A lot of abstract concepts degrade as they age. My take on it is that they start as a sort of art. Name things. Get big abstract points across. Shift attention

A lot of abstract concepts degrade as they age. My take on it is that they start as a sort of art. Name things. Get big abstract points across. Shift attention from one thing to another. Use a different perspective lens. Enlightenment era "rationalism," for example. When it's an eye opening perspective, we will adopt the whole system of thought. Then, leaks in the abstraction start to become obvious. Does Hegelian reasoning (to get meta) really have three distinct phases. What about these examples over here, that seem to have four or two. If the abstraction/ideology has been built upon, and those ideas are now important to the integrity of subsequent ideas then, most likely, we'll try to fix the underlying theory. Generally, what we do is keep the labels, but change/augment their meaning. "Workers State" has an increasingly nuanced & technical meaning, depending on how long it's been since Marx said it. So does net neutrality. So does liberal democracy, rule of law, Agile... "From now on, we're doing Agile"" has the exact opposite implications in 2018 then it did in 2003. Postmodernism, as a word, has been at that stage for while. It's too much work patching the damn thing. It obscures more than it informs. Generally, instead of describing something using the word postmodernism (or one of its many associated terms) it will be easier and better to just explain things directly.