Truth About Truth

The postmodern world is one where people are bombarded with supporting and contradicting information. As Walter Truett Anderson writes in his epilogue in his book the Truth About Truth, "The quest for universal understanding - and the work of creating a global culture - goes on....What's happening now is in many ways similar to what happened a few centuries ago when people were exploring the planet: They kept discovering they lived in a wider world and re-drawing their maps....The world that had once been flat became round, and then it became larger, and old worldviews were discarded regularly."

Because of all of this information, the human mind is continually questioning and evaluating. Truth about Truth includes selections from thirty writers on their concepts of postmodernism, which can be as illusive as what anyone likes to see. Postmodernism criticizes the ideas and activities associated with the modern period first developed in the Age of Enlightenment during the 17th and 18th centuries, which highlighted such thinkers as Descarte and Rousseau and negated religious tradition and superstition with reason and systematic observation. Truth and virtue were the answers to man's overriding problems.

Reading this book, however, does not make one feel that the times are a recreation of the Renaissance when new ideas and concepts abounded. Rather, with the extension of globalization and the development of the "flat" world, it appears instead that the Western world with its industrialization and capitalistic needs will win out. In the past there were always differences between cultures and novelties and exotica from various societies.

Will that still be the case when the same products are manufactured and sold worldwide and what is desired in India is desired in the United States and in China? Will the postmodern world be stagnation rather than a renaissance?

Anderson, Walter Truett. Truth about Truth. New York: Putnam, 1995.