In my last post, I addressed the idea that the millennial generation is a generation that has a heart for social justice, preserving the Earth, and essentially finding a way to bring peace to the world. However, it also became clear that we’re working with a strange worldview in regards to the cause. How can we make sense of these aspirations if a worldview lacking a meta-narrative paints the social justice heroes in the same light as their villains? Actually, an even better question that needs to be asked, is why do we even think this way to begin with?

I’m going to be very clear here and admit I’m working with a presupposition: in this case, I take nurture in the “nature vs. nurture” debate. I don’t believe we are born with inherent worldviews, but instead are taught methods of interpreting the world. I won’t go any further on what else is nature vs. nurture, as I honestly am not qualified in any medical capacity to tackle those questions. But, I will make the philosophical claim that we are indeed taught our worldview. Now if we’re taught our worldview, how can we be sure the one we’re running with is actually correct in its broad strokes? There’s always to be minor nuances that need critique within any worldview, but what do we do when faced with such a glaring discrepancy like the one we’ve been taught?

We must delve deep into inquiry, questioning whatever we can. And our beginning questions must start with our presuppositions, or, what we seem to hold as true at a base level. We all have primary presuppositions we work off of, and until we learn to confront and critique our very foundations it is impossible to make any real progress forward.

In this article, I’m going address the implications of postmodern thought. But, for the sake of critical thinking, we should not denounce something purely because we don’t like the implications it presents. Postmodernism has horrible consequences, but that does not make it inherently wrong. If we do find ourselves horrified however, then we should take note and delve deeper, and find a way out of this quagmire we’ve been born into. It’s necessary that we take full advantage of our ability to reason, which presents itself when we question why we do things and not just how we do them.

We’ve been taught to mind our business and focus on our own lives, to lack concern for the people being oppressed unless our concern grants us a special reward. If we find ourselves considering human lives as intrinsically valuable, seeing their suffering as an evil rather than a profit margin, then we must first come to understand why we think that way, and then rise to the challenge of defeating the philosophy that allows this to go unquestioned and unopposed in any meaningful way if we find ourselves in opposition to it.

The lack of a meta-narrative, an overarching story to appeal to, we are left with as many narratives as there are things to narrate. Animals, people, the Earth itself, etc. So how are the rules of these narratives designed? Well, usually it all comes down to “let the most powerful narrative win.” Think back through history and all the atrocities it’s full of. We have the narrative of the confederate south owning slaves, the narrative of the Axis of WWII, and even today, the narrative of the seven (at this time, and hopefully no more to follow) predominantly black churches that have been burned to the ground. Now what do they have in common? From their own perspectives, they were doing something good.

In all of these narratives, we see something that strikes us as completely wrong. People are being slaughtered, owned as property, and ultimately dehumanized. But within a postmodern worldview, how is it possible to discern if it’s actually wrong? In the narrative of each example, the side committing the atrocities believed they were doing the right thing. When reality becomes the summation of all the narratives, we lose any sort of meaning to life. It merely becomes a fact that we encounter. People either died, or they didn’t. One side won, or it didn’t. In the grand scheme of things, we only observe different narratives competing for power while never observing any sort of master narrative. Nothing is inherently wrong, it just sucks to be the losing narrative. Sometimes the losing narrative becomes a slave, a target dummy, or a victim of arson. It’s not wrong, it’s just a personally terrible narrative to get stuck with.

If we embrace a meta-narrative though, we can finally draw lines in the sand. We can point out which narratives are actually oppressors, and which ones are vindicators. We can account for both the radical injustice in the world, and we can also account for the people who liberate those from injustice. But here, we run into another problem, and that problem is, “Which meta-narrative is correct?” This is the quagmire people ran into, became lazy and tired from treading these philosophical waters, and ultimately turned to the postmodern thought that there is no meta-narrative because there’s too many options. It’s now our turn to tread these waters, but we first must learn how to swim. We’ve been born outside of the pool and taught that its meaningless as a presupposition, but it’s time to challenge that. If we desire to establish justice for our oppressed brothers, sisters, etc., then we are required to question everything, including our own rational foundations, and search for truth.

The lives and wellbeing of many are at stake, and the choice lies in the hand of the emerging generation: Either lives should be determined via the most powerful narrative, or there’s a greater meta-narrative that can unite us all.