“Incredulity about metanarratives”?

In 1979 a French philosopher named Jean-François Lyotard published a book entitled The Postmodern Condition that introduced a phrase that has proved to be quite popular among postist thinkers as a tool for articulating one of the more important features of their view of our situation. One of most important developments that had occurred in the period since the technologically advanced societies had achieved mass affluence, Lyotard said, was that their members had acquired an “incredulity about metanarratives.” Not only were they were increasingly secular, but they had even developed a tendency to be skeptical about many of the very ideas and ideals on which modern life itself was based. So it was unlikely, he proposed, that the people in question (or their successors) would accept, much less actively support, anything like the grandiose projects (military crusades, five-year plans, development schemes, etc.) the ideas and ideals in question had inspired in times past. The days when the people living in these societies were willing to go along with such initiatives appeared to be coming to an end, he said, which was a development he welcomed because he thought it could only be liberating for people to be relieved of the pressures imposed by the proponents of such “grand” ideas. Lyotard had his own reasons for evaluating the turn toward “incredulity” in that way, and that part of his argument has attracted little interest. But the empirical claim on which it was based struck a nerve, and it has been a staple of postmodern thought ever since. But is it valid? The contention of this chapter is that it is not – not to anywhere near the extent that appears to be intended by most of its proponents, at least. The argument made in this chapter is that even if the incredulity idea has some empirical basis, it is still contradicted by much of the relevant evidence. Especially has that been the case in the period since Lyotard’s book first appeared, which has brought a dramatic revival of ideological politics in the form of neoliberalism (which is unmistakably modernist in an old-fashioned sense). The chapter also includes a critical comparison of Lyotard’s optimism about the prospect of a public mood in our societies characterized by increasing “incredulity” with Weber’s quite different attitude about the (arguably similar) prospect of an increasingly “disenchanted” world.