Archive: Eras of Hope

Hello, You! This is an essay that I wrote in a previous newsletter, and have shared a number of times since then. I'm putting it here on the Neighborful site so that I can continue to share it. Enjoy.

I am a once and future seminary student, and I am very fortunate to have found the graduate certificate in Adaptive and Innovative Ministry at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. We spent our entire first gathering as a cohort learning about the transition from the Modern Era to the Postmodern Era. I promise you, this is way more relevant to your life than you might think.

The SparkNotes version:

The Modern Era gets going around 1500 CE, and runs the show into the 1900s. It’s the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. We invent shareholder capitalism and horseless carriages. We discover antibiotics and gravity. A whole lot of colonizing happens.

In the Modern Era, Western cultures come to believe there is One Right Answer to any problem or question, and that this right answer is fixed forever in time and space. All we have to do is find it! This is the basis for Newtonian physics and most of what we use today as math. We also end up with things like economics and psychology, where we try to apply the rigor of math and science to squishy human beliefs and behaviors. This is the era of the Rational Man - and yeah, it’s always a man, always a pale one too.

The 20th century gets messy, as this One Right Answer keeps bumping up against uncomfortable realities. We start learning about things like quantum physics and complexity theory. The divine right of kings, and the slightly less divine rule of dictators, starts to yield in fits and starts to pluralistic democracy, with a pair of world wars and countless regional conflicts along the way. The One Right Answer, which shaped Western thinking in governance, religion, and culture, starts to break down everywhere. And then we come to the Internet, which is literally designed from the ground up to be distributed and democratic in how it functions.

The common thread in the Postmodern Era, as best as I can tell, is that we contain multitudes. That’s true for every “we” that you can define - true of our individual bodies, true of any gathering of people, true of the natural world around us. We are embodied and embedded in complex systems, where multiple truths can exist at the same time, and a quick look around will confirm that we are so incredibly, laughably, not ready for this.

Think of all the places in your own life where a single option, or a small set of options, has transformed into virtually limitless choice. TV networks? When I was a kid, you could count them on one hand. News sources? Philadelphia used to have 3-4 daily newspapers for a city of more than a million people. How about religions? My dad grew up in a neighborhood where pretty much everybody went to the same church; a few years ago, I worked in a team of 8 people, in which all 5 of the world’s major religions were represented. Shopping? Leisure? Social connections? Fuhgeddaboutit.

None of us are fully prepared for this transition, because we still live in a world of Modern Era institutions. Our governments, our schools, our businesses, our nonprofits, our social outlets, and our churches - all of them were built on Modern Era principles, to sustain Modern Era culture. They were built to last forever, which is clearly not how things are actually playing out right now. These institutions were also built to compete with each other for dominance, until the One Right Answer emerged victorious. That’s clearly not happening either.

There are plenty of weird and distorted “winner” institutions staggering around the landscape right now, hoovering up monopolistic gains. But is the One Right Answer serving us when it takes the form of a Walmart in a small town with a dead Main Street, or a regional health system eating all the local hospitals, or Facebook as people’s trusted source of ground truth?

So much of what’s happening around us right now, which is deeply unsettling and not cool, is the natural consequence of people living in the Postmodern Era with Modern Era educations and expectations. 

Of course American white people are doubling down on nostalgia, on wanting to make this country great again, meaning their lives are comfortable and orderly. 

Of course we are now living through this national experiment of anointing a false One Right Answer to run the country. Everything was already kinda broken, and COVID made that feel much worse, mainly by distributing the pain of disruption more evenly across society. 

The work of rebuilding our society for the Postmodern Era is already underway, all around us. In a thousand different projects and places, this work is also evenly distributed. That makes it effective, but can also make it hard to see. The work of building this new world is emergent, joyful, and fun. We are living through hard times, but I believe and hope that we will have much to remember fondly from this era of our lives. ❤️