Reality Isn't What It Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and O

PART ONE

THE COLLAPSE OF BELIEF

CHAPTER 1

Welcome to the Postmodern World

In recent decades we have passed, like Alice slipping through the looking glass, into a new world. This postmodern world looks and feels in many ways like the modern world that preceded it: we still have the belief systems that gave form to the modern world, and indeed we also have remnants of many of the belief systems of premodern societies. If there is anything we have plenty of, it is belief systems. But we also have something else: a growing suspicion that all belief systems—all ideas about human reality—are social constructions. This is a story about stories, a belief about beliefs, and in time—probably a very short time—it will become a central part of the worldview of most people. It will be the core of the first global civilization.

But it is not yet a core. It is more a seed of discontent. It fills our daily lives with uncertainty and anxiety, renders us vulnerable to tyrants and cults, shakes religious faith, and divides societies into groups contending with one another in a strange and unfamiliar kind of ideological conflict: not merely conflict between beliefs, but conflict about belief itself.

Politics has always rested on the construction and maintenance of social reality, but until recently we didn’t talk much about that. The deep issues concerning the nature of human truth were left to the philosophers. Most of the conflicts that tore the now-ending modern era were between different belief systems, each of which professed to have the truth: this faith against that one, capitalism against communism, science against religion. On all sides the assumption was that somebody possessed the real item, a truth fixed and beyond mere human conjecture. The modern era brought us into a world with multiple and conflicting belief systems. Now the postmodern era is revealing a world in which different groups have different beliefs about belief itself. A postmodern culture based on a different sense of social reality is coming into being—and it is a painful birth.

In small towns all across America, modern and postmodern culture do battle: neighbor turns against neighbor in bitter disputes about whether children should be taught skills of moral reasoning—a very postmodern concept—or should instead be taught to accept unquestioningly some rock-solid American values and beliefs. In the circles of higher education, the case is stated by books such as Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, which hammer at the postmodern relativism that (Professor Bloom says) abandons fundamental political principles in favor of a wishy-washy flexibility and recognizes no enemy other than the man who is not open to everything. Bloom recognizes—and is alarmed by—the extent to which the old view of reality has eroded: Almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.¹

Bloom’s indictment is quite correct, in a way: most people in Western society today do hold a much more relativistic view of reality. And he is also justified in charging that few of them understand the full implications of this profoundly radical epistemology and instead wander around in a muddled good-guy liberalism that has no clear concept of truth and think all the world’s problems would melt away if we just had a tad more tolerance. A postmodern worldview is present among us, yet unformed: it knows neither its own strengths, nor its own weaknesses. We do not know how to live in a world of socially constructed realities, yet we find it increasingly difficult to live in anything else.

The conservative indictment is correct, and yet the strategy that logically follows from it—to rebuild consensus, to get a core of standard values and beliefs in place in every American mind—is doomed to fail. To see that, you only need to look at the variety of things being offered by people who are in favor of some such consensus building: Professor Bloom offers a restoration of classical Western civilization, and his idea of culture leans strongly to the right. Frances Moore Lappé in her book Rediscovering America’s Values pleads for a similar return to cultural roots, but her version leans equally to the left.² Robert Bellah and his coauthors of Habits of the Heart want Americans to become less individualistic, more settled and community based, to stop wandering around.³ James Fallows in More Like Us argues for restoring the old American sense of possibility and openness, our tradition of mobility, our willingness to head for a new job or a new town and start all over.⁴ E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in Cultural Literacy proposed a list of things we all ought to know about, from Hank Aaron to Zurich, in order to be culturally literate.⁵ Other writers criticize Hirsch’s list for being too white-and European-oriented and propose other lists of items from non-European traditions. Still others counsel us to create and unite around new values based on feminism or ecology.⁶ All of these proposals make sense, in a way. Each of them looks good to certain groups of people, particularly those whose values and beliefs are the ones being proposed for the national culture. And I am sure the great majority of Americans have never heard of any of these people, or their books.

