Submitted by Michael Every of Rabobank
Make It So!
Back in the 1980s there was a lot of discussion at my college about “post-modernism”. At that point it was in a strictly cultural sphere. It meant different things to different people, but I personally found enlightenment in the example of Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the starship Enterprise. To be “post-modern”, I was told, was to be a cultural creation from beyond the modern era. The original Star Trek TV series had been modern (indeed, ultra-modern for the time), but it had clearly been based on pre-modern concepts, such as novels like Horatio Hornblower and Westerns. On the other hand, Star Trek: The Next Generation was based on Star Trek, and hence was “post-modern”.
Post-modernism today seems to be next generation too. The encyclopaedia of Britannica definition is: “…in Western philosophy, a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad scepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.”
As the critics of post-modernism point out, it believes that it is not opinions that are multifaceted, but facts: there are no facts, and those that assert there are do so from a position of power. Yesterday, for example, social-media lit up after a Tweet from a US teacher claiming that “2+2=4” was an example of Western imperialism and that there are other valid ways of looking at it. This was not a high-level maths reference to Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
Obviously, the numerals expressing 2+2 =4 are Arabic, and the concept itself emerged...