I played an interesting mp3 while walking tonight
Mentions a 'hermeneutic of suspicion' being a typical post modern mindset.
Sees that hermeneutic as the legacy of post freudian, post marxist mindsets.
Never mind all of the 'post isms' -even though i think there are a couple more that could be added - since those terms gets a bit too cozy sometimes.
The question of suspicion becoming a dominant principle is an interesting observation - the risk of getting too imbued with a spirit that 'won't be taken in again'
That is, its possible to be very critical of various things in the current state of the world on one hand - especially if the critique is presented in attractive form - say fitted out with new terms and analysis, touched with the appeal of a somewhat counter cultural presentation, and leaving us as the enlightened critic - and yet remain equally deeply moulded by its critical thought forms on the other.
I know something about that hermeneutic of suspicion. My way into faith went through a culture pretty influenced with this - which is only to say, a large uni. Having been broadly brought up in a weakening modernist framework (by which I mean a mindset where the big story of progress was good and we believed we could get there by working a bit harder etc, with a little dose of religion on the edges, so tending to the superficial Pelagianism of the age), I'd been vaguely deferring significant questions. Then i went to off to uni where there was suddenly time and space see how the various ideas and contradictions played out; or really for them to press with new urgency.
So, for example, picking up the works of Nietzsche in a friend's room one night, as a 19 year old; attracted by the incisive writing, fragments of which was soon slicing into the tentative faith formulations i was beginning to investigate, even as i also naively ran into Pascal and Buber and Chesterton and others along that path of reading.
That hurt, was painful to have your beginning faith demolished and shaken to its core by such a potent set of counter ideas.
Working out what the impact of that sort of post modern hermeneutic is going to be - a world where all stories and claims are suspect - is accelerated in this environment, reading chunks of this sort of material. One senses the power and attraction of these modes of thinking, indeed lives inside them to some extent - attracted by both their critique of things and their promise of change -and surrounded by friends becoming socialists and militant feminists, or at least trying on these ideas - and later feeling the illusions, the over-promise, seeing what false dawns are offered and feeling the nausea of things still out of place.
When you're seriously debating your approach to life - sounds overstated now, but did seem to have a lot riding on it - and have plenty of time to read and wander off the path, those years of academic incubation allowed you - allowed me at least - to try to see where these mindsets end up. Not that its as comfortable or clinical as that implies - a difficult and confusing, indeed sometimes painful and disorientating, process. (Learning piles of physics and chemistry was also interesting but often a lower priority and indeed possibility in the scheme of things; and so found myself picking up some 'history and philosophy of science' subjects as a path that also allowed me to engage some of these ideas by writing and reading etc).
So I began to see, to feel, that that this whole current of thinking can lead to a place where nothing can be asserted but all can be negated, where the best intellects seemed to have cornered the market -or at least blocked the path - as to why there can be no meaning, except another round of pulling things apart and reveling in the contradiction and demolition of yet another position. As a more recent example of the idea, we all see Shrek is fun as a reverse fairy tale, where we love the ogre and despise the prince, and prefer such complex stories to the brightly shallow alternatives - Wiggles should be banned for parents. And yet the same playful logic that is enjoyable in Shrek, has a more serious and surly older brother who plays that game for keeps; questions and reverses every cherished assumption till all is lying in shreds. Its not so cute when it presents the apostle Paul as the anti-hero, and his opponents as the real victims, whose useful perspectives we should try to recover as valid Christian experience, as i hear some post modern biblical studies have supposed. Not so cute -but basically the same method of reversing assumptions. Or the TV shows that invites you to have sympathy with a serial killer.
I wasn't studying theology, even though the Christian idea of God was often the target of similar approaches in various subjects. But certainly any 'convention' of nobility - even in fiction - indeed any stabilizing frame of reference in general, was often undermined with this sort of approach, this reading against the grain, and since the 'author is dead' and dismissed as providing any canonical reading or interpretive key, who is to dispute the approach - which first year will question the lecturer who suggests that when Shakespeare ('possibly a woman?') used the word 'die', we should substitute various explicit terms; and try reading various sonnets of beauty with that idea in mind. Enlightening.
So rather than reading great authors (another deconstructed concept) for their merits (likewise), this sort of thing tends to cultivate a mindset of suspicion as the dominant hermeneutic, wants to situate everything back in historical context, which is good in itself - but tends to operate from a framework where traditional morality and God are faintly ridiculous. Though by now i was evaluating all this by a better framework, having come back to do a dip ed after working in analytical chemistry for a few years; now a bit more settled in faith and church, just widening my studies to include an English method.
