My grandfather just sent me a letter that is pretty relevant to the class discussion. He is anti-modernist/postmodernist values (heads up): "Modernism deals in analyses and reductionism in things and motion: emphasizing the atomi and the void, seperation, discontinuity. The part is seen as greater than the whole. [Modernist] art becomes a cube, a dot, or an empty blank (a void). Poetry is free of verse. Music loses harmony, melody - even rhythm. Truth is always relative, changeable, and individual. All ideas are equal and none is privileged above the others. There is no unifying morality, meaning, or purpose; no intelligent design in nature, no telos. There is no God. There is decreasing organization [resulting in] increasing entropy and chaos. Truth is personal, individual, and self-centered...and Reality, it seems, unknowable."
I thought it was a good synopsis. Whatever.