Front PageThe Crisis in Meaning
Submitted by bill on Fri, 01/25/2008 - 21:28. Faith, Truth, Love, Happiness and other virtues meaning
In many corners of the globe there is a growing crisis of meaninglessness. This condition includes deep, visceral feelings of separation, accompanied by profound uncertainty about personal identity and purpose. Separation disconnects us from family and other group relations, while lack of self-knowledge leaves our selves nowhere to be found. Not only do we not know where we are going—we don't know where we are at. We are cut adrift in a sea of meaninglessness.
Citizens of the so-called Industrial and Industrializing nations are not only moving away from extended family and friends to seek employment and business opportunities, they are changing jobs, and even careers, more frequently with each passing decade. Increasing emigration and immigration adds to this alienation in two ways: the immigrants are separated from their family and homeland; and their new neighbors feel the ethnic changes in their communities as an estrangement from what they thought they were. All of this change and interchange unplugs us from our outer identities while exposing our lack of inner connection. We are alone in a sea of strangers.
Humans have always searched for meaning. Even our Neanderthal ancestors may have made this sacred journey. We know this from the paintings our primitive ancestors left in sacred caves, and from the meaningful artifacts they buried with their deceased loved ones. Any sort of sacramental act or object is by definition a symbol of the meaning given to it by those who uphold its meaning. If meaning were water, then there would be water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
Great migrations—whether physical or mental—have required a reappraisal of meanings by both those migrating, and by those receiving the migrants. Migrants include people, animals and plants, and cultural and intellectual information. In the past century, there have been so many migrations and changes in economies and governance, that most of us belong to at least one diaspora1. In some areas the original inhabitants (if there is such a definable group) have become the minority, and are now aliens in their own land.
Additionally, the migration of culture via broadcast media, cinema, Internet and other published media, has induced changes in cultures without them leaving home. The migration of ideas can leave people estranged in their own homeland. We need to look only at Eastern Europe and China in real time to verify this notion. Fundamentalism, of every kind, is a reaction to the perceived threat from change. But one need not be a fundamentalist to feel threatened.
This forum is a place to discuss Meaning. From how to define it, to where and how to find it, this is the place to discuss it.
1 For a definition of diaspora I'm using the Free Dictionary's fourth definition: “diaspora A dispersion of an originally homogeneous entity, such as a language or culture”
Bookmark/Search this post with:
The growing diaspora of diasporas
Submitted by bill on Sun, 01/27/2008 - 00:56.
Reido,
I'll accept your compliment for ingenuity, :). Thanks. But I'll add (as you hinted) that the Diaspora Condition is not at all my invention. Instead (as you know) it is the Jewish condition from at least four centuries before Jesus, and it continued until the 1948 establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine—and it still continues today. It became a significant part of (or contributor to) the Rabbinic Judaism of the post-temple period. That is, the destruction (absence) of the temple and the scattering of the people around the known world would get explained by, and embedded in Jewish theology. The Diaspora was God's will, according to some perspectives. Pious Jews later disagreed and even revolted against the mostly secular Zionist movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s. Diaspora was more meaningful than the Promised Land, it seems.
All:
As one who moved many times as a child, then traveled my own country, plus the Pacific, Atlantic and Arabian Seas as a member of the US military—then later married an Army Brat, who also traveled many times in her childhood, including abroad—I feel both the pain and the freedom of having lived in many places yet having no place to call home. Both my wife and I attended a diverse university on the Texas-Mexico border, which is a commuter school: over sixty-percent of its students work to pay their way through college. The school has comparatively low out-of-state tuition, yet very good Nursing and Engineering schools shown by Texas state license examine averages, which together attract students from many other countries: mostly the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Both of us later invested too much time climbing the corporate ladder, which sent us traveling around the US and abroad, allowing us to learn to get along with folks from different parts of the country and the world. Then, after twelve years of marriage we adopted two children, three years apart; first from South America and then from India. And in between these two adoptions we moved across the big state of Texas to start lives and careers over again in North Texas. We are now a mixed-race family, whether we realize it or not. Actually, our children are keenly aware that they are regularly judged by the folks we meet in public places. But what does it mean?
Eventually we will all grow increasingly out of place. We may begin to make-up clubs and groups to increase our sense of belonging. Some churches are actually booster clubs for groups that refuse to assimilate. This comes from failing to understand what true belonging is. Belonging is not measured by similar characteristics such as skin color and language, or—heaven forbid—political party affiliation. But instead, our similarities—the ones that ultimately matter—are rooted in our most basic and shared values. These values make us sisters and brothers. The other match-making stuff is for losers.
