Ross Edwards: Coach, Author, FounderIn this article, we’re going to cover the key aspects of the postmodern worldview.
This worldview has been active in a significant percentage of the population since around the 1960s, and currently has its greatest presence in modern democracies.
As you’re reading the descriptions to come, I invite you to notice how this worldview buttresses postmodern values, political views, preferences and so forth. These are all natural and expectable under this paradigm.
I invite you to also notice how the different aspects of the worldview necessitate and reinforce each other. Like the other fundamental worldviews, it is not just a flimsy, replaceable belief system that one chooses to hold, but a self-consistent psychological system that correlates with the prevailing survival conditions.
I also invite you to appreciate that there’s an ongoing and necessary tension between the traditional worldview, modern worldview and the postmodern worldview. Sure, on the political scene they seem to create unending chaos rather than stable order. A priori, it seems life would be easier if we all simply held the same worldview.
But consider, instead, that these worldviews are like poles that evolve one another. Modernism and postmodernism pull the tide of evolution forward, while traditionalism puts the breaks on it. The former two, with their zeal for change and advance, slowly seek to improve via trial and error, while the latter maintains normality by signalling the problems and dangers of advancement. The tension is evolutionarily juicy. Together, slowly, we inch our way forward, as we have been for thousands of years.
I imagine many of my readers skew modern, liberal and progressive, and hold the postmodern worldview. When we do, it’s tempting to believe ours is the best. In trying to understand it, we must soberly ask ourselves why it exists, why it’s necessary, and why our worldview legitimately threatens the traditional and modern ones. Only then will we truly grasp its nature and realise that it’s not the best by default.
To that end, we must recognise that all worldviews appear within a certain context that legitimises and necessitates them, and the Postmodern is no different. Let’s begin by discussing the context of the postmodern worldview.
Context for the Postmodern View
Like the traditional and modern worldviews that precede it, the postmodern worldview is well-established and highly visible, especially in modern democratic countries.
It’s most visible in the United States, where its present in around 20% of the population, the English-speaking nations, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and other countries at a similar level of development. It first appeared on a grand scale during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and in many ways its emergence defined this period.
Crucially, the postmodern worldview arises in reaction to traditionalism and modernism. Several of its core feature centre around its rejection of the nasty byproducts of these prior views, including the dark aspects of capitalism, religion, individualism, colonialism, racism, big industry, and so on. Though this worldview certainly brings novelty too, rejection of the establishment is among its most fundamental aspects.
This may seem like a trivial point, but grasping this will help you deeply comprehend this worldview, along with its necessity and its blindspots. The majority of postmodernists fail to appreciate this point.
The revolution in the sixties was a counterculturalist revolt against the traditional-modern establishment. It was successful in that it lead to remarkable social change, particularly for minority groups. It was also a failure because by attacking the establishment head on, the counterculturalists generated backlash and in some ways made it more rigid than before.
At this time, the postmodern view continues to fight against traditional and modernism. In some ways, it’s incredibly successful: the developments in feminism, minority rights, voting rights, abortion laws, transgender rights, sexual rights, and so forth, are testament to its power and necessity.
However, though it promotes itself as the pinnacle of all worldviews, its very makeup guarantees it’ll be forever considered a countercultural values system and never reign supreme. It occupies a countercultural political cleft that essentially denies and demonises the other prevailing worldviews.
In focusing on the establishment’s shortcomings, rejecting it, and failing to comprehend its necessity, it guarantees that it’ll never touch the hearts and minds of traditionalists and modernists. Hence the current culture wars, where traditionalists, modernists and postmodernists are locked in ideological war.
That this worldview arises in reaction to traditionalism and modernism is crucial to understand for another reason. Most postmodernists fail to appreciate that their evolutionary role is to fight back against the shortcomings of these earlier worldviews. It’s a legitimate worldview in the sense that it is born to achieve this and often does.
However, our absorption in anti-establishment fervour convinces us that everyone, in all places and at all times, should hold the postmodern worldview by default.
In falling into this trap, postmodernists fail to understand that the existence of the traditional-modern establishment is an indispensable ingredient in their own countercultural worldview.
How could one possibly lash back against the establishment if there is no establishment? How can people who have never experienced the traditional or modern world possibly hope to adopt a countercultural perspective?
