Postmodernism Rules

The following is an abridged version of Larry Wall's talk at Linux World on March 3, 1999. He explains why Perl, a computer language he created, fits a postmodern era. In this version, most references to the Perl programming language have been eliminated. I've tried to preserve his thought-provoking, iconoclastic essay on postmodernism. It's still pretty long, though I managed to cut it almost in half.

For the full text of this speech, see http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html  or http://www.perl.com/pub/1999/03/pm.html. It's funny and delightful and well worth the read.

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I started thinking about the deeper reasons for writing software. And that led to the subject of this talk. I'm going to start off talking by about postmodernism. After that, I'll switch to talking about postmodernism. And at the conclusion, I'll return to the subject of postmodernism.

Nowadays people are somewhat jaded by the term "postmodern." I distinctly remember the first time I heard it back in the '70s. To me it was inconceivable that anything could follow modern. Isn't the very idea of "modern" always associated with the ideas "new" and "now"?

It took me at least ten seconds to figure it out. Or to think I'd figured it out. Obviously, if there were to be a period following the Modern, it would have to be called something other than Modern. And postmodern is as good a name as any, especially since it's a bit of a joke on the ordinary meaning of modern. Obviously the Modern period was misnamed.

But that was the pat answer. The Modern period was not misnamed. The historical period we call Modern chose to associate itself with the "new" and the "now" in such a deep way that we actually see the breakdown of the whole notion of periods. The Modern period is the period that refuses to die. The world is now an odd mix of the Modern and the postmodern. Oddly, it's not just because the Modern refuses to die, but also because the postmodern refuses to kill the Modern. But then, the postmodern refuses to kill anything completely.

A couple of days ago I was discussing all this with my daughter on the way to school. As usual, I turned on the radio to hear the news, and Heidi immediately started surfing all the music stations. Since this is one of the perils of fatherhood, I only said, "I have to talk about postmodernism on Wednesday. What should I say?"

She said, "Like, it's all about how you don't have to justify everything with a reason anymore. You can just put in stuff because you like it, you know, because it's cool. With Modern stuff you always had to justify everything."

She settled on a station with some interesting music, and said, "This is Dave Matthews' Band. The thing that's really cool about him is that he, like, went out and found all these different artists who have different styles, and combined them all in ways you've never heard before."

I said, "Isn't it interesting how postmodernism has become so much a part of our culture that it's sort of fading into the woodwork?"

Heidi frowned and said, "Dude, dad, it's not like it's some kind of a fad. Postmodernism is deeper than that—it really is the culmination of everything that went before it. Like, it's all about coming full circle. It's not like we're going to stop wanting to do that next week."

I said, "I suspect you're right. After all, the various earlier periods of music were measured in centuries."

"It's not just music," she said.

"Well, of course not," I replied. "All these things go together, but some disciplines change at different rates. The reason I'm giving this talk on Wednesday is because I think there's still a big streak of Modernism running through the middle of computer science, and a lot of people are out of touch with their culture. On the other hand, I'm not really out to fight Modernism, since postmodernism includes Modernism as just another valid source of ideas."

Heidi said, "You wanna know something really funny. In my IMP class, our class slogan is, 'There's more than one way to do it.'"

"You're kidding," I said. (I should also say that that IMP stands for Interactive Math Program, which is a math curriculum in which you sort of learn everything at once. In sort of a postmodern way.) Anyway, I said, "You're kidding."

"No," she said, "That's why IMP is better for math students like me—we learn better when we can see the big picture, and how everything fits in. The old way of learning math never gave you any context".

While I was digesting this, and thinking about how it applied to computer science, she went on, "Well, it's like, you know, we have this saying at school, when somebody gets uptight about something, we say: 'Tsall good. If someone is depressed, we say: 'Tsall good."

"But you don't actually think everything is good, do you?"

"No, of course not."

"Are you saying that everything has good elements in it?"

"No, Dad, I think when we say that, we're saying that, overall, things are good. Like, look at the big picture, don't just focus in on the two or three bad things that are happening to you right now."

