Leon McKenzie is associate Professor Emeritus in the School of Education at Indiana University. He is the author of Pagan Resurrection Myths and the Resurrection of Jesus. Copyright © 1998 Leon McKenzie.

Some say postmodernism defies definition. They are right. The word is a catchall for a hodgepodge of ideas and sentiments, some worthwhile, some seriously flawed, some bizarre. Postmodernism, in my view, is a transition period between the modem era, which is ending, and the next phase of history, whatever that will be.

It is impossible to draw precise boundaries between eras, but it is generally accepted that the modem age, began in the 1600s, and I would predict that the transition through what we are calling postmodernism will not be complete for another century. During this time we will be engaged in the messy business of revising our worldview. In ordinary language, that's our conception of what the world is really like; in postmodernese, it's our "meta-narrative." Many ideas and values and principles are vying with one another to become the governing themes of the next historical period, each promoted by academics, gurus, publishers, marketers, pundits, and would-be culture-framers of every stripe. How does one sort through it all?

To me the salient principle, which this article illustrates, is that postmodernism as we know it today is composed essentially of extreme reactions to the perceived extremes of modernism. Listed below are some comparisons between excessive modem and excessive postmortem doctrines. Not everyone in the modem period, of course, espoused extreme philosophical positions, nor is every postmodernist characterized by extremism. But a display of the extremes of each camp may aid us in understanding where we now are.

Modern and Postmodern Extremes

Modern: Language is self-interpreting and conveys the author's exact meaning. Postmodern: Language means anything a reader interprets it to mean.

Modern: Underdeveloped areas of the world must be colonized and civilized. Postmodern: All cultures are equal in every way.

Modern: Jobs must be awarded solely in terms of a manager's understanding of merit. Postmodern: Persons representing oppressed cultures must be given preferential treatment in hiring for the sake of diversity.

Modern: Moral culpability is determined solely by adherence to external norms. Postmodern: Morality is determined strictly on the basis of anyone's feelings.

Modern: Truth is the perfect and objective correspondence between a person's mind and external reality. Postmodern: Truth is whatever anyone wants it to be.

Modern: Human reason alone is supreme and science is reason's only tool. The sole reality is matter. Postmodern: Feelings alone are the supreme arbiters in all matters requiring human judgment. Reality is a social construction.

Let us examine these one by one.

Postmodernism emphasizes that modernist language is too realist, too evident, and is assumed to interpret itself. Modernism, it is claimed, grasped linguistic communication as straightforward and objective. Literary deconstructionists preach the use of language that is playful, and even nonsensical at times, in order to foster insights. Language is never as clear and easily understood as it seems. Indeed, language is indeterminate. What you are now reading, according to postmodernism, can mean anything you want it to mean. If you read a text with a "correct" insight, it will likely deconstruct itself to represent something other than what the author intended.

Literary postmodernists have taken a truth and twisted it into an outrageous error. Sure, anyone who reads a text puts something of his subjectivity into the interpretation of the text. Texts are not objectively self-interpreting. The modernist who believes a text merely says what it means and means what it says does not fully understand what constitutes the process of reading.

The deconstructionist error is the opposite extreme: All texts are intelligibly indeterminate to the point of being devoid of the author's meaning. Once language deconstructs itself - is destroyed interpretively and distorted according to the "correct" ideology inscribed in the consciousness of the reader - it can mean anything, everything, or even nothing.

What deconstructionists must be asked is this: If what you say about the interpretation of language is valid, why should anyone listen to you or read your pronouncements?

Colonialism was energized in the modem era. Some cultures dominated and treated unjustly the cultures they colonized. In response to this, certain postmodernists today claim the equivalence of all cultures. Every human culture is deserving of respect, I submit, because its people deserve respect, but this is not what some postmodernists maintain. They argue that all cultures are absolutely equal in every way.

This argument is founded on a mindless egalitarianism that promotes absolute equality regardless of merit, achievement, competence, or intrinsic worth. As a practical consequence, for example, there are those who insist that jobs should be awarded on the basis of cultural and ethnic background. Some college admissions are now doled out in a lottery system. Otherwise only those whose grades merit admission would be selected and all cultures would not be proportionally represented in the student population. Diversity would not be served without quota systems blind to merit. Certain universities are now governed on the same principle on which Orwell's pigs governed the barnyard in Animal Farm: All cultures are said to be equal, but some are obviously "more equal" than others. Members of these more equal cultures must obtain preferential treatment, it is asserted.

