MacIntyre

Cultural Chaos

I have lots of new friends and followers recently so I want to let you know about a series I did 2 years ago about the moment that we live in and why it is only going to get worse.

My favorite philosopher (Zizek) says that the light at the end of the tunnel is probably another oncoming train and I agree.

I am a naturally optimistic person but the past 15 years have alerted me to the very real turmoil and fracturing in society. I want to assure you of two things:

It will only get worse
That is probably a good thing

The original series had 4 parts:

You can go back and watch all 4 videos (or read all 4 posts) but I wanted to summarize it for those who are new what I am doing here.

The two basic things that you need to understand about our cultural moment is that

Everything you see – and all of the competing tribes, opinions, and agendas – are remnants of previous eras.
We have no agreed upon arena in which to settle these disagreements and disputes.

Ours is a fractured and fragmented society in which incompatible agendas and projects compete for thinner slices of the collective pie. They cannot be reconciled to one another because they all house (are embedded with) different programs (to use a computer analogy) and sometimes entirely different operating systems.

It is not just that they have different goals, agendas, and methods … they are different to each other not just in degree but often in type.

This is why there is cultural chaos. We are both fractured and fragmented but each of those competing camps speaks an internal language game that makes in nearly impossible to translate between them.

It is not just Chess & Checkers but (to use a sports analogy) it is like asking a Baseball player how many touchdowns he scored. It is just not how it works. This is not like the difference between Ford and Chevy in NASCAR or the difference between quilting, knitting, and crochet. This is like trying to feed a banana to cell phone. They are two entirely different things.

So whether it is Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative and libertarian, creation and evolution, traditional and progressive, religious and secular – we talk past each other and often can’t even hear what the other ‘side’ is saying.

Then you take that confusion and you turn up the volume to 11 (as they say) and our self-selected echo chambers start to distort and become feedback loops that are unintelligible.

So how can I say that this is a good thing? Because we are being given the opportunity to finally deal with remnants and remainders of our historical legacy and the roots of our various programs. If we are willing to look at the genealogy of how we got here and do some discourse analysis (this is why I love critical theory) then we do an autopsy on our failing and faltering institutions and organizations.

People like to say, “the more things change the more the stay the same” but I would like to submit to you that has never been less true than it is right now. I say that they more things change they more they will continue to change at faster and faster rates.

The words for our time is history are agitated and accelerated. Changes is constant and happens not incrementally anymore but exponentially and perpetually. This is why going back to the past will not save us. Our moment is begging for better answer but is asking us completely different kinds of questions.

This is why I do what I do. This is not a blip on the radar. What you are seeing in the news is not a fever that will pass. This is the world we live in now. It is not a season and ‘this too shall pass’. No, this our new reality. Covid, police protests, political dysfunction are not glitches or bugs in the system – they are now features of the system that need to be considered on their own merit.

So I will say it again: Everything you are seeing is a remnant of a previous project or program and we have no arena in which to settle the disputes. So there is no to think that things will naturally get better or that we will somehow find a middle-ground. That is the good news of this moment if you have ears to hear and eyes to see. Our public, political, economic, medical, and environmental crisis are not a sad side effect of an otherwise healthy system. They are the remnants and remainders of a pre-existing condition. They are the logical conclusion of a long history and now the chickens are coming home to roost.

Like it or not, this is our new reality and sooner we wake up and realize that this is no nightmare the better we can do at dealing with the fractured and fragmented nature of our society and world.

I woke up to this 15 years ago And lots of people have said, “it’s only a matter of time before this all settles down can we get back to business as usual”. But there is no going back and whoever we elect this fall won’t fix it. They can’t fix it because it is embedded in the system – it is baked in the bread. So until we wake up and take a sober look at how we got here there is no reason to think things are going to get any better on their own.

