Today, in the west, we scrutinize everything with a presumption of incoherence. We use postmodern theoretical models to call into question even the possibility of coherence, suggesting that the world we inhabit is fundamentally fractured. This presumption reveals an underlying anxiety about the old certainties and reliable truths of a time long-past. Meanings are now slippery. And truth is a murky river. So we sing wistful songs about that good old-time religion.
It is ironic that the story of post-modern thought falls neatly into the mythos that undergirds the Judeo-Christian conception of the world. The appearance of the post-modern impulse resembles the fall—a loss of innocence. Suddenly, our eyes are cleansed and we see clearly our naked forms. We see that the ideas we once wore are threadbare. Or, more recently, the appearance of the post-modern impulse resembles the German Reformation, with its iconoclasm and its suspicion of the old forms and its rise against the arbiters of power. The chief difference between Luther and Derrida is that Luther found it easier to name the enemy. He pointed to the roman catholic church. Derrida faced a much woollier beast—our culture, our language, those things we entrust with the responsibility of mediating all our meanings.
If post-modernism resembles the Judeo-Christian mythos, then what does its eschatology look like? Christians have the Book of Revelation with its account of the end of time and a reunion of the righteous and their creator. What follows deconstruction? Post-modern thinkers are great at shredding cherished precepts and melting down all our false idols. But do they set down anything new for us to feed on? Perhaps they have only begun a larger task. Derrida died in November. Maybe it falls to others to take up the cause, to apply his prophetic scrutiny to other, as yet, untested areas of our living.
How have our priests and pastors responded to the last 25 years of prophetic declamations? Perhaps the wrong question is being asked. Perhaps I should ask instead: do our priests and pastors even notice? I see occasional acknowledgments of a new voice, but these are sporadic and suggest a refusal to see that something radical is afoot. Five hundred years from now, people will have given this movement its own distinct name and will refer to it with thanks for delivering them from the shackles of ignorance that, in our time, were our affliction to bear. But today’s visionaries cannot be found in the churches and synagogues and mosques. Today’s visionaries can be found in literary journals, in chat rooms on the internet, on concrete overpasses with a can of spray paint. Today’s churches are weighed down by the same massive superstructures that ground down Rome when Luther was preaching 500 years ago.
Then, the west had just invented movable type and this new technology suddenly empowered a people who, until that time, had gone unheard. Interesting that the prophets of the late 20th century are speaking out as a new communication technology is emerging. Will those who have suffered for so long in silence seize this opportunity to similar effect? I wonder. If the Reformation offers a model, then the answer to this question will not become apparent until long after we are gone.
We, in the west, tend to think of history as linear: one structure is torn down and supplanted by something new. And always, it is assumed that what is new is somehow better than what went before. But it is not clear to me that this story can continue. We may be capable of generating an infinite variety of ideas; but not so for the categories, the types, the classes, of ideas. Time may be less an arrow and more a pool. Waters circulate. History carries us around in gentle eddies. And the ideas we deploy to understand our history return again, like the waters in a pool.
Perhaps coherence is the demand we place upon space when we try to draw out a line forever. As an idea, it is incoherent. A circle is also a line drawn out forever, but it has the economy to place no such demands upon space.