Transcript Preaching 2 - Erskine College

PREACHING TO
POSTMODERNS:
The Problem
MODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• American culture is the dominant
culture in the world today
• Consider how the world been
influenced by our pop culture
– MTV
– Hollywood
– Apple, Sony, Dell
– MGM/Universal
– FOX and CNN
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MODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• “During the 20th century, mass
entertainment extended the reach of
American culture, reversing the direction
of influence as Europe and the world
became consumers of American popular
culture. America became the dominant
cultural source for entertainment and
popular fashion, from the jeans and Tshirts young people wear to the music
groups and rock stars they listen to and
the movies they see.
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MODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• People all over the world view American
television programs, often years after the
program’s popularity has declined in the
United States. American television has
become such an international fixture
that American news broadcasts help define
what people in other countries know about
current events and politics. American
entertainment is probably one of the
strongest means by which American
culture influences the world . . . .”
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/RefArticle.aspx?refid=1741500820&pn=2
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MODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• Consider the influence of
Hollywood on “McWorld”
• “Thus while in 1972 only 86 or one-third of
the 255 foreign films shown in West
Germany were American, by 1991, 162 or
nearly two-thirds of 262 foreign films were
American. In Europe today [1996],
American films account for about
85% of the revenue- about $1.7 billion
of the $2 billion in box office receipts.”
Barber, Jihad Vs. McWorld, 93
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MODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• Benjamin Barber, Rutgers Poli-Sci
professor, describes the Americaspawned, globalized, consumer based
economy as “McWorld.”
• “McWorld’s denizens are consumers
and clients whose freedom consists of
the right to buy in markets they
cannot control and whose identity is
imposed on them by a consumerism
they scarcely notice.”
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MODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• “The style marketed is uniquely
American yet potentially global since,
for the corporations in a quite literal
sense, we are the world. To the
world, America offers an incoherent
and contradictory but seductive style .
. . : youthful, rich urban, austere
cowboy, Hollywood glamorous, Garden
of Eden unbounded, goodwilled to a
fault, socially aware, politically correct
. . . ” Barber, Jihad Vs. McWorld, 61
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MODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• “For America’s largest
brand-name consumer
goods corporations like Coca-Cola,
Marlboro, KFC, Nike, Hershey, Levi’s,
Pepsi, Wrigley, or McDonald’s, selling
American products means selling
America: its pop culture, its putative
prosperity, its ubiquitous imagery and
software, and thus its very soul.”
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MODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• “Not long after World War II, Victor
Lebow recognized that ‘Our
enormously productive economy . . .
demands that we make consumption
our way of life, that we convert the
buying and selling of goods into
rituals, that we seek our spiritual
satisfaction, our ego satisfaction,
in consumption.’” Barber, Jihad Vs. McWorld, 223
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MODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• American GDP (Gross Domestic Product)
for 2006 is expected to be 13.5 trillion
• European Union GDP, for 2005, was 13.5
trillion
• Or, to make another comparison, the American
GDP in 2005 was equal to the combined GDP of
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Japan
China
Canada
South Korea
Brazil
India
Mexico, and
Russia
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MODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• Truth? Or Fiction. Consider this:
• “The TV ‘needs’ the VCR, which ‘needs’
a laser disc player, which ‘needs’ a
computer, which ‘needs’ endless
software.”
• Barber calls this, ‘modern man’s
conundrum.’ “The more powerful he
becomes, the more miserable he feels.
All that we have only serves to make us
‘need’ more . . . .”
Barber, Jihad Vs. McWorld, 41
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MODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• “ . . . today’s ‘pop hedonism,’ cult of instant
joy, fun morality, and the generalized
confusion between self-realization and
simple self-gratification, has its origin not in
the culture of modernism but in capitalism
as a system that, born from the Protestant
work ethic, could develop only by
encouraging consumption, social mobility,
and status seeking . . . .”
– Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 7
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MODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without
constantly revolutionizing the instruments of
production, and thereby the relations of
production, and with them the whole relations
of society. Conservation of the old modes of
production in unaltered form was, on the
contrary, the first condition of existence for all
earlier industrial classes. Constant
revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted
disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty, and agitation distinguish the
bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
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MODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train
of ancient and venerable prejudices and
opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. All
that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned, and man is at last compelled to face
with sober senses his real conditions of life
and his relations with his kind. The need of a
constantly expanding market for its products
chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface
of the globe.”