July 31, 2020 0

Video: Fragmented & Fractured

Here is a follow up video for the blog post (2 weeks ago)

You can read the full blog at [this link] and either comment here or there. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Next up: There is no neutral anymore

June 12, 2018 1

Jordan Peterson and the Past

I listened to a fascinating podcast yesterday where an older British intellectual (Philip Dodd) took Jordan Peterson to task on one subject after another. It was very argumentative and quite contentious – not to my irenic liking.

Jordan Peterson has risen to fame recently in a parallel way to “Make America Great Again” based on the same ‘things are out of control’ discomfort and backlash. This is a phenomenon that I am particularly intrigued by.

Peterson’s brand of ‘we have to get back to the preferable past’ reclamation project is the perfect blend of two things that I am very familiar with: The academic approach of Alasdair MacIntyre and the therapeutic manliness of John Eldredge’s “Wild at Heart” series.

Eldredge has a therapeutic approach to masculinity based loosely on Jungian archetypes (warrior, king, magician, lover) and thinkers like MacIntyre are trying reclaim Aristotle’s ancient Greek notions of virtue, ethics, and moral character.

When you combine “Wild at Heart” masculinity, with Aristotelian principles in ethics, and throw in a dash of ‘make culture great again’ … you get Jordan Peterson.

Peterson’s book is “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos”. The first six rules are:

Stand up straight with your shoulders back
Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
Make friends with people who want the best for you
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world

None of these rules seem intrinsically bad. Rule 1 is very ‘Wild at Heart’. Rule 6 is very MacIntyre.

Now I have written a lot about MacIntyre and the problems of Aristotelian reclamation projects. Susan Heckman[1] has convinced me that the solution is not simply to (re)claim/(re)cycle/(re)purpose ancient, antiquated, or Aristotelian concepts from the pre-modern world.

“MacIntyre’s approach exemplifies a disturbing characteristic of much of the communitarian literature: the romanticization of premodern societies that ignores the oppression and hierarchy that was endemic to those societies. Even Sandel (1984), despite his modernist leanings, sometimes falls prey to the tendency to glorify traditional communities. The narrative selfhood that MacIntyre lauds can only be obtained at a high price: the ascription of traditional roles.”

She explains:

“When it comes to the highly charged issue of the sexism and racism of the traditions he praises so highly, MacIntyre seems to abandon his interrelationship thesis. With regard to the Aristotelian tradition, he tries to deny the claim that sexism and racism are an integral part of this system of virtues.

… throughout his writings MacIntyre unambiguously asserts it is this traditional community we must foster if we are to return to any semblance of a moral life:

“What matters at this stage are the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us (1984).”

To thinkers like MacIntyre and Hauerwas and Peterson, we are descending further into an age of darkness.[2] Their answer is to (re)claim or (re)turn to some former understanding or expression of virtue and order. Hekman is right though – we cannot even attempt to do so without acknowledging and addressing the inherent racism, sexism, and disparity built into every level of the structures from which those romantic notions come.

This is the problem with Jordan Peterson’s notion of the past.

Three thoughts that I want to leave you with:

Don’t read Peterson – it is too predictable. Read instead Teaching Community by bell hooks and Church In The Round by Letty Russel if you want to understand and do something in our historical moment.

The future is going to be slightly like the past but largely unlike it. The world is really changing in some ways and this cultural shift requires not just a new mental framework (thus my interest in ‘social imaginaries’) but a new skill-set. In a land based culture, farmers develop a certain set of skills. As we move to a more liquid and fluid culture, sailors need to develop a different set of skills and knowledges. Both require strength and intelligence … but they are very different.

Peterson came to prominence for contesting Canada’s language directives to use gender-neutral pronouns for trans people. Now, leaving out the argument about the government telling us how to talk (a whole other subject) I just want to say that using ‘they’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘she’ is not that difficult and doesn’t take anything away from your masculinity.

