Part 1: Tradition vs Enlightenment
Liberation fever is not new; it’s at the heart of the Modern impulse. It started with the Reformation, progressed through the Enlightenment, and ultimately manifested in the liberation movements of our own era. The modern spirit from its earliest manifestation has always been a movement to shuck off the constraints of the traditional premodern social system. The black liberation movement, the women’s liberation movement, and now the gay liberation movement are all perfectly consistent within this fundamental liberationist logic of modernity.
They are all assaults on traditional constraints. And conservative establishment resistance to the demands of blacks, women, or gays has always been rooted in arguments to preserve traditional social forms and traditional morality. And these arguments were also always accompanied by predictions of social chaos if these groups were given what they asked for. But in the modern era traditional logic always loses to modern logic sooner or later. The custom (“the way we have always done things around here”) argument always loses to the rights argument when basic fairness is at stake. And the fairness’ argument should defeat the ‘custom’ argument.
But here’s where it gets tricky, because many people on the right think that the culture’s surrendering to the demands of blacks, women, and gays is directly responsible for the destruction of the traditional American way of life. They are not. On the surface there might seem to be some merit to this argument, but traditional America was already dead by the time any of these movements got any traction, and the liberationist left didn’t kill it. Free-market, consumer capitalism did.
Consumer capitalism is the end result of another kind of liberation movement whose origins lie in the sixteenth century and are linked the emergence of the Protestant bourgeoisie as a driving force in science, politics, and commerce. This new class wanted to be free of the stultifying constraints of state-centered mercantilism. They pushed for the laissez-faire approach that would let the market dictate the direction of the economy instead of the king dictating it. The new class gradually won that fight, and in the late 1700s the enormous economic energies that produced the industrial revolution were released. And during the 1800s we saw the enormous growth of industrial capitalism and with it a ravaging of traditional social arrangements as the economic center of gravity shifted from the manor to the factory.
The American Civil War pitted the new modern forces of industrial capitalism against the forces that shaped a tradition-centered agricultural, hierarchical society. Traditional forces sooner or later always lose to the forces of modernity, but that doesn’t mean that the traditionalists go down without a good fight. The Southern Confederacy showed a ferocity in defense of its culture and mores that ultimately proved futile. The recent Tom Cruise film, The Last Samurai, explores this same theme of a soulful traditionalism losing to the relentless, machine-powered forces of the new industrial state in Japan of the 1870s. The same dynamic is working now in the Middle East.
But even as late as the 1890s about 90% of Americans still derived their livelihood from farming and agriculture-related businesses. And traditional American culture was rocked by economic turmoil in agriculture that eventually led to the destructito of the family farm as the basic institution in which traditional values thrived in a genuine way. And a formidable political counterbalance to the soul-deadening encroachments of industrial capitalism came from rural America where Populism became a political force in the 1890s.
The rest of the culture benefited from the continuity of American traditionalism in the rural heartland. Whatever else may have been going on in the cities or the factories, the heartland was there as a kind of ballast for a few decades more. But living American traditionalism was destroyed by first the ravages of the Great Depression in the 1930s and the mechanization of agriculture in the 1950s, which led to the capital-intensive agriculture that gradually killed off the family farm. Without the family farm, there is no institution that preserves the genuine living American traditionalism of which I speak.
Traditions need thriving, living institutions and a way of life through which the tradition is passed from generation to generation. The death of the family farm and the traditional way of life associated with it is the main cause of the the death of a living American traditionalism. People like Wendell Berry and other Agrarians have tried to keep that tradition alive, but it’s a largely futile effort, and yet a kind of not-quite-dead form of traditionalism still lingers in the red, mostly rural red districts throughout the country. I’m not saying people there don’t lead decent, thoughtful, virtuous lives, but they don’t do it because they are traditionalists, and they don’t do it any better than urban Americans. Both rural and urban Americans are living in a world turned upside down since 1860, and I just reject the idea that rural Americans are somehow more authentic as custodians of living American traditional values.
Preserving this kind of traditionalism in America is like the Irish trying to preserve Gaelic language. It’s more of head trip than the preservation of something still living. It doesn’t really live because there is no natural habitat to support it. Sure people talk about traditional values, but the point I’m trying to make is that these are zombie traditional values. They no longer inhere in a living tradition or thriving cultural habitat. The traditionalism of movement conservatives manifests in twitching, wraithe-like cultural forms and values that might provide a sense of order and meaning, but are themselves soulless.
