Urlich Beck just published a new book : ''A God of One’s Own''
Here I present some of his ideas commented. Any other comments schould be welcome due of the importance of the anthropological issues he mentions. This presentation that I transfer here ,was made yesterday by a colleague anthropologist Allan Brill in his blog :
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This is the one book to read this year about religion in the world. Ulrich Beck, an important German sociologist of globalization, cosmopolitanism, and secondary modernity has written a synthesis of the various works on post-secularism of the last decade. He integrates Habermas’ allowing religion into the public sphere, Jose Casanova’s critique and reformulation of secularization, the gang over at Immanent Frame (Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, Arjun Appadurai et al)along with the sociology of Zymunt Bauman, Anthony Giddens, and Pierre Bourdeau. This book is almost a summary study of the writings on religion of the last decades and into the future. Beck is interviewed often and has many quotable quotes. (There are many more interviews out there.)
Beck’s opening point is clear. Most sociology of religion has been functional and accepting. They explain why people have beliefs without judging the value of the beliefs. Sociologists are equally open- minded toward any manifestation of religion -new age, Evangelicals, revivalism, and magic. Beck argues that we need a sociology of the effect of religion on society and to examine the cultural productivity and destructiveness of religious beliefs. The contents of religious beliefs as an
“autonomous force and reality, their vision of a different humanity and their power to make whole worlds tremble, are so rarely exposed in their full ambivalence to the gaze of sociology.” Beck is a confirmed European secularist, yet he seeks to capture the power and hold that religion has today.
Beck’s conclusion about contemporary religion is that everyone has a” God of one’s own.” This God is not an omnipotent God, rather God needs mans help to be acknowledged and to make the world a better place. God himself is “impotent and helpless in an apocalyptic age” We turn to God to seek solace and dignity not safety or solutions.“We wish to chain our personal God to our own desires, traumas, hysterias, fears and hopes and at the same time, we want to keep these chains in our own hands.” (13)
Beck considers taking refuge in dogmas of faith that are incompatible with our “individualized experiences and ambivalent feelings” is a form of self-deception- it fails to acknowledge individualism. Rather one needs to recognize the empirical and historical fact that the God of one’s own correspond to the space of one’s own life and life of one’s space. Man is at the same time believer and God. Modern life is fragmented with an alterity of own’s own life. (15) One’s own life is another name for the contingent and reflexive nature of that life
Beck declares that the collapse of secularization theory is greater than fall of the Soviet Union (21). Heavily reliant of the essays that Habermas wrote in 2007 – 2008, Beck declares a post-secular age. orthodox and conservative religions are gaining ground everywhere. (24) The new religious movements are based on changing psychological schools cobbled together to form Gods of their own. Asian and archaic elements are accepted by even the most modernized people. (27)
The visit of Pope Benedict to the US or Britain was a mass media event of papacy- a cosmopolitan event. It filled no churches and does not stop decline but it becomes a major cultural event even for atheists. God in the age of technical reproduction is adapted for mass media- there is an aura given by the Pope (37-8)
Beck is one of the leading theoreticians of globalization. Habermas’ reflexive modernity (and Bauman’s liquid modernity) is defined by Beck as having three elements – risk society, individualization, and cosmopolitanism. Beck prefers the term cosmopolitanism to that of globalization since there is an erosion of clear boundaries, an involuntary confrontation with the
other, and a new need for a hermeneutic of the other. (67-8) This time it is a choice of enriching mutual recognition or violence.
Cosmopolitanism is defined as a product of powerful economic, political, and mass media developments at the start of the 21st century. There is a simultaneous abolishment of older boundaries between people and the creation of new ones. Erased are the old boundaries , the new overrides the pre-existing hierarchies of class, caste, exclusion. In turn, it creates new boundaries of violence and tolerance or new sets of competing religious universalism or a dualism of good and evil that withholds dignity to outsiders. (52-54).
Individualization does not mean Bellah’s individual, and egoistic choice, nor is it Enlightenment autonomy and it is not the market’s conscious choice or individual preference.(see Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman).Individualization is imposed on the individual. There are no more specific roles in a marriage, ways to act at work, or paths in life. Until recently, men
were the legal bread winner and women had to cook. Now that that is not legally mandated, Individualization is the process of deciding in a marriage of the routine of chores, roles, place to live, finances. A similar need for choice, negotiation, decision making applies to all aspects of our lives.
The third element risk society is to recognize that these changes are not better nor worse (Giddens vs Toraine), rather that we are forever seeking to minimize or deal with risk in our lives. Individualization creates risk. We live on a circus high wire act trying to balance marriage-divorce, several jobs over the course of a life, self-praise and marketing, the need to be flexible and resilient to change. We always have risk and are making decisions – evening meal, insurance, who takes out the trash, old age, medical decisions, university training, what house to buy, who to have as neighbors. There is a new immediacy to our lives and we need to make choices.
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