Variations on meaning-making

On July 3 Bill Moyers’ Journal featured three theologians; Serene Jones, Cornell West, and Gary Dorrien, discussing “what our core ethics and values as a society say about America's politics, policy, and the challenges of balancing capitalism and democracy.” (http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07032009/transcript3.html)

Serene Jones described how her students at Union Theological Seminary are responding to the dissolution of the economy and to the general inadequacy of major institutions. She considers this historical moment to be analogous to the time of John Calvin, 500 years ago. Whereas I have considered our contemporary experience to be analogous to the simultaneous occurrence of the Copernican, French and American revolutions, I think the Protestant Reformation is a good contribution to the mix.

Where Serene Jones spoke of a crisis of metaphysics, I see an emerging meta-narrative of complex adaptive systems …. to provide the vocabulary for expressing the interdependence and unpredictability of our online and offline lives and how the multiple connections we have with one another across all sorts of national and communal boundaries are transforming our imaginations of the world and ourselves….….. much of the time more rapidly than we can recognize, let alone anticipate. Eventually, as we may come to visualize the feedback loops of our online relationships, we might come to more deeply appreciate the feedback loops of our offline interpersonal relationships (Gov. Mark Sanford’s revelations this June notwithstanding). As Danny Hillis remarked (WIRED, January, 1998):

We are not evolution’s ultimate product. There’s something coming after us, and I imagine it is something wonderful. But we may never be able to comprehend it, any more than a caterpillar can comprehend turning into a Butterfly. (p. 38)

Of course, we hope our social metamorphosis will be so lovely as a butterfly.

The dynamics I initially perceived in 1999 have become more intense, more rapid and widespread….the dissipation (no longer adequate) of journalism and schooling, the reconfiguration within and among nations, the rapid feedback of news with events about the collapsing economy and the ways continuous synchronous and asynchronous conversations are changing our relationship to how we understand or know ourselves and the world with which we are both participant and witness.

Transformations from individual and independent to collaborative and interdependent experience:
1-Dissipation of newspapers and the centralized practice of professional journalism
2-Dissipation of schooling and the top down teacher- student relationship
3-Transnational, participatory politics
4-Shifts in economic relationships among corporations across and within nations
5-Dislocation of work, emergence of new occupations and fields of inquiry
6-Challenges of future threats beyond our “rational” modes of response, for example taking adequate steps to address long range climate change

In each case where and by and among whom information and knowledge are produced and disseminated are the vortices from or the strange attractors around which the familiar is dissipating before our eyes…. Not so much as a film in slow motion, but as an alternating fast-forward, rewind, and again fast forward anthology of non-linear stories. Rapid social, political, and economic changes are experienced as personal emergencies…..

Consider the word… “emerg” ency…. What is emerging is within us and our environment… inseparable, inexorably contingent and interdependent. Complex systems analysis, complexity/chaos/dynamical systems theories offer vocabulary and conceptual tools for describing our experiences. The conceptual tools are the images, metaphors, words, cultural artifacts and media of our adaptation with the worlds we co-create and interdepend.

Here is how Serene Jones describes her students and their world: from http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07032009/transcript3.html

BILL MOYERS: Are you saying that there's a...you sense a hope, now for a new reformation?

SERENE JONES: Oh. It's a fantastic moment to be standing at a seminary. That's one of the reasons why I decided, after 17 years at Yale, to come to New York and be at the helm of this little school. It has a great legacy, but it's not a huge mega university.

It's because, and you can feel it in New York so palpably, but what is happening globally. Change in forms of technology. The breakdown and reconfiguration of the nation state. Forms of economic interaction that have never before been imagined.
And a crisis of knowledge. And a crisis of value. Parallel, in really profound ways, what was happening 500 years ago when this little guy named John Calvin got run out of Paris because he was asking the secular question. They ran him out of Paris. And he ends up in Geneva. And, in the midst of all of that, begins to listen to what's happening in Europe. That's the challenge right now, is for us to listen to what's happening globally and to be able to track the emergent forms of spirit. The emergent forms of organizations. The forms of love and the forms of hope that people are finding on the ground in the midst of these changes and that is going to be sort of the spirituality that's coming. And it's coming fast.