Artifacts and products of all cultures are said to be equal. One evening I attended a concert on campus that presented the music of a tribal culture. It consisted of frenzied banging on various drums. "Just as grand as Bach in its own way," was a comment I heard at the intermission as I headed for the door. What some postmodernists deny is any basis for distinguishing between beauty and ugliness, goodness and evil, falsehood and truth. There is nothing that is better or worse. Plato, I am sure, would reject this theory of value nihilism as demented.

The test of multicultural postmodernism is obvious. Take a postmortem multiculturalist who is seriously ill and requires surgery. Give him the option of surgery in an ordinary hospital in America or in, say, Borneo. What would be his choice?

The goofy egalitarianism typical of multicultural postmodernism is exhibited in many ways in the workplace. Slavery was legal in some American states until some 135 years ago - that is, during most of the period I have called modern. Today throngs of postmodernists hold that the terrible injustice of slavery must be remedied in ways that violate justice. The establishment and enforcement of ideals of equal opportunity for economic advancement, equality before the law, and equality of human worth are beyond any doubt just. But this is not enough. Equal results are demanded and thus we get reverse discrimination to atone for sins of the past.

Women have been economically and occupationally enslaved, it is argued, by modern ideas. Some postmodern women's political organizations, favored by the elitist media but not by women in general, would have women don the cloak of victimhood, link their cause to the cause of racial justice, and require the same preferential processes in the, workplace claimed by the descendants of slaves.

I have taught hundreds of women in graduate courses. All were admitted to our graduate school on the basis of demonstrated competence. Overwhelmingly my women students and women administrative superiors and subordinates were not only able but also eager to excel. I was aware of their abilities, accomplishments, and willingness to be treated without special privileges. None of them was a whiner. They were feminists in the same way I am a feminist. They insisted simply on an equal opportunity to compete on the basis of hard work and achievement.

Some women, however, expect special rights to redress past wrongs. They insist on favors, privileges, and prerogatives not extended to men. They demand, for instance, their "rights" to careers in the military under special conditions. Women are not held to the same physical training standards as men. They claim exemption from the ordinary rules precisely on the grounds that they are women. Gender-based norms, in any aspect of competitive endeavor to pursue career opportunities, are loopholes to assure the success of women and, simultaneously, the unjust treatment of men. If fairness is a one-way street that only women may travel, the effectiveness of any work team is compromised. Revolution, declared Aristotle, arises when a sufficient number of citizens resent that they are not being treated equitably. Dysfunctional work groups and organizations are created when some individuals receive special "rights" on the grounds of grievance-group membership.

The concept of rewarding merit, of course, is spurned as a modern value that must be destroyed to preserve the self-esteem of those who may be unable to compete successfully, thus assuring an increase of resentment of superior performance in any walk of life.

During the modern age, according to extreme postmodernism, people's choices were constrained by moral norms and ethical standards. In its extreme form, modern morality did not consider the intentions and capacities for serious reflection of those who broke the rules. Nor did extreme modernism admit that circumstances can alter moral culpability. These things may have been recognized by the Scholastic philosophers in the 13th century but have been ignored, it is argued, by modernists.

In postmodern doctrine, the range of moral choices must be unlimited. Not a few postmodernists insist that the individual's right to choose is sacrosanct. AU choices are of equal value. Indeterminate choice - choice without regard to the object of choice - is the highest good. Some choice, of course, must be disallowed for political reasons, -such as the choice of poor parents to send their children anywhere but to a public school. Again we hear another variation on the postmodernist theme: AU choices are equal but some are more equal than others.

Other choices must be advanced by our system of law in its subsidiary role as the great tutor of values. The choice to kill an unborn baby is favored by the American legal system. Even infanticide, permitted in partial-birth abortions, is supported by law. Sexual promiscuity, it is argued by many postmodernists, must be included under the protection of the great idol Diversity. It is perfectly acceptable to cohabit before marriage or to forgo marriage altogether (much to the economic disadvantage of women and children).

Moral postmodernism approves of sexual license. One of the first demands of postmortem feminists was sexual freedom identical to the freedom enjoyed by the most brutish specimens of the male population. Sexual license is particularly fancied by Hollywood moguls out of greed and by Internet prowlers out of simple perversion.

The sole commandment engraved on a stone tablet somewhere seems to be, "Thou shalt not be judgmental."

