Marshall McLuhan was by training and temperament a paragon
of the 20th-Century, text-centered, literary man. A less likely prophet of post-literate
culture is hard to imagine.[1]
But in the fifties and sixties he understood better than anyone what was
happening to the collective psyche because of the huge impact of electronic
technologies on human consciousness. He told us then, what will become more
apparently true as we move more deeply into the 21st century, that
we are currently undergoing a major transition of one historical era into
another, not unlike the passing from the medieval era to the modern, or earlier
from classical antiquity into the medieval age.
For this reason, he agreed with those who felt that the West
was in decline is real, but he didn’t think of it as something to lament. He
saw it as part of a longer-term historical process. Our current decline doesn’t
mean the end of civilization, as social conservatives seem to think; it just
means the end of an age. Something new will arise; it always does. And as
always it will not be unambiguously good or unambiguously evil. But it will also open up new
possibilities for the human spirit.
What lies in the future is impossible to predict, but it was
axiomatic for McLuhan that as generals are always fighting the last war, most
humans habitually envision the future in terms of the past, and as a result we
don’t easily see what’s coming. We
tend to misperceive the new as a variation on something old. Or we simply don’t see it at all—it’s
simply invisible as a phenomenon that doesn’t fit into our habitual perceptual
frame. And so a corollary to his
rear-view mirror axiom is that the assumptions humans carry now that shape
their perceptions about the “real world” are old habits of mind that will be
gradually replaced by new ones generation by generation. The real world as it appears to us is
not the real world as it appeared to our ancestors; nor is it the world as it
will appear to those in the future.
Our situation now would be similar to that of a hypothetical
observer during the reign of Louis XIV during which absolute monarchy defined
the real world. Let’s say he would have been shrewd enough to point out that
the days of the ancien regime were
numbered and that the bourgeoisie were already in the culture’s driver’s seat.
In retrospect we see that he would have been right to say so, but to have said
it then would have made sense to hardly anyone because the collective
perceptual frame defining the real world was still shaped by medieval
habits. The habits and attitudes
of the old medieval paradigm persisted well into the modern era, but the energy
that was then shaping the future lay in the new ‘modern’ impulse driven by the
interests of the emergent bourgeoisie.
Although the Medieval Age in the West died in the 15th
century, its complete decay took several more centuries to complete. In the same way, even though the Modern
Age died in the 20th, its habits of mind will persist well into the
future. Nietzsche, the first postmodern[2],
announced its end toward the close of the nineteenth century; it took others
like T.S. Eliot until after World War I to recognize that he was right. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” had such a huge
literary impact when it was written in the 1920s because it articulated on so
many levels for cultured Europeans what had become of their civilization. The cultural forms remained, but the
soul that animated them had withered away. We in the West have since then been
wandering in Eliot’s wasteland, and while it is a bleak place, the wilderness
is where we go when we have need to strip ourselves of old habits so that we
might meet God. Our ideas about
him may grow old and die, but he arises when we least expect him.
The wilderness is an in-between place, a
neither-here-nor-there place, neither in Egypt nor yet Canaan, and our culture
is there now. We are neither in the Modern nor whatever comes next. We’re in the Postmodern[3],
and it is truly a wilderness—and
our passage in it will be temporary. The question is whether we wander
with purpose or whether we wander because we’re just lost. And we are lost if we wander without
some hope of reaching a destination. The ancient Israelites wandered in the
wilderness in order to shed their Egyptian habits as a preparation to live
something radically different from their life in Egypt. And so similarly our
wandering now should be understood as a shedding of old habits in preparation
for something similarly new.
In our wasteland wandering we are neither here nor there. We
feel it mostly as a condition in which we lack a culture-wide aspiration toward
something that is transcendently noble. Yeats pointed to this in one of his
most famous poems, also written in the twenties, which suggested that ours is
an age in which the “best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of
passionate intensity.” The best lack conviction because there is no imagination
of noble aspiration for them; there is only raw desire—it doesn’t matter for
what: sex, power, money. The worst are our heroes now because the ones who know
what they want and are passionate in its pursuit have a charisma and excitement
about them, and who cannot but admire it?