The postmodern worldview requires a stable modern context in order to appear and flourish. It typically appears in educated, economically well-off people who are have already grown through the traditional and modern stages of development. Yet, not only is it unaware of this context, it despises that context. Thus, the postmodern worldview, like the others, can be hypocritical and self-contradictory.
Though it’s legitimate and plays an important function, it’s illegitimate in that it sets itself up for a fall, and in doing so makes its evolutionary role quite limited. Only when an individual begins to move beyond the postmodern level of development do they understand why this worldview is unsustainable.
STEVE MCINTOSH
Like modernism and traditionalism, the postmodern worldview provides people with a sense of identity and thus creates strong loyalty to its perspectives. And following the pattern of the rise of previous worldviews, postmodern values stand in antithesis to the values of the existing culture from which they arose.
the postmodern worldview is an authentic “new” paradigm—its inclusive, sensitive and environmentally conscious values represent an authentic advance over the more individualistic values of the modernist worldview.
The Postmodern Worldview: Defining Features
Before we go further, I should warn you that conventional society tends to misunderstand and demonise the postmodern worldview, mistaking it for a set of quirky preferences rather than a well-established stage of human development. It often presents us with a strawman of this worldview. And since this worldview has also dominated in me and continues to play a significant role in my life, my presentation of it will inevitably be somewhat skewed.
I want to encourage you to generate understanding, ask with genuine curiosity and interest why people develop into this worldview, and aim to comprehend why it stands along pretraditionalism, traditionalism, and modernism as one of the fundamental worldviews that constitute our evolutionary pathway as individuals and as a species.
The postmodern worldview, like all the others, is not an accident or a result of mere preference. It’s not held as a conscious, carefully evaluated choice. Instead, it constitutes the move to a new stage of consciousness, called Green Postmodern. This worldview envelops one’s entire life, including values, morals, epistemology, metaphysics, spirituality, even dietary choices, just like the other developmentally-driven worldviews.
To sum up, this worldview is multicultural, pluralistic, liberal, leftist, progressive and countercultural. It’s environmentally sensitive, spiritually attuned, pro-equality and worldcentric. It’s relativistic, anti-traditional, anti-modern, anti-hierarchical, egalitarian, pro-inclusion and pro-diversity.
Susanne Cook-Greuter highlights that in terms of ego development, the shift from the modern to the postmodern worldview entails moving from conventional to postconventional meaning making.
Unlike the preceding developmental shifts, this one is not supported by society, and friends and family will often be unable to fathom it. Thus, shifting to this worldview can be confusing and destabilising unless one finds postmodern friends and groups to associate with.
One of the key features of the postmodern worldview is relativism. Here, we realise that objective observation is an illusion and that our own filters radically distort and influence how we perceive reality and truth. Our beliefs are in important ways a function of our surround, our life history, our psychological quirks, our biases, and so forth.
Since we’re always involved in the truth process and interpret reality subjectively, our ability to contact objective reality is very limited.
Realising that we’re all participant-observers and that our point of view is relative is called the fourth-person perspective. This constitutes a mental expansion that enables us to do epistemology and question the foundations of our beliefs and knowledge. We’re now highly aware of self-deception, cultural conditioning, and the influence of context on identity.
As a result, we question the assumptions and tenets of our familiar surround. Realising that science is relative, we begin to question it, along with all the advancements it has enabled. Our truth criteria broaden, and many claims now seem valid: we become pluralistic. Absorbed in relativism, we may lose the ability to choose between perspectives, and get lost in aperspectival madness.
We also seriously question the modern assumption that material possessions and status will bring happiness. In fact, after living with the modernist worldview, we may have realised for ourselves that they don’t deliver on what they promised. As Susanne Cook-Greuter says, there is a “serious questioning of the underlying assumptions of the achievement mentality.”
We begin to value quality of life more than status and material possessions: we want to live a full life rather than a materialistic one. Postmodernists tend to turn away from society and external affairs and live a simple life free of rat races and corporate ladders. They take to naturalising and minimising their life, preferring natural, organic food, a vegeterian or vegan diet, alternative medicine, and simple clothing.
A thread running through this worldview is its despisal of hierarchy. It’s highly sensitive to unfairness, injustice, inequality and oppression. It tends to see the world and history in terms of victims and oppressors, and wants to flatten the nasty hierarchies in the world. It focuses on fixing the wrongs of history and the damage caused by the earlier worldviews, aiming to rehabilitating the victims and “losers”.