Humpty-Dumpty is not going to be put back together again. Efforts to do so are ultimately self-defeating, because campaigns to make people choose any particular system of value and belief tend to have the subversive effect of informing people that they are free to choose systems of value and belief. All too often, indoctrinations—even indoctrinations into traditional principles—turn out to be de facto courses in postmodernism.

The metaconflict about beliefs has become a central theme in American politics, and it also echoes around the globe: we can see it in the travails of the Catholic church as it struggles to hold the line against radically new ways of looking at revealed truth, in the reluctant and explosive deflation of doctrine of Marxist nations, in the worldwide proliferation of spiritual and psychological cults that offer new certainties to people who have abandoned—or been abandoned by—the old ones.

We can also see an increasing theatricality of politics, in which events are scripted and stage-managed for mass consumption, and in which individuals and groups struggle for starring roles (or at least bit parts) in the dramas of life. This theatricality is a natural—and inevitable—feature of our time. It is what happens when a lot of people begin to understand that reality is a social construction. The more enterprising among us see that there is much to be gained by constructing—and selling to the public—a certain reality, and so reality making becomes a new art and business. And a very big business, if you consider how much money is spent (and made) in fields such as advertising and public relations and political campaigning.

These are signs of the postmodern world coming into being—a world that, as philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin says, does not know how to define itself by what it is, only by what it has just now ceased to be.⁷

Three major processes are shaping this transition.

The first, which has been going on throughout this century, is the breakdown of old ways of belief. It has been amply documented elsewhere; indeed, it is one of the major themes of literature and scholarship in this century. Yeats in The Second Coming summed it up well:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.⁸

The result of this breakdown, now becoming increasingly apparent, is a kind of unregulated marketplace of realities in which all manner of belief systems are offered for public consumption.

The second process is the emergence of a new polarization, a conflict about the nature of social truth itself; epistemology joins the old family favorites—class, race, and nationality—as a source of political controversy. This polarization is evident in battles over education—especially moral instruction—and in several different intellectual disciplines.

The third process is the birth of a global culture, with a worldview that is truly a worldview. Globalization provides a new arena (or theater) in which all belief systems look around and become aware of all other belief systems, and in which people everywhere struggle in unprecedented ways to find out who and what they are.

The decades just ahead will provide the stage on which these processes will unfold, and on which the human species will strive to build a new civilization based on a new sense of social reality.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these three historical processes. First, the breakdown of old ways of belief.

FORCED TO BE FREE

In premodern societies, social constructions of reality took form slowly and invisibly, and the symbolic universes that people wove about themselves seemed to be permanent fixtures of life. The duty of persons in authority was to maintain the official worldview; that of everybody else, to conform to it. Most people do not appear to have known they had a worldview, nor to have felt in need of one. Premodern societies did not generally entertain the idea of any possible gulf between objective reality and social belief systems, much less the idea that it might be possible for other societies to have much different but equally good worldviews or that multiple worldviews (and views about worldviews) might coexist in the same social space.

In modern societies—born out of social and physical mobility, with people beginning to suspect that there were different possible realities—individuals and groups gained, or tried to gain, more options. And so were played out the dramas of recent centuries—inquisitions and revolutions, the explosive appearance of new ideas such as human rights and the separation of church and state. At a high cost of blood, with monumental investments of courage, many people gained the freedom to make their own choices about what to accept as real. They became consumers of reality who could select different values and beliefs and ways of behaving.

