(Re)inventing the Sacred

Planting Roots: Alienation and the Enlightenment

Now that we have a basic understanding of Finger’s terms, we may turn to discuss what he believes to be at the root of contemporary alienation: Newtonian physics. This may seem like a stretch even to a historian of science and culture but Finger’s thesis deserves a fair hearing. What he means when he speaks about Newtonian physics as the cause of this contemporary process of alienation is that the advent of Newtonian Physics marks the beginning of the breakdown of a metaphysical metanarrative view of the way the world works. He writes

According to the enlightenment’s “metanarrative,” which has shaped Western culture, the scientific revolution consisted in the triumph of observation and reason over tradition and authority. Until then, scientific views, much like religious and social ones, had been based on what the Bible and ancient philosophers (especially Aristotle) had said. These views were taught for centuries by the institutional church and continued to be repeated by its authoritative leaders. Over against this reliance on tradition – the metanarrative continues – the scientific revolutionaries insisted on empirical observation.

So we see that the modern scientific era ushered in a metanarrative, not of authority, received tradition, and metaphysical reality, but of “fact”, reason and logic. Indeed, “it began, we might say, by separating questions of essence, purpose and value from questions of fact.” Finger and others critique such a separation on the grounds that “fact, reason, and logic” are affirmations grounded themselves on faith affirmations.
Whatever the presuppositions were, it was Sir Isaac Newton (at least according to Finger) who was the first in this era to set in place a complete paradigm that many believe has governed society’s view of reality even up to our current era. Finger explains Newton’s role in this cultural shift as one that has profoundly effected our current situation as people who live and exist in a highly industrialized society. A central concept to Newton’s scientific paradigm was the division of reality into individual particles. “Every particle occupied a precise point on a homogenous, undifferentiated absolute space stretching infinitely in all directions, and every event occurred at a precise moment on an uninterrupted, evenly-flowing continuum of absolute time.” Thus the individual particle occupying absolute space and flowing in absolute time becomes the ultimate, irreducible, final “real entity” of reality.

In line with the Newtonian paradigm, and in the spirit of the times, John Locke asserted that the most basic unit of society was the individual. As with other leaders in the enlightenment era, Locke “regarded the traditional hierarchical laws and customs of European society, which deprived the masses of power and wealth, as analogous to the faulty organizing principles of medieval science.” The task of scientific and societal inquiry became that of analyzing and reducing the hierarchical structures (both literal and metaphysical) to their most basic parts. Locke’s vision of the pinnacle of societal development would “leave individuals as free as possible to pursue whatever brings them pleasure and mitigates pain.” The individual, not the community, becomes central in Locke’s paradigm. Thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith carried Locke’s banner with a few additions and changes and Hegel and Marx provided interesting critiques that, although helpful, were also influenced by the Newtonian paradigm.

Ultimately, however, the enlightenment is at least partially responsible for the shaping of modern industrial society that, according to Finger, with its assembly lines and lack of a place for a metaphysical interpretation of history and scientific inquiry, paved the way for many forms of contemporary alienation. How is it, then, that alienation is caused by this need to reduce both society and scientific inquiry to its most basic parts? What about this cultural environment engenders alienation from the self, from the earth, and from society as a whole? In order to further understand the roots of this alienation, one must see that it is not the enlightenment itself that brings about the conditions for alienation but, indeed, its failure as a viable cultural spirit.

Two of Finger’s “theological kindred spirits” may help us understand this cultural failure as well as the necessary Christian response: Jonathan R. Wilson and Rodney Clapp. Jonathan R. Wilson, a Baptist Christian writer who is Professor of Theology at Carey Theological College, has written Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World: Lessons for the Church from MacIntyre’s After Virtue in part as an affirmation of the ultimate failure of the enlightenment project to “achieve an independent rational justification for morality.” Rodney Clapp is an Episcopalian who, although not technically part of the Free Church admits the formative influence that neo-Anabaptists such as Stanley Hauerwas in his own theological thinking. In the next section, we will examine his understanding of the community as found in A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society. Of course, these are not the focus of our inquiry here but we will be able to understand the roots of in Finger’s thought by some engagement with both Wilson and Clapp. We will begin this section with Wilson and turn to Clapp in the final section on the Christian community as corrective to alienation.

As we observed earlier, Many of the enlightenment’s “purely scientific” assertions were based themselves on faith commitments. In addition, although he does not state it explicitly, many of Finger’s observations and critiques of the actions and lives of people in contemporary culture rely on an assumption that the enlightenment failed to achieve the goals for which it aimed. This is evidenced by the fact that, even with the hopes and dreams of the enlightenment of a better society somehow free from metaphysics and purpose, Finger still believes that something is wrong. Finger obviously believes that, although the Newtonian paradigm offered to “fix” the problems of culture, alienation is as much a problem in our current society than it has ever been.

Wilson has a different term for this process that Finger has identified as alienation – that is, fragmentation. In Living Faithfully, he recounts a story told by Alasdair MacIntyre that posits an imaginary scenario in which the science community is eventually wiped out in a terrible, bloody revolt. Rationality and reason are demonized and scientists tortured and killed. Years later, in MacIntyre’s story, an “enlightened” people attempt to revive science but with little success. They do not speak the language. They have only fragments of experiments that are attached to no true theoretical framework. People in this new “enlightened” society argue about the importance of various scientific theories with no true knowledge of any of them and “those contexts which would be needed to understand what they are doing have been lost, perhaps irretrievably.” In this fictional parable MacIntyre relates the point that

in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the languages of natural science in the world which I described. What we possess, if this view is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived.

Fragmentation (much like Finger’s alienation) describes the state of affairs in which people are disconnected from their roots. Both terms describe “a general condition in which elements that belong together, which should be supporting and sustaining each other and which ultimately cannot survive apart, are profoundly estranged and hostile.” An example of this may be found in the disconnect between the work of a person’s hands and the end product in industrialized society (an enlightenment development). In a furniture assembly line, one person may attach legs to tables for an entire month without ever seeing or touching a completed table to which he has contributed. The person who only sees the individual table leg is always disconnected from the work of his hands, and thereby loses an essential connection with his identity as a person who builds furniture. The assertion that a person “belongs with” the work of his hands is but one example of the type of alienation of which both Finger and Wilson speak. Another example is likely more personal. Christian people today (myself included) will often travel hundreds of miles a month to attend a church which suits their “needs” without ever knowing that, by using excess fuel and wearing out their tires, they are contributing to the widespread degradation of the earth’s resources for the sake of comfort and convenience – not to mention they are losing a vital sense of rootedness in a community of fellow travelers in Christ.

All of these things are examples of our current state of alienation. What, then is Finger’s response, to these issues alienation? What solution does he believe to be best in our current circumstances? In the next section, with the help of Rodney Clapp, we will investigate the role of the Christian community in general, and the practices of Baptism and the Eucharist in particular, as ways to combat alienation in contemporary culture.

Up Next…Rodney Clapp & Baptism as Mortal Combat