Living tradition is in sherds in America. It was shattered by the spirit of consumer capitalism. It has been replaced by the kind of zombie traditionalism that typifies the right-wing Wal-Mart mentality, a company that spouts traditional values while at the same time destroying the habitat of small, family-owned businesses in which those values thrived. And, yes, we need to pick up some of the pieces and use them to assemble something new, but this idea that we must preserve a traditional way of life in America is like a traditional East Indian father who insists that his Americanized daughter marry the husband of his choice when she’s in love with someone else. Arranged marriages can work in a cultural habitat in which the whole society supports it, but they can’t in modern and postmodern cultures where the individual and his or her freedom, for better or worse, is the paramount cultural value.
Part 2: You Can’t Go Native in the Past
For me the most important cultural divide is not between east and west or north and south, but between premodern and modern. In a premodern culture people live for the most part in a ‘given’ world and in a modern culture in a chosen world–or at least in a world where choices are forced upon them in a way they are not in premodern societies.
The zombie traditionalist who haunts modern societies is in effect a premodern wannabe. Such a one longs to live in an earlier era when the world would have been delivered to him as an indisputable given with a universally accepted cosmic order. No choices, no confusion; no fuss, no muss. In a genuinely premodern traditional society, there are no alternative cultures or “value systems” recognized as valid–we in our tribe are the “human beings”; everyone else is the “barbarian” Other. Authority lies only in that which has been given by the ancestors.
It’s no longer possible or appropriate to live in such a given world. There is no going back to it. But this kind of nostalgia for something that once was alive is the ghostly spirit than animates zombie traditionalism. This kind of traditionalism clings to the dead form of the old thing thinking that it preserves something valuable. It’s like propping up the corpse of the heirless king in his throne for fear of the chaos that will ensue when it becomes known that the old regime has ended and no clear successor has emerged.
This plays out in dozens of different ways. For instance, I believe the objection of the zombie traditionalist to homosexual marriage/civil unions is not primarily a religious or spiritual issue. It has more to do with propping up the dead king. It’s about their fear of moral and cultural chaos if the old order is no longer something they can rely on. The issue for them is not whether these “sodomites” are all going to hell, but whether the society is going to hell. Because if society goes to hell, then everybody goes to hell. For them the social order has to mirror the cosmic moral order. That’s how it is in premodern societies. So the zombie traditionalist sees gays and lesbians as the latest agents of modernity’s campaign to destroy what remains of the social/cosmic order given to them by the ancestors.
They fear that the whole society is being dragged into hell, which is for them tabooless, normless chaos. Zombie traditionalists don’t really care about the tradition; they care about social order–an order with as little real freedom in it as possible. For without a strictly normed social order, they don’t know who they are or how they should act. All of that has to be given or prescribed for them. So whenever you hear a right winger talk about freedom, you can assume that all it means to him is the freedom to go hunting, to go out and play at being an aborigine, a hunter, and not the nine-to-five drone he otherwise feels himself to be.
The zombie traditionalists feel like cornered animals whose territory in that corner is continuously shrinking. They see themselves as an endangered species, and now they are lashing back, fighting for their survival. On the subrational level, the backlash that began with the Reagan presidency represented the revenge of the zombies. And they have taken the mainstream culture by surprise because the mainstream never took them and their worldview seriously. They’ve been for them a laughing stock since the Scopes trial.
For the past five hundred years, especially in the West, humans have been struggling to find the balance between the individual, his freedom, and his rights on the one hand, and society, its norms, rituals, and obligations on the the other. But when forced to choose one or the other when the two conflicted, the more interesting and creative people, the culture shapers, chose the former, and so the scale in the West has always tipped toward freedom and the individual. The Catholic, premodern, group-centered or tribal mentality lingered into the modern era, but the individualist spirit of Protestantism dominated.
The cultural historical dynamic that drove the conflict between Catholics and Protestants 500 years ago is the same dynamic that characterizes the conflict between the premodern tribalism of Islamist radicals and the individualism of the West now. It’s been often pointed out that Islamist extremism has little to do with Islam and almost everything to do with the preservation of tribal and cultural identity. The same dynamic is at work in the conflict between the mentality of the red and blue-districts. The second group in each of these pairings is, relative to the first, more individual and choice oriented. The first group in relation to the second is more group, authority, and ritual oriented.
