W: LP: GRP: PL: Solomon Among the Postmoderns: 02

Here is some more Peter Leithart from his book, “Solomon Among the Postmoderns”; these thoughts are useful to me in constructing the specifics of the aesthetic I will try to apply to a Steampunk story (consider that an alternate history in which the rate of modernization and technological advancement in mechanics, including mechanical computers has advanced to give analogous steam-tech solutions to society’s technology needs would all the more create the social pressure toward a post-modern effect):

[Quote:]

Postmodern skepticism also arises from the intensification of scientific progress: as science becomes more and more specialized, it becomes less and less obvious that it is all one project. The very successes of modern science produce a postmodern ghettoization, an inversion of modernity that produces postmodern tribalism—the tribe of physicists at war with the tribe of biologists, and each tribe plagued by its own subtribes—astrophysicists versus particle physicists, biochemists versus microbiologists.

Alongside these inversions, postmodernism unmasks truths that modern science has tried to hide. The truth, for instance, that scientific experiments require very special conditions and constraints and therefore don’t offer the direct and transparent access to nature that they pretend to. Science has acted as if scientific methods quietly seduce Dame Nature to unveil herself to expert gaze, naked and unashamed; postmodernists often see science as something more like gang rape. To take another instance, postmodernists unmask the truth that scientific theories are never as uncontested as the textbooks make them appear. There are always anomalous facts that stubbornly refuse to fit the elegant lines of the dominant paradigm, and there are always cranks who gleefully point out where the undergarments are showing through the straining seams of theory.

[Unquote, p.80-81]

[Quotes from p.100-101]

Under the sun, during this time, we are surrounded by diffusion, differance, death, and decay. Under the sun, the self is elusive, and we all die. Solomon says there is no profit “under the sun,” that is, there is no apparent accumulation, no guarantee of surplus or progress. Under the sun, our projects slip from our fingers like mist. Under the sun, we cannot get a panoramic view of the times and seasons, cannot tell a master story that organizes and places every event of history. In this time under the sun, all is vapor—our lives, our books, our words, our projects. All is so much futile shepherding wind.

~

How can Solomon, after emphasizing the vaporous character of reality, speak with the confidence he does? The key to understanding Solomon is to recognize that he deliberately limits his observations to what is true “under the sun” or “under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1: cf. 1:3, 9, 14; 2:11, 17-18; etc.)

~

Unlike most postmoderns, however, Solomon does not believe that the world “under the sun” is the only world there is. One of the things Solomon says he knows is that God will bring all wickedness to judgment (3:16-17). He knows this, but he doesn’t know it by observation of the world. Observation of the world would lead him to the somber conclusion that the wicked will triumph. If Solomon knows that God will judge the world, that every wrong will be put right, it is because he trusts that God will not let evil triumph forever. Like Abraham, Solomon knows that the God who is the Judge of all the earth will do right.

In knowing that God will judge, Solomon also knows that Derrida is wrong: waiting for the messianic is not fruitless waiting. There is a final word, a word that closes out the time under the sun and begins the time after the time under the sun, a word that sets the final horizon for all words, all thoughts, all selves. And this omega-word is, Christians confess, also the alpha-word, Word who was from the beginning, the living Word who is with God and who is God, the living Word. The words of the wise who fear him are not vaporous breath but “well-driven nails.” For Solomon and for Christian faith, there is a time after the time under the sun, and scripture teaches that there is treasure, a surplus beyond imagining, waiting for us there (Matt. 6:20; 1 Pet. 1:3-5). In the time after the time under the sun, there is a judgment, a final word. In the time after the time after the sun, death and decay are swallowed up in incorruptible life.

[Unquote:]