The Challenges Of Postmodernism
THE CHALLENGES OF POSTMODERNISM
J. P. Moreland
An important and, sadly, often neglected component of Christian apologetics is the task of showing how Christian ideas enhance and do explanatory work across the academic disciplines and how rival worldviews harm and fail to do commensurate work in those same fields. And given that the various aspects of the image of God are recalcitrant facts for rival worldviews such as naturalism and postmodernism, one would expect that in those fields that examine that image, Christianity would enhance and its rivals would harm work and practice in these fields in particular. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the field of psychology. In what follows I want to delimit some significant features of postmodernism relevant to the practice of therapy and counseling and show how these postmodern features wreak havoc in that practice.
For at least two reasons, the effective Christian counselor must keep in touch with the intellectual currents of the day. For one thing ideological trends have an impact on academic disciplines, and psychology and theology are no exceptions to this rule. For example, during the arid days of positivism in the first half of the twentieth century, philosophical behaviorism was all the rage. Apprised of those trends, one can be more discerning while reading in one's field. Further, ideological trends contain ideas that shape the emotions, thoughts, and behaviors of patients; so counselors should be able to address those ideas as part of their therapeutic package. Currently, postmodernism is an intellectual trend that Christian counselors would do well to understand. With this in mind, I shall offer a summary of postmodern thought, followed by an analysis of four aspects of postmodernism especially relevant to the Christian counselor.
What Is Postmodernism?
Postmodernism is a loose coalition of diverse thinkers from several different academic disciplines, so it is difficult to characterize postmodernism in a way that would be fair to this diversity. Still it is possible to provide a fairly accurate characterization of postmodernism in general since its friends and foes understand it well enough to debate its strengths and weaknesses.1
Postmodernism is both a historical, chronological notion and a philosophical ideology. Understood historically, postmodernism refers to a period of thought that follows and is a reaction to the period called modernity. Modernity is the period of European thought that developed out of the Renaissance (1300—1550) and flourished in the Enlightenment (c. 1650-1800) in the ideas of people like Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz, and Kant. In the chronological sense, postmodernism is sometimes called “post modernism.” So understood, it is fair to say that postmodernism is often guilty of a simplistic characterization of modernity because the thinkers in that period were far from monolithic. Indeed, Descartes, Hume, and Kant have elements in their thought that are more at home in postmodernism than they are in the so-called modern era. Nevertheless, setting historical accuracy aside, the chronological notion of postmodernism depicts it as an era that began in and, in some sense, replaces modernity.
As a philosophical standpoint, postmodernism is primarily a reinterpretation of what knowledge is and what counts as knowledge. More broadly, it represents a form of cultural relativism about such things as reality, truth, reason, value, linguistic meaning, the self, and other notions. On a postmodernist view there is no such thing as objective reality, truth, value, reason, and so forth. All these are social constructions, creations of linguistic practices and, as such, are relative not to individuals but to social groups that share a narrative. Roughly, a narrative is a perspective such as Marxism, atheism, or Christianity that is embedded in the group's social and linguistic practices. Important postmodern thinkers are Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-François Lyotard.
My purpose in this essay is to tease out implications of postmodernism relevant to Christian counselors; it is not to provide a philosophical critique of it. Still, I cannot resist offering one criticism. Put simply, postmodernism is self-refuting. Postmodernists appear to claim that their own assertions about the modern era, about how language and consciousness work, and so forth are true and rational; and they write literary texts and protest when people misinterpret the authorial intent in their own writings. In these and other ways postmodernism seems to be self-refuting.
Sometimes postmodernists respond by denying that they take their own assertions and writing to be true, rational, constituted by their own authorial intent, and so forth. If these claims are correct, then they would, indeed, save postmodernism from self-refutation. But this response must be rejected. When one actually reads carefully postmodernist writings, it is hard to avoid the impression that they do, indeed, present themselves as true, rational, and so on. In this sense, though on the defensive, postmodernists may deny that their writings exhibit these features; nevertheless an examination of those writings seems to undermine those denials.
