Chapter 14: Expanded conversation: postmodern city
 

In the past few decades, advanced industrial societies have moved through an inflection point, from the Modernization phase into a Postmodernization phase… With Postmodernization, a new worldview is gradually replacing the outlook that has dominated industrializing societies since the Industrial Revolution… It is transforming basic norms governing politics, work, religion, family and sexual behaviour.

                                                            Modernization and Postmodernization (Inglehart, 1997:8).

I have sought to define the modern city of Auckland in conversation with the ideal city of God. In this chapter, I extend the conversation about goals of transformative revival by describing the context in elements of postmodernism, the lifestyle of the mega-city, identifying some conversation spaces within it. I will largely leave responses to the next chapter on the Kingdom of God.

The task of rational definition of postmodernism, a description of an eclectic anti-foundational milieux with shifting boundaries, is impossible, so I will simply seek to describe some elements in its (non-existent?) metanarrative. The choice of which themes to discuss reflects an extension of the previous urban themes and an attempt to identify primary aspects of change in relationship to truth and authority, the material, the nature of humanness and the socio-political.

I first consider reasons for utilising the theme of postmodernism in social analysis and its development from modernism in the New Zealand context. Then I define postmodernism in the context of postmodernisation, examine two critiques, and describe its expansion in philosophy, literary theory, physical sciences, economics and its resurgent spirituality. I then look at some characteristics: loss of metanarrative, resulting in image as substance, fragmentation and schizophrenia, the global technological society with its belief in progress, consumer society, and pragmatism as a way of life. I conclude by examining the revival movement in Kiwi Kulture and its response to this new milieu. I then take a brief excursus at the end of the chapter examining whether the hermeneutic of transformational conversations of Chapter 2 is postmodern in style and substance.

Postmodernism: Interpretative Key to Complex Cultural Change

Postmodern Child-raising

My 11 year old Brazilian-Kiwi daughter comes home from an evangelical school, to sit before a computer designing 21st century cities, while messaging Pakeha friends who frequent a charismatic church and her Chinese friend whose father flies in from Hong Kong each month. At night, when she joins me to watch the news, I have to censor what she sees as she is bombarded by juxtaposed views of poverty, welfare, government interference, homosexuality and the regular update of police response to violence.

In the midst of this plurality, sensuality, truth and sordidness, how do I interpret to her the cultural changes going on and the lack of public Christian response while expanding her understanding from evangelical retrenchment to the public engagement of the Spirit?

Unclear definition of the causes of societal change and unclear theological and strategic processes to bring about actual engagement with structural causes of moral and social disintegration leaves many in a fog of failed dreams. Social analysis, such as this chapter, is an essential step in clearing away the fog. Such analysis must take into cognizance the elements commonly lumped together under the nebulous term, “postmodernism.”

Rural Village to Modern City to Postmodern Megacity

1: Internal and External Forces Defining Kiwi Society

 

Fig. 1 shows some external determinants in three phases of development of the Kiwi soul. These are paralleled by internal communal progressions. The early phase through till the second world war was one of survival and dependency. Aspects of modernism then became central. Issues of postmodernism in the 1980’s and 1990’s lead to both redefinition of the tribal and expansion of migrant communities as well as characteristics of the global postmodern city.

To understand post-modernity, I need to define modernity in New Zealand. The city of Auckland, representative of many emerging mega-cities, is a mixture of rural/tribal, modern and postmodern cultures and values. It grew from the rationalist modern period in which New Zealand as a nation was born. Five characteristics of that period are identified in Fig. 1.