People understandably choose the regressive tendencies in
their human nature if there is no nobler imagination of possibility for their
lives to inspire them. The Modern Age has ended, and its Enlightenment humanism
and optimism have become as quaint as the medieval view of the saint. Both
medieval and modern ideals continue to echo in our time, but faintly. For any
aspiration, if it is driven by an idealism that transcends the sex-money-power
motivations that “realists” recognize as the only “honest” drivers of human
behavior, is looked upon with ironic derision. This kind of cynicism is symptomatic of a culture in decay,
a culture that doesn’t know what to believe anymore, a culture afraid to aspire
to something “more” for fear of deluding itself with false hopes.
We are at the end of something and the beginning of
something. Jacques Barzun in From Dawn to Decadence,[4]
his wonderful book about the birth, flourishing, and dying of the Modern Age,
uses the word decadence in a non-pejorative way. For him the word simply describes objectively the end of
something that once flourished. “When people accept futility and the absurd as
normal,“ he writes, “the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur, it is a technical label.” Decadence,
he says, “. . . implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or
talent or moral sense. On the
contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns but peculiarly
restless for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility.”
It is difficult enough to have to wander in the wilderness,
but to do so without any hope of future possibility, of eventually arriving
somewhere better, is unbearable. This was the harsh truth as Nietzsche saw it, and his
response was to develop an imagination of a new kind of human being who could
flourish without hope, and he called him the Uebermensch or Superman. For Nietzsche
Christian civilization was a disaster in its having produced the anemic
bourgeois, the hollow-chested, slavish Last Man, whose aspirations were
entirely circumscribed by a love of safety and comfort. So he envisioned the Superman as its
antithesis. It was an idea whose time had come, but not with particularly
salubrious consequences.
When talk of Nietzsche’s Superman comes up, everyone thinks
of the way the Nazis appropriated it, and we could point to many of the doleful
ways in which Nietzsche’s philosophy, fairly or unfairly, has been adapted to
justify excessively pathological behaviors. But the fact remains that we see the basic Superman/Last Man
complex celebrated in almost every film that comes out of Hollywood. The protagonist, whether he’s an action
hero, or even the more innocuous free-spirited types that for instance Jack
Nicholson portrays in One Flew over the
Cuckoo’s Nest or Matthew Broderick in Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off, is a variation of Nietzsche’s Uebermensch. He is formulaically depicted as a
larger-than-life, make-up-the-rules-as-you-go-along Superman who always fights
a villain who represents the repressive, conformist law of the Last Man. Every plot that pits the alienated,
risk-taking, bold individual against the soul-crushing ”system” is a variation
on this Nietzschean theme. The American adaptation of Nietzsche’s Superman is
hardly perceived as pathological.
Rather in one variation or another, he is as the charismatic passionate
man we described above. He’s in
touch with his instincts, he knows what he wants, and he thinks that rules are
for lesser beings, namely the Last-Man wimps[5]
who lack his boldness and initiative.
So it would be wrong to say that within American culture
there is no imagination of noble aspiration, but we see such a human being
almost exclusively through the Nietzschean lens. And whatever we might understandably admire about his
bravado and his refusal to submit to the oppressor, the basic
complex—Superman/Last Man—leads to a nihilistic dead end. There is no future in his world. He is a tragic figure whose essential
nobility, like Camus’ Mersault, lies in his defiance despite its pointlessness,
for life is a nothing more than a pointless groping. His nobility lies in his futile assertion of Self against
the pointlessness and against all of the forces that otherwise seek to crush
him. And so the Superman is a hero to those who identify with him as someone
like him trapped in history and who can entertain no hope of ever breaking
out. And that, of course, was
Nietzsche’s view—that we are all caught in an eternal historical loop, a closed
circle from which there is no escape.
