I have been reading the twenty plus books to get a head start for next semester. One of the books on pastoral care delves deeply into “postmodernity” and another also reviews it as a legitimate social criticism(!).
Postmodernity is an ill-defined, politicized concept. Even its proponents and “critics” of the school have found it difficult to provide a measured, operating definition of the term. From my recollection it is a concept the evolved out of the 1960’s student movement, a movement I would characterize at a superficial level by its nihilism and alienation towards our parents’ values and at a deeper level as fear of failing to meet the standard of our parents’ generation.
The generation of these parents was a childhood lived in the Great Depression, an adulthood dealing with the threats to their world in World War II and then the Korean War. It was the generation who finally came home to a world of relative modern comfort living in a cold war under the threat of nuclear destruction.
Some of you may have read one of Joseph Heller’s less appreciated but important novels, Something Happened.1 This novel captures the essence of the worldview of many of our parents. We are entirely too close to them to see that at least some of them were living in a post-traumatic stress syndrome in reaction to that whirlwind ride from the rural society of the early 1900’s, the unspeakable horror of World War II and the urban sprawl and world threats of their 1950’s and 1960’s society.
In the end, postmodernity may be as much a movement directed against American, and by extension, western values as anything else. While our culture has good reason for criticism, I am in a fair quest of a legitimate definition of postmodernity from its practitioners.
Edward Wimberly seeks to define postmodernity by defining “modernity” and essentially defining postmodernity as its opposite.2 He states modernity is characterized by (1) a Cartesian philosophy; (2) capitalism; (3) technology; and (4) science.
He further states these four matters have caused a massive “redefinition” of the mind of the disadvantaged, which has led to a pervasive nihilism that explains the current problems with the predominately African-American population of the inner city. He further states, “[modernity is] a social, theological transformation brought about by technology uprooting beliefs and values." Personally, I do not think the problem can be so narrowly defined as strictly an African-American matter.
In effect, Dr. Wimberly is defining postmodernity as a social movement of Luddites.3 The Luddites were a anti-technology social movement in England in the early 1800’s opposed to automation of textile mills. Dr. Wimberly goes further. He extending the concept to be essentially complete opposition to all elements of western society, a culture that he characterizes as a wasteland peopled by individuals living isolated, unconnected and dismembered lives seeking validation via the cultural norm of possessions.
A favorite word for postmodern critics is “deconstruct.” It is used in the manner that existing "norms" have to be "deconstructed" so they can be "reconstructed," presumably in a more effective "postmodern" form.
Often the comments of the late pop critic Marshall McLuhan on the media and its pervasive influence are used to define the postmodern “view.” One famous widely known quote about television and the media is “the medium is the message.”4 (As do many people, I think a lot of what McLuhan said about the media was remarkable prescient. McLuhan maintained every way we communicate is "the medium." In fact, I have to admit a lot of my critical comments benefit from the reality described by McLuhan, “We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”5
From all this, I conclude that the postmodernity of these postmodern critics is a nihilistic liberation philosophy upset over virtually every aspect of our modern culture. In my mind postmodernity finds this definition most visible in its view of the arts.
I interpret this in regard to the arts to mean that art is to be reduced to what is accessible to and meaningful to each individual, in essence, “ Every one is an artist.” The natural extension of this idea is that if everyone is an artist there is nothing that is not a work of art6, or certainly no place for artistic criticism. Marshall McLuhan put it a bit more humorously when he said, “art is anything you can get away with.”7
Another underlying element of postmodernity is the ideal to be “global village, or a culture of living among and with others.” In a sense, this is an idea espoused by the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel.8 Marcel strongly believed we exist only in-relationship to others. He defined this as true “being.” Marcel, however much he struggled with the dehumanizing element of technology, would probably roll over in his grave if he were called a postmodern thinker. His thinking was far more sophisticated.
As mentioned earlier, I maintain (and remember) that postmodernity arose out our 1960’s student days when outraged by the draft, Viet Nam, the materialism of our society and the mores placed on us by our parents concerning sex, religion and race, we rebelled against virtually every element of our parents lives, and often choked on the largess they fed to us.
Perhaps standing at the apogee of postmodernity is The S.C.U.M Manifesto9 by Valerie Solanas published in 1967. S.C.U.M. stands for Society for Cutting Up Men. Among the gems in this manifesto are two particular points she makes in its beginning:
1. “Life in this society being at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”
2. It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.
Even though she truly believed this miasma (and I intentionally left out her really blunt language), hardly any of us can see this as other than hyperbole drive by an internal struggle with cultural norms. Who burnt their bras? Who was so happy about the technical advance of, and to get that first prescription for birth control pills as a sexually liberating act? Maybe using that technology opened eyes to the real issues of sexual politics imposed on many women.
