The Nation: A Parcel of Posts

Living in the future places quite a burden on language. For some years intellectuals have sought a vocabulary to describe a society that has, in its own mind, passed outside familiar landmarks into unexplored realities. For a time, as the quarterly the Public Interest observes, the voguish literary modifier was "beyond"—beyond tragedy, beyond ideology, beyond capitalism.

UPI Now the new modifier is "post." The Public Interest has collected 19 of the new signposts:

post-bourgeois, post-capitalist, post-Christian, post-civilized, post-economic, posthistoric, postindustrial, postliberal, post-literature, post-market, post-materialist, postmodern, post-organization, post-protestant, post-puritan, post-scarcity, post-traditional, post-tribal and post-welfare.

Although the terms are sometimes interesting and useful they have the effect of turning life into a kind kind of chartless supervoid. Perhaps the real problem is that too many sociologists and other thinkers have grown postarticulate.