In a recent phone conversation with my oldest brother, Chris, we got onto the subject of church. Why don’t people seem interested in it? And what might they be looking for?
These are big questions, but I took a stab at it. I cited 9/11 as a case in point. In the weeks following the attacks, I reminded him of the great influx of people into our churches. After a time, of course, they drifted away.
But what brought people, who otherwise had no real use for church (or at least not enough to rouse them out of bed on a Sunday morning), to fill the pews?
The answer, I think, is twofold. For one, human beings have a need to be with other human beings. In our isolated, balkanized culture, genuine community is close to non-existent.
They were looking for a sense of belonging.
Secondly, in the face of raw, unmitigated evil, people were looking for something deeper than the secular explanations of reality. In a society that rejects sin and diminishes the fact of evil, how does one comprehend the incomprehensible?
They were looking for meaning.
Both these symptoms of contemporary secular culture continue unabated, the brief, post-9/11 stutter notwithstanding. Human nature has not changed in its basic need for belonging and meaning.
Let’s first consider belonging. As discussed in earlier posts, the push and pull of autonomy and consolidation, the individual and society, seems constantly at play. We seem to lurch from fears of excess autonomy (and its isolating tendencies) to fears of social cohesion (and its risk of dulling conformity).
To a large extent, Vietnam served as the culmination of collectivist fears, begun in the 30’s with the arrival of a highly influential group of intellectual refugees fleeing totalitarian Europe. As understandable as their fears had been – in their native context – they tended to conflate Nazi Germany with a far more innocent, benign, and peculiarly American form of patriotism and nationalism.
Eagerly embraced by American academicians, however, it seemed over time as if there was a Hitler lurking behind every bush. Thus, when the tragedy of Vietnam came about, many of my generation decided that the only way to cope was to opt out, to “turn on, tune in, drop out!” (Timothy Leary).
America had again lurched away from any sort of social cohesion and toward autonomy. However, this was a new kind of autonomy, one without any intellectual or moral foundations. What one felt, regardless of tradition, society, or neighbor, was what one was urged to be and do.
Multiculturalism suited the times perfectly. It fit into the increasing plurality of American demographics. Here no one single tradition, belief, truth, culture, idea, or feeling was thought definitive, much less the same. There was no hierarchy of truths. All had equal value.
Eventually this new radical individualism led to the loss of a unified moral language and the absence of any notion of the common good. While people demanded individual “rights and entitlements,” civil society and civic values foundered. Gone was any convincing argument for social solidarity, social cohesion, or social obligation.
Into this social vacuum emerged a new form of tribalism, also known as identity politics, in which one finds a redefinition of community, of belonging, one based not on common values but on the anomalous dictates of the tribe – racial identity, ethno-national identity, sexual identity, etc.
Some of the more serious people came to see in this a crisis of “values,” and tried to rectify it. Robert Bellah’s influential book, Habits of the Heart, attempted to reclaim some sort of moral language, some underlying moral truths that could bind an increasingly disparate society together.
In 1979. Yale law professor, Arthur Leff, keen to the problem, offered this defining question, “The Grand ‘Sez Who?’” If everybody is free to make up his or her own truths (moral relativism), on what basis can we live and act? He wrote:
“All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves, and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us ‘good,’ and worse than that, there is no reason why any thing should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless:
Napalming babies is bad.
Starving the poor is wicked.
Buying and selling each other is depraved.
Those who stood up and died resisting Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, and Pol Pot —and General Custer too— have earned salvation.
Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.
There is in the world such a thing as evil.
[All together now:] Sez who?”
Bellah’s later response to this question was to encourage people to reclaim prescribed “universal” norms and moral truths. But this, of course, assumes everyone will agree on what those norms will be. The fact is, as Leff’s words suggest, we simply don’t.
Bellah’s approach betrays the well-meaning, but ineffectual conceit of the Enlightenment – that everyone everywhere can agree on what is “good.”
But, as Nietzsche prophesied, without God, there is no establishing “good.” There is no higher authority. There is only the lone individual creating for him or herself what is “right.”
Today there is indeed a crisis of values, but perhaps more to the point, a crisis of faith.
The next post will take up this question.