The modern era was a long period of transition, now nearing completion. As it ends, we are all thrust rudely—Adam and Eve thrown out of the garden again—into a new climate of freedom and stress. In the postmodern world we are all required to make choices about our realities. You may select a life of experimentation, eternal shopping in the bazaar of culture and subculture. Or you may forego the giddy diversity of contemporary life-style swapping and fall into step with some ancient heritage: be an Orthodox Jew or a fundamentalist Muslim or a Bible-toting Christian or a traditional native American. The range of such choices is enormous, but the choice is still a choice and requires an entirely different social consciousness from that of the Jews, Muslims, Christians, and native Americans who knew of no alternatives. The contemporary traditionalist may resemble in some outward ways the premodern individual, but the actual lived experiences of the two are utterly dissimilar. Today we are all forced to be free in a way that Rousseau could not have imagined when he coined that famous phrase. We have to make choices from a range of different stories—stories about what the universe is like, about who the good guys and the bad guys are, about who we are—and also have to make choices about how to make choices. The only thing we lack is the option of not having to make choices—although many of us try hard, and with some success, to conceal that from ourselves.

A new social consciousness is coming into being, and taking up residence within every one of us—including those of us who want no part of it. We all now live in our belief systems in an entirely new way. When we choose to adopt one, we know—even if we are terrified by the knowledge and do all we can to repress it in ourselves and others—that we could choose an entirely different one. The fundamentalist lives in eternal fear that he or she may lose the faith; the freethinking liberal lives in eternal fear that he or she may tire of freedom and fall into the arms of some ancient, modern, or postmodern belief system—anything from Islam to Scientology—that has a solid structure and ready answers.

The postmodern individual is continually reminded that different peoples have entirely different concepts of what the world is like. The person who understands this and accepts it recognizes social institutions as human creations and knows that even the sense of personal identity is different in different societies. Such a person views religious truth as a special kind of truth and not an eternal and perfect representation of cosmic reality. And—going beyond modern secular humanism—he or she sees the work of science as yet another form of social reality-construction and not a secret technique for taking objective photographs of the universe.

Many people are well into that postmodern understanding. Old ways of belief are collapsing within millions of minds. But we all have remarkable abilities for managing this internal transition, psychological tricks that help us remain sane and more or less socially conventional and that also conceal the enormity of what is going on in the world. It turns out that a collapse of old ways of belief does not necessarily—at least not immediately—result in a collapse of old systems of belief.

Like hermit crabs who skitter about in the tide pools wearing the shells of dead snails, we don old belief systems that do not always fit too well, and go about our business. Most of us now are not so much believers as possessors of beliefs. Conversion comes easy and often. The seeker after religious faith tries on not one religion, but any number of them. Conservative intellectuals point proudly to their renounced Marxism. And a dazzling tool kit of contemporary methods—everything from the brainwashing of individuals to the propagandizing of entire nations—is employed to get people to drop this belief, pick up that one, adjust the fit of another.

We all become consumers of reality (although, as in other forms of consumption, not with equal buying power), and greater numbers of us also become creators and merchandisers of reality. As the faith in old absolutes wanes, the season opens on the construction of new realities for those who do not care to be seen in the standard models. In earlier times, the invention of cultural forms was shrouded in mystery; now it becomes, for better or for worse, democratized. Individuals feel free to create new identities for themselves, and entrepreneurs of reality dabble gaily in the creation of new history, new science, new religion, new politics.

The mass media make it easy to create and disseminate new structures of reality. A new reality does not have to convert the entire society; it merely has to find its buyers, get a share of the market, and locate enough customers to fill up the theater. For example, recent books have been written seeking to demonstrate that in prehistoric times societies were goddess-worshipping and consequently peaceful, productive, and progressive. In The Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler tells us that early civilizations, under the influence of female-spirit religion, were wondrously benign and creative until—in the eleventh century B.C., apparently—macho barbarians from Europe and Asia came down from the hills bringing a new culture of violence and domination.⁹ Her general conclusion is that societies based on a feminine ethos are superior, and that if we can establish that ethos worldwide everything will be fine.

