Postmodernity unleashes fear, Bauman says: “Modernity was a continuous and uncompromising effort to fill or to cover up the void; the modern mentality held a stern belief that the job can be done – if not today then tomorrow. The sin of postmodernity is to abandon the effort and to deny the belief.” By pulling back the curtain on modern pretense, postmodernity propels people to fear of the voice, which is, Bauman says, a specifically modern fear. Yet, “postmodernity has... Read more
Johannes Fabian argues in his Time and the Other that “geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics.” Bauman summarizes the argument: “The modern perspective ‘denied coevality’ to any form of life different from its own; it construed the Other of itself as ‘living in another time.’ The allochronic distancing device (Fabian’s felicitous term) seems to be a variant of a more general expedient: construing the Other (defining the Other) in a way that a priori decides its inferior and, indeed,... Read more
In his recent history of slavery in the New World, David Brion Davis records some surprising facts about American slavery. Prior to 1820, for instance, African slaves were more numerous than European settlers by a ratio of 5 to 1. About 5-6 percent of slaves in the Western hemisphere were in North America – about 500,000 – compared to about 3.5 million in Brazil. Contrary to some accounts, Davis claims that slavery was efficient and profitable, which makes the British... Read more
In his history of the idea of toleration, the late A.J. Conyers summarizes the arguments of Robert P. Kraynak on the development of Locke’s thought on religious toleration. The puzzle is this: Locke’s early works are absolutist in a Hobbesian vein, invoking the supreme magistrate’s power to oversee religion for the good and peace of men. Of course, the later Locke became one of the most important apologists for religious toleration. Kraynak argued that Locke didn’t fundamentally change his perspective,... Read more
Zbigniew Herbert writes in a poem entitled “Mr Cogito and Pop” of a visit to a concert. “Mr Cogito,” a recurring character in Herbert’s poems, reflects on the “aesthetics of noise” and offers some penetrating observations on the character of contemporary pop music: “to be a god means to hurl thunderbolts” The inarticulate scream of the rock concert elicits a meditation on silence: “the difficulty is that the shriek eludes form is poorer than the voice which ascends and falls... Read more
INTRODUCTION John’s readers are in danger of being misled, and John writes to warn them about false teachers and deceivers. John is confident that his “little children” will be delivered from the deceivers because they have an “anointing” from God. THE TEXT “Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us,... Read more
Christopher Insole wants theologians who attack “liberalism” to be more careful about what they’re attacking. He favorably cites Robert Song, who distinguishes the constitutional liberalism of Locke and Kant from the laissez-faire liberalism of Hayek from the welfare liberalism of Hobhouse. Fair enough. But Insole’s own definition of liberalism seems to be vulnerable to precisely the theological criticisms that Song and Oliver O’Donovan, among others, attack: “by ‘political liberalism’ I mean the conviction that politics is ordered to peaceful coexistence... Read more
1 John 2:15-16: Do not love the world, nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. When John talks about “the world,” he’s talking, as we’ve seen, about a cultural, social, and political system organized in hostility or indifference to God or His word. In particular, he says that the world is shaped by “desires” and “boastings.” The things that are in the world are products of desire,... Read more
Cultures have traditionally been rivers (Z. Bauman). The current carries everyone along in the same direction, whether or not they like where they’re going. When someone asks, “Why are we going this way?” it’s a sufficient answer to say, “We always have.” The only way to go a different direction is to jump out of the boat and find your own river. If traditional cultures are rivers, modern culture is a sea. We can choose any destination or path we... Read more
Modernity arose to tame the chaos and carnage of 16th and 17th-century European wars. To form a Europe reduced to formlessness, modern thinkers and politicians drew boundaries – the boundaries between Protestant and Catholic established in the Peace of Westphalia and the boundaries between religion and political life, among others. Now, under the circumstances, was that an entirely bad thing to do? Isn’t division the way to form a new world from the chaos? Read more
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