8/21/96 at 13:44

     Terrance McKenna has called the "big bang" theory of astronomy/cosmology the "limiting case for credulity," and I would like to propose the limiting case for irony.

     That would be any declaration that one is providing a more valid statement of postmodernism than anyone else.  If there is one thing common to most postmodern pronouncements, it is that "reality" as we typically embrace it in daily life is an illusion. What we naively trust as objectively real is actually our subjective perception.  While the pre-postmodernists, whom Walt Anderson calls the "modernists," acknowledged that different people would have different subjective perceptions of reality, the postmodernists suggest that the perceptions are all there is.

     If there is any justice in the world (if there is a world), it would be that there is no absolutely or objectively correct version of the view that suggests nothing is absolutely or objectively real.  Come on, fair's fair.

     This comment, be sure, is not an attack on that which commonly passes as postmodernism.  It has now become chic to lampoon postmodernism, just as it has become trendy to have always thought communism was a bad idea.  (Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I published my view that communism was the most successful form of organization in human history--the family being my chief example.)  I have no intention of distancing myself from post-modernism.  As someone with no known credentials to speak on behalf of postmodernism (or any other ism), I wish to speak on behalf of it.  (Consider it speaked.)

     There is important value, I submit, in the postmodernism I will discuss. If my representation of that philosophical view is deemed too far away from "real" postmodernism, then I propose to call the view now advanced "Babbie-ism."  I hope you will call it postmodernism, however.

ID: 47819

(c) Earl Babbie 2000