How Does Postmodernism Impact Counseling?
At least four implications of postmodernism strike at the core of Christian counseling. The first two follow from the fact that, according to postmodernism, the self is a social construction, a creation of language, an objectification of the first-person pronoun I; and, as such, the self is a culturally relative, historically conditioned construct. As Philip Cushman asserts, “There is no universal, transhistorical self, only local selves; no universal theory about the self, only local theories.”2
Two things follow from this. First, there is no unity to the self and no enduring ego.3 Rather the self is a bundle of social roles and relations that are expressions of the arbitrary flux of the group. This has disastrous implications for helping people separate and individuate in any objective sense. If postmodernism is true, all that can happen is for a patient to disown one arbitrary, socially constructed self while standing in another one. One wonders if such a trip is worth the effort. Further, on this view there is no point in taking personal responsibility for one's pathologies since it is always open to a patient simply to distance from an arbitrary, fleeting constructed self in which the pathology is embedded.
Second, as postmodern critic Terry Eagleton points out, since the self is a passive social construction, “there are no subjects sufficiently coherent to undertake … actions.”4 Active agency and free action disappear under the postmodern cloud of constructivism. Thus, postmodern thought is on a collision course with important developments in psychological theory during the last ten years which have emphasized the self as an active, free agent. Moreover, as Immanuel Kant wisely noted, the goal of the moral life and, presumably, of therapy, is the production of a good will, of a person who freely and rationally chooses to live a virtuous life that honors the moral law. If this goal is removed from therapy, as it must be for postmodernists, it becomes opaque as to just exactly what therapists, especially Christian therapists, are trying to accomplish.
Third, postmodernism leads to the institutionalization of anger. Postmodernists are preoccupied with power struggles that surround language use and social practice, and they see themselves as part of a missionary movement to liberate powerless, oppressed victims from dominance. They often practice a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in which they interpret body language, speech, and written communication not in terms of the communicators' own intentions but in terms of their attempt to victimize and dominate “the other” as understood according to the postmodernists' interpretive agenda (e.g., feminism, gay rights, and so forth). To be sure, power issues are a legitimate aspect of language, though one hardly needs postmodernism to see this. But by making power struggles and victimization a central focus of the postmodern crusade, the movement dignifies anger by institutionalizing it and placing it on ideological high ground, and it creates anger by fostering relational suspicion according to which there is a victimizer under every linguistic tree. America is a country of angry people, and postmodernism is to be blamed for its share in creating this situation.
Finally, with its relativization of truth, postmodernism has contributed to the absolutization of desire satisfaction. With truth dethroned as a guide for life, something had to take its place. And the heir to the throne is the absolute importance of satisfying one's desire. Postmodernism helps to prop up this value in the culture by its denial of truth and reason, along with its promulgation of a naive and destructive notion of tolerance. Christian therapists know that some beliefs and behaviors—for example, child molestation—should not be tolerated, and they also know that a healthy person is one who can cultivate good desires and control bad ones. Ironically, due to the implications of postmodern ideology, a movement that seeks to liberate victims actually creates the conditions under which that liberation is impossible. And that should be a matter of concern for us all.
The Christian worldview, with its emphasis on the existence of truth and goodness and on the reality of personal identity and responsibility, helps us address problems discussed in psychology. The Christian faith furnishes us with a wide range of answers and resources that are lacking within a postmodern framework. And this fact is an indication of Christianity's convincingness, integrity, and intellectual plausibility over against its competitors, including postmodernism.
1 For a helpful introduction to postmodernism, see Joseph Natoli, A Primer to Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
2 Philip Cushman, “Why the Self Is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psychology,” American Psychologist 45 (1990): 599.
3 For more on the self and the soul, see J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae, Body and Soul (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2000); J. P. Moreland, “Restoring the Substance to the Soul of Psychology,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 26 (1998): 29—43.
4 Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 27—28.