The Last Ones Past The “Post”
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
We’ve become really comfortable using the prefix “post”. We tack it onto the front of a whole whack of words and then follow it all with “world” or “society” or “reality”. We like to pair up “post” with words like “industrial”, “war”, “scarcity”, “capitalist”, “work” and most recently, “pandemic”.
It isn’t hard to see why we’re so fond of these four letters. Sticking “post” on something, especially something scary, awful, confusing, or unsettling, gives the sense that it’s done. Over. Finito. It feels really good to contain the ick, to put it in a box with a tight lid and put it somewhere else. A lot of the somethings that get paired up with “post” are ugly and horrible, damaging, divisive, and destructive. Who wouldn’t want to be done with them? Who wouldn’t want closure?
“Post” also seems to insinuate that we’ve grown, changed, that we’ve learned from our encounter with whatever this thing is. Who wouldn’t want to think that we’re better off than we were “pre” something? We use “post” to feel wiser, experienced, and more savvy. It sings of being strong and capable.
There’s a third use for “post”. We can stack it next to something we’d rather forget, something we think we’ve conquered, but we can also attach it to things that aren’t nasty at all. “Post” can be applied to things we should be desperate to hold onto, like science, reason, and truth. I’m wincing as I wait for it to be stapled to art, beauty, empathy, and justice. It’s harder to unpack our motivation in using “post” for these things. Shouldn’t we be clinging to them, white-knuckled and determined? I guess, in a strange way, “post” could be a statement of mourning, of fear that we’ve passed a point of no return. We used to be reasonable, but sadly that’s all gone. We used to be innovative, but no longer. We used to have empathy, but…what can you do? Maybe in these cases, we recognize that maintaining these good things is hard, that there will be a struggle to hold onto them, and there will be loss in the process. “Post” can be used as a sort of resignation. We just can’t have nice things, can we?
The problem with all three of these uses of “post” is that none of them represent a statement of fact. If we’re going for accuracy, whether it be historical, economic, or linguistic, we have to admit that we are not done figuring out the hard, horrible stuff. We’re not off the hook for defending and embracing the good stuff either. Is it even possible to undo things like science, art, and literature once they’ve become part of our vernacular? Aren’t we denying the best part of ourselves in relegating them to “post”?
But “post” is just a word, isn’t it, and not even a full word? Isn’t it just a handful of letters that helps us to get our heads around the giant, complex, confusing blob of human existence, to sort things out and try to determine what comes next? Couldn’t “post” just be predictive or organizational? True, it is just a word, or rather a snippet of one, but words matter, some a great deal more than others. We don’t just use “post” to clarify and comprehend. We use it to dismiss, to excuse, and to negate. “Post” is an imposed rear-view mirror.
Imagine being in a position to decide what gets put away, when we’re just “done” with something, when something is “over”. Imagine watching multitudes around you struggling to get over an obstacle, to hold tight to what helps, and announcing with a four-letter snippet that their concerns, their goals, and their reality are past tense. “Post” has power, though not any kind of power I’d like to wield.
Acknowledging the persistence of these things we’d rather not admit are still with us isn’t dwelling. It’s not blind pessimism or living in fear. It’s just being realistic. We’re always going to be in the thick of something, probably the same set of somethings, probably very difficult somethings. That’s what living is like. Luckily, we also have the means to pull ourselves out of the muck, at least for long enough to catch our breath. There will be useful somethings, ingenious somethings, creative, and wondrous somethings, and we shouldn’t be in a hurry to “post” them either. Short of being “posthuman”, this is our lot, and no prefix can save us from it.