The sad thing about all this is that even in my textbooks postmodernity is viewed as a legitimate philosophical and theological perspective. In spite of the seemingly romantic element of being a young socialist seeking to deconstruct society, I would suggest that at best the anomie or alienation many of us experienced in the 1960’s and 1970’s was rooted in fear of the draft and the realization that our culture was grossly materialistic and we are part of it, perhaps psychologically in a terrifying fear and guilt that we would fail to achieve the greatness of our parents, or justify their sacrifices, as it was anything else.
We should face the facts. Most of us had a self-interest in being anti-establishmentarians and had little true altruism about it. Forty years later our predicament proves it. Essentially, Richard Nixon ended the "postmodern" movement when he replaced the draft with the lottery. A lot of postmodern thinkers with large lottery numbers suddenly got interested in other things, like getting out of college and finding a job. (My number was 161, I got an induction notice and was never inducted, but that is another story.) Unfortunately in the philosophical and artistic world there is a lot of inertia and they fail to remember McLuhan's assessment that we can only see the present in the past as we motor on looking backwards.5
Very few of my hotheaded radical friends from the 60’sand 70’s are living in poverty and fighting culture, most of them drive BMW’s, are presidents of their family companies, or are retired in their summer homes watching their bank balance, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and their stockpile of scotch and fine wines. In a facile argument, postmodern apologists might explain this unseemly retreat circularly that these folks(themselves) are victims of culture, a culture that redefined their values.
There will always be people who for good and bad will become engineers or scientists, human resources people, secretaries and groundskeepers working for companies that seek to build better weapons for war at a fat salary. In fact many standing in the pulpit are part of that chorus. Many Christians find it easy to justify war as did the noted theologian, St. Augustine. 10,11 but the chrous isn't one of unanimity. Sad as it is to admit, social and international struggle, and capitalism probably are a primary engine that drives technology; but that does not mean that motive has to be the true end of mankind.
I think perhaps "postmodern" folks like Dr. Wimberly miss (or conveniently ignore) the bigger picture. We have water purification technology that allows high purity water is almost any place on the globe, vaccines against hepatitis, pneumonia, whooping cough, measles, polio, some cancers and many more. We see HIV/AIDA vaccine on the near horizon - something desperately needed in the African world.
We may want to contemplate technology a little more critically. It provides artificial skin for burn victims, extracts tens of times more gasoline from a barrel of crude oil (yes we all need to stop driving so much), CAT scanners, MRI machines, industrial and mechanical engineering that has automated manufacturing to dramatically reduce the cost of goods, the burgeoning growth of standard of living conditions in China, India, Viet Nam, and Mexico that are leading to social revolution.
We may want to contemplate the growth of information technology that is allowing us to understand the code of the human gnome and may allow us in the near future to manipulate cell growth to cause a heart to heal itself from heart attack, or a liver to regenerate, or a body to start producing insulin again. Technology might well allow our children to live active, productive and healthy lives well towards the hypothesized natural lifespan of the human body of about 120 years.
Of course I should mention the media arts and ceramics, artistic disciplines that have benefited quite a bit from technology.
We may be surprised that the percentage of women enrolled in science and engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology is over 20% from 40 women in 1965. We may be surprised that Georgia Tech has an active program to recruit people in the arts and African Americans. At one time if not now, Georgia Tech led the nation in African-American enrollment. I expect these trends only to increase at every university. The doors are open.
* * *
Is this a technology tract I write? Am I wearing rose colored glasses? Hardly.
Will the technology be democratically dispersed, or will certain countries use it first? Almost certainly the latter will occur, but no one should doubt that the technology will diffuse rapidly. Then we will face a true theological crisis as our world rapidly fills up even faster with people draining resources.
Were we to allocate the amount of funds on clean water that we spent in Iraq over the last eight years there might well be no thirsty people, at least for water. That is our American sin.
Does anyone want to bet the innovations and threats to stabilty might well lead to the social and theological pressure that stimulates human exploration of enhanced agriculture, resource preservation, exo-earth migration and who knows what other kind of technical innovation? We may well be at the door step of the true “postmodern" era. It really depends on us.
The reality of technology is that we opened Pandora's Box a couple hundred years ago or more (think about Michelangelo). No one will pack technology away and turn back the clock. It is going to be used and unless we decide to jump in, understand and use it for our common good, we can count on it being used badly as often as well.
