Selling Our Souls: Bacevich on This Age We Live In

Today's Amulet?

Andrew Bacevich is a thinker I admire. The essay (excerpted below) appears in August’s Commonweal, and is another in Bacevich’s line-up of penetrating critiques of our culture– and especially of our triumphalism. Like theologian Douglas John Hall (click here for a link), he calls our triumphalism for what it is: the false bravado of a (mostly unconscious) desperate, fearful society that has cut its ties to its moorings, and floats perilously in the chaotic seas of post-modernity.

Difficult to remember as we walk down aisles of sumptuously overstocked grocery shelves, is the saying (variously attributed), that any society is only three meals away from a revolution. While jarringly dramatic, the saying points to the anxiety that nips at us humans: our awareness that life is fragile; that the line between meaning and meaninglessness is thin; that chaos is always lurking at the edges of civilization. The barbarians are at the door, and they are us.

At the risk of oversimplification, I think it is fair to say that part of Bacevich’s argument– and, more fully, Douglas John Hall’s– is that Western Christian religion (with notable exceptions, to be sure) has been complicit in creating our present predicament. Institutional Christian religion has done this by accommodating, supporting, and legitimizing the political, technological, and economic powers that have gotten us to this point. To be fair, it was an honest mistake: the blessing and glory of human progress certainly seemed to coincide with God’s very own blessing and glory. What Christianity forgot (and this is more Hall than Bacevich), is the cross– and all of what being a disciple of that God means.

Commonweal is a Catholic publication, so Bacevich appropriately refers to Catholicism. With some important qualifications, we can read “Western Christianity” where he writes “Catholicism”:

Confronting the twentieth century, Catholicism stood fast. This was its mission: church as bulwark against the disorders afflicting the age. The excitement of Vatican II (I was a teenager when the council convened) derived from the sense that the church possessed a hitherto unsuspected capacity to adapt its witness. Rather than merely standing in lonely opposition, the church intended to engage—and then redeem—modernity.

Catholics in the twenty-first century find it increasingly difficult—perhaps impossible—to sustain any such expectations. The problem is not simply that the institutional church today stands dishonored and discredited, but that it has misconstrued the problem. The ramparts it persists in defending—a moral order based on received, permanent truth—have long since been scaled, breached, and bypassed, and have fallen into ruin.

What went wrong? The great American historian Henry Adams—dead nearly a hundred years—offers a more cogent answer to that question than any we are likely to hear from Rome. Recalling his return to New York City after a lengthy stay in Europe in “The Education of Henry Adams,” the historian rendered this verdict: “The two-thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward from Broadway,” a panoply of false gods clattering in its wake. That failure had created a vacuum. The heresies that were filling that vacuum filled Adams with foreboding.

Worse, he could see no reason to consider Christianity’s demise as anything other than definitive and irreversible. Yet a century later we remain largely oblivious to its implications. We still don’t understand what hit us….

via Selling Our Souls | Commonweal magazine.

 

What is the Nature of this Universe?– World Atheist Convention Meets in Dublin

Issues and content aside, the most compelling upshot of this past weekend’s meeting of atheists in Ireland is what it tells us about the universe we Westerners (and increasingly, all of us on this hot and crowded planet) inhabit– believers and atheists alike. Succinctly, we don’t live in a universe anymore. We live in a multi-verse– or, less charitably, we live in a chaos (the opposite of a cosmos).

The way that I am asking this question– what kind of universe do we inhabit?– is a metaphysical/philosophical question, not a physical/scientific question.  The evidence that we live in a multi-verse, is that there is no common understanding– in fact, there is very serious disagreement– about the nature of what is real; about what we can know and how we know it; about where we came from and where we’re going; about what is beautiful and good, and on what ground we can make that judgment– in sum, about all questions of meaning and purpose. Any universe begins from assumptions about the nature of what exists; the defining characteristic of those assumptions is that they themselves cannot be proven. Even the universe of Western material science is not exempt from the logical necessity for this epistemological first move, which for materialistic atheists is the functional equivalent to, ironically, a religious leap of faith.

Western culture has been in turmoil– more or less– since at least the Enlightenment, and as the West has bumped elbows with non-Western cultures, those cultures have at various times elbowed back. Fundamentalisms of all stripes– Christianism, Islamism, scientism– have wide appeal, because they aim to supply us once again with a universe to inhabit– a cosmos instead of a chaos. Such a tidy resolution to questions of ultimate purpose– such a tidy restoration of the universe– is not possible, because the commitments that people have to their cosmos– to their way of making meaning of experience– are, at root, non-rational.

A multi-verse– a world with different and competing ways of ordering morality and meaning, origin and destiny–  is always at risk of becoming a chaos. The opportunity of our time is achieving a widely-shared, deepening appreciation for all that is life-affirming in the multi-verses we inhabit together– and for the mystery at which our knowing cannot reach.

[Last] weekend [June 5th and 6th], about 350 conventioneers descend[ed] on Dublin to discuss matters of faith and its place in public life. It’s not a meeting of the Catholic Church hierarchy, but the first World Atheist Convention.

Organizers claim they aren’t trying to make a statement by selecting Ireland, often seen as one of Europe’s most religious nations, but the get-together of nonbelievers does come in a country where religiosity has been in steady decline. In fact, faith seems to be on many European minds of late and questions of religion in public life have reentered political discourse here – from the French “burqa ban” to Ireland’s antiblasphemy law to frequent complaints from Pope Benedict XVI about perceived moral relativism.

Long considered a private matter, some say public questions of faith are even threatening Europe’s traditionally secular politics. “Broadly speaking, religion is back on the agenda in a way people didn’t think it would be 10 or 15 years ago,” says Titus Hjelm, a sociologist of religion at University College London.

via Atheist confab in Ireland comes as Europe confronts religion in public life – CSMonitor.com.

 

Silence at the Heart of Things

After 36 hours of retreat with the Benedictine monks at Glastonbury Abbey, I am reminded of the question raised by a beloved teacher of mine, in an undergraduate seminar 30 years ago: “Why is the man of action absurd?” (She had not yet adopted inclusive language.) Or as Ecclesiastes puts it: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.” (1:9)

One way to take this truth is to ride it down into desperation and defeat: all comes to nothing. There is no point.

Another way to take this truth is to allow it to check our feverishness, and to welcome its injection of a mature irony into our stance toward the world. In a further twist of irony, then, the more deeply we stand in what is authentic about our human lives (including the absurdity of action), the more effective our action becomes.

 

What Makes This News Good?

 

In this Aug. 19, 2009, file photo, a shopper leaves a Gap store in Palo Alto, Calif. Gap will open 100 of its stores nationwide on Thanksgiving Day rather than waiting for Black Friday. Paul Sakuma/AP/file

The Christian Science Monitor reports that more stores are opening “on Thanksgiving Day, rather than waiting for Black Friday.” So let me get this straight: the day that we have set aside to remember what we have received, is now becoming just another day to see what we can get?

I’m exaggerating, of course. But still, I am prompted to wonder: where, in our society, do we reflect on our values and test, critically, our assumptions and standard operating procedures? Where do we ask, “What are we missing here?”