Whatever its faults (the unreasonable trust in reason, the tendency toward a hypernaturalism, the unwarranted optimism in human progress, the "demythologization" of religion), the Enlight- enment worldview at least included the possibility of knowledge and of truth. The real was deemed rational and, hence, knowable by rational minds. Not only does reality exist, but we can–through a diligent application of reason, scientific method, common sense, and mathematics–understand and exploit it for our maximum good.

However extreme the Enlightenment thesis (that all knowledge is rational), and however painfully parochial its antithesis (to limit reality to reason and science alone is like looking at Mount Everest through a pinhole), post-modernism (pomo) denies the possibility of knowledge at all. Reality is nothing but a subjective construction of the mind, which itself is structured only by transient, localized, and fluctuating cultures, traditions, and predilections. For pomos there is no overarching absolute, no grand metanarrative in which humanity can establish common roots, no natural laws in which we all operate. Truth is as multifaceted and multivalent as individuals and societies themselves. Ethics, morality, justice, righteousness, even knowledge, are at best collages of local prejudice, at worst coldhearted attempts to legitimatize social structures in order to control and terrorize the masses. If Yeats could warn that "the center cannot hold," postmodernism asserts that "the center" was always an artificial construct to begin with. Though pomos appear, provisionally at least, to accept certain stanchions of the external world (gravity, the periodic table of elements, astrophysics), even science is viewed as a particular mental posture contrived in a mostly European and American White male milieu (the worst of all) and, hence, exceedingly suspect.

Postmodernism–playful, faddish, erudite, strewing its discourse with chic vocabulary and phraseology ("language games," metalinguistics, heterotopia, deconstructionism, the "differend" "play of signifiers," "regimes of truth")–is just a late twentieth century rehash of ancient Greek skepticism, perhaps best expressed by Arcesilaus, of member of the Platonic academy, when he said, "Nothing is certain, not even that." What's more, postmodernism is typical of the nonsense that permeates the extremes. It's the Posse Comtitatus of the intellectual elite.

Of course, there's a certain amount of contingency in our knowledge, and whatever we know we know provisionally, and language referents are mere subjective and ephemeral tools–this is all given. But these limitations don't mean that humans still can't know truth. Since when is knowledge "knowledge" only when it's apodictic? That I don't know how gravity works, that great blocks of ignorance surround my grasp of planetary motion, that why we're moving in ellipses and not circles is beyond my ken, still doesn't mean I can't "know" that the sun will rise tomorrow and plan my life accordingly. That we can't know everything "for sure" doesn't mean we can't know something "for sure," a basic truth that postmodernism misses. That's why it's so silly, a truth recently brought home when, as a joke, physicist Alan Sokal submitted to the scholarly journal Social Texts a ridiculously titled article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (come on, a hermeneutics of quantum gravity!). Amazingly enough, the article–filled with arcane and abstract silliness, including phrases such as "emancipatory mathematics" and "liberatory science"–was published as a serious piece.

The quotation at the beginning of this editorial ("Madonna and Material Discourse"), no matter how erudite it sounds, is in fact nonsense, taken from a website (http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/cgi~bin/) that uses a computer to create grammatically correct but meaningless postmodern texts. "The essay you have probably just seen," the site says at the bottom of the text, "is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by this Post-modernism Generator."

Nevertheless, tempted we might be to dump postmodernism into history's curiosity closet (along with theosophy, alchemy, and phrenology), we can't. Postmodernism, to one degree or another, has invaded the mainstream of Western thought, including the church-state debate, where separationism is becoming a conduit for one of the most serious consequences of the postmodernist ideal: amoralism. After all, if all truth is subjective, localized, and fluctuating, morality must be as well, and thus any attempt to enforce moral strictures through law are nothing but power grabs by an elite bent on dominion and terrorism. When any civil attempt to structure a moral base for society is deemed violative of church-state separation, the pyrrhic victory of postmodernism is apparent. Few concepts, though, are more antithetical to postmodernism than separation of church and state, which was extricated from the Enlightenment ideal that truth not only exists but can be known and lived. Church-state separation arose out of a belief that God created natural laws, and that humankind could find freedom, fulfillment, and happiness by obeying those laws. Far from reflecting the axiological nihilism of the postmoderns, church-state separationism is premised upon an overarching, enduring, and universal moral metaconcept, which is that God wants humankind to be free and happy, that He has placed the desire for these ideals in the heart of the rational and moral beings He has created, and that one of the best ways to ensure that happiness and freedom was to allow humanity to (or not to) worship and serve God as each individual deemed fit. Keeping government as far out of religious issues as possible was an attempt to protect moral integrity, not denude it of meaning by making it helplessly subjective, contingent, and locally determined. Separation of church and state is an edifice, however limited, built upon the concept that God in heaven has established eternal norms of right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice–and that one fundamental expression of this right, good, and justice is freedom to worship God according to the dictates of one's own conscience, and not the conscience of others. What it wasn't built on, nor should it espouse, is the postmodernist chimera that places ethics on the same plane as aesthetics, and that declares moral preferences no qualitatively different than gastronomical ones, a notion as nonsensical as "Madonna and Materialist Discourse."

Separationism is thoroughly "modern," and thus no more benefitted by postmodernism than an aging computer is by Viagra.