Can something valuable come out of something that is not valuable (or considered less valuable)?
I had coffee with a friend of mine today and we got to talking about authentic community and the issues involved with postmodernism and modernism. He sees major issues with postmodernism (and for that matter modernism as well – but thinks it is better than PM) because he thinks that it eliminates the regions that modernism creates in such a way that makes it so individual that no one can say anything that stems outside of their own context (if you want to argue about if postmodernism says that or not, that’s another argument).
This got me to thinking (because we were talking about authentic community) in such a way that community needs events in which generate transformative experiences but is not reliant completely on the context of those events. For example, you go drinking with 3 of your good buddies for an afternoon and hang out. You then at a later time have a deep conversation with one of these individuals. Would that deeper conversation happen if you had never gone drinking with them before?
Can you have a conversation that stemmed out of a context without the context that you had? Would it even be the same conversation? Would you have ever had the ability or awareness to know that that person is capable of having this deeper conversation without the prior event?
Can you have something valuable grow out of something else that is less valuable and then separate it off? Can postmodernism have benefits once modernism is no more? Can authentic community be created without some form of less "valuable" community?
