An Ancient Message, Through Modern Means, to a Postmodern Mind
Ravi Zacharias
1998 - Fall
In April 1981 Daniel Yankelovich, a social analyst, wrote a very insightful article in Psychology Today. His principal thrust was to analyze how Americans were thinking about life and where we were headed should such ideas go uncriticized. It was a warning to the West. In his opening remarks he defined the role and the imperative of culture. Quoting sociologist Daniel Bell, he said "Culture is the effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existential situations that confront all human beings in the passage of their lives."
I pause here to make a parenthetical remark because to define culture even in these terms may well be outdated now. Some months ago I recall lecturing at one of the universities in the country when a student stormed up to the microphone and bellowed, "Who told you culture is a search for coherence? Where do you get that idea from? This idea of coherence is a Western idea," she said. I replied by reminding her that all I had done in that instance was to present a sociologist’s definition that culture sought coherence. "Ah! Words! Just words!" she shouted back. "Let me ask you this then," I pleaded. "Do you want my answer to be coherent?" Some laughter rippled through the auditorium. She herself was stymied for a few moments. "But that’s language, isn’t it?" she retorted. I asked her if language did not have anything to do with reality? "Must words not point to a referent? If you are seeking an answer that must be coherent, but culture itself does not have to be, from whence do you get this disjunction?" You could sense the turmoil within that life and indeed later on I was told that this individual was a rather outspoken person whose lifestyle was radically aberrant from the normal. Her whole struggle for coherence was rooted in her very physiological dissonance.
She may well be the quintessential postmodernist. Our bodies and proclivities are defining our reason for being. That is how intense I believe this struggle is in thinking and in living itself. Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault may well be the definitive bookends of this twentieth century. Both brilliant yet tragic figures. To some the name of Michel Foucault may not be familiar. He was a leading French intellectual who by virtue of a very promiscuous life, died of AIDS at the age of 58. He was a lover of Nietzsche’s writings, who ironically had died at age 54, in the wake of his pitiful bout with venereal disease and insanity.
So even as we look for our cultural moorings, and try to understand the radical shifts that have disrupted the shared meanings of the past, attempting a coherent answer becomes a prohibitive challenge.
Walter Truett Anderson humorously gives us an insight into this in his book Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be. He compares our predicament by presenting an analogy from baseball. A pre-modern baseball umpire would have said some-thing like this, "There’s balls, and there’s strikes and I call ‘em as they are." The modernist one would have said, "There’s balls and there’s strikes, and I call ‘em as I see ‘em." And the postmodernist umpire would have said, "They ain’t nothing until I call ‘em." In brief, all reality is subject dependent and the postmodernist frames reality by naming aspects at his or her whim.
I believe an important reminder will help provide a backdrop to aid us in both our understanding and our limitation as we try to respond to such a change. You and I in some way have been so subsumed by this culture that we, too, cannot get ourselves completely outside of it. We are locked into this postmodern mindset. Perhaps the most radically affected of all are our very children. If you talk to your teenager after a movie that your son or daughter wanted you to see, you suddenly hear comments such as,"I’m sorry, Dad, but I hadn’t noticed all the bad language until you were sitting next to me." It is almost as if they live in that world, and they don’t even notice it anymore until somehow, someone with a counter-perspective is sitting next to them, and then they mutter "Oh-oh. I’ve blown this one." The disorientation is thus double-edged, both external and internal. Reality is redefined and our own thinking is unwittingly reshaped.
THE CENTURY OF CHANGE
How did we get where we are today? I perceive that five major shifts in this century have occurred. The first major shift was the popularization of the death of God movement; the second shift is the disorienting blow of religious pluralism. The third is the power to inform through the visual as the lines between reality and imagination are blurred. The fourth is the lost center of cultural molding, and finally, the shifting power to a younger world. Let us look at the last two shifts.
There is a vacuum at the heart of our culture. Saul Bellow argued in his 1976 Noble Laureate lecture:"The intelligent public is waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy and social theory and what it cannot hear from pure science. A broader, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. If writers do not come into the center, it will not be because the center is pre-empted; it is not."
Very simply stated, there is no center to hold things together. Or to put it differently, there is no over-arching story to life by which all the particulars can be interpreted. But while no story is dominating the plurality of of our culture, the means to knowing has taken over as the ends of knowledge. In his book Beyond the Postmodern Mind, Houston Smith makes this comment: "If modern physics showed us a world at odds with our senses, postmodern physics is showing us one that is at odds with our imagination. We have made peace with the first of these oddities, but the problem of the new physics cannot be resolved by refinements in the scale." How do you measure the imagination? There is no scale. If I were to identify a handful of fearsome realities, this would be near the top. The pursuit of knowledge without knowing who we are or why we exist, combined with a war on our imaginations by our entertainment industry, leaves us at the mercy of power with no morality. May I illustrate this?
