Describing Postmodernism, Christian theologian David Wells wrote in 2005: “Postmoderns are remarkably nonchalant about the meaninglessness which they experience in life. Reading the works of an earlier generation of writers, existentialist authors like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, one almost developed a sense of vertigo, the kind of apprehension that one gets when standing too near the edge of a terrifying precipice, so bleak, empty, and life-threatening was their vision. That sense, however, has now completely gone. Postmoderns live on the surface, not in the depths, and theirs is a despair to be tossed off lightly and which might even be alleviated by nothing more serious than a sitcom.”
Eurpoean reflections on the sense of meaninglessness engendered by the modern world tended to be dark. By contrast, Americans have remained more upbeat, especially as Postmodern sensibilities trickled down to pop-culture. Take the show Seinfeld which, with its bright colors and bouncy bass riffs, expressed the same meaninglessness, albeit with a smile.
Wells again,
“By the 1990s, when we encounter the television series Seinfeld, for example, this sense of internal loss and disorientation had been turned into a brilliantly acted but completely banal sitcom. Seinfeld, Thomas Hibbs writes, was ‘a show about the comical consequences of life in a world void of ultimate significance or fundamental meaning.’ This show, he adds, was ‘by its own account, a show about nothing.’ The darkness of soul had lifted, though not its emptiness. Now we were no longer serious enough to do anything but smirk. The journey into the postmodern world, from the writers of this literature of bewilderment into television shows like this, is one from darkness in the depths to mockery on the surface, from suicide to shallow snickers.”
Yet in the twenty years since Wells’ wrote those words (and thirty years since Seinfeld’s television reign), things have shifted again. One label given to the shift is “metamodernity.”
Here are two helpful Christian accounts explaining these changes:
Brett McCracken’s “Understanding the Metamodern Mood.”
And, just published today:
Patrick Miller and Paul Anlietner’s “Welcome to Metamodernity.”