The Age of Modernism brought revolution. It was the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. It brought the advent of the scientific method, the development of common literacy, and offered the building blocks of the entire cosmos.

In a sense, it is the most intoxicating and self-righteous era in human history.

Historians even referred to previous ages as “dark” and “middle” to demonstrate their lesser quality.

Today, we refer to the time before as the Premodern Era. And describe it with terms of un-reason. When people believed in magic, astrology, and other nonsense. The stuff the Modern Era eagerly disproved.

Except that there’s a flaw in modernism. A flaw exposed by postmodernism. That singular answers and universal truths aren’t self-defining or totally observable. And even reason itself has elements of bias and magical thinking.

But the modernist conceit is built on the idea of finding truth. And its revulsion toward premodern ways of dealing with unfound truths prevents modernist thinking from exiting intellectual dead ends. For in modernism, there is only ever linear progress toward the answer.

Modernism has no capacity for dealing with impossibility. No backtracking, reimagining, or heading in new directions. Forward, even when stopped by impenetrable truth.

Postmodernism, at its heart, is about helping us get over ourselves.

To help us get unstuck from our own modernist excesses.

From the stuff that feels valuable and necessary, but is merely indulgent and self-gratifying. Like perfecting free speech or protecting the 2nd Amendment.

Modernist thinking can trap us in indecision, delusion, or nihilism.

To its own excesses, postmodernism will offer the same.

But it is modernist thinking to place the two into a binary, deadlocked as either/or or into a pendulum swinging back and forth between extremes.

Modernist thinking lacks elasticity and self-awareness. It’s the friend who doesn’t get your jokes but studies with you to make sure you ace your exams.

Modernism is everywhere today.

And it shows up in literalisms of all kinds. In obsessions about historical records and elitist validations, not just in blind adherence to the “plain reading of the text”.

And most of our struggles with power and authority, community and politics, freedom and working together display our conviction for modernist thinking. Our desire to understand the reason things work the way they do. Wanting things to make sense.

These ideas themselves aren’t modernist but are coded with modernist ideation. We’ve been formed to deduce through modern lenses. And taught that these lenses themselves are somehow unfiltered; or represent a fundamental difference from premodern (read: magical, spiritual, imaginative and therefore bad ) thinking.

This is how we tangle one another in binaries and false equivalencies. And why we struggle with differentiating the political from the partisan.

Our discourse is trapped by modernism. Including modernist fears of postmodernism. Of accepting the imperfection of the pursuit of perfection. Fearing that true and total understanding is unattainable after all.

Escaping the trap isn’t easy.

Nor is it likely to be something we simply will ourselves toward.

It takes curiosity and courage. A willingness to interrogate our own certainties and methods of interrogation.

And it means developing new goals for living.

This looks like recognizing that postmodernism isn’t “the answer” either. But it allows us the freedom and wisdom to recognize that we won’t find the truth through modernist thinking alone. Acknowledging the arrogance of modernism to throw out premodern (and postmodern) thought.

That we might see limits for what they are.

A final thought:

I often turn to the late and much-revered theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer for offering the most valuable koan of the modern condition.

Murder is always wrong.
Allowing genocide is wrong.

The theologian’s role in the plot to assassinate Hitler is famous, yet often stripped of its true significance.

Bonhoeffer didn’t see murder as the right thing to do. Or a passionless lesser of two evils. He saw it as an evil that he hoped God would forgive him for.

He saw both choices as evil and regardless remained evil. He merely hoped God would be merciful on him for such an act of evil.

Modern thinking can’t solve this puzzle without erasure. Without redefining terms. It needs to make something more evil or define one of the options as virtuous. But neither is. Nor can either ever be.

For us to fully understand how broken we are by Modernism, I suspect we must let go of our ego. Not just our certainty or rigidity. But the very thing that leaves us blind to the truth: that we can’t be perfect. Nor may we survive without blemish.