Reconciling Traditional and Modem Realms of Meaning

The nihilistic strain of postmodern thought purports that the best one can hope for in a world that does not refer to a higher realm of meaning is to amuse oneself by arranging the bits of wreckage in clever ways. A problem with such nihilism is that meaning is tenacious. It is really inevitable, a prerequisite to human existence. Humans are self-evidently social creatures—they must coordinate their actions to survive. In doing so meanings are constructed, and not only linguistic ones. Other meanings reside in conventions of behavior that organize in myriad ways the shared and therefore external world. The most essential of these are learned by children as they imitate the actions of their caregivers. The dependency. of the child on the caregiver for sustenance, approval, and attention is later projected into other relationships and provides the basis for social cohesion as well as the impetus for social change. Participation in society by the individual is regarded by her or him as meaningful insofar as it seems relevant to the pattern for human relationships set in childhood.

Because humans construct meaning in collective and largely noncritical ways, neither God nor history is really dead, despite the statements of Nietzsche a century ago and despite postmodern assualts on "metanarratives"—the grand overarching stories, such as broad recountings of history, that can validate or trivialize personal stories. Nietzsche's nihilism was strangely optimistic: It foresaw a new ground for knowledge in reason rather than faith. His God, anyway, had been dispatched earlier in the nineteenth century by Ludwig Feuerbach, who coined the aphorism "theology is anthropology." Although not as striking as Nietzsche's more famous maxim, it nonetheless evidences the replacement of a theological with a scientific order. Postmodernity, with its hyperawareness of perspective and mode of expression, questions science itself and, of course, anthropology. and history. It is perhaps most succinctly what Lyotard has said, "incredulity toward metanarratives."^[7] Such skepticism is common among thoughtful persons. How far is this statement from the philosophical starting point proclaimed by Socrates: "One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing"? It is a mistake in any case to think that metanarratives are constructed only by thoughtful persons or, for the most part, in thoughtful ways. Critical evaluation, even deconstruction in the postmodern mode, of a metanarrative is not the same as the construction of one. Whatever incredulity may result is not sure to destroy the metanarrative or to alter it in important ways. Equally likely is that the metanarrative may be transformed in ways unforeseen by the critic.

For example, Nietzsche suggested "will" as the antidote to the sense of universal isolation that the modern viewpoint frequently engenders; he reasoned that man's existence in a cosmos without ordained order gave him the capacity, to become whatever he determined to be, to become, finally, a "superman." Of course, Nietzsche did not have the final word, as no one ever does. Theologians, like Paul Tillich in his The Courage to Be, found ways to accommodate Nietzsche's intellectual position, building upon Feuerbach's legacy as Nietzsche himself (and Karl Marx) did, but in a different direction. Tillich argued that God exists apart from "theism," and that the courage to face this draws one nearer to the truth, a line of reasoning not dissimilar to the Eastern expression that "the Buddha you can name is not the Buddha."^[8]

It should be evident, too, that for most who are unengaged with philosophical or theological niceties the proposition that human life is essentially without meaning is not a durable one. Perhaps it did not serve even Nietzsche well, who suffered from delusions of grandeur and persecution, and near the end of his life was put into an asylum. Lawrence Wright,

a journalist who specializes in the foibles of religious leaders, described his own reflections on the matter:

"There is nothing more," I said to myself once in the middle of the night when I was forty years old and struggling once again with the questions that life poses at that hour. . .. I had an image suddenly of the spinning planet; behind it was a great screen, like a portable home-movie screen that rolls out of a tube. It was there to capture my projections. Then the screen snapped and rolled itself up, and I was looking into the stars. It was if I had never seen them so clearly. I realized that the screen had always blocked my view. I think it was also there to protect me from the coldness of space. . .. Atheism forced me to focus on the life I was actually living. Never before had I savored the sweetness of existence so intensely. . .. I felt comforted by the thought that I was living with the truth and not flirting with possibilities. I lived for a year in this state of crystallized certainty. Then doubts crept back in.^[9]

Wright's doubts stemmed from his being "open to mystery." He pondered the unified field theory after reading an article about it. He began to think of all attractions as in some sense emotional, the sort of emotion he felt for friends, nature, community, ideas, and values. Then he realized that for him this emotional network was merely another way to envision God. It made him wonder "why the God idea is so resonant it keeps echoing inside me."^[10]

In fact, God and history in this era of accelerated modernity continually reemerge in new forms that often are not recognized as such or appear twisted and perverted to those accustomed to the old versions. The recent evangelical movements sweeping the New World, emptying, for example, Catholic churches in South America, are such forms. So are "careerism," the environmental movement, the New Age, the "human potential" movement, the manias that people often develop about everything from railroads to the Civil War to Corvettes to soccer and baseball teams, the resurgence of concern with ethnic identity, and reform movements. These sorts of collective efforts strive to transform the condition of the world (or the world according to the group in question) from mundane to sublime. All implicitly recognize that history has not come to an end, that there is still work to be done and improvements to be made. All are driven by the concern that the human world is less than perfect; all imply that standards exist by which such judgments can be made.

The model for ultimate glory is always in the past. The classic Corvette, the New York Yankees in their heyday, human compassion before the church was corrupted or capitalism introduced, the purity of the race before mongrelization began, the human condition before ancient wisdom

was lost or repressed, gracious living in the American South before the Civil War, Atlantis, Camelot (where the "rain never falls 'til after sundown"), the Ottoman Empire to the Turks, ancient Rome to Italians, the American West to "rugged individualists" in the United States and elsewhere, the kingdom of Sukhothai to the Thais (when "the fields were full of rice and the rivers full of fish and the king took care of the people"), the fourteenth-century trading center of Malacca to present-day Malays, paradise before the Fall—nostalgia for lost worlds spurs us onward to an imagined future that is really an idealized past.

Modern politicians know this. We may not be privy to their reflections on the subject, but we can see that they deploy this knowledge in a practical way at every opportunity. Mussolini, de Gaulle, and Thatcher, to mention only a few, explicitly or implicitly promised to reclaim national greatness, and Hitler provides perhaps the most notorious example. John E Kennedy was more subtle in his calls for a "New Frontier," which he portrayed as an era of selfless patriotism animated by the spirit of American frontiersmen. At the 1992 Democratic convention, Bill Clinton went to great efforts to attach his programs for American revitalization to Kennedy's, which, in part because of Kennedy's assassination, have now attained nearly mythical status.