The reality of classical "postmodernity' is we outgrew it before it was ever more than an idea struggling for definition. It may well be a movement in search of a cause but it may also be the early voices of whatever future we are running backwards towards as fast as we can.
It is almost certainly true that we are entirely too close to the subject to know what the so-called postmodern world may look like. In my eyes, the current “postmodernity” is a burp in a social evolution driven by technological change wherein, theological and social elements must redefine the paradigm to maintain functional value both to their own belief and to guide an ever increasing technology-oriented culture.
The reality of a "reformed" theology would seem require determining how to apply its worldview to present time not just full of inventions and ethical choices inconceivable in its literal (3,000 year old) view,12 but of insight and understanding into the nature of consciousness inconceivable in its literal application. Are we to believe the God that made a world wherein such technology can exist did not intend us to learn from it and apply it and change with it?
I owe an honest word in defense of Dr. Wimberly. I do not want you to leave this essay thinking I do not respect and value his ideas (or those important ideas of the newer "reformed" theology). Edward Wimberly is not in that literal camp. He asks some very important questions although his rhetoric works against him.
Any one who doubts the unhealthy preoccupation of our social structure with dehumanizing elements such as pornography, materialism, corporate malfeasance and the loss of the extended family isn’t really being internally honest. I think we fail to recognize the counter-cultural power of theology and of many people asking the right questions to enforce positive change; and we may not acknowledge the very real loss of hope for a positive future if we do not. In the end we shape the world through our human values as long as God continues this "experiment."
Dr. Wimberly is talking about real people in need who are "living on the edge." I suspect most people live along a continuum of internalized worldviews bounded by two edges or extremes. It is easy to define the extremes where few of us actually live. The majority of us live somewhere along the line between them, the hurting live near its extremes.
One extreme is the externally directed person who holds the idea that “I am powerless in the face of society. The world/culture around me, its values, theology and politics delimit me. I cannot succeed because someone else has he power to control me.” Perhaps Michael Jackson comes to mind, or a crack addict.
The other extreme is the internally directed person who holds the idea that “I am powerful.” Nelson Mandela comes to mind but his positivism is redeeming and clearly not seated at the extreme. The “I am powerful” mindset views the world as a plastic thing that “I may shape and mold so as to achieve my objectives. My achievements depend solely on my actions and commitment to them.” It holds onto an idea that there is something of value within us that we are obligated to share with the world. I still advise my sons "be sure you leave the world with more than you took from it." Just be careful not to take the idea too far.
Both extremes have serious theological and practical problems, which is why few of us could survive in the extremes. But from a pastoral care perspective not to understand and not to be able to look through the lens of someone living in those extremes calling for help delimits one’s effectiveness as a giver of pastoral care.
When one reads Dr. Wimberly’s book carefully one sees Dr. Wimberly has identified and discussed a very important and legitimate need, the victim-culture of many in the African American lower income groups. However, I point out that the alienation he addresses isn’t specifically racial. Many people are so alienated and live on the edge.
Bibliography
1. Heller, Joseph, Something Happened, Alfred A. Knopf, NY (1974)
2. Wimberly, Edward P., African American Pastoral Care and Counseling, The politics of Oppression and Empowerment, The Pilgrim Press, Cleveland, 2006. See for example pages 131ff.
3. Several good reviews of the Luddite movement are available, see, for example, Sale, Kirkpatrick. Reading, Addison-Wesley Pub. Co, (1996), or review the Wikipedia summary for other citations to begin an examination.
4. McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, MIT Press, Boston,1994 (a republication of the 1964 original)
5. McLuhhan, Marshal, http://thinkexist.com/quotation/the_past_went_that-a-way-when_faced_with_a/152841.html
6. Taylor, Mark. After God, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago (2007), Chapter 5, p. 216. Also refer to summaries of comments by artist Joseph Beuys.
7. McLuhan, Marshall, http://thinkexist.com/quotation/art_is_anything_you_can_get_away_with/215230.html
8. Gallagher, Kenneth, The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, Fordham University Press, New York (1962). See for example, chapter II.
9. Solanas, Valerie, SCUM Manifesto, AK Press, 1996. (Also available online at http://gos.sbc.edu/s/solanas.html.)
10. Benson, Richard, The Just War Theory: A Traditional Catholic Moral View, Tidings (2006).
11. For a good counter argument to the just war theory see, Brimlow, Robert W., What About Hitler, Brazos Press (2006)
12. A number of resources describe the so-called new "reformed theology" which its holders would call the "old" reformed theology. For a start one is referred to this web site: http://www.monergism.com/directory/link_category/Reformed-Theology/Essays/
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