The return of religion since 1989

Postmodern spirituality A dialogue in five parts Part I: The rise of a proto-spirituality in the late works of some leading postmodern thinkers Roland Benedikter integralworld.net THE GLOBAL “RENAISSANCE OF RELIGION” (SINCE 1989-91) AGAINST THE PROTO-SPIRITUALITY OF LATE POSTMODERNISM (1979-2001)

I think, overviewing the situation today, we have to recognize: On the one hand we have the so-called “renaissance of religion”, the return of religion on a worldwide scale. You can see it in controversies in America under George W. Bush, you can see it here in Italy where I live in the Silvio Berlusconi era, you saw it when the pope John Paul II. died and his heir, Benedict XVI., was elected, and you see it in Hinduism where people become more aggressive, more militant, more organized. You see it, of course, in Islam. This is a movement, a general movement, of some of the world's most influent religions, that has been going on since 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and since 1991, when communism collapsed. Old ideologies are disappearing, and what replaces them is culture, something invisible, that forms a new center of identity and a new center of gravity for social organisation. And at the core of culture there is always religion. That is true for every culture in the world, be it pre-modern, modern or post-modern (even if in the last case it is more hidden, and often unconscious).

So we have seen the return of religion since 1989, when the big polarity between East and West fell. And at the same time, at the other hand we have this kind of growing desire in the post-modern cultures for something that is not religion, but a more direct, more personal broadening of horizons, of consciousness. For some essence you can grasp with your own hands and can hold on. For something, that should be more a personal experience than a religious belief. A psychological or individual growth. For a concrete, meta-rational transformation – but, if possible, firmly grounded on empirical rationality.

At the same time, when these two tendencies began to move, we experienced a big change in the cultural paradigm of the European-Western world. It was the so-called “postmodern” movement in philosophy, in the social sciences and in academical thinking in general, that rose since the late 1970s, about ten years before the Berlin Wall fell, of whom the big change was made. The “postmodern” thinkers in Europe were people that came out of the revolutionary impulse of 1968: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Helene Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari. They were inspired by a big, overwhelming emphasis of emancipation. If you put it in the guiding principles of the French revolution, the first, grounding emancipative and democratic impulse that stays at the beginning of modern life, you can say that their big intuition was not primarily “freedom”, not primarily “brotherhood” (even if those two principles were very important to them), but “equality”.

They all tried to fully establish the principle of equality that was expressed in the French Revolution in the post-war and post-colonial European-Western world. And they tried to do that importing this principle from the political sphere into the educational sphere and into the academic thinking in general - where not equality, but freedom would be the right principle, according to the French revolution. As you remember, the French revolution, and we should never forget that, said: brotherhood should be the guiding principle in the economic sphere of modern society; equality the guiding principle in the political and juridical sphere; and freedom the guiding principle in the educational, cultural and religious sphere.

The “postmodern” thinkers coming out of 1968 were concentrated on the principle of equality, because they saw that the society they lived in was unjust. People were not equal and there were strong hierarchies, open hierarchies and hidden hierarchies – just think at the situation in Berkeley and San Francisco at the end of the 1960is, but also, even if in a completely different manner, in Continental Europe. And they thought that changing these hierarchies would change everything. So they took the principle of equality as their “universal key”. And to start the change, they thought, since most of them were students or scholars, you have to start with the single person, with her or his thoughts and feelings: you have to start in the educational and cultural sphere. So they just wanted that everybody was conscious of what equality between people means, and that everybody could feel it and act accordingly.

But how to pursue that goal? To pursue it, they used the method of “deconstruction”. More or less all of them, even if they gave this method different names. They wanted to “deconstruct” the main pillars of hierarchic organisational patterns in the European-Western societies. And the mechanism for doing that was, to put it in a simple image, to import what psychoanalysis does in therapy into the educational system. They tried to import the method of “self-deconstruction” in philosophical discourse, in academic life, in higher education, and to do it there in a slightly different way than psychoanalysis. But basically, it was the same. You just learned from them, and you learn it until today, how to deconstruct yourself. That means: How to see what you are not, what your illusions of yourself are, and how you eventually are made by your parents, your experiences here and there, you education, your friends, the culture you live in, the social class you come from.

With one word: You learn to see, and feel, how you are not primarily an independent “I” as you thought, but much more, decisively more a construct of your context. Gaining this insight means, according to the leading postmodern thinkers, “deconstructing” your illusions of yourself (and the world) that you had before this discovery. In the end, as the main result of the postmodern deconstruction method, which lies at the heart of our cultural paradigm since the end of the 1970is until today, you realize that your context: your education, your culture, your class, your unconscious bindings, all this is your self, even if you normally feel that you are something else than all those things.

And the result may be, that you become more connected, more tolerant, more self-aware for hidden hierarchies working in your ego generating hierarchies in yourself and in your everyday world, and thus that you pay more attention to equality and justice in your thinking and in your everyday life with other people, who share your moment in time and your destiny of a “constructed” being.

If this is the core goal and method of Postmodernism, than we can assume: The main postmodern thinkers like Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard or Foucault tried to “deconstruct” virtually everything possible, that means: everything that appears as “something” in the normal mind, such as: your unreflected everyday self, your ego, your “normal” I, the history and societal patterns we are living in, our truth concepts, our “speech acts”, our gender roles and so on. Deconstruct them until they fully reveal themselves as pure social and cultural constructions without any “essence”, without any objective truth.

When they reveal their “essencelessness”, we are free to change them at our will. So deconstructing everything means, to leave just nothing “essential” behind. And the logic behind that is: If there is nothing essential, if everything is just a construct, than everything can be changed if people want to change it. And that will equally be an emancipative impulse for society, collective and individual truth systems as for the concepts of “I”. It will, basically, be good for everything. It will move us forward – not in spite, but because we have nothing “essential” or objective left. rolandbenedikter@yahoo.de