Introduction
Ancients versus Moderns
Unencumbered self vs. Situated self (Sandel)
Themes
I. Selections from Peter Berger’s The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation, 1979.
The jet traveler in the Third World is a pretty good metaphor of modernity. He moves on the same planet as those villagers, and yet he moves in an altogether different world. His space is measured in thousands of miles, theirs by the distance a bullock cart can go. His time is expressed in the controlled precision of airline schedules, theirs by the seasons of nature and of the human body. He moves with breathtaking speed; they move in the slow rhythms set long ago by tradition. His life hurls itself into an open future; theirs moves in careful connection with the ancestral past. He has vast power, physical as well as social, more or less at his command; they have very little of either...
But the jet traveler differs from the villager in another very important way. It is not only that he is so much more privileged and powerful. It is also that he has so many more choices.
The Heretical Imperative
The English word "heresy" comes from the Greek verb hairein, which means "to choose." A hairesis originally meant, quite simply, the taking of a choice. A derived meaning is that of an opinion…For this notion of heresy to have any meaning at all, there was presupposed the authority of a religious tradition. Only with regard to such an authority could one take a heretical attitude.
For premodern man, heresy is a possibility—usually a rather remote one; for modern man, heresy typically becomes a necessity. Or again, modernity creates a new situation in which picking and choosing becomes an imperative.
A Very Nervous Prometheus
This modern man, as he undergoes the world-shattering movement from fate to choice, easily impresses one as a Promethean figure. Often enough, especially since the Enlightenment, he has so impressed himself. It is all the more important to see that he is a very nervous Prometheus. For the transition from fate to choice is experienced in a highly ambivalent manner. On the one hand, it is a great liberation; on the other hand, it is anxiety, alienation, even terror.
Emancipation:
An example may serve here; it is perhaps the most important example in the modem Western world-that of Jewish emancipation. In the situation of the ghetto, as in the shtetl of eastern Europe, it would have been absurd to say that an individual chose to be a Jew. To be Jewish was a taken-for-granted given of the individual's existence, ongoingly reaffirmed with ringing certainty by everyone in the individual's milieu (including the non-Jews in that milieu)... The coming of emancipation changed all this. For more and more individuals it became a viable project to step outside the Jewish community. Suddenly, to be Jewish emerged as one choice among others.
When is choice a blessing or a curse?
What was gained and lost for you, Jews, or humans in the transition from pre-modernity to modernity?
Three responses:
1. Deductive, Reductive, Inductive
-Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom
What then is the meaning of freedom for modern man?
He has become free from the external bonds that would prevent him from doing and thinking as he sees fit. He would be free to act according to his own will, if he knew what he wanted, thought, and felt. But he does not know. He conforms to anonymous authorities and adopts a self which is not his. The more he does this, the more powerless he feels, the more is he forced to conform. In spite of a veneer of optimism and initiative, modern man is overcome by a profound feeling of powerlessness and enslavement.
What does it take to exercise freedom well?
How/why does freedom lead to conformity?
Given the Heretical Imperative, how do you decide which podcasts to listen to? Or not listen to? What do you filter out or in?
Harold Kushner, Conservative Judaism in an Age of Democracy (2007)
The second great truth [after Judaism is a Civilization], which the Jewish world has been slower to absorb, is that the French Revolution of 1789 was as traumatic and paradigm-shattering for the Jewish people as was the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. It ushered in an age of democracy and individualism, empowering people to make choices about their own lives. It defined people as individuals rather than as members of a group. Thus the formula by which equal rights were extended to the Jews of France: “to the Jews as a people, nothing; to the Jew as an individual, everything.”
One of the implications of the dawning of the age of democracy, one that gave rise to the Conservative movement but one that the Conservative movement has been reluctant to recognize, is this: in the absence of an enforcement mechanism, halakhic Judaism is no longer viable. To the commanding voice of halakhah, “You shall do the following,” the modern non Orthodox Jew responds, “Why should I?” He need not be saying it dismissively. He may simply be asking for a persuasive reason, but the dimension of recognized obligation is no longer there.