This was a philosophic wave on which the leadership of New Zealand built momentum. Rationality created the drive for the efficient running of a capitalist economy, a bureaucratic or semi-socialist state and a highly valued scientific method (that supported my father’s role as a soil research scientist in sustaining agricultural pre-eminence). These were all encompassed with a sense of economic and social progress and increasing control of the forces of nature. This environment of technological modernity in which the New Zealand soul developed, has been characterised as Descartes’ autonomous, rational substance, encountering Newton’s mechanistic world (Grentz, 1996: 3).^[1]

Conversation Space: For believers, inherent in such worldviews is a grieving of the Spirit, who created humanness in far greater complexity than rationality, to rule, manage, care for a world far more complex than mechanistic, and to do so, not as autonomous agents, but in dependence on himself. Modernism has been a denial of the truth that in ourselves we have no existence — a worldview denial of God as the sustainer. Evangelicalism, growing in the modernist period and using its tools has always critiqued its foundations (Vanhoozer, 1995: 10-11).

The Phase Shift to Postmodernism

Twenty years beyond the failed responses of the Christian Heritage Party challenging “secular humanism” of modernism, a new cultural window has opened. For modernism, characterised by “the pervasive rationalisation of all spheres of society” (as Weber put it), has been fracturing at its centre as advanced industrial societies morph into postmodernism.

… modernization is not the final stage of history. The rise of advanced industrial society leads to another fundamentally different shift in basic values – one that deemphasizes the instrumental rationality that characterised industrial society. Postmodern values become prevalent (Inglehart, 1997:5-6).

This phase-shift into postmodernism provides a window of time for new openness to transformative conversations.

Postmodernism is a term describing a cluster of complex social analyses of cultures beyond the expansion of modernity. Modernism has now moved into a new phase of global culture we might call New Global/Tribal Culture.^[2] It is a global civilisation, embracing that sixth of the world not trapped by poverty and filters down^[3] to that other five-sixths, who are increasingly affirming tribal identities. It grew from a past Western Christendom and modern civilisation, based in Europe and was exported via the European empires. En route it was transmuted into a global civilisation, marked by jeans and McDonalds, Pepsi and computers, MTV and walkmans. Despite the prominence of some American cities, such as Los Angeles, in its emergence, it has no single base nor is it a politically defined civilisation. This kind of networked civilisation without central rule is something unknown in history.

Postmodernism Defined

There are multiple perspectives on postmodernism, not all compatible. Anderson describes a global paradigm shift in belief systems:

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 pre-modern societies… But we also have something else: a growing suspicion that all belief systems — all ideas about human reality — are social constructions… 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 (1990:3,4).

The term radicalised modernity, used by Anthony Giddens in The Consequences of Modernity (1990) reflects thinking in economics and development studies. He argues that we are not so much living in a postmodern world as experiencing a fundamentally changed condition of modernity, where changing technology in late capitalism is increasing the scope and pace of change in cultural forms. This term better includes issues of continuity, in contrast to “post-” implying “against”. British sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman (2000), also extends “heavy” or “solid” hardware modernity (the mass production factory society) to “liquid modernity,” (the information, networked society).

Postmodernisation

This Postmodernism as a description of cultural values, beliefs, worldviews etc., is based on postmodernisation, changes in the structures of society. Fig. 2 shows some of the identifiable changes in social structure from the modern to postmodern period.

2: Postmodernisation: Structural Changes from Modern to New Global Culture[4]

	Structural Elements of Modernisation	Structural Elements of Late Modernity (or Postmodernisation)
Institutional Carriers	Modern nation-state Industrial capitalism The knowledge sector (universities)	International institutions (UN, IMF, etc.) The electronic superhighway The media
Economic Structure	National capitalism and communism	Global hyper- capitalism
Production Technology	Transition from agriculture to manufacturing	Transition from manufacturing to information
Institutional Political Carriers and Allegiances	Modern nation-states	Globally interconnected cities (& city-states) Ethnic political entities
Organisational Structures	Bureaucracies Hierarchies	Networks Flattened levels of authority
Range of Decision-making	Growing level of choices within a nation	Endless expansion of choices within the global city
Modes of Relating	In-city relationships clustered around vocation and family	Global webs of common interest relationships electronically connected
Structural Location of Belief	Structural relocation from centre to periphery as one societal sector along with economics, politics, sociology, psychology, etc.	Relocation from periphery to only one of multiple belief options Diversification of semi-formal religious communities

Fig. 2 indicates structural differences between modernisation and postmodernisation. What is not indicated is that the modern continues in parallel with the postmodern, as this is at least a generational transition.

