Arnold Toynbee, an historian from the last century, writing in the 1940's was the first to use the term "postmodern." He studied twenty-one world civilizations from ancient Rome to imperial China, from Babylon to the Aztecs. He found that societies in disintegration suffer a kind of "schism of the soul." They are seldom overrun by some other civilization, rather, they commit a kind of "cultural suicide."
Disintegrating societies have several characteristics in common:
Abandon - they fall into a sense of abandon - people stop believing in morality and yield to their impulses.
Truancy - escapism, seeking to avoid their problems by retreating into their own worlds of distraction and entertainment.
Drift - people yield to a sense that their efforts don't matter and as if they have no control over their lives.
Guilt - self-loathing that comes from moral abandon.
Promiscuity - not so much in the sexual sense, but as the indiscriminate acceptance of anything and everything... an uncritical tolerance.
Toynbee saw the postmodern age as the fourth and final phase of the Western Civilization - unless, he said it could rejuvenate itself - which he acknowledged sometimes happens.
How does it happen?
Through the means of a religious awakening!
Gene Edward Veith, Jr. author of Postmodern Times, A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture, Crossway Books, 1994, (pp. 44-46).
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Volumes I-VI by D.C. Somervell, Oxford University Press, 1947, (pp. 427-532).