The chief tenet of postmortem morality is that nothing is wrong and nothing is right. All words and actions are relative. Moral nihilism reigns. In principle, not only should all persons be tolerated but anything they say qualifies for toleration unless it can be branded as "intolerant." As for actions, only murderers, child molesters, rapists, and others of this ilk are exempt from the principle of absolute toleration. When they are brought to trial, however, their defense attorneys -argue for tolerance on the basis of their clients' diminished capacity due to a rotten childhood and an ensuing psychological or medical disorder. Sometimes the defense is justified. Sometimes it is merely an appeal to widespread emotions and prejudices produced by the miseducation of the American citizenry by schools and television.

Those who raise objective moral standards are despised for placing impermissible limits on choice. They are said to be religious fanatics and are usually pronounced guilty of the abomination of Christian fundamentalism or the unspeakable crime of loyalty to the Catholic Church.

It was formerly thought that truth obtained when a person's beliefs correlate with the way things are, that logical truth is in the mind when a subjective mental image closely approximates an objective reality. If I hold a baseball in my hand and make the judgment, "This is a baseball," my judgment is true. If my judgment is, "This is a horseshoe," my judgment is false. Moral truth consists in the correspondence between what is in my mind and what is on my lips. To say "yes" when I mean "no" is to lie. So modernism accustomed us to believe.

The postmortem theory of truth is called pragmatism. Pragmatism is essentially a theory that nullifies truth as correspondence or coherence. Whatever works will serve as truth. Pragmatism avows that all statements about reality are relative. What must be believed as true is what produces beneficial results. Intellectual postmodernism is the counterpart of moral postmodernism. Just as there is no good or evil, so there is no true or false. We come back to the deconstructionist credo that language is indeterminate. All truth claims are true or false depending on each individual's feelings.

This is not to say that many postmodernists simply recognize that truth claims are often finely nuanced. Due to the essential ambiguity of language - and consequently the fundamental imperfection of thought - most theories, propositions, and truth claims fall short of representing reality perfectly. Postmodernists go to the extreme of ignoring logical truth in favor of a results-oriented "truth" that is most properly described as the achievement of desired outcomes.

Relativism, in its most virulent form, rejects the principle of contradiction enunciated by Aristotle. George Englebretsen states this principle as "a statement and its negation cannot be true at the same time," and notes that anyone who dismisses it cannot be counted on to speak the truth. Conversing with such people, Aristotle taught, is a waste of time.

The truth will set us free. Intellectual postmodernism enslaves. Woe to those who teach or study at institutions where political correctness is enforced by speech and thought police. Teaching in these pla6es becomes brainwashing, and scholarship turns into propaganda.

Modern rationalism reached a defining moment in the French Revolution when the mob enthroned an opera singer on the high altar of Notre Dame cathedral. This was a portent of what was to come to full flower in the 18th and 19th centuries. Human Reason, in the persons of modernist savants and scientists, was to declare itself autonomous and supreme.

The most potent instrument of rationalism was its derivative, scientism. Science becomes scientism when the metaphysics of certain scientists, assumed from the beginning of their projects, shows up later as inferences in their theories. Darwin's metaphysics of "natural selection" is a case in point.

In 1995 the National Association of Biology Teachers issued a statement on the teaching of evolution. The statement included the claim that the diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution. Evolution is "an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments

When scholars asked the association to delete the words "unsupervised" and "impersonal" on the grounds that an empirical investigation could not possibly show that God was not directing evolution, board members initially rejected the request. Later, wiser heads prevailed and the words were deleted. The incident was instructive and showed that Darwin's use of the term "natural selection" in the minds of many scientists masked an ideology posing as an empirical finding.

It is altogether proper to criticize the excesses of rationalism and scientism. Extreme postmodernists, however, throw out the baby with the bathwater. In the postmodernist model of rationality, even the objective order of reality is seen as a social construction. The law of gravity, then, becomes something that exists only in the mind. Rationality itself is replaced by feelings and emotions. If someone's discourse makes you feel good, it must be correct. If a speaker seems sincere, this is a basis for believing what he claims. The world of objective reality disappears.

