9/11

Last updated on: September 11, 2008 at 8:11 am by Gene Veith

I really thought that September 11, 2001, marked the end of post-modernism. It has been said that the Fall of the Bastille in 1789 marked the end of the pre-modern age and the beginning of modernism. It has been said that the Fall of the Berlin Wall exactly two hundred years later in 1989 marked the end of modernism and the rise of post-modernism. Surely the Fall of the World Trade Center was another collapse that made post-modernism seem outdated. Those planes crashing into those buildings was a truth that we did not construct for ourselves. On that day we saw that both evil and good are real. Instead of being just a cacophony of mutually antagonistic cultures, as the postmodernists call for, America came together. We also saw that all religions are NOT equally valid, that they do NOT teach the same thing, and that they do NOT all lead to the same ends. You would think that relativism died in the rubble of the World Trade Center.

And yet, all of that, seven years later, is back. Postmodernism, after hiding out in a hole for awhile, came back with a vengeance. How could that have happened?

Or did postmodernism die after all? Are we perhaps seeing a new kind of postmodernism, or some new world view emerging?

On this seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks, do you think America has, for better or worse, changed because of 9/11/2001?