Liquid Modernity and how it impacts our relationships

This is a transcription of a conversation inlcuding one of my favorite Sociologist's--Zygmunt Boaman. His book, "Liquid Modernity," is the central conversational thread. It seems to me that Bauman has particularly haunting insights into our political life, our public life, and our religious life. He starts off with a quip about computers.

The most conspicuous case is the photo camera, the car, and the computer. You will probably change your computer every other year simply because there are better computers out there, not because it has gone bad. We want "up to date...state of the art." We speak of liquidity because it is the frame of our life, and our business, and the purposes that we dedicate ourselves to is also liquid. By age 25 we know that our whole life will be a constant chase for a forever elusive horizon. People growing up today expect this to be the case. It is seen as normal. 11 times people will change the nature of their jobs according a prominent sociologist. Today it is considered "great" when we change and move and adapt. We have moved from Rockefeller to Bill Gates. Their relationship to their own creation is very different. Rockefeller wanted to invest in things that last. Ford factory was built with solid walls, huge buildings, big crew, and a mile long assembly line. Bill Gates has no guilty conscience and disposes today of his own invention from a year ago.

Education of the contemporary business leader or managers is not scientific. There are not rules to be followed. Now we educate our managers in knowledge of adaptation, how to have a lively personality, how to be flexible, how to establish a quick relationship in order to face new challanges.

People want to swim freely in this liquid modernity. There is not a stable personality core. Top managers are finding more and more that their life and their job are ONE. As they go on vacation they are finding themselves tied to their phone, their computer, or to their TV. They are all in the job. There is no distinction between working time and time off. YOu take your portable computer, your cell phone, and your entire life. Your life is consumed by your role.

We are encouraged to pursue the transient, the ephemeral, and the short lived. We therefore have a hard time in the political process, according to Zygmout Bouman. The trade union meeting was the prototypical polotical movement just a short fifty years ago. This transpired that they shared problems and they could do something together about their problems. They might go on strike which leads to political activity, which makes someone a citizen and allows leverage for action to be taken.

But today, the prototypical meeting is weight watchers. Rathen than gather authority in community, by concensus, one only gathers authority based out of their own individual resources. They compare their weight, but they do not arrive at any conclusion about what they can do together. There is nothing communal about what they share. There is nothing they can do TOGETHER to help each other become more slim. We leave the meeting not transformed as a political being, but leave the meeting feeling that we are individuals. That is the difference between today and fifty years ago. The new meeting is therapuatic more than political.

This can be seen in how we watch TV. We spend time in confessional on the T.V. rather than in productive political action groups. We do confessions publically. Why? Becaue, under these present cultural conditions of the weakening of an individuals political capital, the individuals have no way to make their issues public. And so we feel more inclined to watch TV than to rally around a political leader. The political leader has been traded in for our "reality TV," and we all get to vote for who is the best. What we do need once we are burdened, is the example of how to live. We desperately hope that someone else, in the chat show, will show the way of coping. Our reality makes us isolated. We are living in the greatest time of isolation in the history of civilization.

We are still individually as minded as before. But we are not citizens. We are re-inforced in our condition as lonely individuals who have to cope with our problems on our own, with our own resources. We need to seek and hopefully find "biographical solutions to systemic problems."

Personally, we also want transience rathen than durability. There is no solidity, or little anyway. The general influence of our experience is the "fear of long term commitment." In a year or two we worry it will be a burden. Long term commitments, such as education, are hard to commit to. It is hard for us to say "till death do us part." We would rather "live together." There is a feeling of insecurity in all modes of life. Episodicity--living life as if we are going from one episode to another. The common denominator is "suspicion," towards long term commitment.

At the end of the day we must return again and again to relationships. Modernity is suspicious of anything outside of personal autonomy. The church, the truth, and anything that is external to the individuals field of experience is called into question. Eckhart Thole, they guy who wrote the book, "The Power of Now," is making lots of money and going around the world speaking about just this problem of modernity. But he does not see it as a prolem. We must never just focus on NOW. Life is not just a bunch of NOW moments. There is sorrow. There is pain. There is laughter. We are children and then we grow up and learn how to ride our bikes. It all comes back to relationships. Where are we grounded? Why are we grounded there? Tholle is a lot like Deepak Chopra. They come from this simliar veign, or, perspective. Each of them desperately wants to contact an ever present stillness beneath all things. And they are onto something. There is an ever present stillness. His name is "I am," and He sent His son to claim us as His friends. We are His friends though. We are not solitary, individual waves floating on the surface of NOW.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.