This story is offered as a new reality for everybody—indeed a prescription for the future of all human civilizations—but it has not been accepted as such, even by feminists for whom it is obviously meant to be a manifesto. Rachel Sternberg criticized the book’s excesses of free association and sleight of hand.¹⁰ Elizabeth Fox-Genovese dismissed it as full of absurdities.¹¹ A reviewer of an earlier book with a similar thesis pointed out that prehistory is still prehistory, and thus a playground in which one can create just about anything one pleases.¹² Nevertheless, the thesis is widely, uncritically, even gratefully accepted by many people because—well, because it’s a good story. It makes a case for a higher position for women in the world, and dramatically challenges the equally spurious construction of reality upon which male-dominated society is built. However, although offered as a universal, it does not sweep away that reality; it merely finds its following among people who think it’s a nice thing and soon becomes the belief system of yet another subculture. In the collapse of belief, a thousand subcultures bloom, and new belief systems arrive as regularly as the daily mail.

Can a case on behalf of a decent position for women in the world be made on any less grandiose basis? Can we work toward equality of the sexes without believing that it is going to fix up all our problems? Or do we need to swallow whole another shakily assembled story about the past and another glib promise about the future? In the postmodern era, many people choose the latter—conclude that the best way to advance a personal opinion is to create a whole new reality around it, complete with new absolute truths.

The logic of reality-creation is the following: if people believe this, then they will do that. It is a somewhat dubious method of getting things done, since it requires that a lot of people believe, it assumes they will do what you want/expect them to do when they do believe, and it all too often carries a certain contempt for the intelligence of those to whom you plan to sell your story. It is flimflam—high-minded flimflam at best—and although it is being practiced as never before, it is also as old as Western civilization. It is the logic of what Plato called the noble lie.

In The Republic, Socrates and his friends considered how it would be possible to obtain the loyalty of the guardians of the republic. It is one of the earliest recorded discussions of a deliberate social construction of reality. Socrates says that he will

attempt to persuade first the rulers and the soldiers, then the rest of the city, that the rearing and education we gave them were like dreams; they only thought they were undergoing all that was happening to them, while, in truth, at that time they were under the earth within, being fashioned and reared themselves, and their arms and other tools being crafted. When the job had been completely finished, then the earth, which is their mother, sent them up. And now, as though the land they are in were a mother and nurse, they must plan for and defend it, if anyone attacks, and they must think of the other citizens as brothers and born out of the earth.¹³

And so, with a bit of what would later become known as brainwashing, Socrates offers his solution to the classic political problem of how to get young men to sublimate their natural urges toward self-preservation and instead go forth willingly to risk their lives in conflict with other young men who don’t appear to be all that different from themselves. The noble lie is not a complete fabrication; it takes a core of what most of us believe to be true, our organic connection to the earth, and puts a different spin on it. But it is obvious that Socrates does not believe it himself; he just thinks it would be a good thing if others did.

We have many such noble lies, created out of the best of political intentions. We have always had them, and postmodern society is a fountainhead of new ones. The most recent is the story of Gaia, an ancient Greek myth hoked up anew in the guise of science to make us suitably reverent toward the biosphere. It, too, has a plausible, even in some respects obvious, core—the hypothesis that the biological processes on the earth affect geochemical and climatic conditions and, in effect, maintain the conditions for life. The hypothesis (or theory, as it is now being called) is quite worthy of our attention, and is easily the least important part of what could more accurately be described as the Gaia phenomenon, the popular new belief that the earth is a living organism. The Gaia phenomenon rests heavily on myth and metaphor. The Greek myth carries an image of earth as goddess. The organism metaphor suggests that the earth must, if it is like other higher organisms, have its own mind. These ideas—which have very little to do with science—are the turn-ons, and they are what is being transformed into a new faith, a kitsch ecotheology complete with its doctrines and its priests and priestesses.

The job skills of the creator of social reality include not only storytelling, but playwriting and playacting and many varieties of stage management. As more people suspect that reality can be created, the world becomes a kind of theater in which competing groups offer competing plots, and people with political aspirations try to get themselves cast in good roles. Shakespeare saw this coming when he had a character say, All the world’s a stage; today it is true in a way he could not have imagined.

