Postmodernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, that has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s. Postmodernism is hard to define because it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of areas of study such as art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications, technology, and politics. It's hard to locate it historically because it's not clear exactly when postmodernism begins. Perhaps the easiest way to start thinking about postmodernism is by thinking about modernism through which postmodernism seems to grow and emerge from. Modernism comes from the movement during the late nineteenth and twentieth century which changed peoples philosophical, political, and ethical ideas from the old Victorian standard to the new modern ways of life. These new views had been accepted and went without questioning until the postmodernist came along. Postmodernist take any statement or subject and pull it apart to try and figure out what they think the true meaning is. They also tend to pull things apart and say that they have more than one meaning as opposed to what is stated. It is referred to as the beliefs about beliefs. It tends to divide societies into groups contending with one another not about the conflict between beliefs, but conflict about belief itself. .
Here in America, many modern and postmodern cultures do battle about if it is better to teach our children the skills of moral reasoning, which is a very postmodern concept, or should instead be taught to accept some traditional American values and beliefs such as religion. These are some of the fundamental examples of humanism, or of modernism. They serve as you can probably tell, to justify and explain all of our social structures and institutions, including democracy, law, science, ethics, and aesthetics. Modernity is about order: about rationally and rationalization, creating order out of chaos.