Postmodernity, the slow-rolling “age of fracture” from roughly the 1960s to the 2010s, unmistakably draws to a close. We experience the end of it in a fog of frustration, polarization, insecurity, conflict, and confusion while we struggle to keep our institutions, particularly our democratic institutions, alive and functioning. And far too many of us struggle to escape poverty and discrimination to find the necessary resources and recognition to live full and dignified lives. To call our political vision crippled is an understatement; the cultural resources we require to move forward together are drained to exhaustion.

Yet we will live in postmodernity’s shadow for some time to come. It defines the starting point of our emerging metamodern now, and it also conditions the political resources and intellectual capacities we need to move forward into the future-present. So we need to understand postmodernity and how it has both enhanced and diminished us before we can begin to explore the path forward into (and eventually through) metamodernity’s Valley of the Shadow of Death—a discussion that we will pick up later in Section II.

Section I (essays 2 – 5), then, concerns postmodernity. In Essay 2 we will begin to look at it by describing postmodernity’s cultural underbelly, the source of our fractured present condition of life. To do this we must confront an ugly word: nihilism. Postmodernity is not unfairly labeled “the age of nihilism.” The very word nihilism congers up dark fears from the black abyss. But our purpose here is not to terrify; it is simply to describe nihilism as a phenomenon and how grasping it helps us to understand ourselves.

In political discourse, though, both the terms postmodern and nihilism are intentional ‘scare’ words; epithets promiscuously hurled by political and cultural conservatives against progressives they blame for undermining traditional family and sexual values and trampling underfoot constitution rights and national interests as if this were the explicit intention behind progressive activism.

Nothing is further from the truth: both terms, postmodernity and nihilism, are primarily historical descriptions of an evolving age. They describe the natural course our Western societies took over many recent decades and for many reasons, reasons that often enough through our postmodern age have felt to us normal and natural. Postmodernity and nihilism are to be understood on their own terms and not to be blamed as the work of nefarious leftists, although many on the left have been committed postmodernists and were fully aware of postmodernity’s nihilism.

In fact, decades of political activism from the right—including for example, attacks on academic authority, especially questioning the humanities and attacking them with accusations that they are dens of leftist ideology; and attacks on broad scientific consensus on climate change, evolution, and gender; as well as efforts to dismantle the institutions of liberal democracy constructed over centuries; and fascination with market ‘freedom’ at the expense of social norms—is itself a postmodern gesture and a powerful signal of creeping nihilism that finds favor among many on the right. The Trump administration’s spectacular demolition of government institutions, prevarications, and accusations of “fake news” add up to nothing less than the exclamation point on the age of nihilism.

Our task is to get beyond name calling to examine the trends that define postmodernity. Despite their scary sound, the terms postmodernity and nihilism—as long-term signs of social and cultural change—teach us much about ourselves, and not all of it is bad. Later, we will raise “two cheers” for postmodernity (though not the customary “three”) and show how nihilism itself helps to clear the ground of traditional injustices to start anew. Yes, much of their influence has been corrosive and certainly we must cautiously leave them behind. But we in doing so let’s not lose sight of their positive contributions to our self-understanding.

Essay 2 surveys postmodernity’s nihilist underbelly and the reasons why we can call the last fifty years the age of nihilism. Nihilism as described here gives us a useful interpretive window into the fractured nature of the present. Essays 3 to 5 will then examine how nihilism has worked its course through our cultural, political, and economic lives and explain its consequences moving forward. After this, we will be ready to explore metamodernity proper in Section II: Metamodern Dawn.