Dad joked my dad with this one . <| sep |> If modernism is the collective of man entering this industrialized , nuclear , post WWII , Brettonwoods institutions , bi polar world sort of thingPostmodernism might be a response to that , but modernism dates to decades or centuries earlier . In many ways , its culmination is the Belle poche , the thirty years or so before WWI , which saw the height of European science , art , music , literature , industry , military and political power across the world , the culmination of the reforms and revolutions that began during the Enlightenment . Postmodernism is , like you say , a response to the failures of that vision of the world , questioning its certainties , the unquestionable faith in the goodness of science and economic development , the centrality of the European point of view , and the nature and purpose of traditional forms of beauty , both as a response to the horrors of the 20 th century and as an attempt to understand the foundations on which those concepts of beauty were built .