Thoughts?
Our terrain has shaped a self that experiences a significant absence of community, tradition and shared meaning. It experiences these social absences...as a lack of personal conviction and worth, and it embodies the absences as a chronic, undifferentiated emotional hunger. The post-WW 2 self this yearns to acquire and consume as an unconscious way of compensation for what has been lost. It is empty.
(Cushman 1990)
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Ponderous...
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2 comments:
I’d agree that the ‘lacks’ are visible, and that consumption is often used as a means of assuaging the hunger. But I’m always wary of the utopian past. Community, tradition and shared meaning were (are?) often predicated on low social mobility, low personal autonomy – you know who you are in a stable community because you are born into your identity and you can’t change it. The poor stay poor, women bake but don’t read, the powerful feel a duty to their people – but noblesse oblige and a hamper at Christmas are a poor substitute for universal suffrage and the ability to choose what you will do for a living.
The hunger is different in a highly stable community, and the methods of dealing with it are different. But there is always hunger, except where there is God. And God can work in any social structure. And it seems to me that He builds His church to embody the best of all models – known identity, community, tradition, but also roles given to those best suited to them, and everyone (male/female, slave/free) expected to grow and mature.
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