Modernity and Identity

Conversations That Matter

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Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We're going to talk about a post I made earlier today.

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It's going to be a short podcast. I wrote it as I was walking and I thought to myself, self, what has been the challenge to someone's identity?

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In other words, what's caused confusion in people not knowing who they are because of what the left has been up to?

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And that led me to thinking some things. And it's really more broad than the left, liberals, progressives, whatever term you want to use.

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It's more broad than that. It is the inevitable march of modernity upon individuals.

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Taking modernity to its logical conclusions has led to the point we're at and it will lead farther down this road to perdition.

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What do you mean by that, John? What's modernity? Well, it's hard to define. That's part of the problem. But it's not that leftists aren't the problem.

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It's that leftism is a manifestation, an aggressive manifestation of modernity.

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And modernity is really the post -enlightenment and most especially the post -industrial revolution ways of living and thinking that people have engaged in, patterns of life that people have now, assumptions that they make.

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It's the assembly line of the mechanistic way of looking at people.

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Urbanization is part of this. Secularization is certainly part of this. It is the denial of a world of forms like Plato believed and embracing particulars.

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And when it comes to the individual, very atomized individuals who are free of any obligation of any kind.

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So there's a libertarian free will that's maybe perhaps part of this.

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And there's so many different metrics we could use and look at to say, well, that's modernity.

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Politics, looking at politics instead of as the high art, the high form of trying to match the laws of a nation or a country with the laws set down by the creator has given way now to, there is no standard laid down by a creator.

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We're not discovering law. Politics is the practice of attempting to manipulate people to get your agenda or whatever benefits you or your constituency approved.

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It's even things like stealing and lying are acceptable in some ways.

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And it's just about using power without the recognition that actually we're stewards of delegated power.

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And so it sees man as the measure of all things. It's very humanistic. So I'm hoping that I'm putting some meat on the bone so you understand a little bit more of what modernity is.

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Some books that might help you, David Wells, No Place for Truth is a good book that I think would help you understand what modernity is.

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Richard Weaver's stuff, Ideas of Consequences would certainly help you understand that.

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And he really looks at one particular strain of thinking and shows how nominalism has led to what we're experiencing today.

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I think these are actually must -read books, to be honest with you. As I was thinking through this, and my post will make more sense of it, even if you don't understand modernity, the post will help give some definition to it.

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I was thinking, though, this attack on the family and attacks on who we are as individuals, as people, and the obligations we have, the identity we have, the sense of belonging we have, the attack on those things didn't start yesterday.

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It didn't start with the radical left overnight. And some conservatives tend to look at it that way.

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In fact, I would say that most conservatives on talk radio are products of modernity.

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They're just conserving a previous version of it. They don't want to go down the road as far as the progressive left has.

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The progressive left embraces modernity more so. And so, anyway, I just, I see this as bigger than just, it's not just the

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Democrats or something. Like there's sort of an inevitable, if we're going to accept some of the assumptions of modernity, then we're going to get to this point.

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And so that's what I wanted to talk about. What are some of those assumptions? And so let me just read for you this post.

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It says, pre -modern man could look up, see the heavens and know that he was part of an order with obligations to a creator.

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He could look into a reflection, see his ancestors staring back at him and know he had an obligation to his family.

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He could look out across the land and see the places and things that he relied on for sustenance and know he had an obligation to his community.

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He could look between his legs and know he had an obligation to his wife and children. And modernity has undermined every single significant identity conferring mechanism to the point modern man doesn't know if he's created, what a family is, who or what makes survival possible, and if he's even a he.

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And I would also perhaps add, if I was going to make this longer, that pre -modern man was able to do all of this, was able to have all these obligations and exercise responsibilities apart from government.

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You didn't, government was not necessary, by and large, for these. Now, I'm not saying that government didn't come in and enforce, hey, you're not taking care of your kids, go take care of them.

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You know, things, you know, you're in debtor's prison or something like that. I understand that.

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But you didn't need, the point I'm trying to make is that you did not need the heavy hand of the government for people to realize they had these obligations.

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Today, the government almost has to force people, it's becoming more that way, at least, to meet certain obligations.

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So let's start here. Pre -modern man could look up, see the heavens and know he was part of an order with obligations to a creator.

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What do I mean by that? I mean this, that pre -modern man, meaning man before the modern era, before the

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Industrial Revolution, really before the Enlightenment, and there are still people who function in a pre -modern way,

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C .S. Lewis may have been one of them, as he talked about reading old books and the importance of this. I think that everyone starts out as a knower.

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Romans 1 teaches this. We look at creation, we know there's a creator because you can also look at anything else and see if there's design, if there's beauty, that something created that, someone created that.

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There's purpose, there's personality even behind it. Pre -modern man would have just thought, yeah, duh.

