Reality Isn't What It Used to Be

Chapter One

Welcome to the Postmodern World

In recent decades we have passed, like Alice slipping through the looking glass, into a new world. This postmodern world looks and feels in many ways like the modern world that preceded it: we still have the belief systems that gave form to the modern world, and indeed we also have remnants of many of the belief systems of premodern societies. If there is anything we have plenty of, it is belief systems. But we also have something else: a growing suspicion that all belief systems -- all ideas about human reality -- are social constructions. This is a story about stories, a belief about beliefs, and in time -- probably a very short time -- it will become a central part of the worldview of most people. It will be the core of the first global civilization.

But it is not yet a core. It is more a seed of discontent. It fills our daily lives with uncertainty and anxiety, renders us vulnerable to tyrants and cults, shakes religious faith, and divides societies into groups contending with one another in a strange and unfamiliar kind of ideological conflict ... read full excerpt from Reality Isn't What It Used to Be ebook