A Journey into the Postmodern Wasteland

The University of Sydney was not unfamiliar ground for me when I first arrived on the campus as a student in 1989. I had lived practically next door for most of my childhood, and, in the days before the university became a sneaky through route for traffic, I used to pedal my bike around it on Sunday afternoons. The heart-stopping challenge of flying down Science Road and over the speed bumps at full pelt was the peak. I once tried it on a skateboard, and I still bear the scars to this day.

The buildings of the university made no sense to me then. I didn’t see them as representing different faculties, or housing great academics furiously working on research papers or slaving over test tubes or (more likely) grading barely literate first-year papers. That changed when, as a fresh graduate of Trinity Grammar School, I took my place in the crowded halls of the Woolley Building and Boche. I had chosen an Arts degree, though I had qualified for Law. I felt a bit smug about that, especially watching my classmates furiously striving to get into Law.

It wasn’t particularly engaging. First year for me was pretty much a social affair. I didn’t read a lot. I learnt how to smoke cigars, and made lasting friendships. I became involved in the Evangelical Union, and to be honest, it was there that I found the most intellectual stimulation. It was a personal revolution for me, because I found at the Evangelical Union a way to own for myself the Christian faith that had, up till then, lurked somewhat in the background. And owning this faith, in a richer way than I had before, actually turned me on to what the university had to offer. It was the faith I learnt at the Evangelical Union that made me into a student.

This had an existential component and an intellectual component. I found for myself that the question that I had come to university to solve, namely, “Who am I?” found a compelling if not total answer in the Christian faith. It was not as if to find oneself a Christian believer ended all questioning or resulted in the end of one’s ambitions to be a success at something. Far from it. But a profound sense of peace swept over me, since I felt that, however fragmentary or disappointing life might turn out to be, I at least knew that it was anchored in something outside of me. And in Christian terms, this wasn’t simply “fate”, or “the universe”, but the divinity who manifested itself in the history of Israel and the Church, however weak and human those entities appeared to be. This was what I encountered in the risen Jesus Christ.

The intellectual component was this. The self-congratulatory attempts of first-year Philosophy lecturers to disprove the existence of God were pathetically weak. I’d been through all that at the family dinner table. But what’s more, the increasingly fragmented and divided nature of the intellectual discourse percolating around the university seemed to undermine the very notion of the university itself. There were not, it seemed to me, faculties, but factions struggling with one another for survival in an increasingly competitive marketplace. There were a number of totalising discourses available: psychoanalysis, feminism, and even, bizarrely, Marxism. There were still a few hairy lefties from the 1970s claiming to be Trotskyites or communists—though they strangely disappeared after 1989. Indeed, the dishevelled characters who used to sell the Socialist Worker at the university gates turned up a couple of years after this selling essentially the same newspaper under the title of Green Weekly.

I started to encounter this fragmentation—and the attempts to find totalising discourses in response—as I engaged more deeply in my studies. The cleverest and most sycophantic students dropped names in class like Baudrillard and Lyotard and Foucault, and—in almost hushed tones of reverence—Derrida. What these thinkers represented was an attempt to revel in chaos. They claimed that the anarchy they were unleashing was in fact freedom.

It was in the Evangelical Union that I was encouraged to think harder about these thinkers. Robert Forsyth, now Bishop of South Sydney, was the Anglican chaplain, a voracious reader and an indefatigable conversationalist. When I told him one day that I was doing English, sitting over a plate of chips and gravy at Wentworth (though I am not sure exactly what I, as an Arts student, was doing there), he asked whether I had read Roland Barthes’s Image-Music-Text.

I think he misunderstood at that time my commitment to my studies. Read a book? It hadn’t yet crossed my mind. But it was a very interesting text for an evangelical Anglican clergyman to suggest to a young student. And yet this was Forsyth, and the intellectual environment of the Evangelical Union was such that its members read everyone, apparent friend or possible foe, because the Christian faith can cope with it.

In Image-Music-Text could be found Barthes’s seminal essay “The Death of the Author”, in which the French literary theorist proclaimed that authorial intent as a way for accounting for texts was a thing of the past, and that, from now on, all eyes would be on the responses of the reader. When we come to make sense of a literary text, it is not the author’s biographical details that should interest us, whether that be political views or historical context or religion or whatever else. The author exerts a tyrannical influence over his or her writing, and should be slain.

For Barthes, the essential meaning of a text lies in the impressions it makes on its audience, imagined to be a liberated, utopian republic of readers happily sharing in the polysemous texts before them, and doing cleverer and cleverer things to them to show that they didn’t say what it appeared they said.

Only, it wasn’t like that. Of course it wasn’t. The postmoderns were just as totalising as everyone else. They claimed incredulity towards metanarratives, but were particularly credulous to their own. They were hypercritical and uber-suspicious of the great literary texts; but developed a canon of inerrant texts all of their own. It was nothing to pick up a work purporting to be a Foucauldian reading of some great literary text or author, and to find that text picked to pieces by means of the apparently infallible pronouncements of that great domed doyen of the San Francisco bathhouses.

One of the most disturbing, funny-if-it-wasn’t-true episodes of the postmodern era was the curious case of Paul de Man. De Man was a Belgian who had migrated to the USA and ascended to a professorial chair in comparative literature at Yale in the 1970s. He was soon lauded as one of the great champions of deconstruction. His great party piece was to show how literary texts, say the poetry of John Keats, actually didn’t mean what we thought they did. In fact, they didn’t really mean anything at all. De Man’s attack was simultaneously on literary texts, and on the very notion of human identity—the idea of being a self, a someone.

