Jean-Francois Lyotard saw truly when he posited the exposure and collapse of the great Enlightenment metanarrative; over the course of the twentieth century, we saw Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism become a monomaniacal tyrant wielded by an empowered few to dominate others. This also happened to the Church/State at the end of the medieval era, and to divinized Roma over the first centuries CE. Each of these collapsed as much from within as from without; I believe that each also collapsed when each metanarratival institution (or institutional metanarrative) reached a point where it alienated and disgusted a large enough number of people that they rejected it, concluding that it violated some fundamental principle of humanity.
It seems that the brief bright explosion of Islamic fundamentalism may be experiencing this same collapse; it may just as likely gain momentum, however, proving to be a narrative-spawning Big Bang. Time will tell.
To analyze these is not the point here. I want to examine where we are now. In the wake of the collapse of optimistic Enlightenment modernism, we flail like drowning rats and cling to what we can, shivering and white-knuckled. Or, more: the existentialists showed us that we never really had a ship; our bits of driftwood bobbed together in the semblance of one, and we told ourselves that the water that drenched and chilled us would get handled by the management presently. Now, we clutch dogmatically what is in our reach, hissing and spitting at anyone who tells us that our bit is worthless.
We can see this more clearly when we see how many ways people seek something outside of themselves nowadays: travel, Eastern mysticism, pop psychology and self-help, service, communal living, politics. "Tolerance" may be the biggest new metanarrative we as Westerners have lashed together; the chief goal of many social help enterprises and legal campaigns is to enable individuals to self-actualize in freedom, as long as it does not impinge on the self-actualization of another (the philosophical equivalent of the "right to swing your fist"). However, Lyotard claims that the only legitimate goal we can rationally assert for any individual or organization is power. Can there be self-actualization for all without anyone infringing on the existential spheres of another?
This is complicated when I look in the mirror honestly and see the self-centered bastard in front of me, who's spent decades tirelessly "self-actualizing" by chasing after the good opinions of as many people as possible, trying to be buoyed up by popularity and respect. Popularity and respect don't hold water, though. Nor does self-respect, because who can honestly say that he or she respects him- or herself according to his or her own standards? We always fail them; or we meet them, and find that they fail us, because they don't provide the hope that we expect.
We long to self-actualize, to have individual meaning. Unfortunately, if we're honest, that meaning often includes a healthy dose of individual power. At the same time, we have an incredible need to belong to something bigger than ourselves, to be a part of something that lasts beyond our "brief lives" (to borrow from one of my favorite authors). What are we to do with these? We must balance them; something in us must bend or break.
I will lay my cards on the table. I have found myself joined to a metanarrative; at first against my will, but now joyfully. That metanarrative is that all humanity was made to be in experiential fellowship with the God who self-revealed as the self-existent "I AM" (Hebrew YHWH), but that we broke that fellowship and continue to break that fellowship on a daily basis. We who would make ourselves or our personal causes into kings are doing so in active and willful rebellion against the self-existent being behind the universe. This being stepped bodily into the world at the turn of the Common Era as Jesus of Nazareth, incarnating the will of the self-revealed God to mankind. Being God and man, Jesus was, in his own words, "the way, and the truth, and the life:" the way to reconciliation with God, the philosophical truth of the world, and the means to live as humans are truly meant to live. Mind, he did not just show the way: he was and is the way, in this metanarrative. He made a way for us to come to God through him, and through him alone, in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension (i.e., tansition out of empirically observable reality). In a sense, Jesus of Nazareth is my metanarrative- not a principle, but a person. And I mean metanarrative in all its powerful, exclusive sense; as the metanarrative of Christianity, Jesus stands above and critiques all else according to himself.
Including me. I seem most often to be the enemy of my own metanarrative, not the hero, or even a great assistant manager. I daily find myself to be a traitor, a terrorist even, to the ruler I profess. Our metanarrative predicted this, thankfully; Jesus had some pretty great insights into human nature.
I would be doing you and my metanarrative both disservice if I didn't tell you how much value I find in it. Jesus doesn't allow me to be the ruler of my own life; that's the part that was broken and has to be rebroken, like a badly set bone. However, his life and death show me that he has value for us broken and crooked rebels, and love for all who are willing to end their rebellion and acknowledge him as king. I find also that, though my psyche must be rebroken and mended constantly, there is a deep inward sense of rightness that no amount of personal success or popularity ever provided for more than a moment (I'm not famous by any stretch of the imagination, anywhere, but the lives of most publicly famous and successful people don't give me much confidence in the security of gaining more success, popularity, or power). Personal peace is not the point of Christianity--the greatness of God is the point--but it is a by-product of it, a gift of God. Thoreau wrote, "All men lead lives of quiet desperation" (we could probably qualify that by adding, "if they do not lead lives of loud desperation"); though I can promise that my life is not at all free of wrongness, I no longer live in that quiet desperation. And no one has to do so, who would place themselves at the mercy of Jesus of Nazareth.
If any of this sounds disagreeable, insane, or boring to you...well, it's because we have different metanarratives. And anyone who knows me knows that I love to talk about metanarratives, so I'd love to hear about yours.
In the hope that you find a ship; or, better yet, land,
Joseph