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POSTMODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• “The reality is that modern consumption is
not simply about shopping because what
we are buying is not simply goods and
services. Modern consumption is about
buying meaning for ourselves. It is about
the way we construct ourselves, the
vantage point from which we want to look
at the world. . . . What was once just a
matter of producing goods has become a
way of producing culture and meaning . .
.”
– Wells, Above All Earthly Powers, 77
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POSTMODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• “It is quite striking, then, to note the
parallels between post-modern habits
of mind and the realities which have
come to mark our highly formed
capitalism: volatility, obsolescence,
the rapid passing of fashions and
ideas, the disappearance of stability,
constant revision, repackaging,
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POSTMODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• the new look, the newer than new
product, the future always looming over
the present. The postmodern mind is a
reflection of this high capitalism, and it is
probably this high capitalism, as much as
postmodern argument, which is bringing
down the Enlightenment belief about
stable, fixed, and unchanging
metanarratives.”
– Wells, Above All Earthly Powers, 77
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POSTMODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• “Given all the choice in the West today,
then, the awareness of difference and of
diversity, the pluralism and plasticity of
life, it seems highly implausible that there
is any such metanarrative, any such
central and single meaning, or viable and
compelling worldview. All that we have is
our own, individual petite histoire, our on
story, a story no more compelling than
anyone else’s and no more true.”
– Wells, Above All Earthly Powers, 78
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POSTMODERNITY: Homo Economicus
• “It is modernity itself, and the consumer
society which arose from its loins, which
has finally pulled down its own false
universals. . . . what is called postmodern
is really a crisis within modernity even if
postmodern thinkers want to take credit
for this accomplishment. There is now no
narrative which connects together the
events of life into a single form of
meaning.”
– Wells, Above All Earthly Powers, 79
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Karl Marx,
Manifesto of the
Communist Party, 1848
WHAT IS THE
PROBLEM?
THE PROBLEM
• “As theologian Langdon Gilkey puts
it, ‘An autumnal chill is in the air;
its similarity to the chill in other
periods of cultural decline is
undeniable.’”
–Walsh and Middleton, Truth is
Stranger Than It Used to Be, 25
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THE PROBLEM
• “As we approach the end of the
twentieth century, modernity is in
radical decline. Its legitimating
myths are no longer believed with
any conviction.”
–Walsh and Middleton, Truth is
Stranger Than It Used to Be, 25
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THE PROBLEM
• “It is not as if people fear
clearly defined threats. Rather,
it feels as if our whole culture
has the willies.”
–Walsh and Middleton, Truth is
Stranger Than It Used to Be, 25
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THE PROBLEM
• “During the last few decades the
antinomian and deliberately
deviant patterns of modernist
imagination have not only won out
culturally but have been adopted
practically and translated into the
life style of an increasingly large
intellectual minority.”
–Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 6
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THE PROBLEM
• “Parallel to this process, the
traditional ideal of bourgeois life,
with its concerns for sobriety and
rationality, has lost its cultural
champions and has reached the
point where it simply can no longer
be taken seriously.”
–Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 6
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THE PROBLEM
• “What we have today is a radical
disjunction of culture and social structure,
and it is such disjunctions which historically
have paved the way for more direct social
revolutions . . . . The post-modernist
temper demands that what was previously
played out in fantasy and imagination must
be acted out in life as well. There is no
distinction between art and life.”
– Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of
Capitalism, quoted in Calinescu, Five Faces of
Modernity, 7
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THE PROBLEM
• “John Dominic Crossan puts it this way: ‘There is
no lighthouse keeper. There is no lighthouse.
There is no dry land. There are only people living
on rafts made from their own imaginations. And
there is the sea.’ The modern era began with
Columbus setting out to sea. He seemed to have
had at least some idea as to where he was going.
As that epoch ends and a postmodern era begins
we find ourselves again at sea. But this time we
have no navigational assistance and no direction.
We are alone, adrift in a postmodern world.”
– Walsh and Middleton, Truth is Stranger Than It Used to Be, 62
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THE PROBLEM
• “Suppose we think of a man made of water in an
infinitely extended and bottomless ocean of water.
Desiring to get out of water, he makes a ladder of
water. He sets this ladder upon the water and
against the water and then attempts to climb out
of the water. So hopeless and senseless a picture
must be drawn of the natural man’s methodology
based as it is upon the assumption that time or
chance is ultimate. On his assumption his own
rationality is a product of chance. On his
assumption even the laws of logic which he
employs are products of chance. The rationality
and purpose that he may be searching for are still
bound to be products of chance.” C. Van Til
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PREACHING TO
POSTMODERNS:
The Problem