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What will come after post-modernity? From my perspective we are already seeing the postmodern lens break down a bit, as religion is getting a bit of a upswing, and many leading intellectuals are turning away from the post modern lens, or rather incorporating it into their thoughts. Examples here are John Vervaeke, Charles Taylor, Jordan Hall, David Chapman, and many others.
In addition, there seems to be a tacit admission amongst the secular humanist crowd that their worldview no longer has the appeal or swing it once did. Tyler Cowen and Steven Pinker, in a recent podcast discussion, went over how humanism seems to be somewhat dead and there aren’t many bright young humanists out there. Cowen also said the same thing about young liberal thinkers with another podcast guest recently, Cass Sunstein.
If you look at the death of the effective altruism movement, and the shift from rationalist to post rationalist, I believe there’s a similar trend.
To me the question becomes less “will old school meta-narratives” return, and more: what will be the ground of future exploration?
Will we adopt “metamodern” stances as they become useful and abandon them just as quickly, as Chapman suggests? Or instead will we rescue the transcendentals, and understand classical theism & morality through a more relational and dynamic lens, as Vervaeke and others are working on?
While the modern chaos can be exhausting at times, it’s also a moment of great opportunity. I’m interested to see what comes next.
I think you may be using the term "post-modern" in a nonstandard/confusing way. AIUI postmodernism is specifically a rejection of the "modernist" ideology that flourished in the early part of the 20th century. We can vaguely gesture at some word associations:
So it seems what you're gesturing at is more accurately binned with the "modern -> postmodern" transition, which has been going on for a while now. Or do you claim we're entering a new stage, of "post-post-modernity"?
I am referring to postmodernity as basically, the falling away of beliefs and overarching, meta narratives and more broadly the idea that there is any sort of objective truth. Another way to put this is the turn away from cultural relativism, identitarianism esp wrt trans, etc is what I’m broadly referring to. I could be more precise.
I think this never existed. There was an academic project for this in the 60s but practically nobody bought in and its immediate successors constructed their own overarching metanarratives (identity politics, gender, decolonization, etc). People sometimes call this postmodernism, because it refuses to give itself a name, and I'm fine with doing that as long as one doesn't also bring up the core tenets of "real" postmodernism, as you do here.
My opinion is that postmodernism instantly died because it's an unserious intellectual exercise. It's woke descendent isn't postmodern, it's pre-modern, specifically it's christianity without the bible, it's "we can be more pious without the bible".
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