And in the lives of people like Nietzsche and Camus we do
encounter rare souls who were tragically heroic in this sense. But the culture has taken them as types
and vulgarized them into something very far in spirit from their austere
dignity they strove to attain. I
think it’s a fair to say that contemporary mainstream culture in the West has
adopted the Nietzschean understanding that time is closed circle. But the Uebermensch ethic to live
boldly and defiantly has devolved into the Hollywood ethic to live
extravagantly. Rather than living
authentically, stoically in a world without hope, the vulgarized superman
strives to realize some dissolute, tawdry dream. And it’s no wonder that our cultural icons are the likes of
J. Lo or the rapper outlaw—or any among a wide assortment of sports and
entertainment-industry bad-boy/girl celebrities. For to live as a Superman requires simply that he or she
live beyond good and evil.
Such concepts are, after
all, only arbitrary constructions designed by the Last-Man majority who wants
everything tidy and safe. “Chill. I’m a hero, not a villain. I’m a superman, not a Last Man.” If
they’re not some rapper’s lyrics, they’re the subtext for almost all of them.
This is a very seductive narrative, and its works hand in
hand with the Darwinian narrative for which likewise there are no rules but the
logic of adaptation and survival. And he who survives best is the one who has
the most sex, the most money, and the most power. Any alternative offered by
the religious traditions looks too much like the Last-Man option. I’m not
saying that everyone who lives within a more traditional moral framework is a
Last Man. Many, many people live
admirably authentic lives of quiet dignity and decency. But when it comes to shaping the
culture’s future, they are the ones who lack all conviction, and the culture
follows where those with passionate intensity lead.
This jungle wilderness has become the real world in our day,
and our wandering in it seems to be the only possibility. To imagine other possibilities outside
of it has become extraordinarily difficult. But in this book I assume that this
imagination of the “real world” derives from a loss of perspective. I remember feeling so sick once that I
was sure I was going to die, and it was clear to me that anyone who said
otherwise was either delusional or just hiding the truth from me. But once the fever passed it became
clear that it was I who was delusional.
God knows that where we are in history right now is not conducive to the
health of the soul, but neither is there reason to despair. Things change. Spring follows winter. Was there a
darker period in European history than the fourteenth century with its plagues
and schisms and wars? The whole
world seemed to be unraveling and yet the next century brought the Renaissance,
one of the most glorious cultural springtimes experienced in the history of the
West.
For the unraveling of the old is a necessary step helping us
to prepare for the advent of the new.
The trick now is to develop a new perceptual frame that will help us to
see the signs of the burgeoning new.
In springtime when everything is sprouting in the garden, it’s hard to
tell which are the seedlings of the weeds and which are the seedlings of the
desirable plants we want to cultivate.
When we look around us now at the wide array of seedling cultural
impulses, the same is true. We need now to watch patiently, carefully, as they
develop. And surely there are some now that have germinated but which have not
yet broken through the surface, and perhaps one or another of them will shape
our future in ways now that are impossible to predict. History has a tendency to take a sharp
turn when you least expect it.
So I sympathize with the critique of social conservatives
regarding the present state of contemporary culture. But I think they are wrong in their nostalgic prescriptions
for a cure. The sixties was not an
era of unmitigated disasters, as they like to point out. The sixties were for America what the
twenties were for Europe—a time when it realized for all that was wonderful
about the Modern Age, its enlightenment ideals and scientific and technological
advancements, it had died. It no
longer had the vigor to offer human beings a vision of Possibility. The putrefaction that the conservatives
smell is not the new that arose in the sixties, but of the rotting carcass of
the old. All of the things
conservatives hate most about contemporary culture are the shadow side of those
things they most admire about the bourgeois culture that they seek to preserve.
But the rotting old thing fertilizes the incipient new.
There is no healthy way to go back to what was. The solution to our present ills does
not lie in looking primarily backwards.
The solution lies in what comes to us from the future. Whatever remains to us from the past
that has value is the fruit of those of our ancestors who knew how to live into
the future in the right way. I’ll
explain more clearly what I mean by this in Chapter X in which I talk about the
difference between nostalgia and retrieval, but my point now is that we cannot
develop a healthy relationship to what comes to us from the past without first
developing a healthy relationship to the future. That relationship, correctly understood, is the formula for
renaissance.
