that treacherous, ill-defined ambivalence - o, that wickedly thin veneer of ambiguity: why can't you just declare yourself??

Above this excerpt, thinly disguised by the original author as a comment on art :), Gideon Strauss slips in the old 'postmodernism is bad' headline.

Which reminds me: he may be right. I often find myself agreeing with insightful comment on why postmodernism (PM) is Evil. (But not always. A standard 10% disagreement rate prevents the label of 'vacillating reed' while keeping one's essentially agreeable nature intact.)

I suppose that this is most frustrating for people who like to have the world packaged up into nice neat formulas. They like to have a Theory About Everything, in which each Thing (a package of formulas) is dutifully understood as Good, Indifferent or Evil. If PM denies Truth, and Truth is the label on a Very Good Thing, then the law of non-contradiction (a formula under Truth) rules that PM must be Evil. Q.E.D, cogito ergo sum and inter alia (impressive-sounding but quite inappropriate Latin phrases) PM is Evil. Full stop.

Regrettably, though, systems of meaning and significance - and even worse, outcomes - are in large part irreducible, not only to formulas, but especially to the formulas of an alien system. And where one experiences rotten fruit, one tastes it on the tongue, but can't necessarily identify where, why or how it went bad. Not with formulaic precision, anyway. And so it is with those of us who want to say to various Christian traditions, "oi! Your fruit is rotten!". When they retort "And your so-called 'cure' is worse than the disease! You deny Truth!", we must reply, "errrr....righto. Let's put that aside for a moment. Oi! Your fruit is rotten!"

Both sides must understand that labels & their formulas are practically useless, both in defence and in attack. Thus, if reaction to rottenness is reduced to throwing labels around, the almost inevitable result is mutual entrenchment in opposing fortresses that neither side actually want to occupy.

So it's not 'Modernism' against 'Postmodernism', 'Truth' against 'Error', in any simplistic way. It is about trying to express, using the tools provided by one signifyer of meaning, what is deficient in the outcomes of another. This is why...

[work-in-progress, feel free to suggest revisions...]