Getting to the Point: post-modernity

Showing posts with label post-modernity. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Why People Are Nervous

Today it seems as though language had been robbed of its forgetfulness: every word is present somewhere in the general noise of words around us. In the general noise of words everything emerges for a moment, only to disappear again. Everything is there at the same time and yet not there at all.

There is no longer any present immediacy of the word and therefore no forgetting. Forgetting is no longer done by man directly but proceeds outside his control in the general noise of words jostling one with another.

But that is not a forgetting at all, but merely a disappearing. And so there is no forgiving either in the world today; since now one can never get rid of a word or a thing, it is always bound to turn up again somewhere. And it is also a fact that one never really has a word or a thing today—and that is why people are so nervous.

Max Picard, The World of Silence

Reflection - I have been working my way through this wonderful book, and periodically have shared some of its nuggets on this blog. This one in particular seems almost eerily prophetic—Max Picard invents the Internet! There are so many choice phrases here that almost exactly describe the world of information today: ‘Everything is there at the same time and yet not there at all… the general noise of words jostling one with another... now one can never get rid of a word or a thing, it is always bound to turn up again somewhere… that is why people are so nervous.’

Well, yes. And almost cliché to say these things nowadays, but this book was written in 1948. To be both constantly engulfed in words and yet at the same time never have them, to be both incapable of forgetting (and hence forgiving) since the Internet is forever, and yet at the same time incapable of remembering, since the rush of words continually races past us (not forgotten, but disappearing)—this is Internet culture, 2015.

And it is unacceptable. Inhuman, and hence incapable of aiding us to be made divine by God’s grace. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us—language is meant to serve its divine purpose always in the end of communion of persons, always towards becoming ‘flesh’ and making our flesh, our concrete experience of life, a communion of love.

Language as a ceaseless flow of binary information across a flat screen is the anti-Incarnation. Language as a roar of verbiage, a clamor and clash of agendas, a fighting for a slight fleeting flicker of attention from the mob, ultimately language as click-bait in the service of generating advertising revenue—this is a perversion of what it is to be. Language is degraded from a quest for truth and understanding ordered towards communion and love to being, essentially, a sales pitch.

In this time of the Synod on the Family, I am concerned to see that roar of language, that clamor and clash and base sophistry of marketing and sales being used to ‘talk about’ (well, sort of) that which is truly a sacred matter, a holy thing. Both the realities of sex, marriage, and family life, but also the reality of the human person made in God’s image, broken by sin but redeemed in Christ—this is the true subject matter of the Synod.

There is a real profanation of the holy, a desecration of God’s image, when the inchoate howl of Internet chatter and punditry engulfs these conversations. I am not talking about the Synod itself—the Pope has decided we need a synod to talk about these things, and I am praying for that synod and doing my best to follow its actual deliberations.

It is the constant blah-blah-blah, the hand wringing, the claxon sounding, the sounding of the alarum against ‘those horrible modernists’ or ‘those horrible traditionalists’, against Kasper or Erdo, Marx or Sarah, the calls to action, the ‘deep concerns and confusion’ of this writer or that writer, the apocalyptic fears on that website or the triumphalist yells on another—all of this is more than divisive and distasteful.

It is sacrilegious. Yes, strong language and so forth. I don’t care. Language is debased and in that debasing of language, actual human beings are damaged, the path of salvation in Christ is obscured, the way of truth and love in the world is made hard to find and ultimately souls beloved of God are made to stumble and fall from that way. And that is scandal, in the exact sense of the word.

So there is a Synod going on. Let us pray for it. Let us address ourselves to our own call to live faithfully the mysteries of family, love, and human sexuality according to our own vocations. And let us otherwise be still and silent. I will not be blogging about the Synod, for the reasons given in this blog post, nor will I be taking any interest in the commentary on same in the media, social or otherwise. And I encourage you to do the same.

Sunday, September 20, 2015

At War With Oceania, Again

Without truth language would be a general fog of words above the silence; without truth it would collapse into an indistinct murmuring. It is truth that makes language clear and firm. The line separating the true from the false is the support that holds language back from falling. Truth is the scaffolding that gives language an independent foothold over against silence.

Language becomes a world of its own, as we have said already; and language now has not only a world behind it—the world of silence, but a world near at hand—the world of truth.

The word of truth must keep in rapport with silence, however, for without it truth would be too harsh and too hard. It would then seem as though there were only one single truth, since the austerity of the individual truth would suggest a denial of the inter-relatedness of all truth. The essential point about truth is that it all hangs together in an all-embracing context.

Max Picard, The World of Silence

Reflection – I’ve had this quote staring at me on my computer for quite awhile now. Of course, this used to be my normal way of blogging – provide a quote, discuss the quote, and I still like to do that on occasion.

This section of Picard’s book, which I have excerpted from time to time on the blog, is very much in his typical style—not so much a tight logical argument as a sort of meditative series of assertions around a subject—language, truth, and silence—to draw the reader into contemplation of these things. It is an unusual way of writing, but very effective.