Those in the second, modernist group see themselves as heroic, cosmopolitan individualists and see the premoderns as frightened, naive bumpkins. Those in the traditionalist group, insofar as they have retained some sense of the living tradition, see modernists as the American Indians saw the white man–as people who have no understanding, people who have become crazy and disoriented, people who have lost their souls because in their uprooted individualism they have lost any experiential connection to the sacred cosmos. Those few who have managed to maintain connection to a truly living tradition see themselves as people who understand the deeper interrelatedness of things, an interrelatedness that is celebrated in the rituals that the modernists judge to be irrational and meaningless. The living traditionalists see the modernists as having shriveled souls, as people who have been rendered incapable of responding to a mystery in things that is to them self-evident, beyond proving or disproving.
But living traditionalists are hard to find these days; the zombie traditionalists are more common, and they are as incapable or responding to the mystery in things as the modernists are. I’m not saying that there is no one who is a genuine living traditionalist today, even in America. But there is no future in this kind of traditionalism. It’s drying up wherever in the world it might still live. We have to find another way to the sacred; it’s no longer something that is just given by the culture as a gift. It’s gone into hiding, and we have to search it out. The mystery in things is still there, but it’s something we all as individuals have to discover for ourselves. It’s not something that can be found in the traditional forms. But that isn’t to say that the traditional forms have to be swept away; they have to be resurrected from the dead. But first we have to recognize that they are dead.
So there’s a part of me that connects with the traditionalism of the first group because it points to something that we must retrieve, but it’s not something we can pretend to have by imitating the traditional practices that celebrate it–that only leads to zombie traditionalism. A living traditionalism is supple, adaptive, sacramental; a zombie traditionalism is brittle, rigid, non-adaptive–all mechanics and form, no life.
The point is that in the U.S., and increasingly in the other developed countries, living traditionalism is increasingly rare because the social institutions–the cultural habitats–in which these traditions flourished are being destroyed. Those traditions have not been able to adapt quickly enough to the onslaught of changes that have accompanied advancements in technology and the the disorienting effects of affluence with its dizzying array of choices that increase exponentially with each passing decade.
So sure, there are still lots of people with traditional values, but they are disembodied traditional values. I consider myself to be a traditionalist in the sense of someone who knows that what premoderns know (or knew) is real and immensely valuable, even if it is for the most part inaccessible to me. But when I am with zombie traditionalists, I feel suffocated and depressed, and I look for any excuse to get away from them.
I am amused when people talk about creating “new” traditions. I know what they mean, but probably the word ‘ritual’ would be more accurate. And I think that creating new rituals is really what needs to be done. We need rituals that will en-soul our life together again. But if a ritual is eventually to become a culture-wide tradition, it cannot be arbitrary. It has to resonate deeply. It has to have a kind of “authority,” or it’s just cast to the side as soon as people tire of it or as some other behavior presents itself as more compelling.
In other words effective rituals arise in response to deeply felt needs, and they have to work. They have to satisfy the need, and they have to be more satisfying than the “unhealthy” behaviors people are inclined toward without them. So the question for me is whether in this fragmented social environment in this time in our history the creation of such “new traditions” is even remotely possible. I doubt it.
***
I don’t know for sure, but for me the ideas of retrieval and second naiveté offers a clue as to what must be done. Both ideas come from Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher of religion that I read years ago as an undergraduate. I’m not sure I’m using these terms precisely in the way he does, but I want to use them to point to an important distinction between the reality of living in a premodern traditionalist society and the development of the kind of second-naivete traditionalism that I think must emerge in a post-secular future.
In premodern societies where everything is a given, you have “first naiveté.” You simply accept uncritically the world as the ancestors have passed it on to you. With the coming of critical consciousness, (Socrates being its first significant practitioner) you start questioning the assumptions on which naive consciousness is based, and inevitably you lose your naive faith that the way things are defined as “given” is more of a social construction than what the things are in themselves. We begin to understand to what degree our experience of the world as a whole is a social construction.
And some have concluded that it is therefore a groundless construction hovering over a meaningless void. That’s not too far from the Hindu understanding of maya and what I think Christians mean by original sin. The difference between postmodernist nihilism and the post-secularist understanding of the world I’m trying to work with is that the post secularist believes that there is something behind the social construction. There is a There there, even if our perception of it is severely obstructed. And it’s to that There that we all must find our way. It is no longer something given to us, we must choose to search it out.
