Professor Bryan S Turner. Turns of Faith, Search for Meaning. Orthodox Christianity in 21st Century Greece. Politics, Religion and Political Theology. Ethics and the Use of Force. Secularisations and Their Debates. The Oxford Handbook of Secularism.
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There were dual consequences. The notable exception in the West was the United States, where millennialism continued to flourish under modernizing conditions. Modernity had raised the secular apocalyptic to a global level. However, the ascendency of modernizing projects had not brought the death of God and the end of religion, least of all in apocalyptic domains. After a long series of developments in the realm of religious politics at fateful times, during the eighteenth century, the apocalypse became secularized. Today, at the beginning of the third millennium of the Common Era, it is being reconstituted in a new way, ambiguously sacred and secular.
The curtains have parted on a new and unprecedented globalized epoch of apocalyptic violence. Beyond those developments, we may now be undergoing an epochal shift away from understanding history as the march of progress driven by the bundled development of science and democracy. Today, apocalyptic religious violence portends a new structuring of the world order, a new, postmodern apocalyptic epoch, the form of which remains as yet open to the play of events.
Apocalyptic times and modern times 5. However, focusing solely on objective time is an impediment to understanding either the apocalyptic as we have seen, itself encompassing multiple possible temporalities or modernity. Thinking about modernity as a complex hybrid of multiple and overlapping temporal forms of action can displace the simplistic binaries of modernity and tradition, advanced and underdeveloped society.
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Such recognition of the multiple temporalities in play under the sign of modernity offers a way of transcending the radical opposition in social theory between accounts of administrative legal-rational modernity versus accounts of the strategic conflicts of imperialism as bases of social order. The shape and span of the resulting social order are plastic and subject to myriad institutional patterns, new formulations, and reconstructions.
Three brief sketches begin to show how an historical phenomenology can reframe a series of modern theoretical conundrums by displaying them in relation to the interplay of temporally constituted social forms. The diachronic axis of modernity 5. Essentially, modern disciplining emanates from the realm of diachronically organized action. Here, if Weber's sociology of legal-rational authority is restricted to considering the state, bureaucracy, and legitimacy, its focus is too narrow.
Weber's legal-rational typification must instead be understood to extend the legitimate exercise of power outward to the entire range of diachronic operations in the social. In this, it merges seamlessly with Michel Foucault's argument that governmentality is diffuse in its exercise. The diachronic is not just about power and bureaucracy; more broadly, it encompasses the ordering and coordination of social activity in any domain. In the world where diachronic temporality predominates, social systems both proliferate within organizations interfacing with their environments, and differentiate in relation to one another.
On this front, operations within diachronic rational bureaucracy have subordinated legitimate exercise of strategic violence to administrative and judicial regulation.
The upshot is incomplete diachronic organization, administration, and regulation of how strategic violence is deployed in contending nation-state territorial empires, in interstate war, and in the broader supra-national governmentality of the Empire of Modernity. Here, Habermas's theory of lifeworld colonization and Foucault's model of governmentality describe an overall dynamic in which diachronically organized action is undertaken to organize the here-and-now according to goals external to the social actors who are the object of its organization and discipline.
The operations of colonization and governmentality toward the lifeworld are diverse. People acting in the here-and-now thus routinely interface with external diachronically-ordered systems and agents of governmentality as we move through daily life. Democracy and the diachronic 5. Rationalization, Max Weber already understood at the beginning of the twentieth century, has its limits Roth Phenomenologically, it thus becomes possible to locate a series of puzzles concerning modernity's empire in temporal terms.
Just to list them is to suggest future tasks of inquiry. However, once we acknowledge the complex webs of systemic governmentality across zones of temporality, more complex issues must be addressed: Under emergent conditions of globalization, as the transformative departures from state communism in Russia and China demonstrate, democratic processes versus alternative kinds of administrative and corporate power remain open to ever novel reconstructions.
More generally, the devolution of national sovereignty into multiple, often overlapping sub- and super-national jurisdictions only differentiates the possibilities of governmentality. On an entirely different front, capitalism increasingly has substituted privately owned quasi-public spaces e. The overall consequences are clear. Democracy is not the ultimate basis of power even in democracies, nor is it inherent to modern nation-state formation.
Instead, democracy comes into play at specific sites and nexuses within nested and overlapping complexes of systemic governmentality that are not inherently democratic. Diachrony and community 5. Like the lifeworld here-and-now, synchronic communities remain strongly resistant to diachronic colonization. The persistence of communities embodies the enduring potential for collective organization in relation to communally experienced social aspirations, and it is thus a central though fragile institutional locus of modern life that establishes a contretemps to thoroughgoing rationalization of the social order.