A week or so ago I wrote a post wondering what the meaning of the word ‘gender’ was, in light of the breakdown of normative, anatomy-based male-female gender polarity. I don’t especially care to revisit that subject—one of the simple facts of my life is that, while I barely have time to maintain this blog, I really don’t have time to engage in long debates on-line around controversial and complex matters.

But this question of language and its relationship to truth is the deeper question yet, it seems to me, in this and in many other tough questions of our day. And this is why we cannot skip those hard philosophical matters in service of some apparent good done to others.

When language is no longer flowing from truth, when there is no longer a concern for the rigorous application of reason to the words we use to make sure that we are talking sense, then language not only ‘collapses’ as Picard says, but in the wreckage of its collapse the remaining shards of language only serve one purpose, and that is the acquisition and maintaining of power.

George Orwell had it all figured out: 'we have always been at war with Oceania'. So did Plato, in his controversies with the sophists. When words are no longer at the service of attaining truth, then they are only good for attaining power. It really is one thing or the other. Moral relativists who are uncomfortable with claims of absolute truth and our capacity to know the same have to confront that a world in which we cannot know the truth is a world where whoever has the loudest voice (and perhaps the money and guns to back it up) imposes their ‘truth’, or at least their agenda on the rest of us.

Power and its misuse as tyranny has always been with us. The mythical caveman with his club was not so much winning a debate with his inarticulate grunts, but rather taking a more direct approach with things.

I would argue that the whole project of civilization is the counterbalancing of power politics and dominance by the disciplined and ordered pursuit of truth. The speaking of ‘truth to power’ is not something invented in 1968, but is the key act which prevents our world from descending to the brutality of tyranny.

And that is why assaults on free speech on the one hand, and assaults on assaults on reason and disciplined debate on the other (the various schools of critical theory and deconstructionism that explicitly assert language to be naught but a tool of power and privilege) are a return to barbarism, and must be vigorously resisted.

That is what Pope Benedict meant when he talked about the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, and his words have become no less relevant in the ten years since he introduced that phrase.

I will get back to the second part of Picard’s quote tomorrow (sorry, Monday Psalter fans!), about silence as the counterbalance of truth-language. But for now, the main point I am making is that words matter, and it matters that our words make sense, and if we abandon the serious duties of truth and coherence we are opening a Pandora’s box of jackbooted nonsense—truth coming from the barrel of a gun and two plus two equals five because I say so and I have the power now, sucker. That kind of thing is what we have to fight against, and it is indeed more and more the way of our post-modern discourse.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

The People of the Word

I am writing a commentary on the Mass each Thursday on this blog. After six posts on the Entrance Rite, which takes all of five-ten minutes in a normal parish Mass, we have now reached the Liturgy of the Word.

This of course is one of the two principle parts of the Mass, the other obviously being the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Before diving into the specifics of it, then, it is necessary to discuss the general meaning of this liturgy, and of the Word in our lives. It is not only in the Mass that the proclamation of the Word precedes the celebration of the sacrament—this is how every rite of the Church proceeds.

This highlights a central fact of the Christian religion. We are not exactly ‘People of the Book’, as is sometimes said. In our Catholic understanding of things, there is more to it than that. We are, however, intensely and profoundly, People of the Word. People of the Revealed Truth.

This means that we do not get to make up reality. Reality—truth—is received, first. The basic structure of all our liturgy—hear the Word, celebrate the reality—is the structure of all Christian life.

We hear the Word so as to live the Mystery. The structure, meaning, purpose, origin, goal of reality is first shown to us in the revealed Word of God who is Jesus Christ, and then we live this reality out in the life of love and mercy, service and prayer.

This is so utterly of the essence. And yet it is precisely here that many of us go wrong on a regular basis. We know (most of the readers of this blog, anyhow) that this is exactly where secular modernity is flagrantly wrong. Just for example, making up new definitions of man, woman, marriage every day.

Or, as we have all seen these past week, deciding that the unborn human being is nothing but a clump of cells, but then turning around to sell at a tidy profit human livers, hearts, brains from those ‘cells’ for medical research. Then efforts to discuss that grisly fact put us back into ‘it’s just a clump of cells’ territory again. That sort of thing—reality is what I say it is, and can change and change again at a moment’s notice for my convenience. Post-modernity in a nutshell.

But we who profess Christianity need to be very careful about our own minds and hearts in this, too. There is a video making the rounds in MH right now—I can’t seem to track it down on YouTube right now, but will post it on the blog when I do. It is interviews with the families of the recent 20 Coptic men killed in Libya for being Christians. All of the wives, parents, siblings of these young men are unanimous in this video in expressing forgiveness, compassion, and a prayer for conversion of heart for the Islamist murderers of their beloved husbands, sons, brothers. And a resolute willingness to suffer the same fate, if Jesus Christ asked it of them, too.

