Postmodernism

The emphasis on subjective knowledge and experience is a connection between New Age beliefs and postmodernism. The shift to a feeling of control over one's expression of spirituality reflects a trend towards personal responsibility, as well as personal empowerment. Its populist origins help characterize the New Age approach. This emphasizes an individual's choice in spiritual matters; the role of personal intuition and experience over societally sanctioned expert opinion and an experiential definition of reality. This does not mean, however, that its members necessarily become free individuals. There may be as much peer-group conformity on the fringe as there is in mainstream society.

Postmodern thinkers claim to have broken the fetters of logic (inter alia) that have characterized the modern notion of rational discourse. The result, it is claimed, is a new freedom of communication. Rationality, in the sense of allegiance to universal logical constraints, is no longer the only, or even major, "communicative virtue." Social, psychological, political, historical considerations must all take precedence over logic. Judging the rational success of a piece of discourse (or "text") is now a matter to be dealt with by social scientists and literary critics rather than by logicians (the ones in whom moderns and premoderns had invested the task of defining rationality). Freed from the confines of logic, discourse can now become open, honest, sincere, politically sensitive, historically conditioned. Premoderns and moderns based their willingness to accept or reject a speaker's claim on their judgment of how well it seemed to fit the facts of the case and to what extent it was logically consistent with the speaker's other claims or assumptions. By contrast, postmoderns "play the believing game," accepting the speaker's claim according to the degree of sincerity the speaker exhibits. Truth and coherence are no longer allowed to bully us in our communicative efforts. Expertise and authority are no longer the possession of only an elite few. We all share expertise and authority equally. Communication, finally, is democratic. The premodern and modern informed and rational despots have been overthrown. We are all informed; we are all rational.

--Postmodernism

--Syncretism

--Millenarianism

--Magical thinking

--Holism

--Mysticism