 No ground under our feet By Uwe Siemon-Netto © 2001 United Press International Monday, April 16, 2001 This is the 13th installment of the UPI series, "Christ and postmodernity."
"One may ask whether there have ever before in human history been people with so little ground under their feet – people to whom every available alternative seemed equally intolerable, repugnant and futile." The point has been made before in this series that the regime that ultimately hanged this German theologian was a precursor of postmodern times. No absolutes Adolf Hitler substituted the transcendent truth of premodern society with his own very flexible "truths." In the absence of divinity there were no absolutes either. Like the communists and other atheistic totalitarians, the Nazis thus felt free to raise or lower their level of morality at their whim. The results were two-fold: Millions died, and the others were left with a sense of futility. They felt no ground under their feet. Later in this UPI series you will read a dialogue between the Catholic and the Lutheran bishops of Dresden, once Germany's most beautiful city, which was destroyed in a senseless air raid in the final weeks of World War II. The Dresden bishops will muse over what happened after the bomb-induced firestorm that by some accounts burned to death more than 100,000 people, chiefly women and children. Sanity through separate lives Dresden became part of communist East Germany, a collectivized society that was so blatantly untrue that people managed to retain their sanity only by leading two separate lives simultaneously. One was the "official" life, where nobody dared to speak his mind or act as he really wished to. And then there was the other life in what Eastern Europeans used to call "niches" – virtual spaces where one could act, talk, love, laugh and enjoy oneself normally in the company of like-minded friends. Very often, church groups acted as "niches" until they were able to play a pivotal role in imploding the untruthful political system. When this system vanished, Western-style postmodernity filled the void, eradicating most of the niches. This caused a severe form of anomie, a condition the French sociologist Emile Durkheim defined toward the end of the 19th century. Symptoms of anomie As a sociological category, anomie is characterized by instability, the breakdown of social norms, institutional disorganization and the divorce between socially valid goals and the means to achieve them. People living under these conditions experience rootlessness, futility, anxiety and amorality. The anomie sensed by Bonhoeffer in a totalitarian system has now afflicted citizens living in an utterly free society. Anomie in the United States We would delude ourselves if we believed that this is only so in societies emerging from dictatorships. Anomie is all around us, even and especially in the United States and Western Europe. This correspondent lives in an apartment block in Washington inhabited primarily by presumably college-educated singles of the Generation X. A grimmer lot is hard to imagine. Without a greeting, without a smile they trot in and out of the building. It's not, one is prepared to allow, that they are hostile. They quite possibly don't even intend to be uncivil. It's just that they are not aware of one's presence – anyone's presence for that matter, unless one belonged to their particular focus group, professional, sexual or otherwise. Have you noticed how the likes of them run into you on sidewalks, cell phones glued to their ears, oblivious of your being there? Have you noticed, on the other hand, the tragic joylessness of the singles scene that pretends to be so merry? If they were such a happy lot, why would they run a 30 percent higher risk of developing chronic diseases than married people, as one study of the University of Rotterdam has shown? One-night 'weddings' One of the world's most pathetic singles clubs is in Hamburg, Germany, where an actor dressed up as a cardinal weds properly attired pairs "for the evening." This is not really meant to be a joke. When asked why they bothered many of the couples say earnestly that they "felt a need for this ceremony." Surf the internet, type "singles" into the search field, and the postmodern world in all its fragmentation will unfold. There are travel agencies specializing in excursions for Catholic singles, Baptist singles, even Vegan singles. For all the high-minded affirmations of a multicultural society, postmodernity promotes the self and the similar to the detriment of natural – as opposed to ideological – diversity. In reality, postmoderns by and large are incapable of appreciating the wonderful medley of types, vocations and colors on this earth. No ground under foot Hence postmodern man has no ground under his feet – less perhaps than the niche dweller under communism because the niche usually sheltered a variety of refugees from the collectivist untruth that surrounded them. This series is about Christ in this postmodern era, whose positive aspects include an opening to transcendent realities. As the season of Lent races towards its crescendo, it is well what Christians believe about their Lord:
This, then, is the message the church must proclaim evermore clearly to a fragmented generation posing as merry, but in reality writhing in what the sociologist of religion Peter L. Berger termed "anomic terror." If the authors of the past and future installments of this series are correct, this message will fall at least on some open ears. For 55 years after Dietrich Bonhoeffer's death on the gallows, it has become evident that much of Western humanity senses what he had recognized so early: "There is so little ground under our feet." Uwe Siemon-Netto is religion correspondent for United Press International. |
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