Only, it turned out that this theory rather suited someone like Paul de Man, because he was a man with a past. During the war, he had engaged in some blatantly anti-Semitic writing. None of this was revealed until 1988, five years after de Man died. And yet, there it was. Derrida, who was himself Jewish, tried to defend his colleague by claiming that to censure de Man and destroy his works would be analogous to the attempt to exterminate the Jews during the Holocaust—a rhetorical gesture which was as obscene as it was clever. The bad faith of a whole intellectual movement was exposed.

At the university, my experience of the devotees of postmodernity was that they formed an alienating phalanx around actual literary texts. The older faculty, who mostly just wanted to get on with the business of reading great books, did so but had the appearance of being embattled. There were some excellent teachers and academics: Penny Gay, Jim Tulip and David Lawton among them. During a particularly obtuse rant by a younger faculty member, in which I stopped and asked her what she meant by “positionalities” (to which the answer was “positions”), I caught a glimpse of an older, mild-mannered academic co-teacher grimacing at the tragedy of the intellect that was unfolding before him.

In the name of freedom, and in its indignant rage against all kinds of hegemony, postmodernity ushered in its own forms of oppression. It pretended that it was giving voices to the oppressed, and so we had courses on literature by increasingly obscure minorities, whose texts apparently had authors that surprisingly weren’t dead, since it mattered that (say) Peruvian lesbians had written them.

To my mind, the Christian faith remained and remains remarkably robust, despite the ferment of postmodernism. It is possible, as a Christian, to side with the postmoderns in their critique of absolutism. Indeed, the Bible critiques human absolutism in much the same way. Totalitarianism is never Christian, though there have been Christian forms of totalitarianism. Postmodernism puts a trace on power in human relationships, a bit like a radioactive dye; and we are right to suspect that human beings in possession of power are usually up to something. Christianity has long observed that human agents tend towards self-interest, and will invent ways to excuse their misdeeds.

But Christian theism was the ground out of which the Western intellectual project sprang; it was the soil upon which the idea of the university was planted. The notion of a creator God gives to the world a presumption of coherence and integration, without thereby revealing everything there is to know about the world.

It makes room for human discovery of the world, because it makes us the promise that we are not deluded as we inquire into the world. If the triune God of Christian faith is declared to be omnipotent—and thereby potentially the worst of all possible tyrants—he is also declared to be a God whose name is love, who makes space for conversation with his creatures, and who treats them with tenderness and compassion. Father-like he tends and spares us, well our feeble frame he knows, as the old hymn runs. The author of the text we call the universe makes space for his readers, and invites them to enjoy his text, and to express their creativity and imagination in the process.

In this way, we can see that faith and human reason are complements, and not opposites. We cannot know truly without faith in the tradition of human knowing, and, I would venture to say, without faith in the coherence and purpose given to the universe that stems from the one who created it. The universe looks meaningful and purposeful, not because we have been conned by our neurology into thinking it so, but because it is. And so, as we learn things, though we must admit that we don’t know everything, we can at least understand that what we learn is part of a whole. No discipline can sweep all before it, or offer itself as the key to all understanding, because only a divine being can give us that.

What Christian faith also helps us to see is that what we know we know as knowers who are ourselves a part of what we know. We never know things at a distance. We cannot transcend the things we seek to know. The historian is herself an historical being; the biologist is part of a biological system. The psychologist has his neuroses, too. Anything we seek to know, we know from within.

The Christian revelation also shows us that we are part of a story that is incomplete. History hasn’t finished yet. We laugh now at those Marxists who believed that history had a precise meaning, which they could see. But the postmoderns, many of whom were disillusioned Marxists, in their haste to declare that history has no meaning, forgot the rather obvious point that history isn’t yet finished. The fragments of history may yet be woven into something cohesive. Just because we are unable to make sense of the events that swirl around us doesn’t mean that they make no sense—only that we can’t see it, yet.

And the Christian claim is not just that the created universe is ordered by the creator, but that it is directed towards a fulfilment. It has not simply an order in the sense of a pattern, or a connection, but it has a telos, in other words. Once again, I must emphasise the humility of this claim—it is not a claim for human knowledge of the meaning of each historical event as it sweeps by, but a claim that, even when we can’t see what history means, it is directed.

That claim, like the other claims that Christianity makes, is anchored in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. In that event, so the New Testament claims, the transcendent, creator God demonstrated his compassionate commitment to the broken world. In that event, which is not a philosophical theorem or an intellectual puzzle, but a moment in time—an event in the unfolding of human history—the creator God announced to human beings that their sense of the order and purpose of the world was not an illusion, but a reality. In that strange sequence, he gave to human beings not comprehensive knowledge of all things, but a decisive piece of information.

Postmodernism was an intellectual fad. That doesn’t mean you can dismiss it, just as we shouldn’t completely dismiss Marxism. It had something to say about that world that was true. But if I could have my time at university again, I wouldn’t be so afraid and intimidated by the postmoderns. Their impact has been, in some respects, nefarious—the seepage of their ideas from English departments into Education departments and then on to high school curricula was an intellectual disaster of the highest order. To find high school students being encouraged to read the great literary texts of the Western canon from a Foucauldian perspective in the early 2000s was evidence that the barbarians were still loose in the library. The problem with postmodernism was not that it was suspicious: it was not suspicious enough.

There are plenty of barbarians still left though, to take the place of the old French ones. There are, no doubt, new academic fashions sweeping the departments of the university, telling us what we can and can’t say, and can and can’t think—and mostly, claiming that they will help us to find the centre of human existence, or at least, free us to make of ourselves, and the world, what we wish.

But could it be that the old idea, that was the origin of this institution and the energy that perpetuated it, was not such a bad one after all? Could it be that to lose faith will not be to unleash reason, but to lose it? Could it be that if we listen again to the Christian revelation, that we might find in it both the humility to recognise our human limitations and the confidence to discover both who we are, and other people, and the world in which we live?