Strange Days: Life in the Spirit in a Time of Upheaval

by Mark Sayers

The way we receive information—primarily through cable news and the Internet, which are instant and blended with entertainment—is changing how we perceive information, and thus, how we experience the world.

The contemporary landscape allows our every glance to constantly find screens, and on those screens, a constant flow of news. “The hum and rush of the news have seeped into our deepest selves,”3 says de Botton.

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff describes the way we now interact with media as present shock. In present shock, all that matters is what is happening right now. In the past, news worked in cycles. When a late-breaking event occurred too close to print, it’d be in the next day’s paper.

“Blatant shock is the only surefire strategy for gaining viewers in the now,” observes Rushkoff, who points out that this media stream creates an emotional response in us.

In this media culture, punditry replaces analysis. Facts float. Feelings replace truth. News becomes a visceral rather than cerebral medium.

Radical individualism continues to dominate, and more and more adults are living alone. Our increasing connectivity to more people, more news, and more opinions, alongside our relational poverty, can make us feel disconnected and estranged from others. In turn, this can lead to anxiety and worry about our own lives and the fate of our world.

Genesis presents all of creation as a temple, and humans as divinely ordained priests. Whereas we are used to thinking of temples as buildings, God originally established the whole world as a temple. The divine, the sacred, was not confined to brick and mortar.

Because humans are spiritually homeless, we dream of holy spaces, utopias, motherlands, golden ages, and soulmates. We yearn for reconnection to the divine, re-admittance to the sacred and pure space.

This wandering, this lostness, is the essence of humanity’s essential weakness: detachment from their true home in God, and with that, the curse of mortality.

Cain, just as all humans will do, fights back against his weakness and mortality with an attempt to carve out meaning and legacy apart from God.

Cain, like his parents, attempts to be like God. Not just in exercising the power of name-giving, but in exercising power over life in the murder of his brother Abel.

Building the city, too, is an act of subtle rebellion against God. It is an attempt to mirror the security and peace of Eden, but without God. It was a projection of human power, an attempt to counter the weakness of mortal human flesh with the solidity of stones and walls.

Cain reaches for a kind of substitute for eternity by fathering a son and attempting to create a lineage. He initiates a city in his son’s name, but without the protection of God.

Like Cain, our selfish rebellion, thrusting us into the fleshly condition of fear and mortality, seeks to find security and stability in the spaces, places, and social structures that we create. Lost, wandering east of Eden, we, like Cain, scratch out imitations of home in the dust of where we find ourselves. Unable to return to Eden, we create a place for ourselves.

Thus the wisdom of the ancient world tended to side with the view that social and political progress would eventually be sabotaged by the frailties of human nature. History was a perpetual cycle, a fight of civilization against flesh, a struggle that would ultimately be undone from within.

“The sin of man consists in that he does not want to be flesh,” writes Herman Ridderbos, reminding us that we are defined by our rebellion against God. We hate our mortality, our weakness, so even as we battle against flesh, we wish to transcend it. Our desire to be as gods continues beyond Eden.

But when we seek fulfillment elsewhere, we use the flesh to try and fulfill desires of the spirit—we take up attitudes and actions that oppose the reign of God in our lives, further adding to our chaos.

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institutions, structures, and patterns of behavior have religious features. All cultures are infused with values and actions that have religious dimensions and overtones. Whether they name the name of a known god or not, societies and cultures are always patterned by some ultimate inspiration and aspiration.”

Humans are not just social creatures, but religious ones, too. The root of the word “culture” is cultus, a Latin word meaning “to care, or tend a sacred site of worship.” Culture is an expression of worship.

We may see ourselves as thoroughly secular, but our lives and societies are contoured to religion. The complexities of the world, so often seemingly random, become clearer when we understand the religious impulses behind our social architecture.

behind all social architecture, be it ancient or modern, Western or non-Western, are “practices concerning holiness, purity, and sacrifice.”2 These are the rules, rituals, relationships, and social structures that organize life. They are arranged around concepts of who is in and who is out (borders); what makes a person, place, or thing pure and safe (purity); and what practices defend the purity of a border against what is dangerous, unclean, and unholy (sacrifice).

So you see that not just the West but indeed the world is becoming a construction site where walls—physical, cultural, and spiritual—are being simultaneously erected and torn down. All in an effort to keep the chaos at bay, to reach for the purity of a utopia, to find a sense of home, and security. A map is emerging, a compass with which to navigate the complexities of our world. “Locate the sacred center of a group; its boundaries of tolerable and intolerable persons, objects and behavior; its rituals of sacrifice—discover all this and you have got down to the elementary particles.”3

Humans are God-centered creatures; even when we run from Him we still create religious systems and structures.

Globalization feels like a threat because it disrupts our boundaries. It upsets our equilibrium. This is the tension the world is feeling.

Globalization integrates cultures, expanding our ability to reach around the world and move across boundaries. For traditional societies, meaning is found in the correct and sacred ordering of space and time. Globalization radically rearranges both.7

Even the socioeconomic dynamics of globalization—specifically global capitalism and the Internet—work against the maintenance of place, boundaries, and borders. For some, globalization brings not wealth but the displacement of poverty.

Globalization creates winners and losers, and the losers often lose their sense of home.

