A Parcel of Posts

Living in the future places quite a burden on language. For some years intellectuals have sought a vocabulary to describe a society that has, in its own mind, passed outside familiar landmarks into unexplored realities. For a time, as the quarterly the Public Interest observes, the voguish literary modifier was "beyond"--beyond tragedy, beyond ideology, beyond capitalism.

UPI Now the new modifier is "post." The Public Interest has collected 19 of the new signposts:

post-bourgeois, post-capitalist, post-Christian, post-civilized, post-economic, posthistoric, postindustrial, postliberal, post-literature, post-market, post-materialist, postmodern, post-organization, post-protestant, post-puritan, post-scarcity, post-traditional, post-tribal and post-welfare.

Although the terms are sometimes interesting and useful they have the effect of turning life into a kind kind of chartless supervoid. Perhaps the real problem is that too many sociologists and other thinkers have grown postarticulate.

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