Anyway, i agree that the 'post' environment - the legacy of various intellectual systems that tend to parody the gospel with a structure of oppression (patriarchy, false consciousness) and redemption (feminism and revolution) - is something that cultivates suspicion.
This is all broad brush - I don't imagine all academics are subscribing to or promoting all of this - or even that its all wrong - and one finds some clear and well thought through Christian or kingdom counter examples, and people quietly working leaven into the lump - moderating the claims with sanity - but i wonder if a Christian world view is possibly easier to maintain in the sciences than some of these humanities.
And no doubt better grounded students might have filtered all of this off. But perhaps there is a reason why 'studies show' so many youth group christians claim to have lost their faith in the first few weeks of uni -saw that process in a few friends around me. I was going the other way, slowly and sometimes suddenly being called in against all the broken-ness and confusion that also went with my story; but i was always interested in the underlying assumptions of the thinking of all this.
As well as that academic mix, we're also double dipped in the mass media version of this cynical view point; as media endlessly celebrates the revelation that some other notable person is caught out and reduced to petty needs as well.
Tom Wright sees the academic fragmentation and deconstruction of postmodernism as the necessary judgement on the arrogance of modernity, with its false myth of progress, its tower of babel that seemed to organise the world around enlightenment premises, while still oppressing many. (Reminds me of someone having a go at the nice moral case studies of Victorian authors, conveniently skipping over the exploitation in the colonies; being the sort of thing that 'po-mo' wants to expose - how exactly are those lovely estates that the marriageable daughter and her family is aspiring to, creating a delicious tension between love and money, being funded, exactly? - who is suffering behind the scenes on the other side of the world, for this? )
But the post modern reversals are not, in themselves, enough - so while acknowledging that all positions are conditioned and are really 'perspectives' and that 'objective truth' is a often style of ideology, is all good as a corrective on modernist arrogance- yet the way this plays out often leads to fragmentation and despair; since what is left after all? What stands when all can be overturned like this?
Finding the edges and limits of post modernism ending in despair and confusion is not a new phenomenon -as old as Nietzsche breaking down and flinging his hands around the horse being whipped in the street.
The answer lies in a different place. We can't just analyse the contradictions. That probably has to be done, but its not enough.
Trust and love and redemption are the correction - not smuggling the hermeneutic of suspicion into our system - more of the world than we know in doing that.
We cannot fight suspicion with suspicion- can't hint suspiciously at the problems, just naming all this is of limited use - since finding a new angle to express this from, a new twist or take, is the endless game of post modernism; which lives, in that form, for the momentary justification and gratification of having exposed another position, revelling in the high moral ground that the critique temporarily enjoys - though of course its vulnerable as soon as it sets itself up as the next target to be critiqued. The solid verities of the past are useful for organising an anti movement - but once thats achieved, then what?
The corrective has to be more direct, more embodied, more relational. Expressing trust and love, by which example we expose the level of mistrust in all such mindsets as really akin to paranoia; as having eaten from the wrong tree, is the way that is suggested.
So, for example, perhaps we need to avoid buying into mindsets that correctly name an issue, but are full of suspicion - some of the emerging church critique of Christendom, for example, sometimes seem to lean this way. Not withstanding the accuracy of the diagnosis, and the discussions of what might follow, the attitude in which its done is equally important.
i'm wired to ask questions, so this is probably closer to home than i care to admit sometimes. Some of my blog posts never make it past being drafts, for that reason - i'm not sure sometimes i haven't stewed the wrong fruit.
Certainly we need new forms, clear critique and paths of action; but seems to me must be marked by love and trust, mercy and truth, power and grace, and by community and engagement - with all of the ambiguity and resolution that involves - not suspicion and mistrust. Indeed a people marked by righteousness joy and peace in the Holy Spirit, who engage and trust, feel whats wrong and hurt with the rest of the world, and express grace amidst that, but don't become bitter and suspicious - not least in how we relate to each other, are perhaps the antidote.
does this all matter? revisting this history is not helpful, its too long winded, if its just stops there. And understanding this - well - i'd be happy for my kids to bypass it, if possible, though i think its comes at you from the culture anyway - analysed or not.
But it is at the back of my mind, at some level. You don't just walk away without taking some this with you.
(and it is in the culture - i've found myself debating with my boss if Barthes really ended that article on the Death of the Author with one more reversal, ie a sly wink that undid the whole agenda).
Sometimes it seems what passes as 'watchman' style discernment in the church, too, can be more imbued with this critical spirit, is really more motivated by suspicion, than the spiritual gift of discernment - ie where nothing is right except our own little corner - and that applies to me as well of course.
So it seems to me as i walk the dog :)
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