As a philosophy, and a scholarly and artistic method, — postmodernism was highly critical of ‘metanarratives’ or methods of reaching holistic truths through science, empirical inquiry and readings of history mainly developed during the Age of Enlightenment and/or the Age of Reason in the 18th and 19th centuries. postmodernism is seen as an attack on modernism.
The emphasis on reason, science, democracy and the capitalist system during the era of Enlightenment is often seen as the main catalyst which propelled the Western world towards modernism, which is often explained as a mindset, attitude and a movement. Modernism looked at modifying and readjusting traditional modes of political, social, economic and theological beliefs in accordance with modern ideas of progress.
In this context, modernism dominated Western politics and the arts across the 19th and much of the 20th century. It created powerful narratives to explain economic, social, military and political progress as the result of scientific advancements, free enterprise, individualism, secularism, and a linear reading of history, in which humans continuously evolved and modified their need to innovate and invent and thus dominate the planet and its resources.
Interestingly, both capitalism as well as socialism/communism were products of modernism, and so were the thriving Western democracies as well as modernist authoritarian regimes....