THE “FREEDOM” OF POSTMODERNISM
Years ago, Bob Dylan sang the song, “You Gotta Serve Someone.” The more I thought about it, the more I saw that he was onto something. The baby serves his or her instinctual survival needs. They cry when they are hungry and know to drink the mother’s milk. When we mature, we begin to serve other needs – both emotional and psychological. Later, these demanding needs become social, as we seek approval and a place among our peers.
However, somewhere along the line, we also have to learn how to restrain our desires. Our conscience begins to kick in along with social norms. These tell us that we cannot always serve our desires. We cannot fight and scream when we don’t get what we want, or can we?
Our postmodern culture is now telling us that can have it all. In fact, you should have it all. We should have our desires, even if it means that we surgically change our sex. If that is not enough, society will now penalize those who speak out against this insipient I-want-it-now mentality.
How did postmodernity achieve this revolution? It has convinced us that:
∑ Repression is bad. It inhibits us. Instead, we have to be who we are and desire whatever we want.
∑ We have to be all that we can be.
∑ Exercising self-control makes us less authentic.
∑ The conscience interferes with our finding self-fulfillment.
∑ Those we had regarded as authorities are all wrong.
∑ Instead, we are the authors of our own reality, captains of our own ship, and we should empower ourselves to pursue our dreams.
∑ We create our own reality. There is no other reality but what we create.
∑ There are no higher truths or principles to tell us that we have done wrong. We should be our own judge and jury.
However, the freedom that postmodernism has promised is just another form of servitude. Instead of serving ideals, we now abandoned to serve our feelings and desires. The external ideals – objective moral law and our cultural inheritance – have been destroyed. Left alone to our feelings and desires, we find ourselves without a roadmap to tell us what to do with these desires. We are left to serve them. We now live with open borders, tyrannized by demanding desires.
I know that this sounds a bit extreme. So I want to try to illustrate how the removal of moral authorities has stripped us and has left us vulnerable to a more destructive and tyrannical set of authorities.
Have you ever noticed that when you get in a fight, it is always the other person who is in the wrong? I certainly have! In fact, the resulting feelings are so powerfully authoritative. I believe that I have been wronged, victimized, and humiliated. We want revenge, even if only in our own heart or the use of the silent treatment.
When objective principles of right and wrong have been crushed under foot, there is nothing remaining, nothing higher than our feelings, to correct us and show us that we have been wrong in our assessment and determination to seek some form of revenge. Our desires are left unchecked to tyrannize.
Our choices can kill. I had been convinced that my wife had wronged me, and I resented her for this. However, I had forgotten how many times she had forgiven me, but even recalling these wasn’t enough. My feelings had been so strong that they stomped down every other consideration in their path. Instead, these feelings dictated that she always misconstrued what I had said and she always would. I was livid.
If I was a postmodernist, my feelings would have remained king. They would have presided over any pragmatic concerns for my own welfare.
I needed protection from myself and to be convinced that my unforgiveness was absolutely wrong and that my failure to receive her back into my heart was an absolute betrayal of love and commitment. I needed far more than what postmodernism could offer. I needed to know that there is something higher than my feelings and even a cost/benefit assessment. I needed to be told that I was absolutely wrong.
This is what Scripture tells me. No, it comes crashing down upon me, indicting and correcting me, and ultimately, restoring us. I need God’s Word to break through my coercive and imperialistic feelings and desires and to put them in their rightful and humbled place.
I don’t know how other couples make it and how they can stand up against this postmodern madness. When caught cheating, a husband explained,
∑ “Well, having multiple partners is just what I am about. This is my truth. You have no right to dictate to me your truth. Keep your own truth for yourself.”
Of course, they divorced. They no longer shared the common ground, a higher truth. Instead, postmodernism damned them to divorce. They had become captains of their own ships and were their compass was leading them to separate ports.
There is no escaping it. We have to serve someone. It will either be our own desires or it will be something above us, hopefully, Someone who dignifies our service.
AUTHENTICITY
In a world of mask-wearing, we yearn for authenticity.
I like being authentically me. Why? I don’t like to expend energy to hide who I am. It’s much more fun to be able to be transparent and laugh at myself. It’s part of the liberty that I have in Christ.
Liberty? Yes! I don’t have to prove myself. I don’t have to become the ideal person so that others will love me. Why not? I am really convinced about the Bible’s truth that my life is no longer about me and my trying to be somebody that I am not:
• I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20; ESV)
This raises an important question – “What does it mean to live authentically?” For the artist, this might mean letting our feelings hang out. After all, aren’t we our feelings? Don’t they define who we are?
Perhaps, but not for someone who has the privilege of serving Christ. Who then am I? I am a servant of the Lord before all else. Does this mean that I am denying my feelings? Certainly not! But it does mean that these do not define who I am. I am His and He is mine. That’s who I am.
Yes, I struggle with powerful feelings of anger and even that horrid and sickening feeling of jealousy, but they are not essentially me. My life in Christ is what is authentically me! Therefore, authenticity does not require that I act-out, but that I live faithfully for the Truth, while I laugh at my pettiness.
But what is the highest truth of someone without the Savior? Themselves! Namely, their feelings! However, he cannot authentically live them out without incurring rejection, even self-contempt.
How then can he live authentically and connect to others authentically? He cannot. Instead, he must find a new face by suppressing the old selfish one. Consequently, he becomes an idealist, a do-gooder to convince himself and the world that he is good.
This is especially needful in the professional world where he is hired to implement programs to help others, where he must wear professional attire and manifest professional concerns, even as he carries a concealed dagger.
While underneath, he is a carnivore, he must live deceptively as an herbivore. Meanwhile, it is becoming increasingly clear to him that he is living a double-life. He is not the herbivore as he presents himself. He finds that the mask cannot be reconciled with who he truly is. He wants to believe that he is a good and caring person, but it is becoming increasingly clear that he is not. He is no longer able to believe in his life and what he is doing. Therefore, in private, he cynically talks about “playing the game.” Cynicism becomes the only glue that can hold these two conflicting identities together.
I am all for doing good, but why? If we wear a mask, a deceptive front, to “prove” that we are a good and worthy person, holding forth our resume of good deeds, we are living inauthentically and the real self will continue emerge, to our chagrin, from behind the mask. It will not remain quiet but will continue to demand stage-center.
How to control it and to live authentically? We have to give the dark-side its own space. However, when it manifests, we can laugh at it and take responsibility. It’s like a pit-bull we have on a leash. We can’t hide it, and when it breaks lose to bite someone, we must take full responsibility. However, we can be transparent about it, denying it the power to operate in the darkness of denial.
“Out of the depths of the heart, the mouth will speak,” but we can humble ourselves and apologize for its words. We can allow ourselves to become accountable.
But how can we laugh at so destructive a force? How can we accept its presence? This is to admit that we are not a good person. It is like admitting that we are a pauper and not a prince. It is to surrender our good feelings about ourselves.
Who can endure such a crash, a fall from such great heights? We have to find our significance elsewhere, from above. Only when we are convinced that we possess something more valuable than our self-esteem – a Savior who has died for us and loves us despite our unloveliness – can we be authentic!
Besides, authenticity and self-acceptance pay great dividends – ability to accept others and even criticism, humility, other-centeredness, and non-defensiveness. By the grace of God, I can be who I truly am.