* * *
Nietzsche and, more obviously, Darwin define the cultural
narrative that dominates the West in our time. The older Enlightenment and Christian narratives remain, but
like shadows in the background. I am concerned that people of faith, despite
their having the resources to frame one, have not yet developed a compelling
vision of future possibility for the earth that is robust enough to compete
with the Nietzschean/Darwinian narrative. As the world’s cultures now move
toward a global fusion culture, developing according to the tradition-killing
logic of the modern impulse run amok, it needs an alternative imagination of
future possibility. And central to
such a narrative should be an imagination of transcendence that has an
historical dimension.
By “transcendence” I mean the superabundant “more” to which
the traditional word “grace” points as its source. Grace is that which comes to us from outside of the closed
circle. But grace is something
that we have always thought of as operating as if on a vertical axis connecting
us below with God above, and as a spatial metaphor it provides one angle of
approach to its truth—that there is a reality outside of the circle that seeks
continuously to penetrate into it. The spatial metaphor by itself, though,
tends to reinforce the classical idea of transcendence as something that draws
us out of the cycles of time, and to suggest that the really real is a
spiritual world located elsewhere in some eternal and changeless dimension. In
the classical imagination, there are the endless cycles of time within the
circle, and eternity outside of it.
It accepts Nietzsche’s view of the closed circle, although it insists
that it is possible to escape from it. Escape is the only goal.
And surely the spatial metaphor points to a spiritual
dimension of reality that I want in no way to suggest is unreal. But Christian thought, so profoundly
influenced by the classical cosmology, has emphasized the spatial metaphor,
while its scriptures have emphasized a temporal or historical metaphor. The
problem lies in that if taken alone the spatial metaphor diminishes the
importance of the earth and of its history. It promotes the idea that history is a prison from which we
must escape; it is maya or a place of exile, and the whole point of human
spiritual endeavor is to break out of it.
And so the problem for spiritually oriented people today, whether they
are at home in the traditions of the East or West, lies in that insofar as
their narrative emphasizes the traditional spatial metaphor, they tend to frame
their spiritual aspirations in purely personal, non-historical, and
other-worldly terms.
The spiritual task of redemption is rarely seen as
transpersonal historical task and as one that involves all the earth and
everything that exists on it. St. Paul suggests otherwise:[6]
Salvation is not just for human beings.
Nor is it exclusively a divine task. If it were only a task for the
divine, God needn’t have incarnated as a human. Salvation is something that can be accomplished only with
human hands, even if it required that God become human to get the project
started.
So the spatial metaphor for transcendence needs to be supplemented
by a metaphor that embraces time.
We need to imagine transcendence now in a way that envisions it in the
historical horizontal as well as in the eternal vertical. Karl Rahner talks about God as the
Absolute Future. Teilhard de Chardin envisioned Christ as the Omega Point
toward which all history aspires. Own Barfield talks about history as a vast
unfolding drama extending between the Alpha of Original Participation and the
Omega of Final Participation. What
if we were to imagine grace as not coming only from above, but also from the
Absolute Future, from the telos toward which the whole of creation groans? This should be a fundamental element in
any attempt to frame a Christian metanarrative for the new era into which we’re
entering.
So this book is written in the hope that we can learn again
to be truly hopeful that history has meaning and that we have a human future
that is worthy of our aspirations and inspiring for our work. It’s written in the belief that each
generation has a role to play in building toward such a hoped-for future
destination, however distant it might be. And it’s written in dismay because
people of faith in our generation are not doing what they can because they have
no such understanding of their role in history. Because since Darwin, it has
been extraordinarily difficult for any educated Westerner to think of the
future as anything but a random, groping process that has no meaning beyond the
logic of adaptation and survival.
Darwin trumped Hegel in the nineteenth century, and Marx’s adaptation of
Hegel led to disaster. So since
Darwin any attempt to make philosophical or religious sense of history or to
think that it has some direction, purpose, or goal seems ridiculous or
dangerous.
But can we continue to think of evolution as a random
process? For now in a historically
unprecedented way the future of the earth lies in human hands and will be
shaped not randomly but by human choices. Humans have the ability to manipulate
physical and biological reality in ways that were unimaginable in the premodern
era, and that power increases significantly with each passing decade. The
significance of this development is profound, and the attempts so far to
grapple with it philosophically or theologically outside of the Nietzschean/Darwinian
frame have been feeble. The earth and its evolution have become a human
project. It’s future is ours to
choose. And right now people of
faith have ceded the future to the Nietzscheans and Darwinians. We have let them by default take the
tiller of the boat carrying us there.
