more than this. There is not simply a delight in other cultures and in ignored people and cultural artifacts in history and there is not simply a playful use or misuse of the historical significance of a cultural artifact rather at the heart of post-modernism. There is a denial of any standards by which cultural artifacts may be judged. That's at the very heart of post-modernism. There are no standards. There is no canon that is no rule, no measure. There is no canon which will tell us what is a great work of art, what is a beautiful cultural artifact, what is a wonderful piece of music. That is at the heart of post-modernism as well. So there is this positive element of a delight in diversity and a recognition of things ignored and that's good and the Christians said should say, Amen. We should have said it first, we should have said it first because God requires his people to be those who stand up for those who are ignored and oppressed. God's own character in order to be ours as well. But there is not simply that, there is more than that. There is the denial of standards. So in post-modernism, no style, no subject is superior to any other style. Let me give some examples and some of you will be familiar with these. How many of you have heard the name Andy Warhol, for example, everybody? And of course you have. But what's Andy Warhol famous for? He's famous for producing as a great work of art a Campbell's soup can. That's his most famous work of art. It's an exact replica of a Campbell's soup can and you can buy one of those works of art probably now for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars. But what it's saying and what Warhol was saying very purposefully is my Campbell's soup can is just as great a work of art as Michelangelo's statue of David or Leonardo's painting of the Mona Lisa or whatever else you want to put there because there are no standards by which you can judge. A Campbell's soup can is just as much a work of art as a great piece of architecture as a beautiful painting or whatever or to take another example. Use the example of Marcel Duchamp, he was a Frenchman who did painting and sculpture going back to the first part of the 20th century he was producing works of art if we want to use that term back from a little shortly after 1910 and some of them were very famous and a couple of them that you'll see over and over again reproduced in books on the history of art are the following examples I'm going to give you one was a bicycle wheel. Marcel Duchamp called these his ready maids he put a bicycle wheel took it off the bike and he just put it on a stand and he exhibited it as a work of art in a gallery and he insisted he signed it he hadn't made it himself of course he just cut it off a bicycle he insisted that it was just as much a work of art as anything else and even more famous example is he took a men's urinal and he exhibited it in a museum as a work of art and he demanded that it be taken seriously and people took it seriously I guess say somebody paid enormous man a money for it and has it in their home today proudly on display not for use of course but to be admired as a work of art now that's post modernism it's a very serious statement it's not just saying that's recovered the glory of other cultures that have been ignored in their contribution it's saying there are no standards by which I can tell what is art I remember going to an exhibition in London at the Haywood Gallery of contemporary sculpture and as I wanted a round observing some quite lovely and beautifully made contemporary pieces of sculpture and some that I wouldn't use those words to describe but the one that struck me more than anything else and I remember to this day was there was this little block of wood with a glass case over it and inside was a piece labeled the artist's breath and it was a collapsed balloon that's what it was and there it was on display and again I dare say somebody's paid a great deal of money for it so there no standards by which we can judge what is great or beautiful or artistic anything is art I was in Kansas City lecturing and preaching this past weekend and a friend there a couple who I had lunch with on Sunday and who invited me to speak at a the culture house they've just started this new ministry down in the city reaching out to people down there and they wanted me to speak for the first the kickoff sort of evening they were driving me in the morning around Kansas City downtown and very beautiful city of phantons just lovely and we drove past the art college and my friends who run a ballet company there and also a rock group an interesting mixture of things that they do we're saying that a that particular art school and no longer teaches its students how to paint or how to sculpt there are no standards by which you can learn you don't learn techniques of drawing or painting or sculpture you just do your thing whatever it is without any training and that holds and you will find this in many art schools thankfully not all around the country right here in St. Louis at Phomphon there's a very fine school of art which is still teaching people some standards of drawing and painting but there are many out there which don't teach anybody anything because the professors really believe there are no standards when my son my youngest son was a student at Washington University and doing art history and he worked in there he was working part time while he was a student for the art history library helping take care of the slides and one of his jobs was to help visiting lecturers come on Wednesday evenings and set up their slide shows as they were giving their lecturers lectures and most of the time that was fine and he enjoyed it but one evening the