In the collapse of belief, a thousand playwrights offer their versions of what is happening: here comes the revolution, here comes the Kingdom of God, here comes the New Age. One stage, different plays.

Tom Stoppard’s Rosenkranz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of the great myths of our time. It is not merely a play, or even a play within a play, but a counterplay about people who don’t want to follow the prevailing story. Some murky tragedy involving a Danish prince is taking place over there on one corner of the stage, but our heroes are not terribly interested in that plot. They do their own thing, spin out a different script. And so it goes in the postmodern world: if you don’t like the plot, you can always try your hand at creating another one and seeing if anybody wants to take a part in it.

It is not surprising, though, that controversies arise as to what is the real plot—or whether there is one at all. This kind of controversy has become a familiar feature of contemporary politics; it produces new and confusing situations, but amidst the confusion we can identify a pattern, a new political polarization. This is the second process.

THE NEW POLARIZATION

In the modern era, everyone learned to see politics along a left-to-right spectrum: the popular image had wild-eyed bomb-throwing revolutionists at one outer edge of the band and uptight my-country-right-or-wrong conservatives at the other. That spectrum had many shadings, but a basic polarization tended to emerge in all countries—particularly those with two-party systems. Gilbert and Sullivan summed it up admirably in their song about

How nature always does contrive

That every boy and every gal,

That’s born into the world alive

Is either a little Liberal,

Or else a little Conservative!¹⁴

This polarization expresses deep psychological differences between human beings. Perhaps such differences exist in any society, modern or ancient; in any case the specific form it took, the form we know best, was a product of the Industrial Revolution. In that form it shaped the politics of most governments at most levels, from national to local. It also generated the capitalist-communist deadlock, which dominated decades of international politics.

Another political spectrum is now becoming visible—so visible, in fact, that you would have a hard time not noticing its presence. We commonly identify it also as a conservative-to-liberal spectrum, but it is not quite the same. The new spectrum has at one extreme those who hold firmly to a set of truths that they declare to be the cosmic reality. These enviably sure-minded citizens may be religious fundamentalists or hard-nosed scientists, Marxist ideologues or true believers in Gaia—epistemology makes its own strange bedfellows. All kinds of positions occupy the middle ground; some of them are moderate and most of them merely confused. Near the other extreme are the relativists and constructivists who hold all truth to be human invention. Whatever is out there, they say, remains for all time out there, and all our systems of thought are stories we tell ourselves about something that remains essentially unknowable.

And there is yet another position. The rush of postmodern reaction from the old certainties has swept some people headlong into a worldview even more radical than that of the constructivists. Many voices can now be heard declaring that what is out there is only what we put out there. More precisely, what I put there—just little me, euphorically creating my own universe. We used to call this solipsism; now we call it New Age spirituality. It is the world according to Shirley MacLaine, who apparently created us all.

Many variations. But, as in the modern era, a basic polarization emerges. A postmodern Gilbert and Sullivan might say that all the people who now exist are either a little objectivist or else a little constructivist. And the two find themselves totally unable to agree on such matters as educational policy: what beliefs and values we should teach in the public schools.

Conflicts about this concrete part of the social-reality question have broken out like angry wildfires in very ordinary American communities, little towns where a lecture on epistemology would not draw enough listeners to fill the back room of the bar. One such place was Lolo, Montana, a small rural community near the Idaho border, where people divided into opposed camps and engaged in a bitter and long-lasting battle about what was being taught in the local schools. Some parents feared that their children were getting global perspectives instead of patriotism, moral reasoning and values clarification instead of traditional Christian and American principles. They considered such ideas to be subversive, and the people advancing them to be enemies of society. A teacher who was fired in the Lolo dispute said that she finally understood what people must have felt like during the McCarthy era or the Hitler years.

