Brave New Postmodern World
As I read Mander's report of these places, I could see
how certain wings of the deconstructive postmodern ideology articulated in
academia, the media, and the New Age movement do not just reflect the
experience of living in a technology-encased planet; they have the effect of
preparing people to accept an even more technologized world one in which life
forms may be manipulated to reflect a corporate vision of
"perfection"; in which anything, organic or inorganic, may be
instantaneously disintegrated by invisible machines; in which people will be
able to mentally remove themselves from the trauma of everyday life with
predetermined techno-visions; in which the Earth will be entirely tamed and
human-created.
The roots of the confusing, seemingly boundariless world
civilization now emerging lie not in the Industrial Revolution or the era of
colonialism, as some commentators have suggested, but in the domestication
process that originally catalyzed both of these processes. As domestication
turned expansionism into an accepted, even touted institution of the western
world, and subsequent technological development made global travel, trade, and
communication the everyday experience rather than the rarity, the concept of
cultural relativity as mindful respect for the miraculous array of human
differences fell by the wayside. In our lives today, the accepted truths of
conflicting ways of life are constantly rubbing up against each other: we watch
Yanomami protesting mining in Brazil on our Japanese television screens while
doing yoga in our Guatemalan peasant pants. An Indian man I know lives with
three generations of his extended family on his nation's land, speaks his native
tongue, practices traditional ceremonies in a traditionally built mud hogan-and
listens to the Bob Dylan bootleg tapes, flies Tibetan prayer flags, and drives
a hot black car with black-tinted windows. During the Earth Summit one
particular Associated Press photo ringed the globe: an Amazon Kayapo Indian,
dressed in jungle garb, drinking a Coca-Cola.
Because of unrelenting cross-cultural exposure made de rigueur by technological expansion, cultures themselves have become subject to the fragmenting process that is inherent in the technological way of life. The result: no culture is left wholly intact, and each fragment that survives, or is exported halfway around the planet, loses its original value. Out of context, it can be viewed in only the most superficial way, perhaps as a souvenir or a piece of exotica, as a consumer item or a "ritual."
The upshot is the next step beyond the agricultural
mind. Here we have the "postmodern mind": a rootless, undigested
perception of life whose hallmark is the absolute relativity of all human-made
experience the very opposite of the primal matrix's caring respect for the
nature-inspired differences among cultures and the penetrating sense of
archetypal patterning that binds them. This new worldview rather purveys a
shaky sense of meaninglessness, a bizarre commitment to the notion that all of
reality is "human-constructed," and for all the grandstanding about
global community and Earth citizenry going on in the mass media, a profound
sense of homelessness. After watching E. T.
on television in his rapidly technologizing hometown, a Balinese boy told an
American tourist, a friend of mine, "I feel
like E.T. I want to go home."
Granted, the postmodern philosophy emerging out of the
technological juggernaut has afforded us unparalleled perceptual tools for
deconstructing what most needs deconstruction—mass technological society
itself. Educators Yvonne Dion-Buffalo and John Mohawk champion this
development, asserting that the postmodern discourse is "positioned in
opposition to domination and therefore ... seek[s] the reversal of conditions
of oppression." Such discourse is essential; in fact, this book is part
of it. And yet it is the postmodern world,
not a philosophy springing from it, that so disorients its inhabitants that
they become prone to relativizing and deeming human-constructed not just the engines
of dysfunction, but everything in
existence.
In his treatise on the postmodern mind-set, Reality Isn't What It Used to Be, political
scientist Walter Anderson explores this disorientation. "[The postmodern
experience] fills our lives with uncertainty and anxiety, renders us vulnerable
to tyrants and cults, shakes religious faith, and divides societies into groups
contending with one another in a strange and unfamiliar kind of ideological
conflict: not merely a conflict between beliefs,
but about belief itself."
According to Anderson, this breakdown of both old and more recent belief
systems constitutes the first step in a global process that is leading to the
emergence of deeply felt conflicts about the nature of human truth conflicts
such as the now well-aired argument about education between old-line supporters
of European classical values and supporters of Afrocentric and other ethnic
perspectives, between those favoring more community and those favoring more
individualism, and on and on. These seemingly unresolvable controversies,
Anderson predicts, will eventually lead to the establishment of a world
culture in which "all belief systems look around and become aware of all
other belief systems, and ... people everywhere struggle in unprecedented ways
to find out who and what they are."
I'd like to give you a couple of examples of what this
deconstructive postmodern mind looks like in everyday life, and in the
telling, I'd like to convey how its appearance is a dangerous and misguided
addition to an already dangerously addicted and unecological world. A few
years ago a Santa Fe man attacked his former girlfriend in the street.
