23:38, 24 December 2009
Tallinn Jaani Church. Source: "Postimees" of 24 Dec.2009
As an attempt to (re)socialize, I decided to visit a Christmas Church today. I thought of going to the Tallinn Jaani Church, where I used to go in 1990s. I was thinking that if I were a priest and would call people to the church in the Christmas Eve, I would carefully think of what to tell them. Therefore, I was expecting at least a kind of „living“ reflection of moral experience, as one of the priests was one of the most brilliant and promising theology students in 1990s at the Institute of Theology of the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church. A worship though consists of different dimensions, the symbols (from colours, pictures, clothes, lights to the building) and acts (from music and singing to liturgy and benediction) being as important as the sermon.
During the day, I was reading the book: Gerard Delanty, Social Theory in a Changing World. Conception of Modernity. Polity Press, 1999. A central thesis of the book (p. 13) is that „the question of knowledge is becoming more and more central to our experience of society: our society is a knowledge society“. Not starting with asking what knowledge exactly constitutes of, Delanty explains that leading such society into being requires from social actors learning capacities – the cognitive means to learn. The author understands the ability to learn as social activity, inseparable from the development of moral consciousness (that distinguishes human beings from things). The author suggests that economy, polity or cultural values systems do not determine social reality as much as the cognitive structures of communication – I have always thought similarly.
Related to the question of knowledge is the theory of social change, where social learning / collective learning is a central concept. How do societies collectively learn and how does learning relate to evolution? And does, for example, the church have a role (and what kind of role?) here?
Knowledge and culture do not constitute solely in science, but also in food, health, movies, etc. factors that altogether form social identity. Thus, if one talks of advocacy as of lifestyle, then advocacy really embraces all these essential components of life that all influence us. Included the sermons that therefore usually synthesize and reflect the plural external experience so that people wouldn’t get lost in the plurality of choice, or could find an anterior category to measure / evaluate the variety of information.
Delanty distinguishes between three great ideologies of modernity – liberalism, conservatism and socialism, and Delanty understands three developmental logics in modernity:
First – the autonomy of the political Subject (as a creative agency);
Second – the autonomy of culture and knowledge (inherently reflecting the cognitive structures);
Third – the autonomy of the social (centred around discursively structured public communication).
From here, Delanty concludes that the modern age has been shaped by creativity, reflexivity, and discursivity (later he names those as: aesthetics, cognitivity, and normativity) – unified by such spheres as religion (Maybe my religious studies are the reason why I have always subconsciously attempted at unifying, although (as strange as it may seem) I have almost always been severily hindered by separationists? – As if I don’t understand that EU Law, and International Law are different subjects (or as if I do not distinguish between private and public). I actually see the difference, but at the same time, even if I technically analyse, say, an actions system, I cannot be prohibited from having in my mind the broader picture, or from asking for the reasonability of the system (that already means bringing in anterior categories).
At p. 20 of the book, Delanty well describes the shift in human history from manifestation of a divine plan to self-realization that he names the turn to autonomy. (That reminds Kant’s separation of morality from nature – The world of nature (objectivity) vs. The self-legislating world (subjectivity, distance between people, experience, and categories that thus become fragmented, self-contained, and alienated)).
Modernity finds its own legitimacy from just itself, therefore, I would consider central the question „Is something wrong with „The self-legislating“ world?“ – Technically, nothing is wrong with self-legislation / self-legitimation, and one can even make and makes high science without needing anything anterior or transcendent.
From the broader perspective (and this forms the content of my previous posting) self-contained regimes do not explain the existence of neither the existential questions, nor the social order.
Take setting up a social contract (that in its different forms is the basis of civil societies) – where do the points /arguments come into it from? For example, the rights that people are used to see as the basis of social order, are drawn from the anterior – from natural rights that preceded the social.
FOLLOW - From Government to Governance is Foucault’s theory of the historical shift, basing on Foucault’s view that power is not located in the state simply, but is located in the social, constituting in social relations. Social relations, according to Lyotard, are shaped by knowledge.
That way, the dividing line between good and evil is negotiable, as opposed by the simpler way – recourse to religion, or by the more advanced way – creation of legislative ethical codes.
