We’ve talked, recently, about postmodern architecture and postmodern movies. It got me to thinking. What would a truly postmodern person look like?

First, let’s get one thing out of the way. I’m not talking about Postmodern philosophy. I know all about Derrida and deconstruction. The world will be a happier place when people like Jacques are once again sitting at card tables outside sketchy bookstores handing out mimeographed flyers, instead of running all the ivy league schools and government think tanks. All second rate thinkers think that because Einstein said time is relative, everything is. They figure there can be no abstract ideas of right or wrong. That’s a convenient worldview if you’re planning on tapdancing on the Ten Commandments, for instance. It’s the intellectual version of hiding in the bathroom when the check comes while the people you invited to dinner pay it. We’re not into that sort of cosmology here at the cottage. To quote the philosopher Sobchak, This is not ‘nam. There are rules.

Postmodern art and architecture and writing and whatall are ostensibly a reaction to hidebound authority, but they’re really a reaction to the destruction of all traditions that the moderns already accomplished. Postmodernists still want to kill traditions, but they want to wear their skin as a suit if they feel like it. They want to use what they couldn’t make themselves without following the rules that made their production possible. They’re born experts at everything. Just ask them, they’ll tell you so.

So let’s run down a list of attributes from postmodern architecture, movies, fashion, and the general zietgeist, so we know what we’re talking about. We’ll refer to the descriptions from a few earlier posts about postmodern stuff, because I’m lazy.

• Disorganized, almost random agglomerations of thoughts, speech, sounds, behavior, etc.
• A rejection of certainty in thought, leading to an inability to grasp the difference between right and wrong, or beautiful and ugly, etc.
• Multiple, incompatible, often contradictory, ad hoc, fragmented, and ambivalent meanings for even the most mundane of objects or concepts
• A penchant for jargon that only a select few can understand or share
• A feeling that real life and objects can be reproduced so closely that the reproductions can take the place of the original items, or even people
• An inability to understand the difference, or even care about, the difference between the past, the present, and the future. Everything only matters in the present
• A rejection of any form of linear timeline in a story. People might do things, things might happen, but the causal connection between actions and results is unimportant, or even completely missing
• Imagining you’ve been systematically excluded from regular life by unseen but all-powerful forces
• A complete rejection of manners and proscribed behaviors in public discourse, appearance, the workplace, and the home.

Oh, I’m sorry. I apologize unreservedly. I have too many tabs open, and while I was trying to describe the worldview of the typical postmodern person, I accidentally listed all the attributes of someone suffering from schizophrenia. My bad.

Oh, yeah, I guess I forgot to mention hallucinations and hearing voices. Sorry.

When I was young, someone once told me a very valuable thing. They said, “If you don’t have good manners, act like you do, it’s the same thing.” Words of wisdom, there. Since that little nugget of horse sense is already taken, I’ll have to coin something new: “If you’re not born with schizophrenia, act postmodern, it’s the same thing.”

[Update: Many thanks go out to Emil, and an anonymous donor, for their recent generous hits on our tip jar. I greatly appreciate it!]