Our share values make us family. Not our characteristics.
Sorry for the wordiness,
bill
» reply
In Search of the Lost Chord
Submitted by reido on Sun, 01/27/2008 - 10:45.
Bill
Your comment about displacement from the Temple in Jerusalem and the fading monarchy that went with it, fit very well into the picture as we experience the fading away of former things and all things becoming new.
There is something to be learned about attachment to such things as a center of meaning because the whole thing revolves around the life of the core. Once the life of the core is gone there will be remembrance of the former and some tend to stay there and look back. But even that becomes out of place eventually as reality makes new history.
There can also be the look forward to some kind of future restoration as hope and salvation -- heaven as it were. Even that, in many ways, becomes a screen on which to reflect the bygone era.
Then there is learning to live in God. I don't mean an imposed set of rules based on yet another attempt at human government of mind and action, but I mean making what often is foundational concept into actuality. Only then do I believe we begin to realize God in process. Take the writings of John the apostle for instance, woe to the person who takes a harmony of the gospels and begins to read parallel verse into the message because he has quite a different message than one that forces his words to agree with the others. If one looks for a difference, it can be seen in more than choice of words by writer as thoughts were implanted by the Holy Spirit. There is a presence of taking the more difficult journey -- in fact, a more Christocentric path that requires universal love. Love that loves the unloved and unloving is much more difficult than simply loving those who think and do just like I do. Hell is a great invention for castigation, and I believe it has been successful at promoting division among humanity for millenia.
reido
» reply
Pillars of Salt
Submitted by bill on Sun, 01/27/2008 - 15:46.
Reido wrote: There can also be the look forward to some kind of future restoration as hope and salvation -- heaven as it were. Even that, in many ways, becomes a screen on which to reflect the bygone era.
Reido,
What you say about looking forward to future restoration or glory and the problems with this as one's source of meaning gives new meaning to Jesus's insistence that the Kingdom is within and already here.
What if his point had more to do with the misdirected focus for meaning? That is, another reading of Luke 17, starting with verse 20 to 37, and then taking in the chapter as a whole. Another way of reading this chapter is that looking backward serves only to turn one into salt. There is no meaning in the past. Neither is there any meaning in a glorious future (which is often a return to the glorious past, as you point out). As you said, only living in God, has meaning. How to do that; and what is God; are most important questions.
bill
» reply
Misdirection and Pillars of Salt
Submitted by reido on Mon, 01/28/2008 - 19:42.
Bill
I think I see what you mean with regards to the Kingdom of God and Jesus' message. Of course, he does not use the word "meaning" -- it may be more useful with today's generation as we continue to wrestle with Plato's dualistic world view and the interpretive blunder of focusing all of life on the heaven/hell outcome.
Let's see if there is something in these particular words....
"25 But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. 26 Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. 27 They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. 28 Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot—they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, 29 but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all— 30 so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed."
Does Jesus make use of the Hebrew love for the term "generation" in much the same way we are discussing the search for meaning in life? Is there a clear note of the former values passing away and the revelation of the Son of man?
Naturally, the literalists will tell us to look to the actual fulfillment of this prophecy in the destruction of Jerusalem, but does this prophecy repeat in every era when faith puts the past to the test? What I mean is, is there not still a generation whose values are facing destruction? And is there a Messianic hope today as well?
Sorry for generating lots of questions...still have more of them than I do answers.
reido
reido
» reply
Diaspora and Journey
Bill
I think your use of "Diaspora" is genius -- originally rooted in Scripture, marked by universal change, and cryptic to the here and now. Too, I agree that while there are many crises that characterize our age, the crisis in meaning may be a framework for the whole story.
Trust is such a valuable and yet a delicate thing. When the world has it, we can move mountains, but when one learns that what he has had faith in is meaningless, there is not an ounce of trust or effort that I would be willing to place with a meaningless waste of life. It is something of a personal ethic.
Then, having been displaced from traditional systematic mapping, one finds him/herself searching for meaning. What can we trust so life can go on with purpose?
Jesus often taught that meaning is not where one normally looks. That is, the powers that be have so dominated the airwaves with their doctrine and dictates that the expected places are near desolate of meaning. It's kind of like watching a reality show -- there's nothing real about it. Now we turn to the unexpected. There journey begins.
reido