It is a really easy change to make once you realize that language (and especially English) is always adapting and evolving anyway. Referring to people by their preferred pronoun is a gracious thing to do (Peterson claims to be a Christian and bases much of his thought on Hebrew Bible stories) and it models Christlikeness through Kenosis (self-emptying) as seen in Philippians 2.

[1] Hekman, Susan. “The Embodiment of the Subject: Feminism and the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism.” The Journal of Politics 54, no. 04 (November 1992): 1098–1119.

[2] In the consumer society of the 21^st century, it is not enough to want to ‘get back’ to a former era of romanticized notions which utilize previous formulations of order and social coherence. We must follow Jesus’ example of interrogating the ‘as is’ structure of our given systems. Jesus employed tactics which subverted the assumed nature of the status quo to inspire people’s imagination about the way that things can be. The way that things are is not the way that God wants them. Things can be different. The gospel calls us to imagine that the world can be a different way. This is good news (evangelion) in the original sense.

May 18, 2018 4

Doing Theology in the 21st Century. or why Aquinas is a footnote

We are going to have to agree to disagree about some things. One thing that I would ask (in my generous orthodoxy style) is that we both acknowledge those things that we agree on as well as those we don’t.

The reason that is important is because of something that Phyllis Tickle points out (paraphrase): it is not that former (and maybe dominant) expressions go away, it is that they no longer hold the prime spot and wield the kind of power that they once did. They are all still around however.

The interesting terrain that we inhabit in the 21st century is littered with artifacts and occupied by pockets of groups – possible ones that were once in the ascendancy. This is, as I am often saying, the bricolage nature of our cultural/societal environment.

You have methodists who have no idea what the methods were. You have ‘Amish’ fireplace stoves being mass-produced and sold on TV (think about it). You have can still, more tellingly, find actual Amish folks if you know where to look.

Here are two things you need to know:

I come to the theological endeavor as a contextual theologian.
In my context, practical theology and its qualitative methods (interviews, case studies, ethnography) is my chosen approach.

There are several implications of these two things. Unlike Tripp, I don’t do systematic theology.* It is not that I don’t value other branches of theology. In fact, practical theology as a field is in a major renovation, at least in part, in order to join the other 4 primary branches of theology that do their own research and provide their own innovations:

Historical Theology
Biblical Theology
Systematic Theology
Philosophical Theology

As my professor Kathleen Greider says:

Practical theologians commonly assert that the primary text of our field is lived experience– diverse persons and communities that are contextually located, inextricably related, and experiencing each other through countless interconnections and interactions.

Almost invariably when I am enduring critique from a conversation partner who is more conservative than myself, it is only a matter of time before they bring up Aquinas. I don’t get the nuance of Aquinas. I didn’t distinguish between the early and late Aquinas. I wasn’t careful to appropriate this or that of Aquinas’ formulations. I didn’t read the right translation of Aquinas. (the same things with Barth and Scotus too)

What I am saying is that we don’t need to understand Aquinas better or deeper.

We are to do in our day what Aquinas did in his.

As a contextual theologian I don’t think that is accomplished by obsessing over Aquinas. I’m not saying that we aren’t generous or respectful … I’m saying that Aquinas lives neither where we do nor when we do. He lived in a different context and time.

Call this dismissive if you will but The Church’s future is not to be found in Europe’s past. I say it all the time.

You may disagree with me about this. That is fine. I’m just telling you where I am coming from since our latest TNT has raised some eyebrows, questions (and hackles) both here and on twitter.

Historic thinkers like Aquinas never saw what I call the 5 C’s of our theological context:

post-Christendom
Colonialism
global Capitalism
Charismatic renewal (especially Pentecostalism in the Southern Hemisphere)
Cultural Revolutions (from Civil Rights in the 60’s to the ‘Arab Spring’)

Add to those 5 to pluralism, the internet and a growing environmental crisis and you have the 8 things we as theologians need to give great attention and care to. They are the context in which (and for which) we do theology in the 21st century. Go listen to our interview with Grace Ji-Sun Kim if you have questions about this.

