INTP Thoughts: From Sherlock to Lecrae - Post-postmodernism

I have several posts on their way to being finished, but here's what's on my mind these days.

What Sherlock Holmes Missed

"The world is woven from billions of lives, every strand crossing every other. What we call premonition is just movement of the web. If you could attenuate to every strand of quivering data, the future would be entirely calculable... as inevitable as mathematics." - Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock, Season 4 Episode 1)

As an INTP, I am constantly analyzing how everything in the world fits together, in an increasingly complicated model, which means my default state is a deep curiosity about everything, especially areas where I have no experience or knowledge (wikipedia was dangerous for a while until I got used to its existence), since it's all helpful for building the model of how everything works and and is influenced by everything else. Despite not being a dominant intuitive type, for areas of the model where we have a lot of experience/data, INTPs can still sometimes make leaps of intuition like Sherlock Holmes (though obviously not as dramatically and not enough to base a legendary fictional career on) because we've understood something deeply enough that we can make educated guesses according to its nature with some degree of accuracy, what Sherlock was expanding to all of reality in his super-INTP-ness. (Must have access to... ALL the data)

What Sherlock missed, however, at least in the context of the quote above, was inevitable, given that his character in the (deservedly) popular series is written as a dismissive atheist. Without factoring God in, it really all becomes math, because there is no greater Mind and Will behind observable reality. People are ultimately predictable, in this worldview, because in the end everything does come down to clockwork... the big bang was when the unthinkably immense wound-up spring was released (For many physicists who are not believers, their definition of God is "Whoever or whatever wound up that spring the first time"), and everything is simply energy falling downhill from there, and all people who ever lived are merely a curious by-product of radiant energy from our star striking a body in space with the right collocation of elements enough times that it started an extremely complicated and impossibly unlikely (except that we can observe it happened) self-sustaining chemical reaction which somehow got more and more complicated as it went along, unlike the way anything else works in nature.

If all that were true, then yes, we could at some point design a vast quantum supercomputer which would be a (lowercase) god for all practical purposes, which could model enough of the universe to know the future and predict natural phenomenon and human behavior.

What those atheists (including people like Neal Stephenson, author of books like Cryptonomicon and Reamde which I enjoyed a great deal) and the character of Sherlock Holmes in the popular current series have in common, is an almost charming anachronism: they are loyal modernists in a time when we are already leaving postmodernism behind for what comes after.

Post-postmodernism: I identify as a genius

The Legacy of Modernism, and the end of Postmodernism

To oversimplify, Modernism rejected traditional values and authority in favor of a grand forward-looking narrative in which we could throw off convention and become whatever we want. It became increasingly turbulent, however, and as Postmodernist thinking emerged there was doubt and rejection toward various premises previously taken for granted. In postmodernist thinking there could be no uniting narrative, no objective truth, all was constructed by one's context ("you only think that because ____"). In the popular consciousness, it was the age of subjectivity, "truth is relative."

Now that postmodernism has peaked and gone into decline, we are entering the new age of Post-postmodernism (no better term has been agreed on yet, my favorite so far is "metamodernism"). As with previous shifts, we preserve some remnants of previous ages while rejecting the current unifying idea and seeking a new "center" to hold things together. It will be a very interesting time if we don't all kill each other in ideological civil wars first.

In a nutshell: At the change of each thought-age in the West, people have rejected something that kept society at peace (common tradition under an aristocracy, common trajectory under a bureaucracy, common tolerance under a plutocracy) as the sins of each ruling group become too obvious and unjust to ignore. As the times shift, whatever was "the center" that held everyone together begins to give way at the same time as the group in power loses legitimacy, and there is a massive societal shift. Modernism: Reject Unifying Tradition - Find your own path
(What keeps us from fighting - a story that unites us)

Post-modernism: Reject Unifying Narrative - Find your own viewpoint
(What keeps us from fighting - living and letting live)

Post-post modernism: Reject Unifying Tolerance - Find your own identity
(What keeps us from fighting - good fences make good neighbors? the jury is still out)