Modern critical consciousness is good at saying No, and Nihilism is the No taken to its extreme. But I will not accept No for an answer. This No masquerades as existential courage, but I see it as laziness, a refusal to keep looking. And so in order for it to be possible to say a deeply resounding Yes, one finds that he must go back and revisit the world as it was presented to naive consciousness, but now with “second naiveté.” This does not mean ‘going native’, i.e., reverting to first naiveté. It does mean opening up to or becoming vulnerable to the There, that was self-evidently “given” to the kind of consciousness that possessed first-naivete. The trick is to do it in freedom and without losing critical consciousness. This is the postmodern cultural challenge–rediscovering what has been lost, remembering what has been forgotten.
My hunch is, and that’s all it is, a hunch—that if “new traditions” are to be created, they will not have enough ballast or resonance unless they are in one way or another the retrieval of older, previously rejected traditions and rituals, but now adapted to our very different circumstances.
Part 3: What We Want is a Living Tradition
What we all want is life. And this discussion about living vs. zombie traditionalism is really a discussion about how culture helps us to live or gets in the way of our living well. A vibrant culture is one in which people are alive–deeply, richly alive. Not just physically healthy, but alive in the soul, and alive in the spirit. Is zombie traditionalism alive? Well kind of, if being undead is a kind of being alive. But none of us looks at that as the real thing, the kind of life that we most deeply long for.
Anybody who has traveled in a third-world country knows that, despite the poverty most of them live in, the people there are alive in a way that people who live in modern, secular societies are not. On the physical level they are poor, but on the soul level they are rich. There is something in their not-yet modern culture that animates and ensouls them in a way that we moderns and postmoderns no longer experience. It’s this impoverishment of soul that most characterizes modern societies, and our having soul or lacking soul is not something that is an individual psychological characteristic; it’s a culture-wide characteristic with individual variations.
Spirit is not the same as soul. You can be poor on both the physical and soul levels and still be spiritually rich. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet some rare individuals whose saintliness directly correlated with an asceticism of body and soul. Asceticism is the willful deprivation of life on the physical and soul levels in order to be radically open to the spiritual. Certain rare individuals can choose it as their life’s commitment. And I would also say that the rest of us have times during our lives when we need to dry out, so to speak, and a temporary asceticism is healthful in such situations. In other words, I think asceticism has its place, but it’s not something you can build a culture around.
Attempts to do so are almost always humanly disastrous. There is a certain type of pinched Christianity that has assumed that the ascetic model as socially normative for the culture at large, that your success as a human being is somehow linked to your poverty on the physical and soul levels. The kind of joyless Puritanism that prohibits dancing, alcohol, and frivolity of any sort is a form of misplaced asceticism. And enforced celibacy among Catholics is another.
I’m not against celibacy. I’ve known lots of people who have amply demonstrated that a well-lived celibate life is possible, but there is a tendency within Catholicism that is rooted in this idealization of asceticism that really values celibacy as the higher and more deeply spiritual calling, and that’s just nuts. And it’s this tendency that I’m convinced is at the root of the Church’s resistance to married priests. There is no better example of zombie traditionalism in action than the attitude for many conservative Catholics who would look at married priests, if there ever were any, as inferior. No one would say that the Eastern Orthodox Churches lack spiritual seriousness, and yet they’ve figured this out. Celibacy should be an option that people called to it can choose as a special vocation within the orders–but the Church’s refusal to budge on this with regard to the priests in parish ministry is as out of touch with the reality on the ground as Bush’s policies in Iraq have been. It is the product of the kind of bubble thinking that might have some idealism in it, but has no soul life. It’s obtuse on the level of soul.
But most of us are obtuse in matters of the soul. That’s our dilemma. I for one don’t claim any special soul qualities. I’m about as dull-souled as they come. But I think I understand the nature of the problem, and that saves me from utter obtuseness, and shedding one’s obtuseness is the first step toward developing an effective solution. Because the traditionalist solution that tends toward an unbalanced spirituality is not a solution. The secularist postmodern solution, which since Freud tends toward a celebration of the instinctual life, is not a solution.
Our instinctual life and our spiritual life are two components in what make us human, but they live in an uncomfortable tension with one another. We are neither animals nor angels; we are humans, and that means that who we are is woven out of the angel and animal parts of our being. And the place where that weaving takes place is the soul. And this weaving, I believe, is at the heart of what the human task is, and it is a redemptive task.
***
Ernest Becker in his book The Denial of Death does one of the best jobs I know of in describing this awful tension between the spiritual and the instinctual in the human being. This has always been true for human beings, but for historically peculiar reasons, we postmoderns suffer the tension with particular intensity at this time because we are afflicted by Missing Middle Syndrome–we’re all head and genitals, intellect and instinct, and and are impoverished when it comes to the middle, connecting element, which is soul. This is the price we have paid for being modern–the drying up of the middle.