Nevertheless, religious congregations have not disappeared. Outside Europe, they thrive in much of the world, and mediation of access to experiences of transcendence is still their stock-in-trade Taylor In addition, paralleling religion, synchronic ritual-creating solidarity occurs in a wider range of communities, ethnic groups, nations and political religions such as fascism that promote aesthetics of nationalism , lifestyle and cultural movements centred on special activities and experiences, social clubs, sports teams, and status groups of all kinds.
Each offers individuals the potential for experience of catharsis linked to group identity and collective solidarity. By the twentieth century, fascist and communist political movements used highly ritualized mass rallies to manufacture the experience of solidarity. In turn, they filmed rallies, thus taking a major step in the direction of producing mediated simulations of synchronicity. Film, television, and the Internet, it has turned out, can substitute for the immediacy of synchronic ritual in the vivid present.
In short, the collective synchronic is subject to rationalization and simulation in its orchestration. Its basic ritual mechanism that produces solidarity is not of modernity, but it persists within modernity. The implications concerning religion resonate more generally. The diachronic institutions that project modernity are vehicles of secularization. However, diachrony can never subsume either the here-and-now or the collective synchronic temporality of the community.
In particular, although synchronic ritualizations of sacred versus profane may be orchestrated by way of diachronic temporality for example, via the mass media , the core logic of ritual is synchronic. Simply put, the diachronic does not do ritual. This mandate will be fulfilled by a genealogical approach only if it does not result in a postmodern historicism or history in fragments. Nor, finally, can transhistorical concept formation unlock the puzzles of historical development insofar as it masks the ontological and existential specificity of historical formations.
In my substantive analysis, I have thus sought to recognize both the generic, transhistorical possibilities of the apocalyptic and to chart their historical and cultural instantiations. Further, I have sketched some of the ways in which modernity itself can be characterized as a complex of interacting social forms, each with its own distinctive construction of social temporality.
To the contrary, radically alternative forms of social enactment sometimes traffic in de facto apocalyptic questions of ultimate meaning. People make sense of their circumstances in various ways, and how people do so can be consequential for how events unfold. Such relationships between ideas, interests, and sociohistorical situation have been described before, by Max Weber in his famous railroad metaphor.
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This circumstance implies that there is no overall telos to modernity, that objective temporality will never completely absorb or subordinate fields of activity centrally ordered in alternative temporalities e. The pessimism no doubt has real sources, and the affirmations are often heartfelt, but both partly derive from a myopic understanding of modernity born of viewing it through the lens of its incompletely realized program. For one could argue that the very attachment to afflu- ence among people living in capitalist democracy undermines their ability to engage in large-scale collective action, which would invariably disrupt the routines and practices making possible the pursuit and accumulation of wealth.
The more their existence is immersed within the patterns of the diach- ronic, the more difficult it becomes for them to act collectively to avoid catastrophe. One sees evidence of such incapacity in the way in which the US has chosen to conduct its so-called war on terror. Although the US has resorted to exces- sive and inhuman measures against those suspected of terrorism, such as the inmates held at Guantanamo, this brutality has coexisted with a strange half- heartedness in how the US has engaged in a struggle against an ostensibly dire enemy.
Although neo-conservatives have declared the struggle against mili- tant Islam to be no less significant that the fight against Bolshevism and fascism, the US has from the outset acquiesced to rigid economic constraints in waging war. Thus, it has not sent troops in adequate numbers to bring stability to Iraq and Afghanistan, because it is too politically costly to revive the draft or to displace, however temporarily, economic growth from its posi- tion as the highest national priority.
John R. Hall: Apocalypse in the Long Run
Even the most ardent supporters of the war in Iraq never called for significant changes to life at the home front for the sake of gaining victory in a lengthy and protected conflict, even though they have been quick to characterize the enemy as fanatics seeking nothing less than the total destruction of the way of life Americans hold dear. The Iraqis have suffered the brutal effects of these unyielding limitations, as the speedy victory gave way to the disintegration of state security through inter-ethnic strife as well as a bloody insurgency, which have claimed the lives of between , to , Iraqi civilians, according to iraqbodycount.
For our satiety rules out the possibility of reciprocity our enemies and delegates the duty of sustaining an untenable status quo to those who benefit from it the least. In this respect it is telling that Hall chooses a rather dated nightmare to illustrate the danger of the dissolution of the public sphere: We would be more fruitful to look instead to the novels of Michel Houellebecq and J. Ballard, who track the pathologies bred by radical individualism and consumerist satisfaction.