post-postmodernism?in the post-modern age, we often think of people continuing to operate morally on some sort of cultural memory of objective truth. that is, having lost any rational basis for morality in an utterly relativistic world, people continue to hold certain principles as right and true...as holdovers from a time when there was still a framework for absolutes. i wonder if the pendulum isn't swinging back the other way today? sometimes i get the feeling young people are operating on a postmodern cultural memory - subscribing to certain ideas, like "everyone is free to decide what's right for them" or "there are no absolute morals" - without actually accepting the postmodern paradigms on truth and reason. this is especially obvious in the pop secularism of today - Richard Dawkins, Rational Response Squad, the Brights movement, etc. - and its younger adherents, posting and commenting on youtube, blogging, and shopping at Barnes & Noble. the secularism of today appears committed to rationality and objective truth, and, of course, science, which itself is deeply rooted in those ideals, and therefore is operating out of a sort of double cultural memory. further evidence of a shift towards absolutes is the waning tolerance for religious worldviews by popular secularists. the titles of several recent publications speak for themselves. The God Delusion. God: The Failed Hypothesis. God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. (that last one is the best. everything?) true tolerance finds a robust framework in only two ways i can think of - in the rejection of objective truth or the acceptance of the Christian doctrines of sin and grace. that's not to say that in practice that's where tolerance is found, but lacking an adequate framework, there will be a tendency to drift away from tolerance, as we are now witnessing in the new atheism. in fact Dawkins himself takes on postmodernism with characteristic polemic in Postmodernism Disrobed. my question would be, to what extent does the success of this small group of new atheists reflect a mass exodus from the postmodern worldview? being a scientist by vocation, i see the rejection of postmodernism in the workplace (did the scientific community ever embrace any more than fragments of postmodernism anyway? i doubt it, though i haven't done the research). Francis Schaeffer bemoaned the belated response of the Church to the world's 20th century transition into postmodernism. we see now a flurry of activity in the Church to either adopt postmodernism on the one hand (the emergent church movement) or counteract it on the other (the more orthodox evangelicalism). are we again gearing up to fight yesterday's battle? edit: looks like my title has already been spoken for. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Postmodernism | 