I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, so long as it is understood as a transitional stage, a temporary wandering in the wilderness between Egypt and Canaan. Because now soul is no longer given to us as our birth right as it is in premodern traditional cultures; it’s something we have to create or weave out of the materials given to us from our spiritual and instinctual lives.
This is for me the most important thing to understand, and in my view it’s the central cultural task for the coming century. This kind of thing is being done all around us without our recognizing it for what it is. My goal here is not to promote a program, but to understand what’s going on, and in this I am influenced here by Owen Barfield, whose short book Saving the Appearances had an enormous impact on me early on, to a point where I don’t know how much of my thinking is his and how much is mine. It was one of those books that when I read it it’s as if he was telling me something I already knew. And I have read no more plausible explanation for our current crisis of soul, nor one that is more hopeful about pointing a direction toward its resolution.
Part 4: Dying Traditions
NPR ran a story this morning about the Islenos of St. Bernard Parish in New Orleans. They are people the Spaniards brought over from the Canary Islands in pre-Napoleonic times to settle and defend this northeastern outpost of their American empire. The report was essentially an elegy to a dying traditional American subculture. It is now moribund because the delta wetland upon which the Islenos people depended for their livelihood as crabbers and shrimpers has been gradually destroyed, Katrina being the latest blow.
They are one of those rare subcultures that found a way to maintain a living tradition as the world around them modernized. It is not yet a zombie tradition. The culture has to die first for it to become that. A culture goes zombie when people won’t let it rest in peace but try to keep the body moving once it has lost its soul. To stay alive, most traditional cultures must maintain a living connection to the land or the sea. There are exceptions–the urban subcultures of Hasidic Jews come to mind–but they are pretty unusual these days in America. And it looks doubtful that the Islenos will survive for much longer. Too much works against it.
Living traditions survive in the U.S. only so long as they can resist acculturation into the larger modern American milieu. The economic pressures working to break down such subcultures are terrific. And it is more than likely that the next generation of Islenos will think of themselves as Islenos as much as I think of myself as Irish. They will have lost their connection to the land and its culture just as much as my family has done: Ireland is in my name. It’s there in the background, but it no longer has any real defining power for my identity. It has very little shaping influence in the way I live my life.
It might even be said that Ireland has very little shaping influence in the way the typical educated, urban Dubliner lives now. Other cultural influences, for better or worse, that have very little to do with Irish history, religion, and customs have severely eroded what it means to be Irish, even for the people who live there. The urban Dubliner has more in common with the urban Parisian or New Yorker than he has with the Irish-speaking farmer in the Gaeltacht. When you become a modern, you lose touch with the living tradition–you step out of it, and you might retain some of the tradition as a matter of habit, but you no longer are sustained by the tradition as something that nourishes in a deeply satisfying way. It no longer composes the warp and woof of one’s soul.
Some might argue that the Italian, Irish, Polish neighborhoods of New York, Boston, or Chicago contradict my argument. And I would agree that traditionally ethnic cultures once thrived there, but such cultures are now for the most part moribund. Take the fairly typical example of my wife’s family’s experience. She came from a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx that was mostly Irish. Her grandmother, however, was a Siciliana who came to Italian Harlem when she was eighteen, was matched up with a husband whose Italian dialect she could not understand, eventually moved to an an Italian neighborhood in the Bronx in which she never had to speak English, and she never did. When we romanticize traditional cultures, we have to remember that tradition has very little respect for freedom and individuality. The group comes first, and you obey the group authorities and comply obediently with its customs. There is a form for everything. There is a way that things are done, and to deviate from form is considered ignorant and barbaric, even if there are good reasons to do it.
This Italian subculture in which my wife’s mother grew up still persists in the Bronx, but it’s not what it used to be. Such neighborhoods are celebrated in Martin Scorcese’s films. Raging Bull, for instance, was about my mother-in-law’s neighborhood when she was a young adult. She is very nice woman, but she is someone who simply cannot operate if required to think on her own. There is a way things are done, and her job is to learn how to do it as prescribed. She still retained a tribal mentality, even though she chose a life that required that she move beyond it.