woman who came to give her lecture just showed a series of extremely pornographic slides and simply presented them as art I mean that that was her lecture that was it was about she just delighted in shocking people by her art and this is a problem that doesn't exist simply at universities it exists in the whole culture let me use a couple of illustrations and most of you will probably remember this I'm sure many of you remember several years back about three or four years back now there was a trial of the group two life crew over some of their lyrics it was down in somewhere in the south in Louisiana perhaps or somewhere down there somebody may remember exactly where it was but the trial was about whether their lyrics were obscene now if any of you remember the trial in detail or if you know the lyrics in question if you had any standard whatsoever by which to judge those lyrics you would say these are obscene because in the most graphic language possible the lyrics in question were encouraging men to sexually brutally assault women in the most explicit terms possible I wouldn't repeat ever to anybody what they said wouldn't be appropriate it's horrific now at the trial the charges of obscenity were thrown out
but that wasn't what was interesting that shouldn't surprise anybody who understands anything about our culture what was interesting was the comments of all of the jurors afterwards because when they were interviewed they said something like this I personally thought those lyrics were obscene I thought they were horribly obscene I never want to listen to that music I don't want my children listening to that music but who am I to say that anybody else should think they're obscene now that's the loss of standards you can say personally I think but can you say this is obscene by some objective standard which should be applied to other people and not just to myself another example of precisely the same thing happened a couple of years later and again all of you will remember this there was a trial in Cincinnati of an exhibition of photographs by the photographer Robert Mabelthorpe and again it was a question of obscenity and again I won't describe what some of the pictures were some of you will have seen some of them some of you will have read some of them described and many of his photographs are certainly beautiful he's a very fine photographer but there is no doubt that some of them are also exceedingly obscene and purposefully so
and pornographic now again exactly the same thing happened the charges were thrown out and he was acquitted but the jurors said exactly the same thing I have no doubt that those pictures were obscene I do not want to see them I certainly will not allow my children to see them but who am I to say that other people shouldn't see them or that anybody else should think them obscene as exactly the same thing see this is a very deep problem in our culture it's not just a few people at universities saying there are no standards by which to judge a great work of art so we can have a men's urinal or Michelangelo statue of David side by side and you take your pick this is where our culture is as a whole it's where our whole culture is no standards by which we can judge whether something is right or worthwhile or beautiful or good or true so the negative side of postmodernism is a denial of standards one of the ways this works out is some of you may very well have studied literature at university english literature but in probably more than half of the universities in this country today if you study english literature you will never read a play by Shakespeare now if you have any standards at all there is no question that Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist who has ever written in any language you don't have to be an Englishman to say that his works have been translated into languages all over this world and are constantly performed everywhere there isn't a day passes that there aren't many productions of Shakespeare's plays all over the world why because people love them because he was a great dramatist there's no question about it but you can go to university and study literature you can go to university and study drama and you may not study Shakespeare at all why because he's just considered a dwemn a dead white european male so why bother to read him that's not just saying well you know we delight in multiculturalism that's saying something quite different it's saying there are no standards at all by which we can say Shakespeare was a great dramatist so we won't bother to read his plays or to watch them now thankfully at this point popular culture is a little more sensible and that's why there have been so many films of Shakespeare's played plays made over the last ten years some of which are just wonderful and received all sorts of awards and lots of popular claim because people recognize them as great drama because they touch something so very deeply in the human heart but postmodernism denies that reality it denies it all together now another illustration of this of this problem here under point three is what we might call the loss of heroism in our culture now you may not have noticed this that we are living in a society where they really aren't any heroes in the traditional sense of the word that is a hero was somebody who you held up to admire and to emulate you here is a wonderful example of a human being who has done something well who has done some great accomplishment in a way that I would love to copy myself and have my children copy that sort of hero is and of course as a Christian we would say Jesus Christ is the great hero he is the true hero who has done the most wonderful things and who deserve to be imitated but our culture