Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind argues that as it now stands, post-moderrns have a powerful image of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of guidance they no longer have any image of a perfect soul and hence do not long to have decide before chaos ensues. The eternal conflict between good and evil has been replaced with “I’m okay, you’re okay.” Men and women once paid for difficult choices with their reputations, their sanity, and even their lives. But no more. Post-modern America has no-fault automobile accidents, no fault insurance no consequence choices.
But the dance is almost over.
Before long, post-modern man will lose his being. Postmodern sensibility does not lament the loss of narrative coherence any more than the loss of being. But the loss will be acutely felt when the post-modern faces crises, say, death.
This crisis is one that drove many old romantics back to the faith too. The romanticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson is fine and good on a warm, spring day. But is a paltry offering to a crying, dying soul.
Paul Johnson, in Modern Times–p. 48 writes “Among the advanced races, the decline and ultimately the collapse of the religious impulse would leave a huge vacuum. The history of modern times is in great part the history of how that vacuum is filled. Nietzsche [whom Davis calls post-modern] rightly perceived that the most likely candidate would be what he called the ‘Will to Power,’ which offered a far more comprehensive and in the end more plausible explanation of human behavior than either Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology. Those who once filled the ranks of the totalitarian clergy would become totalitarian politicians. And, above all, the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by any religious sanctions whatever, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind. The end of the old order, with an unguided world adrift in a relativistic universe, was a summons to such gangster-statesmen to emerge. They were not slow to make their appearance.”
So, perhaps all we Christians have to do is to wait and to pray and to keep our theology and metaphysics dry. Sooner or later life will drive subjective post-moderns to look for something else. Let’s pray that we will be there to share the Gospel!