Eerdmans Interview with David F Wells

Check out Eerdmans interview with David F Wells, one of the foremost Christian writers and intellectuals of our time:
http://www.eerdmans.com/wellsinterview.htm

A short excerpt:

3. What do you see as the difference between popular postmodernism and academic or intellectual postmodernism?

David Wells: The difference is less in the ideas than in the degree of self-consciousness, and often the clarity, with which they are expressed.

However, there is a myth which needs to be laid to rest here. Intellectuals like to think that they are society's trend-setters, that what they are thinking is where reality is cresting. The result is that when intellectuals write about culture (and who else does?) they are inclined to see their ideas and their own culture as being in a cause-and-effect relation. They are the cause of which it is the effect.

In the modern period, however, this has rarely ever been the case. It is the culture, far more commonly, which gives the ideas their plausibility and which makes them seem inevitable. It is from the culture that ideas gain their traction and it is often because of the culture, when it changes, that they lose their traction. That is why, I believe, the Enlightenment ideology has lasted so long in the West and has become so deeply ensconced in our cultural elites, the gatekeepers, in academia, Hollywood, and many of our newspapers. The modernization of our society made Enlightenment ideas (like secular-humanism) seem inevitable, true, and incontrovertible. When this kind of public, cultural scaffolding began to shake in the 1960s, the ideas came tumbling down, leaving us with a void that the Enlightenment beliefs had once filled in our thinking. So we have come to be postmodern. For some, on one end of the intellectual scale, this is so in very cogent ways and for others, on the other end, it is so in ways that are more unthinking but nevertheless not any less real.