Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

CAN ANYTHING GOOD COME OUT OF POSTMODERNISM?... 241
that it is reasonable to be good, that is to say, they would be convinced
that being good corresponded to their own interests and
amour propre (27). Translated into the social and political realities
of modern life this meant the production and imposition of
laws which were to promote the good of all and ensure permanent
stability and security (28). In the course of time, however,
the modern state took on increasingly oppressive forms, often
degenerating into colonialism and totalitarianism and thus ending
up in contradiction with its own professed ideals.
In Bauman’s narrative, it is at this point that postmodernist
thought offers an alternative to the illusions of modernism, not
least in the sphere of ethics. It is only in comparatively recent
times, continues Bauman, that we have been able to see through
the illusions of the project of modernity and challenge the new
hegemony of reason and of the State:
Postmodernity, one may say, is modernity without illusions (the
obverse of which is that modernity is postmodernity refusing to accept
its own truth). [...] The truth in question is that the ‘messiness’
will stay whatever we do or know, that the little orders and ‘systems’
we carve out in the world are brittle, until-further-notice, and as arbitrary
and in the end contingent as their alternatives.(33)
Like other postmodern authors, Bauman is quick to point
out that the “post-” involved in postmodernism is not a merely
chronological specification (10). It is rather a predominantly
qualitative specification: postmodernism does not just look back
at modernism, it looks down on it! To be postmodern is to locate
oneself chronologically and qualitatively in a narrative which recounts
modernism, it is to consider oneself among those who
have passed beyond a wrongheaded vision of the world (“we
now know...” is one of Bauman’s favourite phrases) and are in a
position to see what was wrong with modernity.
Bauman goes on to praise some of the characteristics of
contemporary culture which, in his view, postmodernism has
brought in its train. The abortive modernist effort to disenchant
the world has been defeated and we are enjoying a new appreciation
of mystery; passions and spontaneous human inclinations
(107), the constituents of true personalism, have been rehabilitated
after suffering under modernist suspicions and repression