Stating the obvious

I am reading a book on preaching to `postmoderns’ for review. There is much about it that I’m enjoying, but I find myself once again frustrated by the evangelical generalizations about postmodernism so-called.

1. Again I’m told that postmodernism has rejected the optimistic belief in human reason and progress that characterized modernity. Questions that come to mind: If `moderns’ had so much confidence in reason, how does one explain great chunks of the literary canon of modernity: the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg; the novels of Joseph Conrad; also, the accounts of poverty and slavery etc one finds in the nineteenth and early twentieth century – how many poor and oppressed people were optimistic about human reason? And the effects of industrialization were criticized virtually from the start (Engels, Carlyle etc).
2. Again I’m told of the crisis in confidence in science. Questions that come to mind: how come Richard Dawkins’ latest book is such a runaway bestseller? Why are medical dramas so popular on television? Science seems pretty marketable, considering that nobody's meant to trust it any more. Why is it that so many conditions in the past that were put down to character traits or defects are now medicated, controlled by the scientific paradigm? And isn’t it odd to pen yet another tirade against science on a word processor (not to mention using the systems of mass transport and marketing to sell it)? Isn't that rather like those ads by tobacco companies warning of the evils of – ummm – tobacco?
3. Again, I find a middle aged bloke (a bit like me) telling me about youth culture and what young people will and will not believe. Well, first of all, young people certainly won’t believe anything a middle aged bloke tells them (and that’s not changed in the last 3 or 4 millennia if the laws of the Old Testament are anything to go by). Second, the concept of `youth culture’ is so often blithely trotted out without any socio-economic criticism being offered. I wonder, if `youth culture’ was not so economically important in the way consumer society is structured, would we have heard of the concept? If ferret-breeders accounted for significant chunks of GDP, would we not rather be reading primers on how to reach the ferret breeding community rather than `yoofs’?   It's mischievous to think of it this way, but one student did suggest to me recently that postmodern evangelical theology is pretty much all written by such middle aged blokes and so perhaps is representative as much of mid-life crisis as anything.
4. Again, I’m told that stories, not propositions, are what make people tick today. Yet stories have surely been the dominant medium of cultural communication throughout the ages, from Homer through Robin Hood to Shakespeare to Friends. And any member of the youth culture who wants to get a credit card or loan to buy a laptop to surf the postmodern web, moan about modernity and blog his story, had better understand propositions or the bank manager isn’t going to play ball.

It is true that some moderns were overly optimistic about human progress and science. But I challenge anyone to tell me that flush toilets and antibiotics are not the preferred options even of the most besotted postmodern. And to make generalizations based, I suspect, on a narrow focus on a certain middle class section of modern society is to beg all sorts of questions. Personally, I long for the arrival of `post-middle-aged-bloke-stating-the-obvious-in bald-unsubstantiated-generalisations-and-making-a-career-out-of-ity.’ Of course, when that day comes, I'll be out of a job too.