I report this conversation to you not just because I think my kids are cute and smart, but also because I think it's important that we know where our culture is going, and because it's our kids that will shape our culture in the future. I don't think I could have defined postmodernism better than Heidi. Look at the big picture. Don't focus in on two or three things to the exclusion of other things. Keep everything in context. Don't go out of your way to justify stuff that's obviously cool. Don't ridicule ideas merely because they're not the latest and greatest. Pick your own fashions. Don't let someone else tell you what you should like. 'Tsall good.

That's all well and good, but I ask you, if it's all good, why, in every other breath, does my daughter say "That sucks"?

There's a mystery here, and if we can fathom it, perhaps we'll learn a thing or two. I think that what's going on here is that our culture has undergone a basic shift, one that is actually healthy. It used to be that we evaluated everything and everyone based on reputation or position. And the basic underlying assumption was that we all had to agree whether something (or someone) was good or bad. Most of us actually used to believe in monoculturalism. Although even back then, we didn't really practice it. And in fact, you could argue that the whole point of Modernism was to break our cultural assumptions. We could argue all day long about whether postmodernism came about because Modernism succeeded or because it failed. As a postmodern myself, I take both sides. To some extent.

This would bother a Modernist, because a Modernist has to decide whether this is true OR that is true. The Modernist believes in OR more than AND. Postmodernists believe in AND more than OR. In the very postmodern Stephen Sondheim musical, Into the Woods, one of the heroines laments, "Is it always or, and never and?" Of course, at the time, she was trying to rationalize an adulterous relationship, so perhaps we'd better drop that example.

But back to the monoculturalism of Modernism, or rather the assumption of monoculturalism. Nowadays we've managed to liberate ourselves from that assumption, by and large (where by and large doesn't yet include parts of the Midwest). This has had the result that we're actually free to evaluate things (and people) on the basis of what's actually good and what's actually bad, rather than having to take someone's word for it.

More than that, we're required to make individual choices, the assumption being that not everyone is going to agree, and that not everyone should be required to agree. However, in trade for losing our monoculturalism, we are now required to discuss things. We're not required to agree about everything, but we are required to at least agree to disagree. Since we're required to discuss things, this has the effect that we tend to "deconstruct" the things we evaluate. I'll talk more about the pros and cons of deconstructionism in a bit, but let me just throw out an example to wake you up.

The public, and later the Senate, chose to evaluate Bill Clinton's morality separately from Clinton's fitness to govern. I'm not going to comment on whether I agree with that decision, but I'd just like to point out that this could not have happened thirty or forty years ago. We were not postmoderns back then. We had to have a whole president, or no president. Everything used to be in black and white, like our TVs. We kept our presidents looking good until we got one we couldn't make look good, and then everyone switched to making the president look bad for a while. But we never did deconstruct Nixon the way we've deconstructed all the presidents since Nixon. Nixon is still monolithic, even though we've managed to bypass him and deconstruct Kennedy in hindsight.

Let me say a bit more about deconstructionism. I do not view deconstructionism as a form of postmodernism so much as I view deconstructionism as the bridge between Modernism and postmodernism. Modernism, as a form of Classicalism, was always striving for simplicity, and was therefore essentially reductionistic. That is, it tended to take things to pieces. That actually hasn't changed much. It's just that Modernism tended to take one of the pieces in isolation and glorify it, while postmodernism tries to show you all the pieces at once, and how they relate to each other.

For instance, this talk. If this were a Modern talk, I'd try to have one major point, and drive it into the ground with many arguments, all coherently arranged. Instead, however, I let you see that there's a progression in my own thought process as I'm writing. I would pause in my talk at the same point that I paused in my thought process. If I were a journalist, I'd spend as much time talking about my angst in covering the story as I'd spend covering the actual story. And if I were building a building instead of writing a talk, I'd let the girders and ductwork show. These are all forms of deconstructionism.

I first heard about postmodernism in the late '70s at Seattle Pacific University from my wife's Lit Crit professor, Dr. Janet Blumberg. Postmodernism came early to literature, so it's no surprise that we heard it first from a literary critic. By the way, don't think of literary critics like you think of theatre critics. Literary critics usually know what they're talking about.

