Bronislaw Szerszynski: Is the Sacred Dead?

“Where is God gone? I mean to tell you! We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened the earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? – for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife,- who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise?” (Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, The madman).

I thought this passage would be really interesting to help in assessing the notion of disenchantment or secularization of nature. I find claims that religion has disappeared unfounded as in our age, we find that the further technologies advance in their mode of unfolding, the louder the religious voices of protest can be heard and the more radical they become. As I also find Noble’s claim of the religious roots of technological discoveries and scientific endeavours also very valid. So if religion has not disappeared, then is it as Bryan Wilson would say that “religion is not so much disappearing as simply losing its former role in maintaining and steering the social system, being replaced in this by secular, rational, bureaucratic and technical means? (Modernity, Nature, and the Sacred, 13) I think that this statement is partially true, but in the sense of religion as an ideology and practice that unifies by creating concrete moral systems for evaluating people and governing them by instilling practices that organize people and rally them towards a common horizon, and religion as a hegemonic structure of control. If we strip religion of that then what are we left with?

To say that religion became an individual quest is partially true, but it is more than that for belonging to a religious sect is belonging to that community that is one of many other pockets of communities that in their own rite are semi-autonomous. “The confrontation between modern technology and its critics is a confrontation that is very much internal to Western sacral history, and one in which opposing positions turn out to be internally related in complex ways.” (The Future of the Sacred, 174) It is not simply that religiosity and secularization coexist as two separate but harmonious entities but rather religion drives and shapes our notions of secularization, and in turn secularization fragments, diffuses, and proliferates the sacred. The sacred can be God in the traditional sense of institutionalized religion, but the sacred is also our notions of humanity, the sublime is in nature as a “self-sufficient material order obeying immanent causal laws” (The Future of the Sacred, 171), life becomes sacred because it is valued in its own rite not as a preparation for eternal life, the image of the globe is the sacred, and most importantly reason as the human virtue and technology as a by-product of that virtue becomes the sacred.

“Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event,- and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto! I come too early; I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is travelling- it has not yet reached men’s ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. This deed is as yet further from them than the furthest star,- and yet they have done it!” (Nietzche, The Joyful Wisdom, The Madman)

If the sacred has not so much disappeared as been diffused, proliferated, and fragmented then how has the sacred lost its mystery? It is because the sacred has become iconic. It is not governed by a structure that is entrenched in our routine. We are made to believe that mysteries are solvable, that we are the masters that govern our globe and unlock its mysteries. We are too busy inventing that which is new and original and accumulating information, tidbits, images, and less concerned with reorganizing this information, understanding it within different structures and different contexts. It is not so much that we need to engage and question the truth (or lack of) in information but we need to assess how an image, or a tidbit of information contributes and relates to other images and pieces of information. In other words, what we need is to understand the “relationship between reason, history, and the sacred” (The Future of the Sacred, 177). Engaging with “technology simply on its own technological terms through evaluating specific technical effects and consequences” is not sufficient(The Future of the Sacred, 178). “Instead technologies need to be engaged with more fully in terms of what relationships they bear to our past trajectory, how they might be harnessed to non-technological goals in the present, and upon what future trajectory they might set us.” (The Future of the Sacred, 178)

Examples of that:

• Supplemental Instruction Model of Post-Secondary Education: This model draws from several educational models (behavioural learning, cognitive developmental, social interdependence, interpretive critical, dialectical behavioural, as well as an applied understanding of left brain – right brain ways of processing information). The main premise of this model is that students are active participants in their learning process. Students have to take responsibility of their learning and voluntarily attend the sessions supplied by Supplemental Instructors. This model focuses more on how to learn than what information should be attained. New information is built on old information and the way to learning is building on good behaviour that leads to good education (good study habits, planning course work, gradual accumulation of information, maintaining a healthy life style of eating and sleep habits, learning to cope with stress, etc.) Information should be produced not disseminated and the best way to achieve that is through constant dialogue. Students learn more from discussing ideas with each other than from memorizing and waiting on professors to give them knowledge. Cognitive development is stimulated when conflict arises during social interaction. The educational goal is liberation not domination. This goal should overcome the learner’s “culture of silence”. If knowledge is produced through dialogue with others, then what learners learn today through team-work (knowledge that is more thorough) they will be able to apply on their own tomorrow. Finally information should be diverse (visual, theoretical, practical) and its study should be equally diverse (studying patterns, chronological chains of events and sequences, comparative, applied in daily life, applied in educational institutions, styles of management, modes of design and architecture, art… etc.) This constant reformulating of information produces the most thorough knowledge.

• Decentralized management: This model of management depends more on creating specialized committees that brainstorm cases and produce case studies. Those specialized committees then meet with other specialized committees in the company and cross-reference their case studies. The principles that this style of management holds are: society and its technologies are changing at a rapid pace (knowledge has a diminishing half-life) so that learning is no longer the acquisition of information by individuals but rather that each individual constitutes a part in a larger network of connections. Individuals need to rely on technology and networks to store information and knowledge. Information is produced through specialized nodes coming in contact with other specialized nodes. Learning does not happen outside of life in a separate isolated environment but is rather embedded in the work-related process. Content is not filtered in advance of the learning process but rather in the network itself. Such understanding and application of the network has to be dynamic and uses modern technologies to filter information and reassign it as a process of network reformation. A process tool that is required is one that captures knowledge and permits co-content creation. It should be decentralized and permits diverse and divergent opinions, cultures, and experiences. The process tool should capture the elements of culture and context; it aggregates distributed elements; it filters and adapts to information needs and climate; it builds learner competence to function in environment; it is a space that allows self-expression, dialogue, debate, brainstorming and connections; it is also personalized and learner-controlled.

• The post-modern age in its focus on theory, structure, the play between silence and word over content. The new philosophies that place a high emphasis on developing inter-relations and attempt to identify the boundaries that are crossed and ways to understand and engage with a world of fuzzy boundaries.

• Art and music that focuses on fusing different cultures and elements seeking to show the inter-connectedness of content and the ability to reformulate it to an “other” form that carries different content, is dynamic, interactive, participatory, and customizable.

If lightening and thunder take time, then our current modes of investigation will take time to unfold. Our age carries with it the supreme danger of ultimate fragmentation and disenchantment but also holds within it those new practices and ways of engagement that synthesize, cross reference, place responsibility on the individual to engage with the world as part of a globe that cannot be separated into neat categories. Maybe we are heading towards the greatest danger and are making sense of the greatest saving power that is part and parcel of this greatest danger. The greatest fear and the most breath-taking hope and wonder is that the ripple effects of our current engagements and modes of understanding, our hegemonic culture and its counter-cultures are still not fully seen and understood but are already in the past, the present and the future all at once.