The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 74 of 254
The rejection of meta-narratives
Postmodernism rejected all that. The world has no real essence that is just waiting for us to describe. Reality is constituted by our understanding of it. History is created by the stories we tell about the past, and there are innumerable different such stories we can tell about the same events. Likewise, the Earth can be mapped differently: you don’t even need to privilege the land surface. Science is also a collection of stories we tell ourselves, ones we value for their instrumental or perhaps aesthetic value, but not because they reveal the essence of the real world. These ideas can be captured in the idea of the rejection of grand or meta-narratives. Humans make sense of their world by telling stories. Meta-narratives are the big stories that tie everything together.