The boundary-eliminating momentum of globalization can push us into spiritual poverty, as the markers that illuminated and protected great meanings disappear. This process leaves many disoriented and directionless, looking for ways of remarking the borders and boundaries. They become spiritually placeless because the boundaries of locations sacred and pure to them are punctured, crossed, or abused.

the fear that locals sometimes have of their culture being erased by migrants is nothing compared to the fear the migrant has that their own culture will be decimated by the new culture they find themselves in. Culturally and religiously disoriented, more radical and dangerous forms of religion, ideology, and nationalism can take hold;

However, it is important to note that the proponents of globalization are not just advocates for an economic order, which connects the world through trade and migration, but also of the belief that globalization’s erasing of borders, place, and local meanings is essential for humankind’s development. This belief runs deep in the Western imagination, still driving much of the ideological force of globalization.

The utopia of globalization found at the end of history offered a limitless expanse of options. Instead of commonality undergirded by shared cultural norms, there was an endless choice fueled by the unchallenged ethic of tolerance. The self would stand unbridled by the other.

Emerging adulthood, rather than the teen years, midlife, or older years, became the cultural standard, as the delaying of childbirth, family, and marriage became the norm. Emerging adulthood is a time when “no dreams have been permanently dashed, no doors have been permanently closed, every possibility for happiness is still alive”8 (emphasis mine).

Globalization appeared to be a reduction of the world into a blank canvas on which the individual could paint their dreams.

The reason we feel as anxious as we do is that we don’t see what we expected. We came running into the new world with arms raised in triumph, like a boxer waiting for flowers to flood the ring. But as the darkness swirls around us, our posture shifts. Our arms slouch in confusion, as if to ask, “What is this?” Expect utopia, and dystopia is jarring.

Spaces that are not concerned with history, relationships, or identity, then, are non-places. For Auge, hotels, airports, and highways are examples of non-places.

Whereas place gives identity, the non-place offers only tips and lifestyle advice with which to shape one’s identity.

maximum individual freedom, shorn of the restrictions of binding relationships, externally given identities, and the responsibility of history.

The draw to non-places is to find freedom, but does anyone actually experience them that way? The non-places of globalization, be they a multinational clothing store, an exurb filled with neighbors who never speak to each other, or our smartphones, are far from neutral, ideology-free zones. They have an agenda. They are designed to illicit a particular response within you.

We wrap ourselves in our lounge rooms and flat-screen televisions for safety, but the irony is that it is in these very places we are bombarded with chaos.

The education of non-places is built on the idea that the world should be a comfortable space for us to pursue our pleasures and individual agendas.

Our non-place habits are liturgies that shape us, fool us, into thinking we can have total freedom, expanding human flourishing, and satisfaction through the consumption of products and experiences. They whisper to us that we can be godlike, hovering above it all while maintaining individual autonomy.

Non-places are the temples of the West’s religion, which masquerades as a non-religion. Preaching an oversimplification of life. Appearing to be content free while discipling us in a secular fundamentalism. The gospel that the world is your playground. Evangelizing us into a faith that fails.

However, in the Western bubble of comfort, the role of parents and educators has been to protect first children, then teenagers, and then even young adults from the sting of suffering, tragedy, and even consequence—the traditional engines of character formation. This kind of parenting and education is born of an extreme vision of the fragility of humans, a belief in the excessive damage done by exposure to suffering and hardship.

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han notes that fatigue, anxiety, and attention deficit mark many today. We have moved from a disciplinary society, in which the social structure provides restraints, authority, and rules, to an achievement society. Whereas, according to Han, a disciplinary society is driven by the verb should, in which society asserts its force against the individual to move them in a socially acceptable direction, the achievement society is powered by the verb can. Instead of the negatives of the disciplinary society, the achievement society tells all that they can do it all, have it all, and be all.

The individual’s challenge in the achievement society is to not be overrun by the excess of positivity. With the no-limits of non-places, individuals overwhelm themselves, struggling to meet their self-image and achieve their inflated expectations. In contrast to the disciplinary society, which erected barriers, rules, and taboos to maintain social cohesion with the other, in the achievement society, the other is nonexistent. Thus the self struggles to define the other. And God, as “the other” who offers guidance, authority, and moral limits, is dispensed. Without guidance, the self becomes anxious, agitated, and fearful, caught in a constant mood from which it cannot escape. The individual becomes his own judge. Holding his self-worth against the unrealistic expectations society has given him, he falls into tiredness and exhaustion. Instead of being exploited in the disciplinary society, in the achievement society the self exploits itself, becoming depressed.

There is no rest for the weary in achievement society. The pace of life simply doesn’t allow for recovery time. But taught to fear and flee from pain, suffering, and the negative, they become paralyzed, trapped between what they desire and their own limitations.

“The mania for health emerges when life has become as flat as a coin and stripped of all narrative content, all value. Given the atomization of society and the erosion of the social, all that remains is the body of the ego, which is to be kept healthy at any cost … Life reduced to bare, vital functioning is life to be kept healthy unconditionally. Health is the new goddess.”10

Ultimately, in the borderless freedom of the contemporary “non-place,” individuals make their body a place, a sacred temple to be kept pure. Health becomes an obsession. The body another border. The self a secure land.

So then, what do we make of non-places? We must recognize the irony of them. We are driven there by chaos, to shut out for a moment the fact that all is not right in the world.