Community
Looking for a Simpler Life
in the pool of Liquid Modernity

I'm struck by the barrage of articles, videos, interviews and blogs about our latest cause celebre (not that the whales are gone)and celebrity fixation - Paris Hilton. In jail, out of jail, back in jail and always in the paparazzi magazines. What's the fixation? What's the interest in a woman who has more money and influence than she should and more than most of us could ever imagine having. Is there such an interest in her because people feel like they know her, that as demented and arrogant as she may seem that she's a friend, part of their community through their interactions on E, in People, and through the blog perezhilton.com? Have we truly become - like some philosophers and social-scientists have said for sometime - so isolated in the rat race of modern life dominated by work in multinational companies and days in front of screens that the only place we can find community is through tv or magazines late at night as we recover from the long work day and dread the next one? Has paparazzi-driven media become the way that we meet each other? Maybe we're not bowling alone anymore, just simply alone.

I'm working through a book that I put down sometime ago, Dark Ages America: The Fiinal Phase of Empire by Morris Berman. He talks about Liquid Modernity:

the title of a book by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who defines Liquid Modernity as the condition of a society that lacks a clear sense of orientation, or the kind of stability that dervies from a long-standing tradition or set of norms. He claims that the culture of New Economy America is characterized by speed, fluidity, and transicence - in short - obsessive change. Being modern in this context means always being under construction, living life like a perpetual game of musical chairs. (my version of p. 15 in the book)

What's the trouble with being human these days? Are we so obsessed with change and fluidity that we allow ourselves to be moved around by multinational companies, desperate to keep a job, seeking to fund the essential economic tenants of shoping in the Pottery Barn catalogue from home, have the latest kitchen utensils, and cruising the stores located in every regional shopping center starting at Ann Taylor and Banana Republic all the way through the Gap, KayBee and Pea in a Pod. Are we so desperate for community, while living in the midst of unknown faces, that we turn to the paparazzi for purpose-filled meaning-making community? Berman goes on to say that we live in a culture in which the individual has to continually reinvent themselves, to go it alone, that we live in a country that is the ultimate anticommunity.

In the midst of the week I read the Food Section in the Chronicle and stumbled across an article - A Place At The Table - talking about the rapid and explosive growth of communal tables in restaurants in San Francisco. I wonder if such emerging interest in a well established European tradition is related to our life in liquid modernity? Maybe we've forgotten - or never learned - how to make community, how to find, what it looks like when you can touch, feel, and experience it?

I wonder if our hyper-individualism is reinformed and put on steroids by the fact that we operate in an economy in which we can easily be replaced, downsized, outsourced, or priveleged to become a consultant without health care, at any moment? We live and breathe a culture that talks about interdependency, mutuality, reciprocity, fluidity and growth....but actually doesn't put those things into practice. John Donne said that no man is an island. The apostle Paul in 1 Corinthains talks about the community of the church as the human body, in which the diverse variety of parts of the body have their particular roles but are not any more valued than any other part. They suffer together. They're honored together. It seems to me that such community is what we're looking for. It's the antidote to liquid modernity. It's not anything new in terms of human history, but it is unfindable in the Pottery Barn catalogue or on the book shelf at Barnes and Nobles. It's not something that a CEO can devise. It's not something that can be legislated through creative governmental policy-making or bobo targeted publicity campaigns. It can't really be found on E or in the pages of People. For me I find it in large part through choosing to live in community, in several...first in the context of my faith community: a place in which diverse people have choosen to be gathered into a community based upon the foundation of shared faith. But I'm also in other communities, spaces in which people have choosen to gather because of shared interests or common needs.

Maybe we're so interested in Paris Hilton, because we see ourselves - our fears, hopes, dreams and closet desires of striking out at the world, playing out in her, her partying, her driving style, and self-destruction?