Our discussion of postmodernity thus far has been a collection of stories. Big stories. Stories that added up to an even bigger world-historical story that tells us how our modern world works, or doesn’t work anymore, and where it’s headed into a hazardous future.

Friedrich Nietzsche surveyed the West’s story from Christendom to the modern State’s collapsing cathedral of value and warned us of the nihilism to come. Francis Fukuyama hypothesized that we’d reached the end of history and find ourselves unsure about how to make meaningful sense of it; Immanuel Wallerstein, the evolution of the modern world-system, its ultimate bifurcation and painful age of transition. Jacques Barzun traced the 500-yearlong Modern Era from “dawn to decadence.” All these stories—and they run the left-right ideological gamut—share a common conclusion: Our great big Western world-story didn’t end well.

By the 1960s, the sensation that we’d reached the end of the world as we knew it felt like watching the curtain drop suddenly on a glitzy Broadway musical called The Modern Era! in the middle of Act III. As if the writers went out on strike, left the plot hanging, and our world-story unresolved. Could the replacement writers—postmodern writers—brought in by the producers to finish the show, repair the plot? Or must they write a whole new story from scratch?

What kind of postmodern story could they even write to capture our imaginations, to turn them toward a refreshed new age vision, and to restore our confidence in the world? Not a particularly good story it turns out. Given the time’s confusion—the time of transition from the Modern Era’s dramatic end to whatever will come later—the postmodern story remained at best garbled, a non-story story of sorts. It left us without a coherent world-story to tell about the great big world around us.