The Globalisation Critique

Critics view this term as part of an ongoing colonialist search for a universal.^[5] Such Western definition at a global level is seen as destructive to local cultures. The global culture is not just emerging from the collapse of Western cultural integration but from the interplay of six thousand cultures across the shrinking globe. As such, to define it with a Western term inferring evolution from modernism is a form of Western arrogance. For example, Huntington (2001) argues for nine major modern civilisations around the globe. On the other hand, he concludes that modern societies resemble each other more than traditional societies because of increased global interaction and transfer of innovations and technology and because of the transition from agricultural production to industry as the basis of modern society.

Thus, I prefer not to use the term “postmodern” to imply the new cosmopolis is a culture of networked cities in opposition to the old order. Rather, it is a new emerging order building on the philosophic ruins of the old. There are metanarratives, but they are morphing.[6]  Yet, while bearing in mind these critiques, I will employ the term as a usefully descriptive category because it is popular, and opens a realm of public debate. It also facilitates analysis of the changes occurring between the coexistent urban diversity of tribal, peasant, industrial and information societies in relationships to both local and global cultural poles.

The Genesis of Postmodernism

Next, I will glance over the genesis and some characteristics of global postmodernism in some fields of knowledge, with the recognition that significant parts of Auckland society and a large portion of young adults (it is a generational change) now live within this framework. The question of how the Spirit, through the revived church, will respond and redefine these values underlies this analysis.

Postmodernism in Philosophy

Philosophers for more than a century have been predicting the death of Western civilisation based on the loss of the central sources of tradition, authority and power based in the church, the nation-state and the university (Fig. 2). The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), is considered to have begun the attack on modernity with his ‘the death of God’ (the loss of the truth and power of Christianity in Western culture), leaving only ‘knowledge as a will to power’ (Nietzsche, 1967), the pragmatic use of creative energies in language, values and moral systems to develop conceptions of truth, as perspectives for advancing causes or people. Because all knowledge is a matter of perspective, hence all interpretation is inadequate approximation, hence innately a lie, there is no truth; only relative truths.

This collapse of the search for universals (such as perfect beauty), devolved through the arts. I can best describe this by a presentation I used with students in the 1980’s to illustrate the lostness of humanity without an integrating Christ. It summarised a work of one of Francis Schaeffer’s mentors, art historian Rookmaker. He analysed the collapse of the search for absolute beauty in art (1970/1999). Symbolically, the Renaissance moved God from the centre of the artist’s canvas. Now Dutch canvasses had humans at centre and God in the small picture on the wall (portraying the individual human as central authority, God as peripheral). Realism led to Cubism and Impressionism which led to abstract art. Postmodern art has no human centre. God may not be present. Spirits are. Technique and technology are present, but often warped. The search for integration, perfect beauty and meaning for many has ceased. Experience of image remains.

The rise of deconstructionism as a literary theory provided the philosophical trigger for analysing these changes. Deconstructionists reject the view of structuralists that meaning is inherent in the text. It depends on the interpreter, hence there are many meanings. Jacques Derrida, in French philosophy, rejected the “metaphysics of presence” — the idea that something transcendent, eternal, is present in reality and can be described (Sherwood, 2000). Michel Foucault, reflecting on the relationship of power and knowledge (particularly in Discipline and Punish (1977) and the Archaeology of Knowledge (1972)) added that because knowledge is to name something and is an exercise of power, the great books need to be “unmasked” to show how they conceal the will to power (George, 2000). Richard Rorty adds that we cannot verify truth by correspondence between an assertion and reality through the internal coherence of the assertions themselves (1989). Thus philosophy becomes a conversation rather than discovering truth. These ideas reflect the abandonment of the search for a centre, a unity in knowledge (Grentz, 1996: 5-7).

French philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge characterizes “postmodernity” as “incredulity toward metanarrative” (1985: xxiv). Thus postmodernism, as a philosophy reflecting popular culture in the West lost sight first of Christendom’s God in the modern era, then of modernity’s humanity as authority. The loss of an external anchor for truth has resulted in there being no measure to evaluate “your truth” from “my truth.” This fractionalisation results in no consensus on truth.

Yet, from dissonance, cultures seek integration[7] if they are to survive, emotionally, socially and morally. They may stumble on in that dissonance, or they die. For this reason in this study I posit postmodernism not as a rejection of metanarrative itself, but as a transitional phase rejecting the metanarratives of an integrated modern Western worldview for the emergence of new integrations in the global/local culture.

Conversational Space: Evangelical philosopher Francis Schaeffer developed one of the earliest popular evangelical critiques of these trends (1968), showing that if there is no external reference point for truth, there is no lasting morality, for there is no basis (except the norms of the masses, not exactly the highest of moral bases) for judging what is moral. If there are no morals, there is only what an evangelical theologian of culture, Os Guinness (1976), writes of — the Dust of Death, the death of Western culture. But the end is not death and chaos as the philosophers of the largely atheistic left define, but an integrating city.

The speed of this cultural impact, also reminds me of A.F.C. Wallace’s (1956) revitalisation theory about the impact of a larger culture on a tribal people and the four possible responses that occur as they lose the integrations of their culture – gangs, new prophetic movements, accommodation to the new, or anomie — only this time it is a global cultural tsunami where whole nations face these shocks and four similar possible responses.

What are the implications for revived believers in Auckland facing a culture that daily loses its commitment to truth and increasingly laughs at all authority? In what ways does the church redefine coherence and the centrality of truth for those marginalised by the oppression of incoherence in the midst of new technology? How do they portray The Story into a context where there is no truth, only story, with all stories of equal validity?

What I am proposing in this thesis is a prophetic response that engages the tsunami, but creates new integrations, new metanarratives running stylistically parallel to this dominating worldview (like a surfer riding the wave), but rejecting some of its core tenets.

Physical Sciences: Death of Materialism

In the 20th century, a parallel shift occurred in the physical sciences. Chance and chaos, symbolised in the theory of relativity, or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, replaced the absoluteness of Newtonian physics of inert matter, described in Principia (1687).[8] This leads Paul Davies and John Gribben in The Matter Myth to speak of the “Death of Materialism”:

Newton’s images of the workings of nature as an elaborate clockwork struck a deep chord. The clock epitomized order, harmony and mathematical precision, ideas that fitted well with the prevailing theology. Gone were the ancient notions of the cosmos as a living organism.… The doctrine that the physical universe consists of inert matter locked into a sort of gigantic deterministic clock has penetrated all branches of human enquiry… contributed in large part to alienating human beings from the Universe they inhabit. When extended into the domain of human affairs, such as politics or economics, machine mindedness leads to demoralization and depersonalization. People feel a sense of helplessness; they are merely ‘cogs’ in a machine that will lumber on regardless of their feelings or actions.… These people can take heart: materialism is dead (1991: 5-7).

Quantum physics led to chaos theory, descriptions of nonlinear systems that become unstable and change in random and yet predictable ways. The certainty of clockwork is now replaced by a world of open futures, in which even matter acquires an element of creativity. In the social sciences the reaction to behaviourism in psychology and determinism in sociology in the 1960’s has also moved increasingly to open systems approaches.

Along with this loss of unity comes an all-pervasive intrusion of what postmodern critic Neil Postman (1993) calls technopoly, the intrusion of technology into everything from medical practice to bureaucracy to politics to religion. Ellul foresaw this decades prior (1964) in The Technological Society.