Even if they're wrong.

Anyway, we heard it first from Dr. Blumberg, who was never wrong, so naturally we first thought about it in terms of literature. In fact, most people still think of postmodernism as a kind of weird literature. But postmodernism was also coming along in architecture too, as we were soon to find out. Seattle Pacific was wanting to build a new science and math building, so they decided to recycle an old warehouse down by the ship canal. Note the first element of postmodernism there--they were reusing something old, taking the good parts, and leaving behind the bad parts, though they probably didn't say to themselves, "This rules," or "That sucks." But I'm sure they thought it. Anyway, they combined the old with modern ideas about having a large open lab inside, and making the whole building solar heated. They made it a comfy place at the same time, with a sunken study area containing sofas. And they made all the girders and ductwork show, because they thought it was cool. They also did it because it was postmodern, though they didn't know that yet.

Ducts shouldn't look like girders, and girders shouldn't look like ducts. Neither of those should look like water pipes, and it's really important that water pipes not look like sewer pipes. Or smell like sewer pipes. Modernism says that we should make all these things look the same (and preferably invisible). Postmodernism says it's okay for them to stick out, and to look different, because a duct ought to look like a duct, and a sewer pipe ought to look like a sewer pipe, and a hammer ought to look like a hammer, and a telephone ought to look like either a telephone, or a Star Trek communicator. Things that are different should look different.

You've all heard the saying: If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. That's actually a Modernistic saying. The postmodern version is: If all you have is duct tape, everything starts to look like a duct. Right. When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?

The funny thing is, Modernism itself was a kind of hammer, and it made everything look like something to be hammered. The protest movement of the '60s was Modernistic: "If I had a hammer, I'd hammer all over this land." The focus was always on the nail, or on whatever it was that was getting pounded. And many things did get hammered in the Modern age. Architectural beauty, for one. That one is obvious just by looking at the skyline of any major city. It's easy to tell which buildings were built in the 50's and 60's. They're the ones that look like boxes. When we first saw them, we thought they looked very modern. Well, they did. But when the Seattle First National Bank was built in, you guessed it, Seattle, we all made jokes about how it looked like the box the Space Needle came in. At least the Space Needle was cute, kinda like the Jetsons were cute. But the Space Needle wasn't really very functional, unless you go in for rotating restaurants.

In fact, at many different levels, Modernism brought us various kinds of dysfunction. Every cultural institution took a beating. Government took a beating. Schools took a beating. Certainly the family took a beating. Everyone took a beating, because Modernism was about attacking problems. Modernism was the hammer. Modernism oversimplifies. Modernism puts the focus squarely on the hammer and the nail.

In contrast, postmodernism puts the focus back onto the carpenter. You'll note that carpenters are allowed to choose whether or not to use hammers. They can use saws and tape measures if they choose, too. They have some amount of free will in the matter. They're allowed to be creative.

I do not believe it is wrong to aspire to greatness, if greatness is properly defined. Greatness does not imply goodness. The President is not intrinsically "gooder" than a baby. He merely has more options for exercising creativity, for good or for ill.

True greatness is measured by how much freedom you give to others, not by how much you can coerce others to do what you want. I remember praying a prayer when I was very young, not much more than a baby myself. "God is great. God is good. Let us thank him for our food. Amen." Well, I'm here to say amen to that. God's greatness and goodness are measured by the fact that he gives us choices. He doesn't require us to thank him for our food. (In case you hadn't noticed.) God is not a Modernist. He doesn't view us as nails. God expects us to behave like carpenters. Indeed, he gave us a carpenter as an example.

So I think God is postmodern. He has his own ideas of what rules, and what sucks, and he doesn't expect everyone else to agree with him. Mind you, he likes it when people agree with him. I like it when people agree with me about Perl. But I don't expect everyone to agree with me. Personally, I think the Perl slogan, There's More Than One Way To Do It, applies outside of Perl as well as inside. I explicitly give people the freedom not to use Perl, just as God gives people the freedom to go to the devil if they so choose.