Unprovoked, he came at her shouting, "Cunt!," jamming her against a
wall, and when she tried to escape, coming after her in a high-speed car chase.
After his rage was quelled by an injunction from the county sheriff's department,
he began to attend New Age workshops where he was told, and eagerly accepted,
that "you create your own reality."
Fortunately, this simplistic and one-dimensional posture
is increasingly being revealed not as the new social truth its purveyors would
have us believe, but as a shortsighted and reactive urge for control and
self-definition against the uncertainties of contemporary life. "Many
voices can now be heard declaring that what is out there is only what we put out there," writes Anderson.
"More precisely, what I put out there-- just little me, euphorically
creating my own universe. We used to call this solipsism; now we call it New
Age spirituality."
After taking dozens of workshops, at a financial expense
that had to top twenty thousand dollars, the attacker received a request from
the woman that he pay the medical bills she had accrued from the unfortunate
event. His response, and he fully believed its veracity: "You create your
own reality. You're responsible for your reaction to the attack. I don't owe
you anything."
In another strange encounter in the postmodern world, a
young man who recently graduated from a top Ph.D. program identifies himself as
a "postmodern anthropologist." This means he believes that every
aspect of human life is socially constructed and therefore relative, mutable, and
by implication meaningless. Nothing is universal. No shared human needs or ways
exist. Any similarities among world cultures are merely random. When a
physicist tries to explain to this man that the nuclear industry categorically
denies the medical and environmental impacts of radiation, our postmodern
anthropologist denies the existence of denial. He eagerly cites instead
cultural differences between those inside and outside the industry, thereby
denying the medical and environmental impacts of radiation himself. When I try
to talk with him about how child rearing in a hunter-gatherer band in Venezuela
better answers the long-evolved expectations for human development than child
rearing in technological society, he snaps, "Those stages of development
don't exist. They've long since been debunked. People are blank slates, we're
infinitely pliable." When I tell him about my own process of recovery from
childhood trauma, he disputes that trauma is a complex, biologically rooted
experience and suggests that all anyone has to do to feel good in today's world
is to "change their mind."
Such postmodern thinking reflects both the detachment,
hubris, and fragmentation of the technological mind-set and the denial,
grandiosity, and dissociation of the traumatized personality which are, in the
end, one and the same. The overlooked factor underlying this bizarre twist of
human consciousness is that while it touts human reality as entirely socially
constructed and therefore infinitely mutable, its very presence as an ideology
relies on something that is not mutable at all. Essential to the existence of
deconstructive postmodernism is the predominance of technological society over
all other ways and cultures. As Theodore Roszak puts it, "We are, in ways
that have been expertly rationalized, pressing forward to create a monocultural
world-society in which whatever survives must do so as an adjunct to urban
industrial civilization."
Without the technological developments of the last three
hundred generations, we would most likely still see the world, as we did for 99
percent of our history as human beings, through the lens of the soft cultural
relativity Larry Emerson describes when he speaks of traveling from Dine'
country to the Ute Nation. This is a relativity that respects variety, grasps
the archetypal foundations underlying nature-based cultures, and emphasizes
the relatedness of all life. By contrast, our experience in today's world, and
the psychology and philosophy that grow out of this experience, create an
unprecedented kind of cultural relativity that is extreme, ungrounded, and ironically
absolute. There is no human body that can be harmed, it asserts. No primal
matrix to listen to. No Earth to care about. No interconnectedness among
people to tend to. No unfolding of our stories into the story of the natural
world. No anchoring of human experience in the patterns of universality. No
morality.
On a one-to-one scale, we see this approach being used
by a deeply disturbed man to deny responsibility for his violence, and this is
painful enough. On a social scale, we can see the potential for its use by
sanctioned professionals to convince an increasingly dissociated and
disoriented public that creating our own reality with genetic, molecular,
techno-visual, and shopping-mall constructions would be equally as satisfying
as living in the wilds of a mountain valley.
The Big Questions
In the midst of such developments from the first acts of
domestication some ten thousand years ago to this final enclosure in a
postbiological, posthuman, postmodern world questions arise. These are questions
that challenge the current unearthly notion of human nature. What if the way of
being we know in mass technologial society is not normal? What if the personal
and ecological cycles of addiction and abuse that define our lives are not
representative of human nature at all, but rather are symptoms of profound
woundings and grave pathologies? What if these painful expressions represent
desperate attempts to cope, and even to heal, by a people who find themselves
in an extreme and untenable situation? And what is that extreme and untenable
situation? It is, as the Balinese boy so succinctly expressed, our homelessness.
We want to go home.