Christians and other people of faith, especially in America,
need to play a much more significant role in the conversation that shapes the
critical choices humans will make in the coming decades. They’re not
doing that now on a level that has much intellectual credibility. The Christian
bioethicist, for instance, so often finds that her arguments cannot get much
traction in the “real world,” because that world is dominated by the Darwinian
narrative. The moral categories
that were developed in the great religious traditions still have some cultural
resonance, but the issues with which we all have now to deal seem
incommensurate with the response traditional religious categories offer. But the problem does not lie on the
level of ethics—the traditional principles are as sound today as they ever
were. The basic argument of this
book is that the real problem lies on the level of the basic narrative that
defines what our historical purposes and goals are.
In other words, the problem lies in that Christianity and
the other great religious traditions don’t provide a “this-worldly”
historical/metaphysical narrative that has enough intellectual coherence to
compete with the Darwinian narrative.
Christian moral principles are not outmoded, but they will seem naïve so
as long as the Darwinian or Nietzschean narratives provide the only plausible
way to think about history and its (lack of) meaning.
We can argue endlessly and without result about the ethics,
for instance, of stem-cell research. The Christian who argues against it will
always be at a disadvantage because she has no compelling metaphysics to
legitimate her moral concerns. Her
arguments have no bite when it comes up against the Darwinian argument that the
only meaning is adaptation and survival, and stem-cell research promotes that,
and moral qualms about it are simply obstructive. The Darwinian
metaphysical/historical narrative still provides the background that frames all
such debates, and as long as it does, Christian thinking about such questions
will have little cultural heft.
We are at a cultural impasse right now in our attempts to
reconcile the scientific narrative with the religious one. The debate that came into focus during
the Scopes trial in the 1920s hasn’t advanced much since then. The religious
right, the secular mainstream, and the progressive secular left have
well-defined narratives that give a relatively few American lives coherence and
purpose. But most Americans don’t
live comfortably in any of those narratives; rather they live in an
uncomfortable truce between the secular, public part of their lives and the
private, spiritual part. This
again is a symptom of our being neither here nor there, and this split in the
culture’s psyche contributes profoundly to our lack of a sense of future
possibility and to the paralysis of will that follows from it.
* * *
Biological evolution understood in the Darwinian sense is a
part of the story, but it’s not the whole story. Neither St. Paul, Barfield, Rahner,
nor Teilhard are indulging in moonshine; rather they point to a dynamic element
in history and evolution that runs parallel to the random, groping process to
which Darwin drew our attention.
We think of salvation history as starting with Abraham and ending with
Pentecost. But why does it end there? Because that’s where the biblical
narrative ends? Or is it because
that’s the point in history at which Salvation ceased being exclusively a
divine project and started to become a human one? After Pentecost salvation is
not something given, not something simply done to us as passive objects; it’s
something now that we participate in as active subjects. And yet in the common imagination of
salvation we remain its passive recipients, and that’s all there is to worry
about.
In the Gospels, Jesus confronts the “real world” as the
power narratives of Caesar, Herod, and the Pharisees define it, and he tells
them, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Because of the dominance of the
spatial metaphor, there has been a tendency to think that the Gospels depict
the two kingdoms as separate—the one down here in history, Caesar’s kingdom,
and the other up there and outside of it, God’s kingdom. But what if we were to
think of the “kingdom not of this world” as something more along the lines of a
dimension within history that is an upside-down alternative to what seems to be
the ordinary world as most people experience and understand it? Were Jesus’ parables of the Kingdom
designed to describe life in another world or to point to a possibility for
life in this one?
What if we were to adapt the above/below spatial metaphor to
imagine it in evolutionary historical terms? What if we were to think of
evolution as having two layers, one above and the other below—the upper layer
salvation history; the lower layer biological evolution? What if before the fall these two
layers worked together harmoniously, and the consequence of the fall was for
the biological evolutionary layer to go its own way becoming, just as the
Darwinians describe it, a random groping, process governed by the law of
adaptation and survival? What if
the membrane, so to say, that separated above from below had become so thick
that it was virtually impossible for any influence from above to penetrate to the
dimension below except by extraordinary interventions?