It’s sensitive to triumphalist claims that declare victory for one side or race over another. As such, it tends to be hostile to the history of modern countries and will often tell the story of the victim. For example, a postmodern Brit may prefer to focus on the damage caused by the British Empire and tear down the monarchy rather than celebrating the Empire’s successes. They’re likely to see the Union Jack as a source of shame rather than pride.
As such, patriotism now becomes embarrassing. How can you proudly identify with a nationality when your nation was built through conquering and oppression? It wants to abandon national identity and pride, identity with the multicultural worldwide community, and will proudly declare itself a “citizen of the world”. It’s no wonder this level and the traditional level are in such discord given their irreconcilable attitudes towards national identity.
Learn about my life when the Postmodern worldview dominated in me.
It wants to love everybody and deeply see into people, their karma, their truth and their history, honour them for who they are, and sympathise with their pain and struggle. Thus, its circle of concern is relatively large.
However, the postmodern worldview contains one key contradiction: it struggles to tolerate those who do not hold this worldcentric, multicultural view, and tends to demonise and discard traditionalism and modernism. This contradiction can only be reconciled in the Integral worldview.
Naturally, those with a postmodern worldview strive to improve the rights of all minorities, whether these are ethnic groups, women, disabled people, the mentally ill, the poor, homosexuals, or any other group that has suffered oppression. This view has undergirded the remarkable improvement in rights that these groups have experienced since the 1960s. It can even become militant in its egalitarianism.
This worldview is acutely aware of environmental damage and the unsustainability of modern world. It tends to be anti-capitalist and sees materialistic values to be soulless and hollow. It tends to revere nature and has a deep fear of environmental collapse.
While the modern mind tends to be outward focused and passes everything through a strict rational-logical filter, the postmodern view includes an inward focus on experience, emotion, the body and sudden insight. Psychology and the unconscious opens up, and we become aware of multiple selves.
No longer do we see ourselves as a single, monolithic self: we understand we have many inner voices, all vying for hegemony. Rather than constantly running towards to the future, we become now-oriented and trust our subjective experience more than anything else.
This worldview, since it’s post-rational and post-objective, looks back in time and tends to yearn for a simpler way of life, before countries, industry, capitalism, trade and skyscrapers. It reveres pre-traditional cultures and integrates them into its understanding of the world.
However, it tends to lack discernment, and can easily fall into the trap of confusing expressions of junior, pre-traditional levels with those of higher, postmodern and post-postmodern levels, as well as that of overidealising humanity’s past.
Finally, this worldview has a relatively expanded, inclusive view of spirituality. It’s open, welcoming and eclectic. Its spirituality is non-dogmatic, blends many traditions and tends to emphasise inner growth and experience over belief.
It takes an interest in a variety of methodologies, including Eastern paths, Buddhism, shamanism, self-help, human potential and Buddhism. This worldview underlies the New Age boom in the 90s and the rise of yoga in modern democracies.
Healthily Integration of the Postmodern Worldview
Like the other worldviews, the postmodern view is not a result of choice or preference, but a well-defined stage of development both for individuals and collectives. It tends to dominate for a specific period of a person’s life and have life-changing implications for many aspects of their life.
Taking this into account, we can say that there are three cases in which we must strive to integrate the postmodern view: in the pre-dominant, dominant, and post-dominant phases.
When the postmodern view is pre-dominant in us, we’ll likely be centred at either the Traditional or the Modern worldview. To integrate the Postmodern view effectively, we’d do well to be humble and recognise that this worldview is over our heads, yet waiting for us to reach it through further development. We’d do well to truly listen to Postmodernists and try to comprehend their worldview and its rationale.
When we’re dominant Postmodern, the danger is that we become addicted to this worldview and believe it’s the only valid worldview possible. To counteract this, we’d do well to consciously integrate the two prior views, and to begin to welcome the next worldview, Integral. This helps us to integrate it healthily as an aspect of our ever-changing self-identity, rather than endlessly clinging to it. To this end, studying developmental theory can be very useful.
Finally, when we’re post-dominant Postmodern, the danger is that we aggressively reject it, or remain subtly addicted to it. In either case, the key is to recognise its contributions and healthy aspects, be highly self-observant, notice when this worldview is holding you back, and try to see it clearly as another, potentially valid perspective.