Post-Modernism And The Modern World

Modernism started as a movement wthin the Catholic Church. It is a generic name for efforts to reconcile Christian religion with the findings of agnostic philosophy and science of history and the cultural movements that gradually separated from religion and set themselves in hostile opposition to it. It is any cultural preference for the modern or contemporary especially in architecture, music and art. It emphasises functionality and man's ability to control his surroundings. It covers the 19C attempts to find solutions to the proofs of revelation against modern science and philosophy. It seeks to replace traditional society with modern social norms. An important feature is the search for a new basis for religion, no longer casting it in philosophical certitude about God and creation and historical certitudes about Jesus and his work, but casting it solely in man's inner self and religious experience and the power with which it asserts itself in religion and the world. Interiorisation of this kind is against religious rationalism and Christianity with its insistence on positive revelation. It attacks the foundations of the Church and its structures. It's beneficial effects are that is has prompted modern Biblical scholarship to show the continuity of the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith which Modernism suggested was in sharp distinction. Ritual and so on was also suggested to be part of cult and therefore merely symbolic.

Post-modernism suggests man shares beliefs in the central values of modernism and industrialism, economic growth, industrial production and the infallibility of science. It questions the search for universal truths and values and the existence of objective knowledge. It recognises pluralism in society, the coexistence of different truths, styles and fashions. It has been suggested that post-modernism can be described by a number of key features including fragmentation, de-differentiation, hyper-reality, chronology, pastiche and anti-foundationalism. It is also linked to the ability of consumers being able to see through the hype of advertising. Post-modernism is the new ideological configuration replacing modernity. Post-industrialism describes the transition from a 'productive' social order to a 'reproductive' social order with its simulations, models and signs and its occupation with appearance and reality. It marks a transition in culture with the division between high and low becoming less defined in genres like classical, jazz, blues and rock music. Despite any of the beneficial effects of modernism, and some will deny it has any, and its interpretation of modernity, the arguments still rage between faith and science, philosophy and science and show no real sign of abating.