has lost heroes instead it has celebrities you think about that the cult of celebrity in our society it's really a new phenomenon the loss of heroes and the cult of celebrity and that's postmodernism for you the loss of standards whether it's in the arts or whether it's in with regard to human accomplishment what matters is not that one does something wonderful but that one is famous why do you think all these people try to get on television shows to have their five minutes of fame even if it means telling the most appalling things about what they have done what one might call moral freak shows if people want their few seconds of fame to be watched to become an instant celebrity you know people become celebrities for being witnesses at trials of famous people ridiculous ridiculous what is what are these people accomplished that's worth anything that's worth you being interested in and endless books being written about them and their own television shows and this the kind of thing is happening all the time if you're interested in pursuing this particular question there is a wonderful video series produced by British television called fame which is narrated by an Australian named Clive James and it's extremely funny but it's also a very acute account of this loss of heroism and the rip its replacement with the cult of celebrity in our culture there's something of the same is happening in these shows like survivor and all the other things that they are spawning where we become interested in things which really deserve no interest at all in fact they're going to become worse and worse all the time one of the present ones as you know is setting people up to basically commit adultery that's exactly what it's trying to do famous for sinning we might say now that's what its purpose is for wisdom okay then we have any questions here I'm sure we've got lots of questions so let's start over here yeah the first question is what date would I put on the beginning of post modernism well if you read books you'll see all sorts of different dates assigned to it one of the most common actually refers to an event here in St. Louis the destruction of one of the housing complexes which was built down in the city Proud I go and you will see this referred to as the beginning of post modernism in many books trying to set out the history of this when I was a student here in the late 60s Proud I go was a housing complex which was right down in the city which had been built by a modernist architect with a complete disregard for the life of the people who are going to live in it they demolished rows of houses of poorer housing in the city and they put up these horrible ugly towers where it was almost impossible to have any kind of human community where children had no access to the outside and where crime just flourished and it was such a and really it was simply a monument monument to the architect who done it he was completely disregarded it was a triumph of rationalism in one sense you know a monument to reason it was just a block a mathematical block that was the sort of extreme end of modernism where everything becomes reduced to squares and blocks and without any regard for anything human at all and of course Proud I go was an absolute disaster for the people who lived in it and eventually it was blown up you know while it was still a fairly young building it was blown up in the 1970s I don't remember the exact date that you'll see it in lots of in lots of textbooks and and it was just the recognize recognition that this purely rational approach this kind of mathematical approach to architecture was just ridiculous and so the blowing up of of that tower of that tower block is seen by many people as the beginning of postmodernism now you'll find other dates the date of the exhibition in New York which Marcel Duchamp exhibited his bicycle wheel and men's urinal and that's somewhere around 1913 or 14 I don't remember the date exactly you'll find it again in textbooks that's it's called the armory show that is sometimes thought of as the beginning of postmodernism so you get all sorts of different dates given to you I don't think that it's possible to assign a particular date because actually of course modernism is still with us modernism simply means two things and we'll talk about this next time when we use the term modernism what is meant by that in this context is a supreme confidence in human reason and all its products especially the products of science and technology so modernism here is an equivalent really to humanism to secular humanism modernism says that I have complete confidence in human reason we don't need any words some god from anybody outside it's just simply the human mind looking at the human condition understanding our lives and finding resolutions to our problems through science and particularly through technology and the second aspect of modernism is an optimism about the human condition a feeling that people are basically good and that we can make a better society now those are the two fundamental aspects of modernism and I'll talk more about them next time and postmodernism is a reaction to that it's a rejection of that confidence in rationality and that optimism about the human person and human society now it's very obvious if we think about that definition that modernism is still with us it's still everywhere around us we still live in a very rationalistic society we live in a society which is absolutely dependent upon science and technology and a rational approach the universe just think of computers there's nothing more rational than a computer and emailing and websites you know it this is the triumph of rationalism it's a product of modernism we might say and it's clearly