As long as we're in a demonizing frame of mind, please allow me to demonize Modernism a little more. True, postmodernism admits Modernism as one source of inspiration, along with Romanticism, Classicalism, and, er, uh, Baroqueism. Baroqueness?

I have to give credit where credit is due here. And to show my ductwork. I didn't think of all this myself. I was flying up to Seattle with my wife and my daughter (yes, that one) because my daughter is thinking about attending Seattle Pacific University, that hotbed of subversive postmodernism. Surprise, surprise. So I asked my wife about the differences between Modernism and postmodernism. After all, one has to talk about something with one's spouse.

Especially in front of one's daughter.

Before I get into the list of Modernistic cults, though, I just remembered another cute story about Seattle Pacific. The school had commissioned a Modern Artist to produce a Modern Art, you know the kind, a sculpture, if you can call it that, to be placed on the lawn out in front of student union building, on the corner of campus where anyone driving by could see it. It was most definitely Modern. It consisted of two large black surfaces, partly rounded and partly square, leaning against each other. It was actually rather hideous. You know the sort.

Well, one day we noticed that the large sculpture had had babies. There were seven or eight of the cute little beggars, perfect little replicas huddling around their mommy. It was wonderful. It was precious. It was funny. At least, it was funny until the Modern Artist came storming in and, with no sense of humor at all, removed his work of art, threatening never to have anything to do with Seattle Pacific again. Good riddance, we thought. And smiled. We're still smiling. In case you hadn't noticed.

Anyway, back to cults. The story I just told is illustrative of several of them. First of all, we have the Cult of Spareness. The example of Modern Art I just mentioned was very spare. It was minimalistic. It was almost an artless Art. Certainly the emotion it was trying to instill was something akin to hammering. We felt like nails.

Postmodernism isn't afraid of ornamentation, because postmodernism is a retreat from classicalism back to romanticism. That particular pendulum is quite periodic. The Classical and Modern periods of art identified beauty with simplicity. The Baroque and Romantic periods of art identified beauty with complexity. I think it's an interesting synchronicity that, even as our art is becoming more complex again, science is also discovering beauty in complexity theory. Perhaps it's more than a synchronicity. Just as Modern art had exhausted the possibilities of bigger hammers, so had science. In short, we'd been oversimplifying for too long, and hence couldn't see the simplicity within the complexity of a leaf.

I could go on about simplicity, but let's move on to the next cult. Modernism is also a Cult of Originality. It didn't matter if the sculpture was hideous, as long as it was original. It didn't matter if there was no music in the music. Plagiarism was the greatest sin. To have your work labeled "pastiche" was the worst insult. The only artistic endeavor in the Modern period not to suffer greatly from the Cult of Originality was architecture. Architecture went in for simplicity and functionalism instead. With the notable exception of certain buildings that were meant to look like Modern art, usually because they contained Modern art. Odd how that happens.

The next cult on the hit parade is the Cult of Seriousness. Recall how seriously our Modern Artist took himself and his art. He was unable to laugh at himself.

Postmodernism is not afraid to laugh at itself. It's not afraid of cute, and it's not afraid of funky, and it's not afraid of what a Modernist would call kitsch. You know, it's actually kind of liberating to be going down the road, and be able to yell, "New buggie! Pea soup green." Postmoderns aren't afraid to be nostalgic about old slug bugs, either. Sentimentality is cool, if you're into that sort of thing. Retro rules. Unless it rocks. I don't know if sentimentality rules or rocks, but it's definitely cool.

As Heidi would say, "Dude, I'm stoked."

You'll notice I keep talking about my wife and my daughter. In case you hadn't noticed. The Modernist would of course explain to you that I was resorting to cheap sentimental tricks to try to establish an emotional bond with my audience. A postmodernist would, of course, agree. But the postmodernist will point out that cheap tricks are less expensive than costly tricks. Showing your ductwork is usually cheaper than hiding it. Even if it's not cheaper, it's certainly more entertaining.

