The twentieth century has not been kind to the idea of progress, to that core of optimistic Enlightenment thinking whose project Condorcet described as the "limitless perfectibility of the human species." If the trenches of the First World War were not enough to cast doubt upon its prospects, certainly Auschwitz and Hiroshima more than sufficed. The holdouts thereafter--those liberals and Marxists still upholding the Enlightenment's positivist, materialist orthodoxies--have come largely undone through the manifest maladies of the welfare state on the one hand, and the far more dramatic collapse of communism on the other. Richard Rorty advises socialists and their sympathizers that they will one day have to admit, if they haven't already, that the once-celebrated "image of Lenin at the Finland Station . . . will form a triptych along with that of Hitler at a Nuremberg rally and of Mussolini on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia."
The idea of progress, in its essential Enlightenment beginnings and even more so in its nineteenth-century expressions, was bound up with an exchange of faith: the substitution of science and reason for God and Providence. Now that the gods of the Enlightenment have had their clay feet exposed, the way is open for some to return to faith. But many cannot; too secular for belief in God, and too skeptical for trust in reason, they have given birth to postmodernism in its various guises.
It is easier to ridicule postmodernism than it is to define it. Its basic impulse oscillates between nihilism and humility, between denying objectivity and the possibility for meaningful rational discourse on the one hand, and recognizing the frailties and limits of the human endeavor on the other. In the former cast of mind, history is reduced to hopelessly subjective narrative; in the latter, however, it turns into a philosophical challenge that puts it, very surprisingly perhaps, into the company of St. Augustine.