Conversation Space: How does the church redefine the human-matter dynamics in terms of such open-ended creativity and futurism? How can the church be faithful in defining the presence of a creative God in the nature of environmental space and network space?

Postmodernism in the Political and Economic Domain

Paralleling these shifts in the physical sciences are shifts in the broader culture, the economic and political domains. As described in Fig. 2, nationally based production/ consumption capitalism has become the globalised economy. Economies have moved from manufacturing to information technology. The result is a flattening of bureaucracies. This has been accelerated by the rapid expansion of technology, resulting in an endless expansion of daily choices.

Concurrently, nation-state political systems have in many countries lost the allegiance of citizens who have now reverted to ethnic origins as the basis of political organisation. Tribalism and at times, balkanisation is increasing from Jerusalem to the Congo to the Maori party. [9]

Conversational Space: In the past, bishops related to prime ministers. Today in this flattened hierarchy, how does the church train its broad base to use new levels of access to directly influence national leadership?

I know urbane Christian workers and an executive who refuse or are unable to utilise email. I know of elderly folk for whom these changes are all confusion and even more confusing when brought into their safe place, the church, by enthusiastic theological college graduates bent on postmodern church growth. How does the church cater for those who opt out of the stress levels of accelerated technology into anomie?

In what ways may it affirm tribal identity, yet enhance cultural unity?

Beyond Secularism: The (Almost) Structural Relocation of Belief

The church during modernisation was moved from the centre of the city to  be replaced by the bank, factory and university. In post-modernity it has become further dispossessed -  no longer one sector of society as in modernity, but one option “for those who like that option.”

Secularism as a philosophy (as against secularisation as process) has developed hostile to spiritual beliefs and supernatural explanations. Originally, there was that area of life that “had not yet been penetrated by religious values.” Gradually however, the word came to mean, “that order of society which is neutral to the influence of religion” (Cohen, 1958: 37-38). But Newbigin argues that the state cannot be neutral in respect to other metanarratives (1986:132) so the phrase becomes one meaning hostility to religions.

Yet, this new culture is not simply secular but deeply spiritual. Moving beyond secular modernism, it involves an underlying search for the spiritual, yet a search largely outside traditional religious structure. This opens a door for conversation about the good city. Peter Lineham argues against extreme perspectives on this structural relocation of belief, indicating that church and state in New Zealand continue to be bound together in an “unequal co-dependency” (2000:41). The confusion for secularists is that the thesis of secularisation hasn’t panned out: “It is in the West itself, not the century of secularisation, but of unprecedented religious innovation” (Turner, 1993:24). While there is a steady rise in those who have no religion or object to the question on religion in the New Zealand census (37% in 2001) the statistics in Error! Reference source not found. indicate that churches in New Zealand are alive and well and with the exception of those which have bought into secular theology or are trapped in older institutional forms, they are growing. In fact, with the exception of large parts of Western Europe, the opposite to secularisation is true globally, as sociologist Peter Berger’s The Desecularization of the World (1999) describes.[10]

Conversation Space: Ahdar has demonstrated points of conflict in New Zealand between secularists and conservative Christians (2000: 112-115), speaking of two “disestablishments” of traditional Christianity, the improbability of re-establishing a Christian state, yet the possibility that public religion may yet make a comeback, with “some unaccustomed bedfellows” in an increasingly pluralistic society (2000:76-77). An interesting phenomenon of postmodernism, is the re-emergence of the search for spiritualities. Secularism has been found wanting. While the old institutional religions are resisted, new spiritualities are being sought. The local bookshop has a shelf of books on new age religion, witchcraft, Zen Buddhism, Yoga, one or two Bibles, but nothing of substance about orthodox Christian beliefs. Our shopping centre in Glen Eden, as in many Auckland suburbs, boasts a new store for witchcraft. In New Zealand this search for spirituality includes the use of Maori spirit