Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In this book, Reinhold Kramer explores a variety of important social changes, including the resistance to objective measures of truth, the rise of "How-I-Feel" ethics, the ascendancy of individualism, the immersion in cyber-simulations, the push toward globalization and multilateralism, and the decline of political and religious faiths. He argues that the displacement, since the 1990s, of grand narratives by ego-based narratives and small narratives has proven inadequate, and that selective adherence, pluralist adaptation, and humanism are more worthy replacements. Relying on evolutionary psychology as much as on Charles Taylor, Kramer argues that no single answer is possible to the book title's question, but that the term "postmodernity" - referring to the era, not to postmodernism - still usefully describes major currents within the contemporary world.
Synopsis
Chapter 1: Introduction: The Contemporary Era
Naming and dating postmodernity
Just the West?
The ethical dilemma
Chapter 2: Truth or Truths?
Truth as a kind of fiction?
Emotion as the new truth?
Truth, Act II
Chapter 3 Ethics: "How I feel at the time"
Moral dilemmas
Skepticism about ethical foundations
Traditionalist ethics
Science-based (modernist) ethics
Postmodern 'other'-based ethics
Market-based ethics
Contractarian ethics
Chapter 4: Individualism: "I Believe in Me"
The costs of postmodern individualism
Self-indulgence
Civility
Decline of empathy
Lack of larger commitments beyond the self
Social distancing
Pleasure
Case study: The novels of David Foster Wallace
The goods and limits of postmodern individualism
Freedom - completing the work of modernity
Blysspluss
Chapter 5: Adventures in Cyber-culture
Internet gains
Internet losses
A decline of memory and literacy
A decline of reason
Illusory gains in multi-tasking
A decline of human connections
More democratic?
More resolutely into simulation
'Layered' reality
Internet addiction and mediated lives
Next step, transhuman?
Hunger for the unreal
Chapter 6: The Nation
Individualism: distrust of the political
Consumer, not citizen
Decline of the public sphere
Multilatera