It is a powerful video, especially since all of these people seem to be fairly poor, ordinary folks. But that’s what people look like when they have received the Word of God into their lives at a deep level. Here in North America we are far too prone to profess Christianity but then live out of the prevailing ideologies or political allegiances or the fads of the day.

We are far too prone to say, in much less extreme circumstances than those Copts, “Well, I’m a Catholic, but… you can’t expect me to love my enemies, can you?" Well, Jesus does expect us to do that very thing. His Word is crystal clear on the point, in fact. “I’m a Catholic, but we have to go along with the world—you don’t expect me to be ridiculed, mocked, maybe even fined or jailed for expressing unpopular truth, do you?” Again, Jesus’ Word is very clear on that point, and a true People of the Word would not even ask that question.

And care for the poor—too many of us subscribe either to the shibboleths of the left where the answer to poverty is one more bloated government program run by anonymous bureaucrats and funded by anonymous tax dollars, or the shibboleths of the right where it’s the poor’s own damn fault for being poor, and I worked hard for my money so I’m keeping it, so there. Personal charity, personal involvement, personal generosity to the point where it hurts, where it entails some sacrifice, a lower standard of living, say? Whoever heard of that? Again, a People of the Word would know Who has not only heard of that, but commanded it of us.

Well, we need to be ‘worded’ and ‘re-worded’ continually, then. This is the true role of praying with Scripture in our lives, a role I have highlighted in my book Idol Thoughts, that we need to continually plant the Word into our minds and hearts like seed in soil, like yeast in bread, live salve into a wound. Work it in, allow the Word to heal us, grow in us, reshape us into the image of Christ.

It is only a people who are daily worded and re-worded by the Word who can then proceed to live the Eucharistic mystery of transforming sacrificial love. But that is where the Word takes us, and next week we will start to look at just how it does that in the action of the liturgy and in the action of our own lives.

Monday, June 15, 2015

Reality Bends

I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry.

He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog,

and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.

He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.

Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord.

Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust,

who does not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after a lie!

You have multiplied, O Lord my God,

your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us;

none can compare with you!

I will proclaim and tell of them, yet they are more than can be told.

In sacrifice and offering you have not delighted, but you have given me an open ear.

Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required.

Then I said, “Behold, I have come; in the scroll of the book it is written of me:

I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.”

I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation;

behold, I have not restrained my lips, as you know, O Lord.

I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart;

I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;..

But may all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you;

may those who love your salvation say continually, “Great is the Lord!”

As for me, I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought for me.

You are my help and my deliverer; do not delay, O my God.

Psalm 40

Reflection – The ‘30’ series in the psalms has been, I will admit, kind of a rough one—lots of psalms of distress and anguish and cries of lamentation. All of that is part of life, and so all of it enters into the psalms which capture the whole of human life. But… it has been a bit of a rough go.

Things are looking up here with Psalm 40! This is one of the most beautiful psalms in the psalter, full of many poetic images that resonate deeply in our spiritual lives. “He drew me from the pit… set my feet upon a rock… put a new song in my mouth’ And then, later on, ‘Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required… I delight to do your will, O my God, your law is in my heart.’

And so on and so forth—a truly lovely psalm of deliverance and praise expressed in obediential love. The Letter to the Hebrews explicitly puts these words into the mouth of the Son of God coming into the world (Heb 10:5-7). And because our life is in Christ and Christ is our life, these words are ours, then, in a very particular way.

Obedience—the word we shy away from, the word that in our post-modern world is so very anathema to us. We are supposed to be able to create our own reality now, to decide for ourselves just what is true, what is false, what is good, what is evil. That these things should, and in fact do, come to us from outside ourselves, and that our fundamental response in life is to obey, to submit, to bow down before realities we did not make, cannot change, cannot control, but to which we are called to make a response, to act in concert with this God who is the author of all that is—this is (we are told) deeply repugnant to many people today.

Well, reality may bend, but it doesn’t break. And we can only bend it so far before it lashes back at us. We can choose contraception and abortion over many decades, but then we cannot choose not to live in an aging and bankrupt society. We can choose euthanasia, then, to get rid of all the expensive old people (let’s be honest – that’s what the push for it is about now), but there will be unintended consequences arising from that as well.

Reality bends, but it doesn’t break, and when we choose to shape reality according to our devices and desires, it will eventually break us. Meanwhile, God awaits for patiently, too, to pull us from the pit of destruction and the miry bog and to make our lives secure on the rock.

The rock is Christ who is Truth, and the result of living in truth is to live in praise, gratitude, and a new song that never grows old. And out of that song, a great desire to tell all the assembly of the saving power of God. So let us pray for the grace and courage, first to obey God and know His power in our lives saving us, and then to be evangelizers proclaiming this power to all our post-modern brothers and sisters, who need to hear about this, don’t you think?