I've been reluctant so far to feed the arguments in my head against Postmodernism and its ideas that I'm hearing in class because I find that the more I argue against what I'm hearing in class the more I get angry at my teachers and the less I learn.
However, I have a paper due Monday on all of this and so I have to start formulating my opinions on what I think about Postmodernism.
It seems like the more I read about it, and based on what I know about the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory, the more I start thinking that this movement is a reaction by the Sensors in the world against the Intuitive Modernists. (I recognize that there is a lot more going on with this, but stick with me).
If it is like this, then this also feeds into the cyclical view of history, which I'm very interested in. Based on what (very little) I know and have observed, it makes a lot of sense that each generation reacts in a lot of ways against the one before it. This is a beautiful way for human kind to balance itself out. However, things start going sour when one side claims to hold their view (intuition vs. sensing, judging vs. perceiving, etc.) as the more perfect than the other and goes to the extreme to prove their point.
My theory is that a lot of postmodernism is rejecting the intuitive way of thinking in favor of the sensing. "Intuitive" on the Myers-Briggs can be characterized by a more big-picture way of thinking about things and its weakness is to create all-encompassing theories that leave out a lot of important facts. "Sensing," in contrast, is more detail oriented but can ignore larger life patterns that can be very helpful.
A quote from my Teach Yourself Postmodernism sounded like it was from a Myers-Briggs Sensor description: "As you know, postmodern thought tends to reject the idea of things having a single, basic meaning. Instead, it embraces fragmentation, conflict and discontinuity in matters of history, identity and culture. It is suspicious of any attempt to provide all-embracing, total theories. And it rejects the view that any cultural phenomenon can be explained as the effect of one objectively existing, fundamental cause" (101)
Thinking of postmodernism this way, as the natural and necessary counterbalance to the highly intuitive modernism, is extremely helpful. As you might be able to tell, I am on the intuitive side, and so have solved my problem with a broad theory. However, deconstruction and cynicism are extremely valuable, especially when tyrants come in with their (intuitive) broad social theories (like communism) and try to make everyone fit into their theory.