My mother-in-law is a typical of the second generation in such immigrant families–neither here nor there. She wanted independence–she married outside the tribe–but she couldn’t pull it off because she couldn’t free herself from the tribal mentality of her family. Her husband, usually referred to by my mother-in-law’s family as “the German,” had no real individuality. He was simply someone who was “not one of us.” My mother-in-law paid a price for her one, bold stab at freedom, and so did her husband, because she was never able to really cut herself off from her family, and the family never accepted him.
Today, that neighborhood is still Italian, but it is moribund Italian. It’s still a place where the kids try to find homes to live near their parents. But my wife couldn’t get away quick enough. Her mother, for instance, didn’t want her to go to college. “People like us don’t go to college,” she told her. But what her mother really feared was losing her daughter, because once you leave a world like that by going to college, you join the “white people’s world,” you’re changed, and you can never really come back into the older world with the “first naivete” that is necessary to live in it unselfconsciously.
And my wife did not go back. She lived in Europe for several years, and after we were married in New York, it was her idea to move to Seattle. She couldn’t put enough distance between herself and her mother. She needed the distance because the tribal pull was still pretty strong in her, too. But given the choice between freedom and the deeply felt need to live one’s own life, on the one hand, and the choice to live within the restrictions of a moribund tradition, she, like most healthy, spirited people, chose freedom. Unless there is something that still lives in the tradition that nourishes the soul in self-evident ways, most normal people choose to leave rather than to stay, if the choice is open to them.
That’s the problem with most European ethnic communities in the U.S. now. They are at best running on fumes and are living a twilight existence that fails to deeply nourish. I see it in my Asian students here in Seattle as well. I was talking to bright, lively Korean girl today about how conflicted she feels about loyalty to her family and her hatred of the restrictions and patriarchal customs that she has to live out because they are antithetical to the kind of American woman she wants to become.
So people like her, as my wife did, leave the comforting but restrictive womb of their families’ culture to seek their fortune in the wide, wide world. But then something interesting happens. Very often, even if they were very successful in the “outside” world, they find that something is missing–that the outside world lacks soul. And so they return to the old thing, but it no longer nourishes; it can’t because in most cases it’s dying. People who insist on staying in the dead thing are those who live in a kind of zombie traditionalism.
Zombie traditionalism is born of a longing for something that has been lost, and a hope that behind the forms there’s a life that can nourish, but there’s not. You can’t go home again because there were good reasons for leaving it in the first place. One chooses to go back sometimes for lack of anything better.
So this morning while listening to one of the Katrina-displaced Islenos women interviewed on NPR, I was moved by her obvious, deeply felt pain. It was the pain of the exile. It was the pain of the Russian émigré, whose very soul withers because it has been disconnected from the soil of Mother Russia. She was like a native American being asked to move to a reservation. After Katrina, she has been prohibited from moving back to St. Bernard Parish, and like so many other New Orleanais, it’s not clear when or whether she ever will be able to move back.
She spoke poignantly about how it’s the only life she knows, how her parents and grandparents and all her ancestors lived and worked there. And I feel badly for her. For here’s the tragedy: Now she has to live like the rest of us in a culture that has lost its traditional culture soul. That’s a boat that’s long left the dock for the rest of us. The challenge now is not to live in a culture where soul is given, but somehow, out of our own interior freedom to re-ensoul the world and in doing so to renew the face of the earth.
Part V: Retrieval vs.The Last Samurai
If there is one thing that can be said for certain about human beings it’s that they are ambivalent, conflicted, and contradictory. What they think and what they do more often than not has very little to do with one another, because human beings want to eat their cake and have it too. But often enough we choose one thing and don’t realize what we’ve lost until it’s gone. That’s the story of modernity in many ways. We choose freedom and we lose tradition; we choose science and we lose our natural sense for the sacred; we choose Wal-Mart, and we lose our towns and local, community-oriented businesses.
We choose when we think there’s something to gain, but we always lose something, too. That’s just the way it works. But if the modern period, the time roughly marked out from 1500 to World War I, was primarily about rejecting the restrictions that came with an authoritarian, theocratic, feudal hierarchical society, the postmodern period will in large part be about retrieving what the modern period rejected, recovering what the moderns thought not worth keeping. But, and this is the important thing, it has to be done without at the same time losing the great modern values of freedom, individuality, critical consciousness, and innovation.
The idea that Americans are the freest people on earth is an essential part of American identity and central to its sense of national pride. Whether Americans are indeed freer than Swedes, Canadians, or Australians might make for an interesting bar-room discussion, but the important thing is that Americans embrace freedom and choice as their most cherished value. It trumps all other values. In the mainstream public imagination anything that constrains freedom is bad; anything that promotes it is good.
