Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Theology Faculty Research and Publications Theology, Department of 1-1-2001 The Leveling of Meaning: Religious Ethics in the Face of a Culture of Unconcern Philip J. Rossi Marquette University, [email protected] Published version. "The Leveling of Meaning: Religious Ethics in the Face of a Culture of Unconcern" in Ethics in the World Religions. Eds. Joseph Runzo and Nancy M Martin. Oxford; New York: Oneworld (2001): 161-174. Publisher link. © 2001 Oneworld Publications. pa 7 THE LEVELING of MEANING: CHRISTIAN ETHICS in A CULTURE OF UNCONCERN Philip Rossi, SJ hristian practices and beliefs - and, quite probably, the practices and C beliefs of most religious traditions - have generally presupposed a deeply rooted human need to have one's own life and the context of one's life make sense in a definitive way. If one accords this quest to find a "final meaning" for human activity a fundamental status in the make-up of human beings, religion functions as an important activity for the satisfaction of this basic human need. Indeed, religion may even be understood to be nothing other than human engagement in such a quest for final meaning. I According to this view, meaninglessness, and its concomitant, despair, would eventually loom before persons and communities lacking a framework of such implicitly religious "final" meaning. Yet what if it were possible for persons to live in ways that are - at least apparently - humanly satisfying, but without a framework of definitive (Le. religious) meaning? Suppose that the human quest for meaning could be satisfied by a series of discrete, partial episodes of making sense which need not add up to a final, comprehensive framework - or suppose, even more radically, that one - or one's culture - came to accept that the quest for final meaning need not be satisfied at all. Suppose most people considered it not at all problematic to hold that life mostly consists - to use a colloquial expression - of "one damn thing after another" and that 162 ETHICS AND RELIGION IN THE WEST few, if any, felt that there was any urgency to make of it anything more than that. 2 Against the background of these seemingly speculative questions, this essay advances for discussion the hypothesis that a set of dynamics for living without a framework for final meaning is, in fact, already operative at a number of levels (theoretical, practical, popular) in the emerging cultures of informational, economic, and technological globalization. These dynamics are unlike those forms of nihilism and atheism that, because they presume the validity or the significance of a human quest for final meaning, are paradigmatically "modern" in their theoretical and practical articulations. Modern nihilism and atheism, like the forms of belief they contest, take final human meanings to adumbrate connections that are more than merely accidental and discontinuities that are not simply random. They are matter!i., enduringly inscribed in the human condition which mark out its depth - even if that depth consists only in the recognition of all meaning as a fragile human construct that is irrevocably shattered at one's death. In contrast, at least some of the dynamics present in emergent forms of so-called "postmodern" global culture work from a quite different presupposition: meaning is not and can never be final; it is only and always a matter of immediacy, contingency and "surface" - the connections that constitute meaning are merely transient "links that one just as easily clicks on as clicks off. Since every meaning is evanescent, any meaning will do. One need not regret abandoning one form of meaning for another, or for yet another after that. Meanings have only limited, contingent usefulness, and so are disposable once their usefulness for the moment has run its course. These dynamics, so the hypothesis runs, offer precisely the possibility of setting aside, without (much) regret, a quest for a life meaning that is unifying and comprehensive, while still finding life satisfaction precisely in whatever transient meaning can be constructed in and from the interrupted and interrupting interplay of life's particularity and contingency. This possibility is not altogether novel. A case can be made that this view was prefigured, in a much earlier age, by the Democritian atomism of Epicureanism, and that, more recently, David Hume eloquently proposed a similar view: an effective cure for the temptation to embark on a quest for final meaning - at least of the kind represented by metaphysical reasoning - is to find some pleasant social diversion that does not purport Rossi, THE LEVELING OF MEANING 163 to exhibit itself as something deeper. Such clear-headed recognition of the absence of final meaning need not lead - as it did for the existentialists of the middle third of the twentieth century - to defiance or despair in the face of a cosmos ultimately indifferent to the fate of any of its particular components. This recognition simply allows one to get on with making one's way through the partialities and contingencies of one's own life with an equanimity that comes from putting aside as pointless bother any quest for a deeper or final meaning in it. These dynamics can be appropriately called "the leveling of meaning." They arise, I believe, from the convergence of a variety of vectors upon the conditions of human living at the beginning of this new century. Some of these vectors take an economic form that seems driven by a momentum fueled by late twentieth-century global capitalism's dismantlement of its Marxist rival. In this context, the measure of "meaning" is economic loss and gain. As a function of market share, the bottom line, and the maximization of profit, this form of meaning has a far wider field than ever before over which to playas well as many more ways in which to play. Instantaneous transfer throughout a global network of markets has made it possible to catch, at anytime of day or night, just the right movement - up or down - to better one's placement for yet more gain.3 Other vectors take a technological form, driven by the exponentially growing possibilities for accessing and organizing information and for global communicative interconnection. In this context, even as meaning accrues in the assemblage of information and through the pathways of its transmission, it is potentially subject at each juncture of its path to re-assemblage and reconfiguration. Meaning arises as a function of coding and decoding, and power resides in mastery of the code.4 Still other vectors take social and political forms that variously devolve governing power from the center into more localized bodies or demand due recognition of the practices that mark and sustain the particularity of linguistic, religious, or ethnic identity. Yet even as the forms of political power seem to be edging back to the local and particular, the shaping of the terms of the political discourse giving concrete meaning to the exercise of that power remain entrenched in dynamics that seem systemically to circumvent the possibility of accountability to any genuinely public realm, be it local, national, regional, or global. Political meaning - most notably, but not only, in electoral politics - comes to reside in how policy and personality can be packaged for this particular electorate at this particular 164 ETHICS AND RELIGION IN THE W EST time. The temporal horizon for the endurance of political meaning stretches only as far as the next campaign. Embedded in these vectors (and others that I believe can be identified within the interplay of forces shaping our contemporary world) - so my hypothesis continues - is an implicit account of, if I may modify a phrase appropriated from Charles Taylor, "the making of a postmodern identity."s This account, which arises from the context of what Taylor has termed the "fractured horizons" of meaning that are the inheritance of modernity, poses a serious and perhaps even radically new challenge to religious belief and practice - most certainly to those forms that have arisen from the traditions that stretch back to Abraham but perhaps to all that construe our human identity, be it individual or collective, to be in some core sense "sp iri tual." The challenge that this account presents is not simply that it is a reductive naturalism, i.e. the view that there is no spiritual ingredient in what it takes to constitute an individual as (a) human (person). The challenge is, rather, that it is a naturalism so seamlessly woven into the fabric of daily practice that this absence of a spiritual component in our human make-up is unsurprising. It is taken as a matter of course that human life is solely a matter of contingent particularity that need not add up, individually or collectively, to all that much. Whereas "modern" challenges to religious belief and practice more typically.took form as an articulated theoretical denial or indignant protest (be it social or personal) in the face of claims made on behalf of transcendence, the "postmodern" challenge is far more likely to be, in practice, an expression of puzzlement or a shrug of indifference. This shrug is directed not so much at the content of the claims of belief, but at the very possibility that belief in God - or its denial - is a matter of importance in the business of negotiating one's way through life. As Taylor has succinctly put it, "The threat at the margin of modern non-theistic humanism is: So what?"6 The shrug of indifference, moreover, is no longer about what may be claimed about God; it is about what we may claim about our own humanity. If it is the case - and I think it is, though the point is arguable - that "modernity" has taught us that we can talk about ourselves and about the world without having to talk about God, then what "postmodernity" in some of its practical forms may be teaching us is to talk about ourselves without having to talk about ourselves as spirit.