Silenus' Worldview

Postmodernism poses the same problem that cultural relativism poses to ethics. Cultural relativism is basically this: if different societies and cultures have different practices, who’s to say that one culture’s practices are better or worse than another’s? It’s a valid point, and yet instinctively I feel as though cannibalism is a bad thing. Of course, according to cultural relativism, a culture that practices cannibalism is no better or worse than one that doesn’t. Like ethics, society has to move past the philosophical quagmire that is postmodernism.

You have to move past this way of thinking because it is stagnant. And not that stagnation is a bad thing (perhaps I’m simply holding onto a modernist concept that progress is good), but to be honest we only have a limited amount of time to live. If it’s all been done before, and there’s no way to critically analyze anything (no ‘critical distance’), then what’s the point of it all? What’s the point of life? And maybe like Silenus taught King Midas, there is no point and it would be better if we had never been born at all. But then again we are alive, we are conscious, and me must deal with it!

Modernism may have been a pipe dream, but we can't live without the hope it provides. After all, Prometheus’ gift to man (alongside fire) was blind hope. Postmodernism is an acceptance of a world without hope, without some sort of foundation (because structure and form are illusory). Is that really what we want, to keep hope trapped inside Pandora’s box? (All of these references to mythology indicate to me my own longing for some sort of historical precedent; perhaps that is because our generation rests between modernism and postmodernism.) Postmodernism, on the other hand, leaves every question unanswered and a pungent sense that originality is a fallacy.

Although I’m reminded of a lot of contemporary plays where these issues are hotly debated, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is the quintessential example. The play takes place during the turn of the millennium. There is fear that the world will end, or worse, remain as is. Many of the main characters describe life in America as evoking motion sickness while remaining perfectly immobile. Ideas on justice, history, religion, race, politics and love are challenged in a postmodern world. Harper, an agoraphobic married to a closeted republican homosexual, sits inside all day cogitating these paradoxes. In a mutual dream sequence she shares with Prior, a prophet dying from AIDs, they discourse over “the limitations of the imagination.” (I.vii.) She says, “Imagination can’t create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions… So when we think we’ve escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it’s really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don’t you think it’s depressing?” (I.vii.)
That’s right! Postmodernism is depressing. I’ve heard tirades similar to Harper’s from frustrated screenwriters, who claim that there are only a fixed number of plots within human consciousness and that all stories are merely remixed versions of these finite plot lines.

So, let’s say that we accept the nonexistence of objective reality (that everything is relative and originality is a myth); what does that society look like, where we no longer strive to be gods but resign ourselves to the nonpartisan position of the satyrs? Someone needs to stop this before we all become cynical Sileni!