Google rules. Google Images, in this case, which digested the search term "postmodern" in 0.19 seconds and spat out this photo of a folk singer called The Bedroom Philosopher, along with the lyrics for his song "I'm So Postmodern":
I'm so postmodern that I just don't talk anymore,
I wear different colored t-shirts according to my mood . . .I'm so postmodern all my clothes are made out of sleeping bags,
I don't need pockets, I'm a pocket myself . . .I'm so postmodern that I write reviews for funerals,
and heckle at weddings from inside a suitcase . . .I'm so postmodern I only go on dates that last thirteen minutes,
via walky talky, while hiding under the bed.
That's what I'm talking about! I thought to myself. See, I was on the hunt for an example of a particular generational pathology of the Gen X & Y pomo sapiens, and I'd found it. It's the strange cultural disorder that causes he or she to feel an irrational fear of standing up to be noticed, to be counted, to publicly believe in something that he or she, of course, privately believes in. It's the multiculturalist's fear of standing up at all -- the fear of how it might look, or what it might lead to, or who it might offend, or what it might mean about me. Sure, we've all got these anxieties to some degree or another, especially if you've spent any length of time at a liberal arts college in the last twenty years. Sometimes, we have them for good reasons. Other times, well . . . other times, I want to personally firebomb the Gods of postmodern relativism for crimes against simple human decency.
Last Saturday was one of those times.
My fellow editor Joel Pitney and I were at the Brooklyn Food Conference, a massive gathering of urban farmers and nutrition geeks, organic foodie wizards and salsa entrepreneurs, anti-globalization activists, small-is-beautifulites, and one medium-sized panel of undergraduate students who were each active in this growing "food movement" in one way or another.
To kick off the panel, the students were asked what had brought them to the sustainable food movement and what it meant to them. The first answered pleasantly, a nutritionist interested in educating disadvantaged kids about the merits of healthy eating and in getting them access to high-quality, environmentally friendly foods. The second, however -- a young woman from a top-tier liberal arts college who I'll refrain from naming here -- took a surprising nosedive. Her eyes began to jitter. Her voice rolled up and down like marbles in a bowl. She laughed at the wrong times. Apologies kept unpredictably jerking from her mouth like driving directions from a GPS device.
She'd always wanted to be an environmentalist, she tried to explain. She felt close to nature and wanted to protect it, but she was terrified of contributing to the "colonialist project" of Western environmental NGO's who were all out to impose their elitist ideas of reality on the planet's disadvantaged masses. She was so worried that expressing any sort of passion for the environment would inevitably oppress underprivileged communities, in fact, that she'd given up all hope of ever becoming an activist. "Of course," she kept repeating, "this is from the perspective of a privileged white person." She seemed to be near tears.
By leaving her dreams as an environmentalist behind and just "vacating the space" completely, she said, she'd hoped to at least make room for others to step in and have a say. But that didn't sit right, either. She couldn't bear the thought of not making some kind of difference with her life. That's when she discovered the food movement, and everything clicked into place. And get this: the reason she fell in love with it -- I swear, I am not making this up -- was because its purview was so small, so specific, and so focused on purely local issues ("like, just on my own neighborhood") that she could freely work to change things without fear of marginalizing anyone else. In other words, from her perspective as a "privileged white person," food activism was not the thing she was most inspired by -- it was the thing she was least afraid of.
My god, I thought, in the uncomfortable silence that followed. She's been tortured by postmodernism.
Eventually, the next girl on the panel spoke up: "Wow . . . that was . . . interesting. I don't think I've ever heard anyone explain it like that." The people shifted in their chairs, and the workshop moved on. But I just kept seeing visions of torture victims superimposed onto green college quadrangles.
How else to explain it? Of course, not everyone in the food movement would agree with her that its focus is so profoundly local that it bears no relationship to anything outside the radius of a few city blocks (for the most part, they'd be right). And not every Western environmentalist would agree that their work is, by definition, insensitive to other cultures (for the most part, they too would be right). But the facts are, in this case, less interesting to me than her interpretation of them, and the eerie paralysis that seemed to result from it. She'd obviously been educated in the very real, moral, social, and cultural challenges faced by environmentalists, both domestically and internationally. But how in hell did she arrive at the conclusion that environmentalism on the whole -- not to mention her own quite evidently heartfelt care for making this world a better place -- was nothing more than an arrogant, colonialist sham?
Indeed, WTF?
This is not the place for a thorough parsing of the pros and cons of the postmodern "green meme," both of which are legend. (Readers of EnlightenNext will be well aware of our frequent use of the word, and our frequent attempts to explain, critique, and transcend it in practically every issue of the magazine.) In this case, I'll just say that while the postmodern leap in human culture and consciousness was a tremendous evolutionary step forward -- deepening, softening, and enriching our humanity in ways that now seem so fundamental, we often take them for granted -- it can sometimes be dehumanizing, as well. At least, it can in 2009, more than forty years after it first burst onto college campuses across the country.
I was a lit major myself. I went to college in 1993, and by then English departments were already well on their way to becoming intellectual cesspools of postmodern literary criticism. I went to grad school in 2001, and things had definitely gotten worse. But I had no idea it was this bad. The girl at the Food Conference had all the nervous paranoia of a serial murderer, but none of the rap sheet. She was on the run from the PC police, and she knew it was only a matter of time before she got caught. She couldn't have been a week over twenty-one, but she was already so afraid of the sins of being born with privilege that she'd cut herself off from one of its best and rarest fruits -- the freedom to think and care about the rest of the world, and the resources to do something about it. It was a tragic thing to see, and I'd bet half my salary that it happened to her at school.
It wasn't that she was questioning things. It was that she'd been taught to fear, doubt, and deconstruct the wrong things, which is to say the very best part of herself, her own authentic care for life and the passion for truth, goodness, and beauty that comes only from the depths of the soul. It's so ridiculously easy to squander whatever precious opportunity we do have to improve things, and the last thing any "privileged" young mind needs is to become so suspicious of their own existence that they think maybe the best thing for the world would be for them to simply disappear. In Scandinavia, in the most evolved postmodern cultures in the world, suicide has actually become a socially acceptable life choice. Are we paying enough attention here?
If I'd had the guts, or if it had been appropriate, I'd have done a mini-intervention right there on the spot. I really wanted to. I wanted to tell her that the painful, disjointed bubble she's immersed in at her small progressive bubble of a college campus is not actually the real world at all. It's not even a good simulation. I wanted to tell her that it was okay to care about life, to love nature, to work for the health and happiness of other human beings. That it was even okay to go big, to do it boldly, to be more than just an advocate for reusable cups and free-trade coffee at her neighborhood 7-11, if she so desired. She clearly did care. That much was obvious. That's why the fact that these things would have sounded at all radical or dangerous to her terrifies me.