Where modernism was overtly hostile to religion and disposed to philosophical naturalism (what you see is what you get and forget about a supernatural order), ultra-postmodernism manufactures new gods and new supernatural agencies. The planet earth becomes Gaia, the earth-mother goddess. Cults multiply beyond counting. New Age mysteries are celebrated everywhere. Satanic worship is performed by confused adolescents and bewildered neurotics. I call this form of extreme postmodernism Dionysian, after the Greek god of wild abandon, illogic, and unbridled pleasure. The Roman counterpart of Dionysus was Bacchus, the god of drunkenness and revelry. Dionysian postmodernism is a kind of intellectual toxic poisoning that comes about when people live by their impulses.

As in the cases of other extremes of modernism and extremes of postmodernism, only the middle ground is rationally habitable. Neither reason nor feeling is absolute. Reason deified is reason idolized, a monument to hubris and arrogance. Human reason itself, for those who are wise and not simply knowledgeable, teaches us to be humble. The model of authentic rationality directs reason to admit intuition, feeling, imagination, and compassion judiciously into its deliberations. All capacities with which God endowed us must be employed in the quest for truth. What anyone says or writes needs to be evaluated by feelings, intuitions, imagination, and compassion in the service of reason and logic. Intuition, after all, is the precipitate of experience that offers itself at times in hunches and gut feelings that deserve consideration. Without imagination we will go nowhere; without compassion we are confined to a sterile rationality.

There is an objective order of reality. It is obtuse of the postmodernist to affirm reality as a social construct conjured up by mankind. As the physicist Freeman Dyson said in his Gifford Lectures, "matter" is an old-fashioned and imprecise concept, but to reduce all of reality to a mental invention is inane. Extreme modernism at times may have presented reality as a mere aggregate of objects, but the doctrine of materialism has been widely discredited and there is no need to combat it by going to the other extreme of absolute subjectivism. The subjective dimension of reality is demonstrated in human consciousness and mind. Self-consciousness, however, can be known only against the backdrop of an objective world. Gravity is not a social construct. Knowledge of gravity may be defined abstractly as the consensus judgment of rational scientists. But the word gravity denotes a fact. Those who doubt this may test their point of view by skydiving without a parachute.

"Postmodernism" is simply a tentative label for the period coming after modern times. Precisely what designation will lastingly attach to it is unknown (consensus will not be reached for at least a century), but the name "postmodernism" seems too meager to describe the complexity of the world that is currently under construction. Possibly a richer and less trivial appellation will eventually specify the period that may now be in its fetal state.

Two things that herald the coming of a new period in history, however, are already in place. First, from where we stand in history we can evaluate the modern age. We can reasonably play Monday-morning quarterback. We have enough hindsight on the past 300 years to make informed judgments. Some of modernism's principal ideas have been tried and found wanting. Marxism, for instance, is today the creed only of a handful of pitiable groups and of a few even more pitiable professors in certain universities. When postmodernism claims that we possess a vantage point in history for evaluating the excesses of modernism, then postmodernism is accurate. This is the central truth of the transitional time between the modern age and the era that will follow.

Second, a new era can emerge only when there is both discontinuity with the previous age and continuity with the more distant past. While new ideas are generated in the critique of the most recent historical period, there can be and must be a retrieval of older ideas, a retrieval of what is classic and perennial in the treasury of human accomplishments. This is not to advise the recall of premodernism - whole and entire - from exile in the past to the throne of the new era. But in addition to salutary ideas for the new era from the systematic study of modernism's successes and failures, we need a linkage to foundational classics from past ages, including the great metanarrative of orthodox Christian belief which is presently scorned by postmodernism -just as it was by modernism. Should this occur, the future will be bright.

Suppose, however, that in its critique of modernism humanity becomes trapped in the absurdities of literary, multicultural, social, moral, intellectual, and Dionysian postmodemism. Then there will be a regression to barbarism. Hordes of rough conquerors clothed in animal skins will not sweep down upon us. Instead the barbarians will be well-groomed pragmatists whose slippery speech serves only their self-interests and vacuous ideologies. Then the current transitional culture of decadence will have led unhappily to a new dark age in Western civilization.

If all goes well, we may find a meta-narrative that will offer us the things we really need: a more profound understanding of written and spoken communication; a way of respecting all cultures that is not fraught with fallacious reasoning; a path to the creation of a society wherein the disadvantaged are given not preferential treatment but the means to compete and achieve; a moral world that recognizes and applies objective standards compassionately; a model of rationality that promotes reasonableness without arrogance, and intuition without banality- and a culture that permits the complementarity of subjectivity and objectivity.