Stranger in a Strange Land

Somewhere in Manhattan, a precocious eight-year-old is asking that question. She's had Adorno and Benjamin for bedtime stories. Mommy teaches Critical Theory at the New School; Daddy's a photographer specializing in corpses. They know what the Right Answer is supposed to be. ("No, pumpkin, of course not: we're all postmodern now.") But they're beginning to have doubts.

No shelf space is available. Atop the heap of recent arrivals in their hallway, books and journals higgledy-piggledy, are two new books on zeppelins: Dr. Eckener's Dream Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel, by Douglas Botting (Holt), and Zeppelin! Germany and the Airship, 1900-1939, by Guillaume de Syon (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press). The mere image of a zeppelin evokes a complex mix of nostalgia and cultural condescension, as you might feel turning the pages of a nineteenth-century photo album.

And there's more of the same in The Ride to Modernity: The Bicycle in Canada, 1869-1900, by Glen Norcliffe (Univ. of Toronto Press). Norcliffe's first chapter is called "Modernity and the Bicycle." Is any further proof needed that we've passed beyond modernity? These comical figures with their velocipedes and long skirts and funny hats: we see them as across a great gulf.

But the style of our own moment, as Hugh Kenner has observed, is invisible to us, and how long will it take before the characteristic artifacts of today seem as quaint as zeppelins? Perhaps there's more continuity between the era of these books and the early twenty-first century than the Postmod Squad would have us believe. We might even learn something about the present from these retrievals.

"Upon receiving news of an airship raid on London," de Syon writes, "Thomas Edison had argued that the next war should be fought with machines instead of men. He suggested that such an approach to war would offer efficiency and also have a deterrent effect." Sounds like the rhetoric that fueled many accounts of the Gulf War, but with the values reversed. The war was deplored as a computer-game war, a living-room war, its public face masking the reality of killing—and said to be the very quintessence of postmodernity. But to a significant degree, it could be said to have realized Edison's vision—and that of many of his contemporaries—for better or for worse. Whatever modernity was or is, are we really past it or out of it or otherwise definitively somewhere else?

You may find the whole question pointless, in which case you've probably already stopped reading. But it's not such an esoteric matter. After all, as we noted in introducing the series of responses to Brian McLaren's book, A New Kind of Christian (the series concludes in this issue; see pp. 32-33), if you've been to a conference on the state of the church anytime in the last five years, chances are you've heard it said that while we live in a postmodern world, the church is still largely stuck with assumptions and practices shaped by modernity. And this is said to have all kinds of practical consequences for ministry.

In fact, assertions about the state of religion—and Christianity in particular, its currency, its authority, or rather lack of same—are never far below the surface of talk about postmodernity, and often right in the foreground. A book we'll be reviewing in Books & Culture is called Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity, and Self, edited by Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton (Univ. of California Press). It's a Festschrift of sorts, a collection of essays in response to the work of the sociologist Robert Bellah, and Bellah contributes a substantial epilogue responding in turn to the essays. Here's the way the book begins:

There is a painful contradiction between what modernity promises and what it delivers. It promises—indeed demands—intellectual, moral, and political emancipation. Yet it delivers an iron cage.

What are the alternatives, according to the editors? Well, there's "the movement commonly called post-modernism," ultimately nihilistic, presuming "that, if religion, moral obligation, reason, and freedom are only human creations, then these ideals, however desirable, have no authoritative status in human social life." The editors present a "third way" based on the "symbolic realism" of Bellah: the notion that "religious symbols, created by human beings as ways of grasping the ultimate conditions of existence, could nevertheless have transcendent meanings that made powerful claims on individuals and communities for moral self-understanding and judgment."

Interesting. Notice that people who believe that what are here called their "religious symbols" are not exactly "created by human beings" don't even rate a mention, except in a dismissive passing reference to "earlier approaches to religion and morality." Evidently such "approaches" don't even constitute a "way" to be rejected; history has already passed judgment.

But then what are all those unreconstructed believers up to, running around the postmodern landscape like dinosaurs in the Parthenon? Someone forgot to tell them: we're all postmodern now.

—John Wilson