Beyond the Modern Age

An Archaeology of Contemporary Culture

Bob Goudzwaard, Craig G. Bartholomew

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780830873128
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

The modern age has produced global crises that modernity itself seems incapable of resolving—deregulated capitalism, consumerism, economic inequality, militarization, overworked laborers, environmental destruction, insufficient health care, and many other problems. The future of our world depends on moving beyond the modern age. Bob Goudzwaard and Craig G. Bartholomew have spent decades listening to their students and reflecting on modern thought and society. In Beyond the Modern Age they explore the complexities and challenges of our time. Modernity is not one thing but many, encompassing multiple worldviews that contain both the source of our problems and the potential resources for transcending our present situation. Through an archaeological investigation and critique of four modern worldviews, Goudzwaard and Bartholomew demonstrate the need for new ways of thinking and living that overcome the relentless drive of progress. They find guidance in the work of René Girard on desire, Abraham Kuyper on pluralism and poverty, and Philip Rieff on culture and religion. These and other thinkers point the way towards a solution to the crises that confront the world today. Beyond the Modern Age is a work of grand vision and profound insight. Goudzwaard and Bartholomew do not settle for simplistic analysis and easy answers but press for nuanced engagement with the ideologies and worldviews that shape the modern age. The problems we face today require an honest, interdisciplinary, and global dialogue. Beyond the Modern Age invites us to the table and points the way forward.

Introduction

Starting with Our Students’ Experiences

One of the greatest privileges of being professors is the opportunity to have ongoing contact with students from different backgrounds. Our exchanges with them usually involve intensive discussions, preferably with a cappuccino or pint of beer in hand. We find the experiences and views about life held by intelligent young people fascinating. These conversations have often served as real eye-openers for us. Students have shared, for example, their concerns that in today’s uncertain and rapidly changing world they may not be able to obtain a good job. But there is more. Students today experience our society and its extreme dynamism as more than challenging; they experience it as highly confusing. They wonder if it is even possible to develop a meaningful perspective on life. How does one orient oneself when everything is changing so rapidly? Students often experience a need for an “Archimedean point,” a vantage point from which they can achieve some objective distance from today’s globalizing reality and gain a view of the whole.1 But can such a place be found? If not, what then is available to help them develop a personal, coherent view of what really matters in today’s crazy world? We use the word crazy not least because ours is a world struggling beneath a tsunami of information.

This central problem of meaning, one that our students have continually grappled with, has grown into a personal challenge for us. Both of us have had long and substantial experience interacting with students in countries such as Canada, the Netherlands, the United States, Great Britain, Indonesia, and South Africa. In each of those settings we have tried to be open to our students’ intellectual and spiritual needs. For us a vital question thus arose: Was there a way we could use our expertise to partner with these students in their personal struggle for more insight and clarity? But we also felt that the need for intellectual and spiritual support was broader. The existential concern not to be overwhelmed by what happens around us surely applies beyond young students and fledgling scholars. It represents the struggle of many people around the world who are searching for some kind of certainty in the midst of a highly turbulent global society.

We knew from the outset that we could not simply begin with an exposition of our own limited ideas about today’s world and its huge questions and dilemmas. If we took such an approach we would easily fall into the trap of attempted indoctrination. No, we knew that somehow we needed to begin by listening carefully. We felt the need to have a class of living students in front of us—not just students from one city or country, but a mix of students from around the world. Are not the rapidly rising streams of information and the ongoing trends of modernization felt deeply even in some of the most remote corners of our global world?

Our aim is to keep the vital, living concerns of contemporary students directly in front of us. Invited and stimulated by our “own” global publishing company, InterVarsity Press, to undertake this challenge, we began our work by assembling, in anecdotal fashion, a number of student voices and perspectives. These voices would serve to augment what we have heard directly from students in the classes we teach. To do this, with the assistance of academic colleagues from around the world, we made contact with a number of young scholars just starting out.2 Our aim was to open up a dialogue with about fifty students spread across the continents. And we were delighted that more than fifty participated!3 Gradually their perspectives arrived. Our hope is that their voices will serve as a starting point and platform from which to engage many young students and stimulate your own perspectives and ideas as readers. We seek a broad partnership in dialogue about key perspectives on contemporary life.

