Postmodernism

anything, fragments encourage the reader to think about a matter, to imagine diverse ways of engaging with it.

has influenced the entire world at every level and at almost every point. No one is untouched by the activities of the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, no one is unaffected by the destruction of the world’s ecosystems by an over-stimulated industrial economy. The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica may have gotten smaller in the last year, but the level of dangerous gasses directly above the hole has recently peaked. Nor is it at all certain that the multiplication of liberal democracies will prevent another world war. It is just as likely that globalization will be regarded as a profound and incessant threat to Islam, especially to its many fundamentalists; that it will be resisted by a new kind of warrior, the international terrorist; and that a badly managed confrontation between the United States and any one of a number of countries will escalate into nuclear war.

Our rough-and-ready idea of postmodern men and women gives us an image of rootless individuals, people who do not trust any sort of linear history. They treat the past as an archive from which they can select items at will, parody them or quote them out of context for a special effect. We think of people who are wholly absorbed in a world of tele-technology and digital information that did not even exist twenty years ago. Could it be that they are living in a world without history?