I've got a queue of articles in my "drafts" folder that I whittle away at when I've got some downtime (for ex., the long air travel).   A long long time ago, Sgt. Stryker had this beautiful article discussing the differences in the Post-Modernist vs. Romanticist world views.   

In postmodernistic (PM) "theology" the romantic is treated as quaint & boorish for having, you guessed it, values. The romantic has a set of values (love, honor, courage, sacrifice, etc.) that he recognizes in reality. The postmodernist by definition questions the validity of any perception of reality (hence all multiculturialists are PM), and thus particularly dislikes an impassioned romantic perception. To the PM such a perception must be misguided, for it will not take as its guide cynicism. Note, in practice a romantic may be cynical towards any number of things; yet the romantic usually does not treat his core values cynically because they form the foundation of who and what he is. This is obscene to the PM, and must be disassembled, for the moral absolutism of the romantic is the single biggest threat to the postmodernist’s world-view (and therefore the progressive movement as a whole).

It's probably quite obvious to any reader of mine (do I have many?  ;-), that I consider myself a Romantic in the broad sense.   For example, I believe that there are universally, morally Good Things like Freedom, and that it's possible to judge social structures (e.g. political systems), plan & execute courses of action (e.g. war!) and generally display initiative towards advancing those Good Things.   

However, there is a physics/metaphysics inspired part of me that understands and even acknowledges part of the PM mindset.   Reality is NOT absolutely objective (especially when you start at the quantum mechanical level ;-).   For a given observation / phenomena, reality & epistemology does fundamentally allow for multiple interpretations / theories that explain that phenomena.   So, when you bubble this all they way up to human values, it is logically plausible to say "suicide bombing to achieve political objectives is wrong for us in our situation but OK for Palestinians." 

To the hard core PM'er, this relativism of perspective sometimes brings a paralysis of action.   If everything's relative it's hard to say that one thing's better than another.  We shouldn't undertake certain types of action because we don't have the proper tools to judge whether an outcome is desirable or not.  Especially when other folks are involved.  

Stryker contends that the 2 positions of Romanticism and PostModernism have deep inherent contradictions:

...The absolutism of the romantic is the matter to the anti-matter of the postmodernist; they are mutually exclusive. Both propositions cannot be right. Either there is a core set of right and wrong as the romantic believes, or there is no absolute reality--it’s all differing shades of gray as the postmodernists preach.

Well, sort of.    While Reality may be subjective and constantly evolving, there are tools available to us to make comparative statements about different models.   My "escape valve" is to argue that, while at the lowest level reality has ambiguity, there is a single, Universal, human nature-driven desire for self actualization that is manifest towards reality.  So I am fundamentally banking on (at least one) single universal, a priori motivation -- self actualization. 

Self-actualization is a fuzzy term and has many, many, many candidate definitions (which, in an eerily PoMo way, vary dramatically with context).   One favorite term from "Pop Philosophy" is Quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I think of it very simply as "having an original idea and pushing that idea forward in the external world."    An idea (& in turn your Self) is progressively "actualized" by how much of the external world you engage and integrate in exercising that idea.  An example of movement along this axis would be:

• working out something in your own mind 
• publishing a paper on how something could work
• actually building something that does work
• building something that works within your economic constraints
• making it "work" within others' economic constraints.
• becoming a zillionaire because others bought something from you to make that thing work in their lives

So, in my conception, there is a very deep integration with economics as a way of choosing between different beliefs (interpersonally, these are esconsed in difference products / services).   There are, of course,  ways to find this actualization outside of purely $$$ motivations.  Fukuyama's discussion of Recognition is particularly relevant -- people like to feel like they "matter" and that still drives towards a form of actualization. 

There are also strong / deep parallels with the Scientific Method here -- millions of hypotheses for a phenomena can be proposed; a thousand may actually pass scientific scrutiny but Occam's Razor drives us towards the most simple which in turn is likely to be the most prescriptive theory.  

The most Prescriptive theory is simply the one most readily testable & useful to others.   We can, for example, create large datatables of masses, applied forces, and resultant accelerations or, we can create the simple theory that F=ma.  While F=ma doesn't work in all cases (quantum and cosmic scales), the theory is nevertheless prescriptive towards a wide variety of situations and allows us to build autos and airplanes.  

Thus, questions of utility and prescriptiveness fundamentally integrate economic questions into the evaluation of reality.   To say that there is a "reality" and that it has property "X" is, at best, an economically driven decision.   We say/assume that "reality behaves like X" because it's a good enough approximation that allows us to reach some utilitarian end.

So, what we see is that via the scientific method, the scientific community does confront a fundamentally subjective matter but is still able to derive ideas which are measurably closer to universal than others.    This is worth repeating -- while no theory is provably, absolutely true, it is still possible to make comparisons between 2 theories and say that one is better.   F=ma may not be absolutely correct, but it provides us with enough data to say that at least some alternate theories are simply incorrect.

Returning to Stryker's text -- values may be Grey as the PM thinks but, unlike most strains of PM thought, we are nevertheless able to make choices between those shades to the degree they facilitate self actualization.  Thus, given 2 competing systems for social organization, the Better one is the one that leads to greater self-actualization for more people.  Concepts like Love, Honor, Sacrifice, while not rooted at a quantum level in nature have important emergent properties for society that alternate theories do not (e.g. is a society that generally believes in "honor" easier to pursue economic self actualization in or harder?  whether or not "honor" exists in an absolute sense, wouldn't you rather live someplace that defines it in a socially-compatible way and generally pursues it?)

On most accounts, this social organization is Liberalism + Democracy + Capitalism.