By Agbo Agbo
When former US President Barack Obama won the historic 2008 elections, he used the opportunity to reach out to fellow African-American men to take personal responsibilities for their lives and make necessary positive changes.
Why did he single out black men? Research has it that the rate of out-of-wedlock children is as high as 70% among African-Americans.
This is already having grave social implications in most black neighbourhoods as the traditional family structure collapses resulting in most children growing up in dysfunctional homes without father figures.
Even back home in Nigeria, the phenomenon is gradually gaining grounds as deliberate single-parenthood is rapidly on the rise.
Like among African-Americans, this will in the future have repercussions. These are results of the postmodern world we’re living in at the moment. This tectonic shift is not limited to the family institution alone; it cuts across almost all segment of society. To understand postmodernism, we must first ask what modernism is.
The modern period is characterised by the development of science, human progress, the development and expansion of industry, improvements in conditions of life and health, urbanisation, continued improvements in technology, the establishment of the nation state, establishment of liberal democracy, bureaucracy, and social reforms – all of these stand out as accomplishments of modern forms of social, economic and political organisation.
In terms of modernist theories, liberalism, rationality, individualism, science, classic and egalitarianism and tolerance, humanism, socialism, and communism all stand out as major perspectives that lead to a method of understanding, interpreting and improving society.
But from the late 1970s, postmodern theorists started questioning how much human progress has actually occurred.
They argued that the nature of the social world and the manner in which development is taking place has changed; thus, we are in a postindustrial world.
Industrialisation has been so successful that the problems of production have all been solved and agriculture and industry are now capable of producing as much or more than humans will ever need.
Such a society, they argued, shifts its emphasis away from the production of goods to the production of services, and away from dull, repetitive, manual labour to mental labour.
For writers such as Daniel Bell, associated with this is a shift in the nature of work, with more meaningful and creative jobs, and perhaps the end of the division of labour into mental and manual tasks.
Accompanying this have been new forms of technology: automated production, robots, and computerisation. In addition, there may be new forms of organisation of the economy, with scientific management, cooperation between labour and management and “people’s capitalism” through widespread ownership of corporate stock.
The last few years have seen greater emphasis on computerisation, information technologies, virtual reality and new forms of extremely rapid and extensive communication.
The latter create more flexible forms of production, instant communication around the world, a greater degree of globalization of the economy, and more rapid change. Other features to be noted are the effects of these features in parts of the world that were regarded as third world. Some skipped over the modern period into rapid industrialization especially in Asia.
As a result, there were population movements, and new forms of identity politics. In North America and Europe, the structures of populations have changed, with more immigrants who are visible minorities, leading to changes in structures of culture, politics, and population.
To this end, postmodernism is most easily understood as a “toolkit” for dismantling the ideologies and institutions of modernism. Its proponents reject most hierarchies, universalisms, grand narratives, and objective notions of truth, reason, and morality.
Reality and society, they say, are social constructs. As a result, this has allowed for greater fluidity regarding truth, gender, sexuality, and family structures, much of which has given individuals more freedom to express themselves and to explore the limits of human possibilities.
Unfortunately, this “freedom” pitches postmodernism as mostly a device for deconstructing culture, not building it, offering us few, if any, answers to the questions about human advancement, morals or ethics.
By destroying social structures, it has removed order, and robbed us of the steady groundwork necessary for living meaningfully. We occupy an empty existence, a nihilistic vacuum where no value has a claim to superiority over another.
This has heralded in the age of moral relativism where the only thing that resembles virtue is an amorphous praise of tolerance.
As a generation, millennials are champions of postmodern perspectives and this show glaringly in their antiestablishment ways of life.
They hold a false sense of being well-educated about the world and so can define the rule to suit the agenda they want to push forward. In postmodern approaches, individual – or even group – identity is not clearly and unambiguously defined, rather it shifts over time and is generally considered unstable.
In addition, it is primarily experiences of individuals, rather than larger structural conditions or positions that are important in shaping these identities.
This means that social classes, ethnic groups, or status groups may not exist in the manner described in social theory, and analysis of these does not provide a useful way of understanding the contemporary social world.
That is, the shared circumstances or common situations of class, race, or ethnicity may not exist, and may be purely a theoretical construct that theorists attempt to impose of the social world.
Shared and common identities give way to shifting and localised identities that may or may not be shaped by the individual. These identities are continually being formed, changed, and particular individuals shift in and out of these experiences and situations, thus changing their identities.
The political implication of this is that it may be difficult to imagine collective action, social movements, and social change toward some specific goal.
For extreme postmodernists, there may be no goals or plans that people can or should attempt to strive for or achieve. Some postmodernists argue that identities and localised situations are all that we should be concerned with; others argue that political action can still be a useful means of improving society.
Some may not take a particular point of view on important social questions, arguing that all identities, statements, and texts are equally valid.
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Rather than searching for a theoretical approach that explains all aspects of society, postmodernism is more concerned with examining the variety of experiences of individuals and groups and it emphasises differences over similarities and common experiences.
According to Rosenau, a postmodernist, the modern world is “fragmented, disrupted, disordered, interrupted and unstable” – and may not be understandable on a large scale.
An area where postmodernism is clearly visible is the music industry. Originally it should be clear what the original and copies are. In the past, musicians made music and it was recorded on a cylinder, tape, record, or compact disk.
As new methods of manipulating the recordings developed, and as electronic sources of sounds developed, it became common to splice, mix, sample, overlay, and generally reorganise the original sounds.
This developed to the point where the recorded sound sometimes became the reality, with the record or compact disk being the song or piece of music. With digital technology, it is now possible that what is real may be pure image.
In all these changes, the more frightening is the redefinition of the family structure and sexuality. The west is already far gone in this regard and the traditional family structure as we know it is gradually on its way out.
In his infinite wisdom, God places the family as the place where kids are taught moral law and the shaping of their consciences.
Parents are expected to instill these on their kids, but the gradually breakdown of the family structure opens the door wide open for future anarchy.
Yes, it is good for society to look back and reorder itself if the need arises. But the question remains to reorder toward what?