The collapse of belief we have been witnessing throughout the twentieth century comes with globalism. The post modern condition is not an artistic movement or a cultural fad or an intellectual theory-although it produces all of those and is in some ways defined by them. It is what inevitably happens as people everywhere begin to see that there are many beliefs, many kinds of belief, many ways of believing.Postmodernism is globalism; it is the half-discovered shape of the one unity that transcends all our differences.
In a global—and globalizing ---era, all of the old structures of political reality, all the old ways of saying who we are and what we are for and what we are against, seem to be melting away into air.
How to have an identity in such a world? Nationalism becomes semi-obsolete before it even completes its conquest; national governments everywhere are challenged from front and rear, past and future. They are forced to do battle against pre-modern tribal and ethnic identities even as they resist the threats to their fragile sovereignties that are posed by international organization and movements and economic forces. The weaker national sovereignty is as an absolute principle, the less secure we are in defining ourselves according to national citizenship.
How about ideology? Throughout the era of the Cold War, global ideologies seemed to be replacing national loyalties as the supreme definers of political reality. For a time, the world appeared to be divided into two opposed belief systems rather than into many nations.
But the international ideologies never quite managed to separate themselves from nationalism (Marxism had a particularly hard time with that, was widely suspected of being merely a tool of Russian ambitions), and today hardly anybody other than a few intransigent communists and die-hard anti-communists believe that the world is politically bipolar.
Religion is still a potent definer of political reality and still an explosive one—we may still be having holy wars when we have stopped having any other kind—but it is also the most vulnerable of all to being unveiled as a creation of the human mind.
Each of these sets of categories, each of these ways that people construct who they are and what they believe is increasingly chimerical, capable of evaporating in a moment when people look at the world with different eyes.
Class and race may prove to be more durable definers of reality, more stable markers of who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’. But each of those, too, becomes anything but predictable in a postmodern world. The wretched of the earth may be a force for rebellious change because they believe some form of Marxist doctrine about class conflict, or merely because they cease to believe in the various social constructions of reality that held their condition to be part of God’s own arrangement. Oppressed races grow skeptical (as the world gains understanding of the games oppressors play) about the social constructions of reality that define their place and strive to keep them in it.