What Comes Next: Messiness

The advent of post-postmodernism can be seen with the focus on identity recently. First we lost the unifying traditions, then we lost the unifying story, now we're losing any unifying identity labels too. When Lecrae decides that he's been trying to put aside his blackness to be Evangelical and says he doesn't want to do that anymore, he's responding to the shift where a deeper part of his identity he calls his roots (the racial/subcultural identity) calls more compellingly than a shallower one (Evangelicalism emerged in response to certain factors, like Fundamentalism before it, and the Church will remain long after both are merely part of Church history). Leaving evangelicalism because associations or aspects of it start to conflict with another part of one's identity doesn't mean leaving the Church, but it demonstrates when cognitive dissonance gets too strong, we "pull back" to less ambiguous identities.

Ironically the same phenomenon is at work with Southerners resisting attempts to purge Confederate flags and statues from the public eye. "Southerness" for many is an identity deeper than an Evangelicalism that says to keep things comfortable, Lecrae shouldn't be "too Black" and Southerners shouldn't be "too Southern." But the world is tired of playing nicely with others a little too different from us for comfort, and "the center is failing to hold," as in Yeats' famous poem. "We do" is no longer a quick answer to the question "who benefits?" because the "we" is getting really iffy.

In the Church, selfless love is supposed to be the glue that holds us together. When by the Spirit's help we manage it, it does work beautifully. In the world outside however, once tradition was found oppressive, and the narrative deconstructed, a broad-minded tolerance was preached as the new glue that would keep us all together. It has failed.

So How Do We Engage an Age of Post-Postmodernism?

For Christians, every change of thought-age is both troublesome and helpful. Modernism was sure there could be no supernatural, but people went to church because that's what good people did; post-modernism wasn't so sure, but it fractured the basic concept of absolute truth and people began to lose the church habit. Post-postmodernism is thirsty for the divine again, and searching for truth, but it wants to fracture us into identity groups at the same time, and a generation is growing up largely unchurched but ready to embrace causes and identities that don't compromise.

So on the one hand, our marching orders have never changed: Speak the truth in love, make disciples of all nations. Actually do that, don't talk about doing it or hold conferences about doing it. On the other hand, understanding and enduring the next decades will require a lot more wisdom and boldness than the Church has shown in recent decades. Do a little reading on the times; a storm is coming. Some have predicted the nation itself will get fragmented into groups that align based on those deep identity fault lines that have slumbered under a wealthy and tolerant age but never went away. That may never happen, but it's clear we are not entering an age of stability, but of things being pulled apart in seismic shifts. When the center can't hold, to continue with Yeats' poem, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The Church, built on a rock against which the gates of hell may not prevail, has been acting like an eager-to-please kite, blown here and there by popular secular trends. ("We can do feminism too." "We can care about climate change too." "Please acknowledge our relevance in the areas you've developed." "Notice me, Senpai." -- Meanwhile there's a steady trickle of evangelicals to Catholic and Orthodox churches) Now weak-conscienced church leaders are debilitated by every accusation of collective guilt the world throws at them. Commanded to love proactively, we are passively nice. Directionless except for inertia, we have expressed our dismay at the state of society either silently in the voting booth or loudly on social media, but not often made disciples of our neighbors. Even when we've strayed perhaps too far into politics, we've mostly chosen the label "Conservative." (What, exactly, are we trying to conserve at this point? It's a lose-lose proposition, wading into the political arena primarily concerned that we come across as respectable folk who know how to retreat with their honor intact. But I digress.)

The choice to be passive, tolerant, and easily swayed, damaging to the church in the best of times, will not even be a choice in the days to come. Belief is coming back into fashion to an almost alarming degree, and institutions with weak and yielding faith will simply not endure. Houses built on the sand will not survive the storm, but the Church as a whole is antifragile. She has survived every tumult of history, for Christ sustains her. The Kingdom will advance, but it may advance without you.

So: Be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, not just the belt and shoes that can be coordinated with your Sunday outfit. In the post-postmodern age, believe unapologetically and they will come, and see whether we truly do have life abundantly and the words of eternal life. If we truly believe Christ is the only hope for a sin-struck world sinking into chaos and clinging to dreams of the latest reincarnation of Babel, now is the time to start acting like it.