But as with anything, too much of a good thing becomes a problem. As Barry Schwartz argues in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, the presumption that the more choices people have the more free they feel and therefore the happier they will be is just not true. The psyche shorts out when it is confronted with too many choices, and this creates problems that are hard to see because it just seems counter-intuitive to believe that fewer choices would be better because fewer choices means less freedom. Having more choices can’t possibly be a reason behind anyone’s unhappiness.
But the problem with freedom as Americans understand it is that it promotes social fragmentation rather than community. When people have a choice, they do what they want. All things being equal, if the typical human being is given the choice between a bowl of spinach and a bowl of ice cream, the smart money will be on his choosing the ice cream. And the same dynamic applies when it comes to choosing between being free or being restricted by traditional norms and codes necessary for traditional community life—they’re going to choose individualism and freedom over community and restriction. Americans say they value community, and long for it. But that’s not how they behave.
The fragmentation that characterizes American social life is a direct result of people feeling dissatisfied with this or that lifestyle, religion, spouse, geographical location, political philosophy, value system, etc., and moving on to choose or create another one. Such a social dynamic promotes innovation, choice, change, but it shortchanges people in their need for depth, connection, warmth. The American choice-centered lifestyle has created a social world where more and more people are feeling isolated, disenfranchised, and lost. They don’t want to give up their freedom, but they don’t like feeling so disconnected. They may join communities for a while, but at best it’s a provisional arrangement. Sooner or later “it’s time to move on.”
The research shows us time and again that few Americans belong to stable, homogeneous communities. They participate in several, moving in and out between them. The center of gravity is not the community but the autonomous individual. In traditional societies, the community always comes first. In traditional cultures one’s sense of self, one’s values, one’s entire worldview is a given, a pre-established meaning framework that the individual has no choice about and it’s a framework that resists mightily any attempts to change it. Nothing could be more different from what mainstream American society has become.
This kind of social fragmentation that comes with a choice-centered lifestyle isn’t something that just happens out there in the public social world, but right at home and within more and more American families. How many families sit down and share the same meal? It’s just assumed that it’s better if everyone gets to choose what he or she wants rather than eat what everyone else is eating. If there are other choices available, what difference does it make if a frozen lasagna or a frozen enchilada gets microwaved. Nuke them both; let people have what they want. Or chances are, when the kids reach their teens, they’ll just fix what they want to eat for themselves when they’re hungry to eat it. No need even to sit down to eat together even if what everybody eats is different, people are increasingly inclined to graze all day according to their own eating rhythm.
How many middle-income families now have more than one television that gives different family members different options to watch the show of their choice rather than to sit together and watch whatever’s on? With the enormous proliferation of channel choices, does anyone expect anymore that the water cooler conversation at work will be about a show that everyone saw the previous evening? Sports these days seem to be the only kind of culture-wide event that has resisted this kind of choice-driven fragmentation of interests. And yet what could be more different than the worlds of the millionaire athletes and the fans who watch them?
Freedom and individuality have always been in a precarious balance with tradition and community. People want both, but the balance is hard to find, and in American culture since the sixties, there has been a greater-than-ever emphasis on freedom and liberation from the constraints of community and tradition. But as suggested above, we want to eat our cake and have it, too. But mostly we want to eat it, and when it’s gone we miss it. And we want it back, and some of us might romanticize how wonderful it would be to live in a traditional community, but when it comes down to it, few are willing to pay the price to live in one. Traditional communities are something people live in when they don’t have other options. The restraint and discipline required to live in them are the opposite of what most Americans think they need to live freely and happily. It’s like most people’s response to public transit. Great idea, but not for me. Takes too much time, too many limitations on one’s freedom.
This is not a conflict that began in the 1970s; it’s been a long time in the making, at least for five hundred years in the West, and it’s what scares the spit out of traditionalist Muslims, because they see that as soon as the choice-centered lifestyle typical of Americans and other Westerners gets a toehold in their traditional societies, goodbye tradition, goodbye community, goodbye everything that they hold sacred. Because the mullahs know that the West is offering their people ice cream, and their traditional spinach dish can’t compete. It would take enormous personal discipline or group cohesiveness to resist. No wonder they think of us as the Great Satan.
