A brief history of postmodernism.
In the Middle Ages: most of humanity believed in a higher power of one kind or another. There is good and evil, and God says what is right and what is not.
From the sixteenth century: the modern era begins. God is dead. Man is independent, and by his reason alone can arrive at the desired way of life. There is good and evil, there is a right way to live, but man dictates it. Disputes over the “right” way — socialism? Capitalism? Nazism? The slogan: “For in man I shall believe” (Tchernichovsky).
From the Second World War: faith in man was burned at Auschwitz. Man saw where his notions of good and evil could lead. So what shall we believe in from now on? In the fact that we can believe in nothing. Faith only in doubt itself.
The sixties: the flower children are the baby-boom children born at the war’s end. The rise of the postmodern era. As a tremendous aftershock of the Second World War, there is no belief in any God, and no belief that man can advance the world toward any supreme morality or absolute values. The sanctification of doubt. Accordingly, a systematic demolition begins of any essence that tries to define things, because every definition represents a value, every value exists only in our imagination and contradicts the sanctification of skepticism.
The first to fall in the postmodern war: the essence that distinguishes between peoples, races, and cultures. So let us march toward a dream without race or nation. The first lesson demanded by the World War.
The second to fall in the postmodern war: historical and artistic conceptions. There is no history with good guys and bad guys, only different narratives. There is no beautiful and ugly in art. A scribble on canvas can be considered as beautiful as the Mona Lisa, and a toilet in the middle of a museum can be as beautiful as a sculpture by Michelangelo.
The third to fall in the postmodern war: the essence that distinguishes between male and female. We will not settle for equal rights between men and women, but for an equality of essences that claims there is no emotional, psychological, or even physical difference between a man and a woman.
So after the essence of belonging to a people was demolished (I am not really Jewish), the notion of moral judgment was demolished (there is no real good and evil), and gender essence was demolished (I am not really male), I am left with one final essence that defines me:
My being human.
And this is postmodernism’s final war. It is not content with defending animals out of compassion, morality, or conservation, but out of the claim that there is in fact no difference at all between a human and an animal.
The books of Yuval Noah Harari are the greatest ideological manifesto of postmodernism in Israel. They lay the conceptual, historical, and scientific foundation for justifying this worldview. It is no accident that they were the biggest bestsellers here in recent years. A few years late, they provided an ideological foundation for an entire generation. In Harari’s second book, “Homo Deus,” he devotes a third (!) of the book to trying to prove that there is no difference between an animal and a human. And once the final essence is blurred, everything is permitted. There is no evil and good, male and female, human and animal. Choice is absolute.
As in every historical era, a total rejection of the spirit of the age is not right. Those who want to go back to “a more innocent, better age” are not grappling with the events of the era. They are fleeing. History does not move backward. Every generation says of the next, “You call this youth? What a disgrace!” — but it is usually a mistake. The next generation is no less capable than its parents. Rather, we will fight the evil in postmodernism, while knowing that it also brings a new message to the world.
All the values postmodernism has flagged are essentially correct. Only that Judaism holds they must come through sharpening differences, not blurring them. There are differences between peoples — there is no justification for enslavement and murder. There are differences between male and female — there is no justification for unequal opportunity. There are differences between humans and animals — there is no justification for killing and cruelty.
Postmodernism takes us back to the days of the “Garden of Eden.” There are no peoples (not yet born), no male and female (not yet separated), no human and animal (before man’s consciousness of his uniqueness). We are living in the era of the greatest free choice in history, on the way to the great transition from “the chosen people” to “the choosing people.”
