Marbury Education Services

 A2 Sociology Beliefs in Society

 

Post Modernity and Religion

It would be difficult to point out a particular year when the modern era gave way to the Post Modern but having said that, some say as early as 1945 and some say as late as late as the beginning of the 21^stcentury. Personally, if pushed, I’d opt for the early 1970’s as its genesis. Perhaps the easiest way to start developing an understanding about Post Modernity would be look at its economic aspects. One might refer to this facet of Post Modernity as Post Fordism.

A Fordist economy was based on mass production and mass consumption of standardised products and services. Yet Post Fordism, which, according to Daniel Bell, emerged in about 1973, was based on small batch flexible production. The consumer wasn’t content with the same products and services as his neighbour anymore, differentiation and specialisation became the dominant approach to satisfying customer needs.

Under Post Fordist conditions, one also saw the declining influence of social class identity. Primary and secondary industries gave way to the new king pin, the tertiary sector. Trade union membership declined and traditional communities withered away as manufacturing and extractive industries closed down due to foreign competition and its life blood, cheap labour.

 

The two homogenous social classes had somehow lost their identity as most of us now carried out some kind of non manual occupation. Inequality remained, but is just didn’t seem quite so obvious anymore; we ceased to define ourselves by our work and most of us couldn’t decide what social class we were even if we were asked. Now we might move onto look as some other aspects of Post Modernity.

 

In a Post modern society notions of truth become more contentious or they simply become something relative; that is, we substitute truth for truths. We start to accept that our world is no longer comprised of definite answers and clear rules upon which there is a general consensus. We have gradually rejected many old values that gave us a clear sense of right and wrong, good and bad and we now simply self select the version of the truth that we prefer, or that we find most convincing, or that we find most utilitarian.

 

The Post Modern world becomes a relativist one. Perhaps a useful practical example of all this was the case made by the Blair government to go to war with Iraq in 2003. The ‘dodgy dossier’ as it has become known, claimed to be an authoritative account of the threat posed to the UK by WMD or weapons of mass destruction. Yet the truth presented was something of mosaic of plagiarised and unattributed sources. In short, it was a version of the truth the Government wanted to believe because it justified their foreign policy objectives, something that was based on supporting the Americans in removing Saddam Hussein.

 

So, we appear to be far more active in the assemblance of the truth than we ever were under Modernity. Truth used to come from Science or religious authority, whereas now, we seek it out. In fact, according Lyotard, Science has never had a monopoly on truth and its’ use language is similar to other forms of expression like history or philosophy. He explains this by saying that science, is governed by protocols or accepted ways of thinking and operating and as such, like other disciplines, it plays its own game with regard to expression, narrative and making sense of the world.

 

We have also ceased to believe in the inevitable march of progress associated with the classical sociologists of the mid 19^thcentury. For Marx it was the march of progress towards the establishment of a Communist utopia and for Functionalists like Durkheim, it was an evolutionary process where society improved through the discoveries of positivist sociology.

Yet for us, we talk about a Risk Society. Natural and man-made disasters, pandemics and threats near and far, real or imagined, have all made us far less comfortable or optimistic in thinking about the future. This leads us to take more active responsibility for our own lives in that we question more, seek out knowledge more, and supporters of the Post Modernity as a concept argue that we benefit from a change in attitudes towards ontology.

 

Post Modernity has seen us throw of the shackles of structures that had hitherto governed our lives and we have become more sovereign, we make more choices about who we are, and who we want to be. We construct our identity and we can be anything we choose, something easily done through the internet. Whilst this view might exaggerate the freedoms we have in society, because the poor are still poor and this will always constrain them in many ways, there does seem to be more active choosing in life, rather than our lives being shaped and determined by the familiar structures of Modernity.

 

Post Modernity and Religion

Firstly, the modernists who were convinced that religion was doomed appear to have been mistaken. Science and religion don’t seem to be mutually exclusive. Furthermore, whilst secularisation has occurred amongst the Trinitarian churches, one might talk about a resacrilisation rather than a desacrilisation. Resacrilisation refers to a reawakening of our interest and concern with religious and spiritual matters. One might argue that this is a reaction to the relativism and uncertainty already discussed. As we lose old forms of meaning and authority, so we look for new forms and as structures have less control over us, we’re freer to make choices. Technology also plays its part in our active choosing because the internet allows us to learn about and experience the religious or spiritual at the touch of a button. Whilst we might interact with ‘distant others’ through cyberspace who share our particular religious interests, in the words of grace Davie, we are believers without belonging in many ways. Mediated religion where physical attendance and deference to clerical authority is required seems less attractive to most of us these days. Perhaps New Age Movements and spiritual development groups allow people to dabble in these things and they can move onto something else when we get bored. Yet for Steve Bruce, the evangelical groups, NAMs and fundamentalist believers are the exception, not the rule and most of us remain secular. However, although Bruce’s criticism of the post modernist argument may have some credence when applied to the UK, if one broadens the unit of analysis, the rest of the world appears just as religious as ever. In short, it is notoriously difficult to measure religion as so much of it is about faith rather than membership and things become even more complicated as we use religion for secular purposes like getting our child into a good faith based school by either making up or exaggerating our own religiosity.