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I don't have to prove this to you, obviously, we all know this. Today, though, there are great lengths made to suppress this.

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So, if you look at the heavens and you see, wow, the heavens display the glory of God. Firmament shows his handiwork.

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I am fearfully and wonderfully made. I am part of this. You immediately go to, wow, there's someone who has a purpose for me.

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I have significance. There's a function for me. I mean something in the grand scheme, and I better meet those obligations.

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There's a right and there's a wrong, and I better do the right thing. And if I do the wrong thing, at least I know that I'm doing the wrong thing because I know there's a standard.

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Now, we're told that you're an animal, that there really is nothing significant in the grand scheme.

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Really, the only significant things are the pleasure that you get or what this

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Tower of Babel ethos, that we're building something together. We're in this together. We're going to overcome something and then come out the other side, and we are going to give ourselves significance.

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I remember people made fun of Obama when he said, we are the ones we've been waiting for. I didn't because I think

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I knew what he was saying when he said that. He's saying we're God. We are our own saviors.

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We are going to manufacture meaning. So, meaning isn't something discovered.

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It's not something that is programmed into you. It's something that you have to struggle in order to create.

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And so, it's generated by man. Man becomes the measure of all things. And of course, this goes contrary to human nature.

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We know this isn't true. People know that there's a Creator. We know there's right and wrong, but yet we suppress that truth and unrighteousness.

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Because why? We want our sin. And if we can replace the Creator's intentions with our own that allows for sin, then, well, we believe a lie that we might be able to soothe our consciences, which we can't.

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And it might lead to good things. It won't. But we have suppressed this information that we can see with our own two eyes.

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And so, what's the result? We don't really have obligations to a Creator. There's no system of rewards and punishments after we die.

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In fact, we have to have judgment here. That's why we have to cancel people here and now. This is modern man's way of looking at religion as a whole.

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It just doesn't even... As long as it gives you significance, because the meaning is coming from you, it's not coming from religion.

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So, that wipes out obligation. You really don't have an obligation, except the one that you've set for yourself, or the one the government forces you into, because now government's

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God. But there's no God who's designed the place. Number two, a pre -modern man could look into a reflection, see his ancestors staring back at him, and know he had obligations to his family.

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What do I mean? Well, I mean, when you look in the mirror, you can see, man, I look like my dad more. I got my uncle's smile.

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I behave in certain ways that are just like my grandfather. I got my mom's ability to play music.

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Whatever those things are, and you know what those things are, there's certain things that are passed down through habits, through traditions, but also through genetics, and through mimicking, through going up in a certain environment.

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And you are known by, we recognize this in our civilization by putting last names.

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I'm of the House of Harris. So, we're recognizing a reality that exists out there in the wild, that I am part of an order, of a set.

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There's two people, my parents who loved each other, came together and had me, and they imparted to me their genetics.

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And then I carry those around as a symbol of the love that they have. And I, in turn, do that with my wife.

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And this, of course, goes on for generations. And you can even tell sometimes, you know, who a family is by just looking at the behavior of children, or looking at the way they look.

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These are things that, it used to be thought that this was important for your standing in a community.

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It was, you wanted to, your decisions affected more than you. You wanted to preserve the good name of your family.

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And I think in the modern world, this is viewed as negative. These are the kinds of things that would cause wars.

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Just like in the first one, I can say, well, believing in your creator causes wars, because someone else thinks it's a different creator.

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And then you have religious wars. Well, you could say that dueling, or family feuds, like the

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Hatfields and McCoys, or even broader than that, tribal warfare, you know, in other places in the world, and even on this continent, to some extent, this is all caused by having too much of an identity and allegiance to one's family.

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So that's a bad thing. So you need to get rid of anything that would cause you to have an allegiance to your family or something. Well, of course, that's not true.

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It's not the allegiance that caused the evil, perhaps. The evil can be caused by just the fact that we have sin in our hearts, and we'll use anything.

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There's any kind of thing that we, I mean, now it's not even about family identity, perhaps as much as it's about political ideology now.

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So should we just get rid of all political ideology now? Because, well, that causes people to have conflict with one another.

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I mean, that's ridiculous. We should be about recognizing the actual distinctions that the creator has made.

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And one of those is that he has, I mean, you see all the genealogies in the Bible. You see even in the nation of Israel, the land that gets preserved, according to tribe for generations.

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That's why there's a year of jubilee. As much as social justice warriors want to make that out to be the model for everything, the year of jubilee is what we need.

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We need to have a time of equity, inclusion, and diversity. That's like the year of jubilee. Actually, the year of jubilee meant that certain people own the land, and you couldn't take it away from them because after 70 years, it reverts.

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It was God saying that he believed in private property, and he believed in passing the land down.

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That confers responsibility. You're able to take care of these things better. When you have a family heirloom, you treat that thing as precious.