Resistance will occur here and there, but in the long run, maybe even as soon as the end of this century, traditional cultures will all but have disappeared. This assumes there won’t be some cataclysmic ecological, political, or economic catastrophe that could send us all back to the Dark Ages, but it will otherwise be a gradual generation by generation global transformation. Why the inevitability? Because choice-centered societies and tradition-centered societies are completely antithetical, and the more choices people in the developing world are given, the more quickly will their traditional way of life be destroyed. The temptation to eat something other than spinach will be too strong. In the long run these local traditional cultures merge into what looks like it will be a global fusion culture.
I think that a key theme to frame at least one aspect of the changing American lifestyle is the idea that as the developing world modernizes, the modern world will be “pre-modernizing.” This is what I mean by retrieval. Americans, while they cherish their freedom, also feel that something is missing. This profound longing in certain precincts of the American soul to restore this “something” that has been lost is explored in an interesting way in Tom Cruise’s recent film, The Last Samurai. Cruise plays Nathan Aldren, an American ex-Civil War and Indian Wars veteran hired by the Japanese government in 1876 to modernize/westernize its army. He’s portrayed as a fearless a warrior who nevertheless feels the need to drink away his shame because of his participation in a My-Lai-like massacre of innocents during the Indian Wars.
His story is one of finding his soul and restoring his honor after spending time in captivity with the Samurai tribal leader, Katsumoto. During his captivity he was forced cold-turkey to stop his drinking and to eat his spinach; he found out it wasn’t half bad, and he chose to keep eating it. He’s someone who recognized that there were refreshing spiritual depths in this ancient traditional culture that he had been asked to destroy. So, like Lawrence of Arabia, he goes native, and becomes its defender.
This is ultimately a story meant to contrast the nobility of the chivalric, premodern warrior vs. the mechanized, soul-less affair that modern warfare was becoming, but it’s really about so much more than that. The entire dramatic movement of the film is driven by Aldren’s longing to recover what the modern world no longer affords, and which the film suggests can only be found in a traditional way of life.
The film illustrates the urge for “retrieval.” Retrieval runs parallel to the historic dynamic that’s driving change in the developing world. As the developing world modernizes, people in the developing world seek to retrieve and preserve what is being lost—to “pre-modernize”, but in a post-modern idiom.
People born today into traditional societies don’t have any choice about it, but as they become increasingly aware of other options available to them, most if given the choice will choose to modernize. Though cultural conservatives would like to, Americans can’t go back to a tradition-structured society in which the culture is a unified world of pre-established traditional meanings. You can’t go home again, in this sense of the phrase.
A choice-centered culture cannot coexist with a tradition-centered culture except insofar as the former tolerates the latter as subculture, like the Amish, Hutterites, or Hassids are tolerated in the U.S. American conservatives who extol free-market capitalism while at the same time excoriating American society’s loss of traditional social norms are astonishingly naïve in their assumption that the two can go together. They never have and they never will. It’s just another case of eating your cake and having it, too. But somehow or another this is a tension that must be resolved.
Because while there is no possibility of the mainstream culture returning to a traditional way of life, the longing that drove Cruise’s Nathan Aldren to make his choice is one that resonates with many Americans. For they long for what was lost in modernity’s destruction of the traditional. The option that is still left open to Americans is “retrieval,” which is like Nathan Aldren’s choice for the traditional, but instead of going to where there is a traditional culture, you retrieve the parts of a traditional culture you admire and bring them here to where you are—you integrate elements of the traditional into a contemporary, post-modern, post-secular, choice-centered lifestyle. And in time a consensus will develop about what is worth retrieving and what is not.
In other words, as cultures in the developing world modernize, there will be a continued and probably increasing interest among Americans and others in the already-developed world to retrieve the premodern elements in those cultures that are being lost. We see it already in the increased interest in Asian religions, martial arts, Chinese medicine, shamanic ritual, in the celebration of aboriginal art forms. I’d argue that the body piercing, tattooing, rap, raves, fight clubs, street gangs, and any number of trends popular among the young are driven by this longing to retrieve the cake that earlier generations ate. They are all driven by the longing to break out of the anonymity and isolation which a society that overemphasizes freedom has created. And they seek relief in primitive traditional forms whose origins more often than not lie in premodern cultures.
In the short run this is an eclectic, often superficial, syncretistic, trendy cultural phenomenon. But the longing behind it is real. And this blog is about exploring what it means for religious and political life. For it is, when everything lines up in the right way, which it may or may not do, the basic social dynamic for renaissance. For retrieval is an essential social dynamic driving any renaissance, large or small.