To gain access to their perspectives, we asked each student to respond to five basic questions. The questions were simple and straightforward. The first asked for a brief personal characterization of their own time and society, preferably using some designated keywords. The second and third questions sought to find out which societal problems bothered students the most and from where they hoped a solution might emerge—or perhaps they did not see any solutions at all.

Below are the first three questions we posed. We now invite you, our readers, to address these questions as well. How would you answer them? Please take a moment to articulate your own responses.

1. Can you give a very short characterization—only one to five words—of how you perceive the present world? What is your basic impression?
2. In relation to the major problems of today’s world, most people choose one (or sometimes two) of the following four possibilities. Please mark your own choice.
   All or almost all problems of today have reasonable, rational solutions.
   All or almost all problems of today can be solved by more goodwill or a better attitude.
   Real solutions to our present problems can be attained only via a radical change in the structures of society.
   The present problems are too big to be solved; they simply elude our grasp.
3. What in your view are the two (or three) most important and incisive problems of today’s modern society?

To get started, let’s listen to students’ responses to the first question. Compare them to your own response. We found the students’ characterizations of the present world to be fascinating, even breathtaking in some cases. They will serve as a starting point for our reflections together:

• Our society is environmentally and politically unsustainable.
• Most modern people are insecure, untrusting, and very competitive.
• There is a sense of placelessness; most people are suspicious of everything and trust no one.
• There is a general feeling of helplessness, restlessness.
• Many people today are anxious, very anxious.
• Networking is replacing community, which also adds to a loss of direction.
• There is a loss of moral principles and an increase of crime.
• We are overwhelmed by outside forces.
• Our society is evolving into an obstacle course.
• We live in a naturally and socially unbalanced world.
• Our world is broken and challenging at the same time.
• Our world, though it still has potential, is curiously wounded.
• Materialism and a rapid tempo of life dominate, along with the drive toward instant gratification of desires.
• Ours is a world of depressing, crowded inhospitality.
• There is a lack of common purpose.
• A self-created world imaging ourselves.
• Scary, unequal, competitive, fast.
• Rapid, exciting, uncertain.
• A world based on false dichotomies.
• Unstable, progressing, suspicious.
• A world of short-term and wrongly valued insights.
• Changing so fast.
• We live in a busy, crazy, abnormal, sometimes beautiful world.
• It is a complex world with a lot of conflict.
• A world full of painful beauty.
• The loss of virtue.
• Deceiving culture.
• The benefits and problems of technological advancements.
• Pendulum of good and evil.
• Failing states, unequal distribution (of power, wealth, and poverty).
• We live in an economic and educationally polarized world.
• An overall increase of vulnerability.
• Human needs are in the process of being solved.
• The world has become more liberated.
• An infant-like attitude prevails: we use the world for entertainment but do not care for it.
• Every gray cloud has a silver lining.
• Much wealth and much poverty, and often so very close to one another.

Do you recognize any of your own responses or concerns in the statements of these students? Of course we need to be careful not to draw too many conclusions from these comments. But they closely match what we often hear directly from other students, and they provide enough material to begin a dialogue. A first glance at this list generates two basic impressions that call for further reflection.

The first impression is that these students and young scholars from around the world do not have a positive opinion of the substance and direction of their own societies. There are exceptions, of course. One holds the view that the world is in the process of solving its needs. Another sees gray clouds with silver linings. Some students point to technological advancements as opportunities for a brighter future. But the answers on the whole display a preponderance of negative concerns. These concerns center around destructiveness to people (poverty, violence, a lack of tolerance and understanding, ongoing loss of moral and other values) and to the environment, which is badly damaged. Some students mention greed and materialism at these two frontiers.

A second striking element is an observation that, regardless of where the students come from, we no longer have control over the overwhelmingly dynamic features of our time. Almost all students and young scholars refer to this. Some add that these dynamics do not correspond with our own desires. Words like “unsustainability,” “high competitiveness,” “instability,” “restlessness,” “helplessness,” “directionlessness,” and “placelessness” all hint in that direction.

This is a most intriguing theme, and it is alarming in at least one respect. It suggests that our students, a group of young people on the brink of accepting public responsibilities, are keenly aware of the shortcomings in their own societies. This is commendable, of course. But it also suggests that they have no real clue about what worldview might serve as a basis from which to overcome these problems. Later we will see in more detail, through their reactions to the other two questions, an almost pervasive sense of indecisiveness.

This has given us a lot ...