Anderson, Walter Truett. Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World. San Francisco, Calif.: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003. --- # Metaphors for postmodernism We swim in a sea of symbols, like sea otters in the ocean, except far more turbulent. Some of us struggle to find an anchor. We create systems of meaning, and then forget that we created them, confusing the map for the territory. Postmodernism is about the social construction of reality. Reality as a building. Ideas as blueprints. The awareness of multiple realities is both a bombshell and a jewel. Bombshell: > The old epistemology that equated human beliefs with cosmic reality is now a minority report. Ancient and non-so-ancient systems of eternal truth lie in ruins everywhere around us. Jewel: > We can see, if we look closely at the ideas and events of the postmodern world, a new sensibility emerging – a way of being that puts the continual creation of reality at the heart of every person's life, at the heart of politics, and at the heart of human evolution. Indoctrination turns into education: > Humpty-Dumpty is not going to be put together again. Efforts to do so are ultimately self-defeating, because campaigns to make people choose any particular system of value and belief tend to have the subversive effect of informing people that they are free to choose systems of value and belief. All too often, indoctrination – even indoctrinations into traditonal principles – turn out to be de facto courses in postmodernism. (Is this true? It sounds nice, but I don't know if it's true in practice. What conditions would need to be satisfied for this to be true?) We are Alice, and we have stepped through the looking-glass. --- # History of postmodernism > For centuries, some of our greatest minds have sought to comprehend the nature of this symbolic universe – to make us see, first of all, that we live in such a medium, and then to show us its limits and its possibilities. This has been going on for a long time: it is some 2,500 years since the Buddha had his moment of profound insight into the illusory nature of human experience, and began trying (with indifferent sucess) to tell his followers, in words, the truth about words. The Buddha was the first deconstructionist. It was only a few decades after Buddha's time that Plato wrote *The Republic*, with its unforgettable metaphor of the people in the cave who see nothing but the shadows thrown upon its wall by the fire. Reality Ain't What It Used To Be was published in 1990. Three decades later, it is still profoundly relevant. In modernist cultures, it is beliefs themselves that are in conflict. Communism vs capitalism, science vs religion, one faith vs another. People still held that an objective truth existed. In postmodern cultures, it is beliefs about beliefs that are contested. In a postmodern society, people debate about whether schools should teach "moral reasoning", or timeless values. Three processes are driving the tide of postmodernism: - the breakdown of old systems of belief - emergence of a new polarisation, in which epistemology joins class, race and nationality as a source of political controversy - the birth of a global culture, the first worldview that is truly a *world* view # Definitions Naive realism - the universe is the way we experience it