very much with us still so some people would say you know there is no postmodernism we're still living in a modernist setting but if you think about that take take an example here think of the heavens gate cult now they're an example of postmodernism the heavens gate cult made their money by working on computers by being computer programmers that's thoroughly modernist nothing could be more rational but their religion was totally irrational you will remember it now their leader taught them that there was a big spaceship up in the sky and when they took drugs and killed themselves they would be transported off to join it there's completely irrational it had no foundation in reason at all that's that that's the challenge of the time in which we live people at one level are extraordinarily modernist in the sense that they are rational about things at the same time they may be maybe completely irrational in things that are enormously important to their lives so modernism is still with us though we are certainly living in a postmodern time now in terms of where it begins if you read postmodern writers themselves many of them look back to Nietzsche as the father of postmodernism and Nietzsche died in the 1880s somewhere I'm then somewhere around the latter part of the 19th century I don't know the exact date of his death but he is writing in the 1870s and 1880s and you'll constantly find Nietzsche's came name coming up when people talk about postmodernism because Nietzsche attacks the rationalism and optimism of secular humanism and so many people would see him as the kind of beginning of postmodernism and looking at it from the point of view of the history of the arts you're already finding what is postmodernism today in the arts already by 1905, 1910, 1915 people like Picasso for example were involved in all sorts of postmodern activities happenings and plays where bizarre things took place and where the audience was offended completely by what was happening and and through rotten fruit at them they were way ahead of their time I mean it would be like seeing something that you could see today so I don't think it's appropriate to say postmodernism starts in the 1970s with the fall of prudigo though I understand why that's used as a symbol especially where architecture is concerned or with a particular art show like the armory show in Marcel Duchamp's pictures I think it's it's it's something that's already happening before the end of the 1800s as people realize the folly of a secular humanist position perspective about confidence in rationality and confidence in the human person and you begin to get an element of nihilism and that of course goes again back to Nietzsche but there are others as well you find this in other writers and artists of the period who are ready beginning to express some of these things now with the example you used a music of cult train I think that you can look at a musician like him and you can look at at at some contemporary jazz you can look at some contemporary classical music as well as looking at various kinds of extreme rock and alternative music and you can say these have postmodern elements in them but you rarely find somebody who is totally postmodern when it comes to music because people just stop listening to it so there as long as there is harmony still and not just total dissonance as long as there is rationality and that is there there is some order to the music the music is going to be interesting and people are going to delight in it if it becomes totally artonal and totally without harmony and totally dissonant and there is no melody of any kind at all a no patent or structure there then it's completely postmodern and there are a few examples of this the one I would use is John Cage he died a couple of years ago in his 80s I had the privilege if I can call it that of going to a concert of his when I was a student here in 1969 or 70 he came to Washington University and put on a concert but John Cage's music is completely chance music if any of you have seen Schaeff's film how should we then live he has John Cage appears in that and he has a piece for piano which lasts two minutes but it's a piece for closed piano and Cage comes in actually doesn't come in he goes out because his ad doors in the open it's not in a concert hall I mean the setting is chosen carefully as well he comes out and he sits down at the piano and he sets his alarm clock to two minutes and then he closes the piano and he sits there for two minutes and then the alarm goes off and then he gets up and everybody applauds and he goes off there's no music at all that's John Cage you know another example of his work is he wrote an opera to James Joyce's book Euler C's and the text of that I'll finish this story and then I'll repeat it next time at the beginning of class that for the tape but the the text of his opera is something like the eighth word of the middle line of every page from the book stuck together I'm as nonsense it's intended to be it's completely irrational you know it doesn't communicate anything it's not supposed to but that's exactly Cage's point there is nothing to be communicated so my opera won't communicate anything now that's radically post-modern music but people won't listen to music like that because unless it's the kind of freak show I mean it's not something you can enjoy it's not something you want to listen to again and again you might go once to hear what it's like but the music of Coltrane isn't like that so there are elements there and what you see in a lot of contemporary music both classical and jazz and in various forms of rock music and punk as well as a mixture of things which are harmonic and dissonant so you get both things there side-by-side