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Yes, I think we are losing
spirituality as a society. But there are many individuals within
the society who remain spiritual, or who find a new kind of
spirituality. Even technology, that seemingly most despiritualized
of phenomena, gives rise to a new sort of spirituality. Since
spirituality continues to exist in individuals, societies may
not have lost it forever.
Over-specialization is indeed endemic today, though I do not
find that to be particularly postmodern (in spirit, though it
clearly is in terms of chronology). Over-specialization has
its obvious dangers, but so does the opposite. Many people who
try to remain and/or become broadly educated run the risk of
triviality and superficiality. Information may be far more readily
and widely available today than in any past era, but there is
also a question of the quality of that information. Browse the
internet, and see how often you encounter outright false information,
or fuzzy thinking. Anyone may post anything on the internet,
so in a sense it is a great equalizer. We are all equally expert,
or equally amateurs, on the internet. This leveling is indeed
postmodern. Of course, poor information and poor thinking were
always available, long before the internet, but in previous
eras good thinking and correct information pushed out the bad.
Not necessarily so any longer. The victim is truth. There is
no longer any truth (but was there ever?). Instead there are
truths, which are useful to some people some of the time in
certain circumstances, but useless in other contexts. Postmodernism
has destroyed the objectivity of truth. In its place, everyone
who wishes may rush in with an opinion, an ill-formed idea,
an uninformed thought. We may celebrate the equality or the
creativity, or we my decry the loss of ultimate truth value,
but we cannot turn back the forces of postmodernism.
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