Well, enough of that. Let's see what's next. Oh, oh, here comes a biggie. The Cult of Objectivity.

You know, Modernism tried. It tried real hard. It really, really tried. It tried to get rid of conventions. It thought it got rid of conventions. But all it really did was make its conventions invisible. At least to itself.

Reductionists often feel like they're being objective. But the problem with reductionism is that, once you've split your universe into enough pieces, you can't keep track of them any more. Psychologists tell us that the human mind can only keep track of about about seven objects, plus or minus two. That's for short-term memory. It gets both worse and better for long-term memory, but the principle still stands. If you lose track of something, it's because you thought it was less important, and didn't think about it often enough to remind yourself. This is what happened to Modernists in literature. They've forgotten what's important about literature.

Note how we still periodically hear the phrase "serious literature." This is literature that is supposedly about Real Life. Let me tell you something. The most serious literature I've ever read is by Lois McMaster Bujold. Any of you read her? It's also the funniest literature I've ever read. It's also space opera. "Genre fiction," sneers the Modernist. Meaning it follows certain conventions. So what? Nobody in the world can mix gravity and levity the way Bujold does in her Vorkosigan books. It's oh so definitely about real life. So what if it follows space opera conventions. Sonnets follow certain conventions too, but I don't see them getting sneered at much these days. Certainly they were always called "serious."

How long till Bujold becomes required reading in high school? Far too long, in my opinion. Horrors. We wouldn't want our students actually enjoying what they read. It's not—it's not Real Life.

As if the Lord of the Flies is real life. Feh.

I would like to say one thing here about objectivity, however. While I despise the Modern Cult of Objectivity, I also despise the quasi-postmodern Cult of Subjectivity. I call it absolute cultural relativism. It's the notion that everything is as good as everything else, because goodness is only a matter of opinion. It's like claiming that the only thing you can know absolutely is that you can't know anything absolutely. I think this is really just another form of Modernism, a kind of existentialism really, though unfortunately it's come to be associated with postmodernism. But I think it sucks.

The funny thing is, it's almost right. It's very close to what I do, in fact, believe. I'd go so far as to call myself a strong postmodernist. Strong postmodernism says that all truth is created. But this really isn't a problem for anyone who believes in a Creator. All truths are created relative, but some are more relative than others. A universal truth only has to be true about our particular universe, so to speak. It doesn't much matter whether the universe itself is true or false, just as long as it makes a good story. And I think our universe does make a good story. I happen to like the Author.

I like Lois McMaster Bujold too, so I read her stories. Same for Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis.

It's no fun to create a new culture and then cut it off from the rest of humanity. No, the fun thing is to try to persuade others to share your opinions about what rules and what sucks. Nothing is more fun than evangelism.

There are two kinds of joiners in the world. Think of it in terms of anthropology. There are the kinds of people who join a tribe, and kind of get sucked in, like a black hole. That's the last you hear from them, unless you happen to be in the black hole with them. And we need people like this in our tribes, if only to be cheerleaders.

But the other sort of joiner joins many tribes. These are the people who inhabit the intersections of the Venn diagrams. They believe in ANDs rather than ORs. They're a member of more than one subset, more than one tribe. The reason these people are important is, just like merchants who go between real tribes, they carry ideas from one intellectual tribe to another. I call these people "glue people," because they not only join themselves to a tribe, they join tribes together.

Still and all, things have improved greatly, and the bridges across the gaps have gotten sturdier. Now people can send their memes across a wider chasm without getting crucified on one end of the bridge or the other.

Modernism created a lot of dysfunction—nobody disputes that. We were encouraged to revolt, deconstruct, cut apart our papers, run away from home and take drugs, not get married, and so on. Modernism tore a lot of things apart, but especially the family. The interesting thing to me is that postmodernism is propagating the dysfunction, because it actually finds its meaning in dysfunction. Postmodernism really is a result of Modernism.

For one thing, notice how you can't rebel by being dysfunctional any more. It's no longer interestin—we've done that already.

Anyway. Isn't history fascinating? Especially postmodern history? As Heidi would say: 'Tsall good. Except when it sucks.