And what if the most extraordinary of those interventions
was the Christmas event, and its purpose was to breach the thickening membrane
that separated one layer from the other.
And what if in Christ’s breaching it, his purpose was to plant the seed
of a new evolutionary impulse at the very heart of biological evolution? And
what if the seedbed for this new creation that he called the ‘Kingdom’ was the
human soul? And so therefore what was before imagined by humans in the old
regime as something that came from above was experienced after Pentecost as
something that arose from within. After Pentecost no longer would there be
extraordinary interventions from above.
Whatever is above can take care of itself; but on the earth, what if the
new regime that develops within is where the human story and where any
imagination of an alternative future possibility for the earth lies now?
And so what if the meaning of history since Pentecost is
linked to the human task to cultivate this new creation within, a project which
if successful would effect a liberation for all of creation? What if the human
being is indeed the measure of all things, and as he goes, so goes the earth?
And what if the whole project were to fail unless human beings attend to this
fragile, regime growing within and nurture its development from century to
century? The biblical metaphor for such a failure is Babylon. The alternative metaphor, pointing to
the flourishing of the new kingdom, is the New Jerusalem. Either is a possibility, and we have no
reason to expect interventions from above to avert disaster. Babylon is a
more-than-likely outcome if we cannot find a compelling way to hope for the
other.
Everything changes if we think of the kingdom not as an
“above,” but as a within and as such not outside of history. We are not exiles
on the earth and our job while here is not simply to keep our nose clean for
eight decades so we get to go live in some otherworldly Kingdom of God above for
eternity. That’s too easy, and it promotes a Last-Man Christianity that
Nietzsche was right to criticize.
For the Nietzschean and the Darwinian narratives are an accurate
description of history without reference to salvation history. And as such theirs follows the logic of
the Fall. The story they tell is
not wrong; it’s just incomplete.
The Christian task is not to condemn what their stories tell us, but to
tell it from another perspective. To tell it form the perspective of the
transformative dynamic working now from within the very heart of evolution that
if nourished will effect its redemption.
A shift from the spatial metaphor to an
evolutionary/developmental metaphor does not in any way diminish the essential
elements of orthodox Christian Faith.
It just requires adopting a new set of mental habits in thinking about
them. This book is an attempt to
think about our world after having adopted such habits. My hope is that it will provoke others
to do so as well, and in their doing so to develop a Christian understanding of
history and time that will be more coherent and relevant to the challenges we
face in a “real world” only provisionally defined by the Nietzschean-Darwinian
narrative.
* * *
Will the emptiness of the wilderness be filled with rank
weeds, or will it bloom with plants both fragrant and beautiful? Perhaps the point is not so much to get
out of the wilderness, but to transform it from within. But so much now depends
on whether the culture can produce a new narrative of transcendence that the
most spirited young people will find worthy of their aspiration. The
neo-primitive, quasi-tribal behaviors accepted as normal by young people—raves,
body piercing, tattoos, drugs, an open-ended sexuality–are understandable;
it’s their futile attempt to resist becoming Last Men. It’s their irrepressible idealism
turned sour; it’s the behavior of a people who have nothing to hope for. It’s such a waste. To tell them they are behaving
regressively doesn’t help. For
they, like the rest of us, need a vision of future possibility that is worthy
of their deepest aspirations. And those aspirations will lie dormant,
slumbering in their souls until a compelling alternative narrative can be
presented to them to awaken it.
St. Augustine is a model of the high-spirited man or woman
of which I speak, and his day he found a way. He lived, as we live now, at the end of something and the
beginning of something. His was a
personal quest to understand the deepest longings of his soul as the cultural
forms of classical antiquity crumbled around him. It resulted in a literature that shaped the highest
aspirations of medieval Christendom for the next thousand years. The Puritans
in England lived at the end of something and at the beginning of
something. Their rejection of the
Medieval crown-and-altar narrative of the Stewarts led to the creation of a new
imagination of future possibility that more than any other influence shaped the
narrative that became the American Dream. We’re at a similar historical turning
point, and our task now is no less important.