On many different occasions while I was driving and listening to music, every now and then a piece would come on that I found either unmusical or jarring. I would shut the radio off. But then one day I was taken to see a play called The Phantom of the Opera. Suddenly I realized that some of the music I had not quite enjoyed was from this play. I was amazed at the difference knowing the story made, whenever I heard the music subsequently. In fact the music in some portions is utterly magnificent. The love songs, the discourses,yes, even the arguments made sense when you know the story. Life needs a story for one to understand the details. Life needs to hold together at the center if we are to reach to distant horizons. But our culture owns neither a story nor holds at the center.
The other significant change is the shifting power to a younger world. I have heard it said that over sixty percent of this world’s population is under age 24. If you talk to a Hollywood mogul today, he will tell you this: In producing their films, if one can win the following of an 18-year-old male, it will be a blockbuster hit because of the critical influence that person has in culture. Teenage girls will go to see a movie that their boyfriends want them to see, but the reverse does not hold. The extraordinary economic power of life at a younger age is powerfully defining how the world culturally turns.
THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL IMPACT
What, then, has been the result of these shifts? There are many. I will underscore just five of them.
The first is philosophy’s move to the existential. The power of a Jean Paul Sartre or an Albert Camus was significant in the decades of the ‘60s and the ‘70s. Historian Paul Johnson points out the devastating impact of Sartre upon the intellectuals of the Angka Loeu movement in Cambodia that destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands in that "Gentle Land." Indeed, a tremendous power was unleashed as philosophers through drama and literature handcuffed the intellect of society’s powerbrokers. Stories were introduced to tell us that "Man was the measure of all things," but they never paused to tell us the entailments of evil men who wrested power and means to destroy their own people. Sartre’s recantation on his own deathbed, notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is philosophy’s shift to the existential cut a wide swathe in our world.
Second is the artist’s move to the sensual, which I looked at in my previous Just Thinking article. The proliferation of sexual material–from books to magazines and now to the Internet–has incomprehensible ramifications. Recently in England, mothers were outraged because teen magazines are peddling sexual topics and they argued that this discussion is making their daughters "sex-mad." Foucault's death from AIDS moves one between compassion and confusion when we realize that it was the willful embodiment of a philosophy that drove him there.
The third is religion’s move to the mystical. Buddhism has become one of the most popular religions of our time because of the widespread interest in spirituality; feelings are constructed into techniques and aphorisms. Buddhism is a classic example of "how to be good without having God"–how to be ethical without having absolutes.
Fourth, we witness education’s move to the skeptical. "You cannot believe anything anymore." "You can’t be sure of anything anymore." From fuzzy logic to relativism the homeless mind has moved to the home-less idea. To argue for truth today is to stir an immediate debate, as if a heresy of devilish proportions has been invoked. The death of God spelled the death of theology, but the morticians of the Absolute were not content to just bleed God-talk. Inevitably God’s undertakers were marching to their own funeral with all of knowledge being pronounced dead.
Here we see our fifth result–the individual’s move to the transcendental. That is, he is his own divine being. The reader is sovereign over the author. As you read anyone else’s story, you deconstruct it and reshape it to your own interpretation. Listen to what philosopher Richard Rorty says in his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: "The Nietzschean self seeks consolation at the moment of death not in having transcended the animal condition, but in being that peculiar sort of dying animal, who describing himself in his own terms has created himself." Here is self-deification in the making.
These are the five effects that have come from the changes we have witnessed in this century.
A DIVIDED WORLD
How, then, have East and West responded to these phenomena?
If I were to put the Western world on the left side of a center margin, and the Eastern world on the right, here are the generalizations. In the West, Christianity has become marginalized, and in some cases even ridiculed. In the East,Western religion is criticized and Eastern religion is protected. In the Western world, Christianity struggles with higher education and academia. In the Eastern world, there is a resurgence of aggressive pride in ancient wisdom.
In the West, theology has been replaced by religion. In the East, religion was always seen as a pursuit and thus continues. There is no great change. In fact, one of my colleagues who works with us in India, says India never moved from pre-modern to modern to postmodern. India just leap-frogged over modern, moving from the pre-modern to the postmodern. In the West, truth has been displaced and there is nothing to replace it. In the East, displacement of truth was not felt because culture was always the driving force behind it.
Some time ago I was addressing men and women from the bar association of a major city. I knew it would be a challenging audience because words and arguments provide their daily fare. I began by recounting a television news item I had just witnessed before I had come to the venue to speak to them. A major network had as their first item of news, a survey. The survey questions proposed to people if words meant anything at all. Do words such as "affair" and "adultery" have particular meanings or could the person speaking fuse them with his or her own meaning? In our salvation-by- survey culture, the journalists asked people if anything meant anything anymore. Having concluded that there were significant variances in the way people used words, they next inquired if morality was purely a personal matter, or were there indeed absolutes? Every person on the street interviewed answered the same way. "No! There is no objective morality, we have to define it in our own terms." First item: Were words subject to the user? Second item: Was morality a personal matter? Having settled on a confused answer which left the individual Lord over reality, the third item on the news was a warning to Saddam Hussein. If he did not stop playing his word games, we were going to start bombing Iraq. How ironic, I thought. We arrogate to ourselves moral authority and deny referents to words, except when we deal with others who play the same game. I was fascinated to see the expressions of those in the audience change and recognize that communication is impossible if we do not grant univocal meaning to our words.
WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY
If such is the reality of our culture, where does that leave us? The challenge, as I see it, is this: How do you communicate to a generation that hears with its eyes and thinks with its feelings?
Firstly, postmodernism may be one of the most opportune thought patterns presented to us for the propagation of the gospel because in a sense, it has cleared the playing field. All disciplines have lost their "final authority." The hopes that modernity had brought, the triumph of "Reason" and "Science" which many thought would bring the utopia, have failed in almost every respect. With all of our material gains, there is still a hunger for the spiritual. In virtually every part of the world, students linger long after every session to talk and plead for answers to their barren lives. All the education one gets does not diminish that search for inner coherence and a story-line for one’s own life. I can picture many of their faces and I read hundreds of letters that come, confessing to a spent life and a bankrupt heart.
What I’m trying to say to you is this: As much as postmodernism has confused language and definitions, there is a yearning that the postmodernist’s own cavalier attitude does not diminish. But our response becomes more difficult because of what I call the "Vietnamization" of the conflict. Classical techniques don’t work anymore. There is no front-line or a single column to attack; the conflict is on many fronts. Maybe postmodernism is a legitimate child of the confusion of the ‘60s. But I say to you, it has cleared the playing field.
I remember just in February of this year, speaking at the universities of Sheffield and Cambridge. I walked into Sheffield the opening night; the place was packed to capacity, absolutely full! At the end of the forum, one student came to me and said, "I came in here straddling two worlds. I cannot leave the same way. Can you help me?" What a joy to observe a young Sheffield student give his life to the Lord. Indeed, there is still an openness. Postmodernism may not be as daunting as we may sometimes portray it.
Secondly, there is just enough of the modern worldview left so that reason still has a point of entry. But we have to use this knowledge wisely. We cannot give an overdose of argumentation.
Thirdly, there is a tremendous search in the postmodern mindset for community. Only in the gospel message that culminates in worship is their coherence–which in turn brings coherence within the community of believers, where both individuality and community are affirmed. The worship of the living God is what ultimately binds the various inclinations of the heart and gives them focus. A worshipping community in spirit and in truth binds the diversity of our culture, the diversity of our education, the diversity of our backgrounds, and brings us together into a corporate expression of worship. One of the most powerful evangels to the postmodern mind is going to be a worshipping community.
Fourthly, we must be observant of God’s sovereign intervention in history. When Princess Diana died, the whole world was hearing with its eyes. A few days later Mother Teresa passed away. Again the world was listening with its eyes. One was a woman who despite having everything, lived with rejection in her innermost being. The other having nothing spent her life taking care of the rejected of this world. I think these are sovereign moments in history. I remember being in the Czech republic a year ago and being told how when the power of Soviet ideology was broken, the churches suddenly became full. People came expectantly, but somehow, there was nothing there. That moment was squandered.
And lastly, we’re living at a time where I think G.K. Chesterton’s dictum has proven to be true. Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain, but meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure. We have exhausted ourselves in this indulgent culture.
I began by telling you of Yankelovich’s description of the titanic changes that were under way. He said in his article that the stakes in such changes were high. He did some case studies of numerous couples to see where we were headed and arrived at an astounding conclusion. One of those couples he called Abby and Mark. Here is what he said. Notice the word "and" in Daniel Yankelovich’s conclusion.
He wrote, "If you feel it is imperative to fill all your needs, and if these needs are contradictory or in conflict with those of others, or simply unfillable, then frustration inevitably follows. To Abby and to Mark as well self-fulfillment means having a career and marriage and children and sexual freedom and autonomy and being liberal and having money and choosing non-conformity and insisting social justice and enjoying city life and country living and simplicity and graciousness and reading and good friends and on and on. The individual is not truly fulfilled by becoming ever more autonomous. Indeed, to move too far in this direction is to risk psychosis, the ultimate form of autonomy. The injunction"–notice this now please– "The injunction that to find one’s self, one must lose one’s self, contains the truth any seeker of self-fulfillment needs to grasp." What an opening that can lead to the Cross of Jesus Christ!
The most dramatic truth about the gospel is that it contradicts us in the way we experience ourselves as alive and compels us to drastically redefine what we mean by life. Jesus contradicts our routine in the way He countered the disciples, even as He headed towards the Cross. They were the ones marked out for death. He, "the dead one," was really the living.
With all that the cultural terrain presents to us, the injunction that "to find one’s self, one must lose one’s self," contains a truth any seeker of self-fulfill-ment needs to grasp. This is a reminder the Church must keep in mind, too. Apart from the Cross of Jesus Christ, I know of no other hope. The songwriter said it simply: We’ve a story to tell to the nations The last stanza of that great hymn says:
We’ve a Savior to show to the nations
Who the path of sorrow hath trod,
That all of the world’s great peoples
Might come to the truth of God.
For the darkness shall turn to dawning,
And the dawning to noon-day bright,
And Christ’s great kingdom shall come to earth,
The kingdom of love and light
Abridged from a message delivered at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School’s conference "Telling the Truth: Evangelizing Postmoderns" in May 1998. Both conference messages by Ravi Zacharias will be available in November.
