Content area
Full text
A kind of post-modern reasoning has been reforming our sciences, with consequences we have yet to imagine. Despite the diversity of the fields involved, many of these changes, which include dramatic proposals in cosmology and a stunning revival of Lamarckian principles in evolutionary biology, are inherently like-minded. And although they do represent what Thomas Kuhn long ago labeled a "paradigm shift" in professional understanding, they also reflect a much broader reordering of cultural common sense. More than just signs of a significant revision in the preferential logic of natural philosophy (as science used to be called), they mark the further articulation of an emerging worldview, one that has been challenging the social presumptions of modernity as well.
Such radical revisions in commonsense thinking are inherently controversial, and given the multiple and often messy meanings of the terms in play, an immediate clarification is required. When using the words modem or modernity, I am referring to the broad revolution in Western thought that led to both the scientific and industrial revolutions-at its best, politically, to a revival of democracy; at its worst, to the utopian delusions that fueled mass slaughter. I am not citing the arts movement of the early twentieth century commonly called modernism (some of whose methods ironically prefigure postmodern techniques); nor will I use these words as a loose signifier for anything that is contemporary. Because the logic of modernity has calibrated Americas core institutions, it remains powerfully present in all our lives. But not only is that logic now in decline, as exemplified perhaps by the "expert" policies that generated our economy's recent collapse, it is also being relentlessly contested by a surging set of post-modern methods, measures, and values.
Post-modern is itself, of course, a highly problematic term, much associated with and tainted by our culture wars. Here, aiming to escape those partisan associations by heightening the most literal meaning of the word, I have employed a hyphenated spelling. Worldviews do pass. Whether for good or for ill, we have been moving away from many of the presumptions of our foundational past as the worlds first truly modem society, caught up instead in an ambiguous transition now a century in the making. We are indisputably postmodern in the sense that we...