It’s hard. It’s hard to feel hopeful. It’s hard because we
live in the decay of the end of an era, and it’s hard to do what needs to be
done, because we don’t feel energized and inspired by any vision of future
possibility. It’s hard enough to do what needs to be done when you know what
the goal is, but it is virtually impossible to do anything significantly useful
if you don’t. We’re out of ideas about what to do insofar as our ideas are
framed by old habits of mind shaped primarily by the dying modern narrative.
And yet the task for our generation is not to attain to the goal, but to strive
to sniff its fragrance, to follow its scent, and to trust that our choice to
follow where it leads us will be in itself a beginning. For it is that scent
which is the grace that comes to us from the future, and while it may not be
possible for us at this time to define the narrative, we can at least begin to
lay the foundation for it.
This book is written not to describe what the new narrative
should be, because what do I know?
I have questions and concerns, and I assume that I am not alone in
having them. This book is simply my
attempt to grapple with those questions and in doing so to stimulate a
conversation that isn’t happening yet, at least in any significant way that I’m
aware of. Agree or disagree with its basic argument, but if this book
stimulates such conversations, it will have achieved its purpose.
This book, therefore, is primarily addressed to all people
who are concerned about the future of the earth and cannot accept that the
commercial/ technological logic of the moribund modern will be by default the
only force that will shape it. It’s addressed to people of faith who suspect
that implicit in their faith, even if not very well cultivated, there are seeds
that if nurtured could develop into a new imagination of future possibility for
the earth and all which live on it.
The greatest temptation for us now is to give up hope, to
think that the way that the world is going according to its current
bread-and-circuses, technological/commercial, Superman/Last-Man,
Las-Vegas/Babylon logic is the only possibility. It’s understandable that we
should feel powerless and hopeless in the face of its huge power and seemingly
unrestrainable energies. But then
who would have thought that a tiny Jewish sect, which originated in the
backwaters of the Roman Empire at the height of its influence and power would
have subverted the old classical narrative in the way that it did?
There is something operative in history other than the logic
of the Fall. It’s the upside-down
logic of the cross, and this logic impels salvation history, and this is the
deeper possibility that lies at the heart of the evolution of the earth and in
the depths of every human soul.
But how many Christians really believe this? How many live as if this
were the real story at the center of everything? Chesterton said that
Christianity hasn’t failed; it just hasn’t been tried. I think we all know what he was getting
at. But I would rephrase what he
says to: Christianity hasn’t failed; it’s still a work in progress.
[1] What he meant by post-literate culture and its
implications for the argument of this book will be explored in Chapter 2.
[2] Kierkegaard and Dostoyevski might also qualify, but
their Christian faith puts them in a somewhat different category that we’ll
talk about later. The main point
is that Nietzsche more accurately predicted what happened to the culture in the
West.
[3] Postmodern is a term used to mean many different
things. My use is
straightforward. The Modern Age is
the period extending more or less from the mid-1400s, the Quattrocento, reaching
its height during the Enlightenment period in the 18th Century and
ending in the late 19th century. The term ‘postmodern’ denotes our place in history now which
is no longer the Modern but not yet whatever comes next. I also use the term ’premodern’, and it
denotes the cultural ages in the West and elsewhere that preceded the dawn of
the Modern Age.
[4] See also
John Lukacs, At the End of An Age
(Yale University Press, 2002)for another eloquent reflection by an eminent
historian on this theme of the end of the Modern.
[5] But perhaps the most chilling use of this Hollywood
formula has been in the Matrix films
which point to the future superman as a neo-Gnostic cyborg. There are
exceptions, though. In the
Tolkien/Jackson The Lord of the Rings,
the protagonist is the least powerful of all the key figures in the fellowship
of the ring, and his task is rather than to use power to defeat evil is instead
to travel into the heart of evil armed with nothing more than his will to do
what his conscience dictates.
[6] Romans 8:20 ff. “Creation
was subjected to futility by the will of the one who subjected it in the hope
that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will
obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has
been groaning in labor pains until now.”