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It has a certain value that isn't going to be the value that eBay's going to give it. It has sentimental value.

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And so anyway, all of that, what I'm talking about, it starts with two people falling in love.

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Well, that's the term we use, but two people not just falling in love, but making a commitment to one another, and then having children, starting a family.

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That's how that starts, and propagating beyond themselves to more families. And so it's a beautiful thing.

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It's the way God's designed things. And we are in a world right now that diminishes this, that thinks family is that there's non -traditional families, but there aren't even really families, that you can just make a family whatever you want.

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I guess you and your homosexual boyfriend and the cat can be a family or something.

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And you don't have to have a mother, father, husband, wife.

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That combination doesn't make a family. It can be anything you want it to be, really.

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And we're going for this definitionalist family. Why even use the term? It's not a family anymore. You're using an archaic term for an arrangement that is meaningless at this point.

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So that's where we're at. And part of, I think, critical race theory's attempt to make race a social construct is connected to this in some ways.

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It's not that you are... I don't believe in genetic determinism. It's not like you're determined. And I mean that by that, that it's not like everything about you is just from your genetics or your

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IQ score or something like that. No, of course not. Obviously, that's not the case. But there is a sense in which, yes, your genetics do say something about you.

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They do confer some identity of some kind. And to deny that is just silly because we all know it.

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And so anyway, that's an attack on family as well.

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Now, I put that pre -modern man could look out across the land, see the places and things he relied on for sustenance and know he had an obligation to his community.

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And this is true, especially in agrarian societies, you know this, but in small towns, you know this, less so in the city.

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But it's true there to some extent, because you can look out and you see there's land. That's where my food's coming from.

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Literally, I rely in that field to live. I know that services, people who have certain skills, the blacksmith, right, the fireman, the police officer, all the different functions of society, we need those things to work together.

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So there are different roles that are played. And this is a little different than the specialization that comes with modernity, the factory assembly line specialization, where someone has such a narrow, narrow specific field that they're involved with that, you know,

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I'm an expert on the mating habits of ladybugs. It's like, oh, interesting. I just was at a graduation and I saw all these people getting their

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PhDs and it said what their dissertations were. And I was like, wow, what a useless thing to study for like half of them.

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I was like, why would anyone say, who cares? But that's specialization. That's people who get so narrow in the scope of the field that they lose track of the wisdom that comes from related fields.

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And so I'm not talking about that. That's modernity. I'm talking about just the roles that we have, that there's different things that skills, abilities

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God's given us. And we're all responsible for certain things, responsible to provide. We all should. I mean,

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I think I was raised with, you know, you should be able to fix your car. There's certain skills a man should have, right?

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But that doesn't mean that we don't have people who have a knack for things and have a role or a calling.

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You know, if you're a minister, especially, you have a calling. And so these are the things that are needed for a community to function.

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And you're born into a community. Even if it's just your family, you're born into a community and you rely on that community for the earliest stages of your development.

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You can't live without them. And so for this to perpetuate itself, you have to also be willing to give of yourself, whether that's through profit or volunteer work to the community around you, to the people around you.

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And that's what keeps a community actually a community, healthy, stable, all of these things.

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This was a no -brainer for people who lived in the pre -modern era. We all play our part. We have different parts.

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And my son, for them, you know, their children will probably grow up doing most likely what they did. And because that's what they would have learned.

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Or if they could, they might've gotten a, I want to say internship, but that's not the word

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I'm looking for. They might've worked with an apothecary or a blacksmith or something to gain a skill.

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And then that would have become their skill, but whatever the case, they would have seen themselves as part of something bigger.

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And today we don't have that as much. Even cities that have like, you know, keep

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Dallas weird and little taglines, you know, proud New Yorker. The thing is, the people who live in these places generally, now there's exceptions, but generally and more so as the years progress,

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I think, have less of an identity based on the place they live and more of an identity based on the habits or the superficial interests, the hobbies that they enjoy.

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That's more so the case. I think you tend to define yourself more on the pleasure you have, or even the job that you have more so than the place in which you live.

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And within a transitive world like we live in, that's going to be more so the case because you don't actually get to put down roots because you don't have time to do it.

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Also living in urban areas and having the access to technology puts a separation there between you and the land, you and directly the people that are actually supplying the needs.

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So you're not seeing the truckers who are bringing the food that the farmer grew. You're just walking into the grocery store and you see milk, you know, is four bucks or whatever, and you pay it.

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You don't see all that stuff. So there's not as big of a connection. There's not as big of a community solidarity and a gratitude that comes with that.

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And so urbanization leads to this kind of alienation to an extent. And, you know, this is one of the things

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Marxists actually were trying to critique about capitalism was, you know, there's an alienation involved. And some of the things that I think some

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Marxists have said, they were looking at something, sometimes even scooting along the edges of what the problem might have been, and then coming up with horrible solutions for how to rectify it.

