What Comes After PostModern?
We seem to have got a little bit confused over one of the small details of our language is recent times. What do we call the time that has already come and passed? That's right! The passed or past. We call it history; we call distant history 'ancient', the bit in the middle have been helpfully named the 'Middle Ages' and recent bit is, we seem to have decided, 'modern history'.
What comes after modern history? Modernity! And what comes after that? The future! Following the same linguistic logic, that would have to be called 'post-modernity'.
But there is a problem. We seem to have developed this habit of mapping out the expanse of time relatively recently, and while in the mapping of physical space you can be relatively confident that once you have named everything and everywhere, those things and places will stay roughly where they are. Fair enough, one can concede that the ancient supercontinent of Pangea, then later Laurasia and Gondwana (some million years after that, of course, we got the continental set-up that we are still enjoying today) have moved a bit. But the continents come and go far more slowly than we do, so that shouldn't cause too much of a problem.
No, the problem is one of modern mankind's relationship with his (or her, as Stan/Lauretta hilariously keeps on saying in Monty Python's Life of Brian) position in time. We can deal with the past, because that is definite and mappable. We can just about handle the future, because that is for the most part all speculation anyway.
But the present – we tend to have rather more than a little bit of trouble with the present. We cannot get our heads around the fact that time keeps on flowing, that the present is due to become the past at any moment, and that consequently when we call an era 'the modern era' we have to surrender that term to history as well. The trouble is, having done this, what do we call the time that comes after that? Post-modern? Fair enough. But what comes after that? And what after that?
It is easy to see how things could get silly if we keep going along this track.
The problem is, though, that this is a problem of language that we are only going to overcome if we accept our own ephemerality – which is something that nobody is particularly keen to do, because conceiving of the present day as it will look as a past even entails conceiving of a future without us in it. And that‌ well, that's just depressing.
What is the point, we ask, of all the baking of bread, the sweeping of pavements, the nine-to-five, the domestic cleaning Camden Town and Stockholm and every other part of the world quietly gets on with each and every day? Where is it all going in relation to us?
Perhaps before we are able to collectively label the present with anything like durable language, we are going to need to take a deep breath and accept that there is a future out there that we don't get to explore. Which is something that we, bless our delicate cottons, is something we are unlikely to be able to stomach any time soon.
Which is a pity, really, because if we did accept that we won't be exploring the future, that might fill us with a bit more excitement when it comes to using the time we do have. For now...