THE ISSUES: AN OVERVIEW
ISSUE ONE: What Comes after
Postmodernism?
The term "postmodernism" has
come to refer to the facile and even
nihilistic historicism and relativism
that many have embraced after losing
their Enlightenment faith in Reason.
Postmodernism, thus understood,
represents a merely reactive and
transitional stage of
post-Enlightenment Western culture.
To move beyond this stage, it is
necessary to rethink Enlightenment
conceptions of reason and knowledge
so that they are not merely rejected
and negated, but transformed in such
a way as to open new possibilities
for development that are continuous
ISSUE with the past.
ONE This site proposes such a
rethinking of the Enlightenment. The
thesis: Enlightenment conceptions of
reason and knowledge can be affirmed
in the post-Enlightenment period,
provided we understand them properly
in terms of the political and
cultural function they have served
for three hundred years -- namely, as
primary components of an emerging
liberal democratic civic culture in
the West. Thus, the project of
rethinking Enlightenment conceptions
of reason and knowledge becomes the
project of rethinking the cultural
foundations of Western liberal
democracy. What comes after
postmodernism, then? The answer
offered here: the postmodern
reconstruction of liberal democratic
. civic culture and civil society.
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ISSUE TWO: Western Culture * See Samuel
and the Clash of P. Huntington,
Civilizations The Clash of
Civilizations
Assume for a moment and the
that the global order Remaking of
emerging in the post-Cold War World Order
era will eventually look (New York:
something more like Simon &
Huntington's* picture of it Schuster,
than not. What sort of 1996)
cultural tasks would such a
global political and economic
order impose on the West?
In a world order
shaped by the clash of
civilizations, one thing is
certain. The universalism of
Western Enlightenment culture
will be obsolete and
irrelevant. During the period
of the West's virtually
unchallenged ascendancy in
the world, it seemed that
mastery of the vocabulary of
modernist Western rationalism
and naturalism was one of the
necessary conditions for
economic and technological
progress.
But that is no
longer the case. East Asian
and Islamic nations have
proven that thoroughly modern
strategies of economic and
technological progress can be
ISSUE adapted to and supported by
TWO non-Western cultural
traditions.
The question is, can
the West adapt to, come to
terms with, the full
realization of the cultural
particularism of the values
underlying its own social,
economic and political
institutions after centuries
of representing those values
to the world at large as
universally valid, as
grounded in the nature of
things?
The universalism and
essentialism of Enlightenment
culture systematically
discouraged reflection about
and active nuturance of civic
culture -- i.e., the
particularistic form of
culture required for the
support of liberal democracy.
This negligence is becoming
increasingly costly to and
dangerous for the West in the
post-Cold War world. The
cultural task imposed on the
West in the era of the clash
of civilizations, then, is to
rethink liberal moral ideals
as specifically
particularistic cultural
ideals, with the aim of
discovering new resources for
. their renewal.
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ISSUE THREE: The Postmodern
Reconstruction of Personal Life
Full cultural citizenship,
full participation in a liberal
democratic civil society, requires
citizens to undergo a certain
difficult and often painful process
of individualization. Citizens must
learn to see both self and other as
free and equal individuals, as
individuals who stand apart from, or
who are not exhaustively described
by, the attributes they possess as
members of particularistic ethnic,
religious or class-based communities.
To persuade citizens to
undergo this process of
individualization, special cultural
resources are needed. Among them are
moral ideals that define as
praiseworthy the participation in
this individualizing process.
Two such moral ideals proper
to modernist liberal civic culture
are the ideals of authenticity and
autonomy. Authenticity -- roughly,
the mandate to become "who one really
is," and autonomy -- roughly, the
ISSUE mandate to "be one's own person,"
THREE have shaped personal life in the West
for over three hundred years. To the
extent that these moral ideals have
been effective, they have produced
citizens whose individualized
identities have made them capable of
full participation in civil society.
However, the credibility of
these moral ideals is entirely
dependent upon notions of human
identity -- notions like "real self"
and "free will" influenced by
Enlightenment culture. To the extent
that Enlightenment conceptions of
reason and knowledge are called into
question, the moral ideals of
authenticity and autonomy lose their
persuasive power.
A civil society cannot exist
without the cultural means necessary
to reproduce its members. If the
ideals of authenticity and autonomy
are no longer effective in producing
the kind of individualized identities
required for full cultural
citizenship, new ideals must replace
them. But what form will these new
moral ideals take? How will personal
life in the post-Enlightenment West
. be transformed by these new ideals?
by Thomas Bridges