You may want to focus more on the christian tradition (like Augustine or Aquinas) and I would understand that – I view that impulse through a Lindbeckian tri-focal lens. I understand the work you want to do within that cultural-linguistic silo. [I’m having fun in this part for those unfamiliar with my style]

Disagree as we might about the importance of a writer in the 3rd or 13th century – I just wanted you to know where I was coming from and what my focus was.**

I would love it if everyone would leave a comment and let me know how this sits with you.

_________________

*One implication of that is that when I read systematic theologians I do so though mostly thought trusted secondary sources. Admittedly, I don’t major in primary sources – for reasons I hope are clear in this post. I find scholars who know their stuff like Elizabeth Johnson, John Caputo, Joseph Bracken and Stuart Murray and trust them.

** If you want to read more about my approach check out ‘After MacIntyre’ that I wrote a while ago but never put up on the blog. It will explain my concern about everything from consumerism to hipsters and the radical orthodoxy project.

December 19, 2013 0

Hipsters and Zombies: the end of civilization

Ballard says in Kingdom Come

Consumerism rules, but people are bored. They’re out on the edge, waiting for something big and strange to come along. … They want to be frightened. They want to know fear. And maybe they want to go a little mad.
– Ballard, Kingdom Come

When we live in a time when like ours, where the as-is structures are assumed and there is a certain giveness to the system, we view them as final applications. Nation States and capitalism are just two areas where this can be seen (Tripp explains this well in the interview).
In this consumerism as culture humans are defined by their external signs and symbols. These become signifiers that form more than our image, they project our identity. It is in this cul-de-sac and the end of the wide road of consuming that the monotony of round and round sameness becomes soul-numbing. You can see why things on the fringes, that lurk in the dark and just below the surface begins to titillate and become attractive.

We are bored.

Alasdair MacIntyre (who asses the situation so well in After Virtue – even though I disagree with his solution) says this about what the church becomes

nothing but a meeting place for individual wills, each with its own set of attitudes and preferences and who understand that world solely as an arena for the achievement of their own satisfaction, who interpret reality as a series of opportunities for their enjoyment and for whom the last enemy is boredom.

Our fractured and contentious societal situation is inflamed by (at least) three cultural elements: consumerism, globalization, and pluralism. The first is the disposition of individuals within a society, the second impacts the proximity of different communities, and the third affects the posture when approaching a disparate series of relationship for communities.

Consumerism is hyperbolized in an examination of Hipster ‘culture’ by Douglas Haddow entitled “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization”.* Haddow provides a vicious critique when he says:

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

It this both the dislocation of generational continuity and the isolation of consumerist aesthetics that are troubling about the brand obsessed and all too self-aware ironic sensibilities that alert one to the incredible disenchantment and disassociation of the youth culture. It is these very same consumerist influences and institutions that give rise to their embodied expression and vague angst that manifests in such irresponsible yet elaborate demonstrations of the Hipster’s intentionally senseless displays.

Ironically, we have more stuff and access to more toys, information, and treats than ever before … but we are soul-numb bored. This is the danger of thinking that what we have is everything in it’s final form. That our representative democracy, that our free-market economy, that our United Nations are the pinnacle and the end of history.

This is why that Zizek quote about living in the end times is so great – that it is easier for most Christians today to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine living in some other economy beside capitalism.

Hipsters and the suburban fascination with zombies and vampires … are trying to tell us something.

* The subtitle of this article says “We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality. “
Mark Douglas Haddow, “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters”, n.d., http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

December 6, 2012 3

Bo Sanders: Public Theology

updating & innovating for today

Tag

Cultural Chaos

Video: Fragmented & Fractured

Doing Theology in the 21st Century. or why Aquinas is a footnote

Hipsters and Zombies: the end of civilization

Email Subscription

Recent

Archives

Pages

Public Theology on FB