Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief

by Huston Smith

In The Postmodern Condition, Jean François Lyotard goes so far as to define postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives,” a synonym for metaphysics. The incredulity takes three forms that grow increasingly shrill as they proceed. Postmodern minimalism contents itself with pointing out that we have no consensual worldview today; “we have no maps and don’t know how to make them.” Mainline postmodernism adds, “and never again will we have a consensual worldview, such as prevailed in the Middle Ages, Elizabethan England, or seventeenth-century New England; we now know too well how little the human mind can know.” Hardcore postmodernism carries this trajectory to its logical limit by adding, “good riddance!” Stated in the in-house idiom postmodernists are fond of, worldviews “totalize” by “marginalizing” minority viewpoints. They are oppressive in principle and should be resolutely resisted.