Illogic Primer Quotes Clippings Books and Bibliography Paper Trails Links Film

J.P. Moreland on Postmodernism and Anger

"The Challenges of Postmodernism", chap.14 in Passionate Conviction, eds. Paul Copan and William Lane Craig (B&H Academic, Nashville : 2007), p.210.

[P]ostmodernism 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.


One thought on “J.P. Moreland on Postmodernism and Anger

  1. Sammy says:

    I am taking a graduate level history course, and the extent to which professors will go to argue for the virtues of postmodernism and the vices of Christianity is amazing — and also frustrating.

    The professor, for example, claims that there is no such thing as historic fact; instead, in the study of history, there is only the subjective selections of a subjective writer.

    In the end, it is all about “power.” And the only noble thing to do, claim the postmodernists, is to reject all traditional views in favor of the views posited by the powerless. In this case — the poor, the homosexual, the minority, the victim.

Leave a Reply