BILL MOYERS: But channel the good Calvin for a moment, Serene. Who listened, as you said, and heard the rustling sounds of spring sprigs in Europe. What are you seeing and hearing right now that give you some sense of encouragement, despite the fact that everything that's tied down is coming loose?

SERENE JONES: What I see in my students is powerful. It is a sense that, in the crumbling of all of this, what is being unleashed is an intense sense of the embodied character of faith. Call it Pentecostal. You can see it in my students now. What does it mean to call them Pentecostal? It's not the traditional things we think of. But these are students who are coming off the set of "American Idol." Or they've been on a war ship outside of Iraq. Or they've been stocking shelves in Texas. And they're coming to Union committed to social justice. And open to the power of the spirit in physical ways that give them this kind of zealousness that, for a large swath of time, the liberal left lost. They're doing this as a whole new generation for whom tactility, thinking about the way the body lives in the world. It's actually exciting to me. Because I think, in their own lives, we're seeing the contestation of the power of the market to configure desire. Because they don't want those market desires in the same way my generation did. They're critical of them. They're coming up with new forms of music. And they're very committed to a sense of passion in it. To use a very scholarly term, I think we need to use it more often, I think it's a crisis of metaphysics. These students are asking, and their liberal professors, questions about, you know, "Do you really believe that God exists?"
Now, the liberal church is sort of, you know, wanting to say, "Well, it might be a myth. It might be a symbol. We can say this about it. We can back away." These students are saying, "I'm not going to get out there on the front line, and I'm not going to reconfigure my interior world to desire different things..." If this isn't real, they want something real that is an alternative.

GARY DORRIEN: Certainly, from our experience of the course, this is an extraordinary generation. I mean, it's, they are connected. They care. They're looking for, they're always sort of obsessing about what's real. I mean, they've got radar for what's unreal. For what is just merely abstract, or it doesn't really speak to their condition. What isn't going to make a difference. What kind of learning doesn't make any difference at all. They've got radar for that. But they're very hungry for what is going to make a difference. And how it is that they can live out their faith in this world that we're creating.

SERENE JONES: They're not afraid of hard thinking. But they also want, they want beauty. The beauty of the thought to inspire.
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We can understand the yearnings of the seminary students for “the beauty of the thought to inspire” as their wish to make meaning and to contribute to the changes underway. Their efforts are the ways persons and the social system self-organize around emerging social forms. The meanings we use to explain the changes in which we are voluntary and involuntary participants are in continuous feedback with the changes themselves. Karl Mannheim (1936) puts it this way:

...knowledge is from the very beginning a cooperative process of group life, in which everyone unfolds his knowledge within the framework of a common fate, a common activity, and the overcoming of common difficulties (in which, however, each has a different share). (p. 29)

Serene Jones’ students’ meaning-making within Christianity parallels assimilation of eastern religions and philosophy and native American practices in other parts of our culture. Consider the popularity of yoga, mindfulness, Native American practices. Parallel meanings are being used in relatively "fundamentalist" circles, responding to the emergency of rapid, profound change with apocalyptic visions that are more a rewind of stories past. For this latter group, the emergency of rapid change evokes fear and rejection.

In contrast, Union Theological Seminary students, with the guidance of Serene Jones and her colleagues, at least according to Jones, seek to create significance for their lives somewhat like the way Clay Shirky describes transitions underway in journalism.

Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

“…But over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need” is probably useful for thinking about the current functioning of government, education, religion…. the dissipating institutions for which new forms have yet to emerge.

Our daily lives are full of problems with institutions that were not designed for current conditions. We embody those conditions at that same time that we try to modify the old institutions. We are stressed because our world system is stressed. Things are not going to settle down for a long while.

Among those who have a higher comfort level with interdependence, contingency and unpredictability Eastern philosophy, mindfulness, and yoga, or Native American practices are strategies for living in this learning universe….. self-organizing behaviors to survive turbulent times. Among those less comfortable with the “emergent,” apocalyptic visions are the tools. We are all seekers and meaning-makers.

Molly Freeman July 6, 2009