What some parents found subversive was the proposition that values are not based on any utter certainty about what is true and right, and have to be worked out by fallible human beings in the midst of daily life. This is a fairly common theme in public-school texts. A home economics book that drew heavy fire in one such dispute had the following statement: Values are subjective. They vary from person to person. You will be able to understand and get along with other people better if you keep an open mind about the value judgments they make.¹⁵

Another text said that one cannot go to an encyclopedia or a textbook for values, that they come out of the flux of life itself.¹⁶ A handbook for values clarification activities told teachers that such learning could not even be graded: The teacher may, and is encouraged to, evaluate how well a particular activity is going, but this can never be translated into an evaluation of students…. There are no wrong answers, and grading would only serve to stifle trust, honesty and a willingness to self-disclose.¹⁷

This sort of stuff, which to most of us might seem to suffer from no vice other than blandness, enrages fundamentalist critics, who say it comes perilously close to teaching that there is no right and wrong. In the fundamentalist worldview, there can be no values without an absolute source and authority; any instruction based on purely human moral reasoning, its critics say, has an amoral, socialist bias.¹⁸

Fundamentalists have produced their own textbooks, based on absolutism instead of relativism. An ad for one announces:

Many good books have been written about the danger of Secular Humanism. Now there is a book that does something to protect the mind of your child from its evil. Escape from Sugarloaf Mine is a power-packed, adventure story for children from pre-school through junior high school.

This children’s book actually counteracts—and neutralizes—the humanistic philosophy taught in Values Clarification…. Where Values Clarification teaches moral relativism, Escape from Sugarloaf Mine teaches decision-making skills based on God’s moral absolutes.¹⁹

Controversies over this issue have torn apart many communities, and have surfaced also at the highest levels of government. In the Reagan administration, some officials pushed for an all-out White House crusade against any sort of relativistic values teaching.²⁰ It is a major concern of national organizations such as Citizens for Excellence in Education, which supports teaching of absolute values, and People for the American Way, which works for moral reasoning.

Running closely parallel to the educational wars are conflicts about religious faith. The Southern Baptist church—a denomination that was once a model of old-style American individualism—has been having a tumultuous battle born of the crusade of some of its members to impose upon all Baptists a single tightly defined set of religious doctrines.

Old-time Baptists are amazed to see such a battle going on within their church. For centuries the Baptist denomination championed freedom of religion, and practiced it. Its congregations were independent democratic organizations, its members guided by the old freethinking tenet of the priesthood of the believer. Put two Baptists in the same room, a saying went, and you would get three opinions.

But then a faction within the church began strenuously advancing a doctrine of the literal truth of the Bible—one truth, one infallible and unerring truth. This position is known as inerrantism or literalism. Bill Moyers (himself reared as a Southern Baptist) interviewed its chief spokesman, the Reverend W. A. Criswell of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, for a Public Affairs Television series entitled God and Politics:

MOYERS: You call yourself a literalist. How do you define that?

DR. CRISWELL: Yes. I just think the Bible literally is true. Just from the beginning to the end of it.

MOYERS: Doctrinally?

DR. CRISWELL: Yes.

MOYERS: Scientifically?

DR. CRISWELL: Yes.

MOYERS: Historically?

DR. CRISWELL: Historically, yes.

MOYERS: In every way?

DR. CRISWELL: In every way.

MOYERS: And by liberal, you mean those people who say that Adam and Eve were not necessarily historical figures, that they were representative of the human race?

DR. CRISWELL: That’s correct.

MOYERS: And people who say that miracles didn’t necessarily happen, that they are parables of truth.

DR. CRISWELL: That’s correct.

MOYERS: That’s a liberal.

DR. CRISWELL: That’s correct, that’s correct, that’s correct.

MOYERS: You mean liberal theologically.

DR. CRISWELL: That’s right. For when the man starts going that way, it’s not long until he puts his Bible down and he picks up psychology and sociology and political science, and the Lord only knows what all. You’ve got to stay by that Bible and what it says, and if you ever turn aside from it, you’re going to turn into all those other things.²¹

Dr. Criswell and his followers