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There is, though, an issue of you have to be intentional.

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You really do to really get involved because you could completely kind of disassociate from the rest of your community, and no one's going to be knocking on your door wondering why you weren't at church on Sunday, or why you're not giving to the charitable donations for the firemen, or why you didn't show up for the town hall meeting, or why the town day and the barbecue happened and you weren't there.

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You know, you can just hide when you're in an urban area, and you don't have to know the people that actually supply the things you need for sustenance.

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And so that's one of the things that has led to, I think, this seeing oneself as detached from community.

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It's one of the things that I think children, even growing up, can detach themselves from their parents, from their community. They want to emancipate themselves from all those things as if that's freedom, that's real freedom, and they're just going to do their own thing.

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And it's like you're cutting yourself off from what makes, one of the things that makes life actually rich and meaningful, and you don't even know you're doing it.

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And no wonder some of these people are the most bitter people once they do those kinds of things. All right. So that's what

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I mean by obligation to a community. I will say, I guess, in closing, too,

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I think some of the attacks on historical artifacts, including monuments, that have been so significant for regional identities is part of this as well.

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All right. So the whole world is just going to be this globalist, you know, sameness, where I'll go to the same gyms, and the same grocery stores, and the same everything, and eat the same food.

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That's kind of what we're going to. There's no uniqueness in community either.

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It's hard sometimes to find that harder. All right. He could look between his legs and know he had an obligation to his wife and children.

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That's the last thing I wrote. And some people on Facebook were saying, what do you mean by that? And I'm like thinking, how do

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I, I don't want to paint a picture here, but what I mean is physiologically, it was obvious to a man that he was a man by the fact that he had certain features.

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And those features would, one of them in particular, was capable of giving joy to a wife and siring children.

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And you cannot have children without this particular physiological feature that a man has, and only a man.

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And likewise, a woman also has her physiological features.

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And so they come together, they create children. And so there's an obligation there though. And you don't have to ask anyone, what's my obligation?

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Because, well, I know I'm a man. So this is what men have.

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This is what their hardware is. And this is what they do. And this is the product of what they do.

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And now that we have a product of what they do, and that product, that little baby is not able to survive apart from them and their provision, then you have an obligation to that baby.

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And so it doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell you that you're a man, but modernity has now, has undermined every single significant identity conferring mechanism because man doesn't know if he's created, doesn't know what a family is, who or what makes survival possible.

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I mean, there's people from the city that sometimes it gets so bad, like they think milk comes from the store. Like, no, it doesn't.

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So we're very, this is very opposite of what Thomas Jefferson thought, this agrarian, self -sufficient society that we would develop in the

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United States. We're not there. And it's not, I'm not saying cities are wrong. I'm just saying that urbanization today has made, has made it difficult to even know what makes survival possible.

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We take a lot of things for granted. And that does, I think that does have negative, that does impact us negatively.

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And then of course, we don't even know today if we're even a he, how do I know I'm not a she?

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Because meaning is all generated from deep within inside your pleasure manufacturing mechanism, whatever that is inside of us.

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It doesn't come from out there. It comes from in here. Of course, evil comes from out there, right?

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Systemic, institutional, but I'm good inside. So it's flipped. It's the exact flipped.

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One of the things that you'll find in thinking through this and examining this more is that Marxists tend to look at your self -worth as based upon your social location or social group.

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So they're able to think in categories when it comes to, let's say, whether or not you're guilty of racism.

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They're able to somehow think in categories when they do this. They are, that's when it comes to self -worth.

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And when it comes though, when it comes to everything else, when we're not talking about self -worth, when we're talking about your responsibilities and obligations and that kind of thing, those kinds of things are being washed away more so and more so.

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The only obligation you have is to be true to yourself and to whatever the state tells you because the state, because nature pours a vacuum and something has to fill it.

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So the state becomes the one that maintains order. But conversely, conservatives and Christians, we think of self -worth as being something that actually is imparted to you by God himself, regardless of your family or in your environment or any of these other things.

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You have self -worth. You have inalienable rights. You have the imago dei, the image of God upon you because God created you.

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And so by nature of being a created being in God's image, you have worth.

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You have self -worth. You don't need to be part of any kind of social location or community for that.

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Now we do think, as I just articulated though, that being part of communities and knowing where you stack up in the order of things does confer identity.

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So it's not worth that it confers, it's identity that it confers. And that's part of the obligations and responsibilities that you have.

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So I thought I would just parse some of this stuff out for you. Identity a little bit.

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You can say more, but I thought that this was maybe an invigorating post for everyone today.

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And hopefully it helps you think through some things and maybe sparks more questions in your mind. But I thought