Postmodern culture has been rightly criticized in recent decades for its relativistic approach to morality and ethics. Relativism is the belief that in our world nothing is objectively, universally, or eternally right or wrong, just different. Right and wrong are simply expressions of our culture’s preferences only, not objectively true moral categories. The problem with this view, however, is that it can never be consistently lived out. Experience, history, and personal conscience all point to the existence of absolutes in morality and ethics, even if they are not always agreed upon in detail. Now, it may be true that absolutes have been used as ramrods or clubs to abuse others, but the pendulum of culture is wrong to say, therefore, that such absolutes do not exist.
The pendulum of culture, especially in the university setting, always swings to extremes, and in its reaction to the abuses of modernist moral categories, postmodernism has shunned propositional truth to the extent that a work of literature or classical history is now seen not in light of the truth it conveys or the intent of its author, but solely in view of the affect it has on the reader. In other words, this “reader response” approach to truth asks not “what is the book trying to teach me?” but “what response does the book evoke within me?” Reader response is valuable, but it should not be considered to the exclusion of the objective meaning behind the book.
As with any cultural trend, Postmodernism gets it right in some significant ways too, however. The Postmodern focus is upon story over propositional fact, anecdote instead of statistic, and experience over textbook. I find this corrective helpful in many ways. Have you ever noticed that certain fictional books, articles, movies, or songs stir your heart about injustice and prompt you to care for others in ways you had not before? Good literature and cinema will do just that. Story has a way of connecting our hearts, creating empathy between otherwise disconnected souls.
One of my favorite stories has always been Dicken’s Christmas Carol. This fictional account, though ‘way out’ in its view of the world—chained souls roaming the night haunting the living at all hours of the night—conveys like few other stories what a transformed life can look like. In the Victorian England of Dickens, where the poor and handicapped were so ruthlessly forgotten, marginalized, and victimized, the story of Scrooge’s transformation touches the soul with a compassionate conviction that could never be produced by a hundred classroom lectures. Sometimes, story will stir us more readily than cold facts. I believe this is a quality of human nature and always has been.
You and I have seen some films and read some books that miss this mark, however, by being overly “sentimental.” Author Philip Fisher defined sentimentality in his book, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (1985) as “all that is cheap, self-flattering, idealizing, and deliberately dishonest.” Sentimentality is a shallow, artificial form of consciousness that is like a tumble weed, here today and gone tomorrow. Sentimentality uses a formulaic or contrived story that unrealistically produces flimsy emotions in the audience. These emotions may seem deep and stirring, but their short duration is evidence of their lack of value. They may draw a tear, but they never put our feet in motion. The proof is in the pudding of meaningful action or inspired life change from our emotions. When story is used well, it moves us beyond sentiment to action…
