Today we seem to accept that “reality is a construct” made up of meaning and values, a moment in the life of human consciousness, both at the individual and social level. The dynamic character of what we call “reality” has implications on our understanding of culture, science and man.

Culture is now understood as the set of symbols and values that constitute the virtual horizon that validates the reasonableness of human actions. By the same token, the principles of science are as valid as the arrival of other principles that revolutionize the preceding ones. Science no longer seeks necessary laws but rather the best available explanations about the universe that is today understood as open, dynamic and evolving.

Man is seen as a unity in tension, holder of a polymorphic consciousness that shapes his understanding according to a set of unconscious and preconscious processes that determine his intentions and decisions. He is known to also possess a consciousness with an unrestricted desire to know and a criterion allowing him to examine himself as he examines reality around him, simultaneously. This unrestricted desire to know leads him to an unrestricted objective: being.

This new way of viewing our own universe has two important implications: the acceptance of diversity and the forward looking mentality of man in almost every aspect of life. The forward looking character of man is associated with dramatic breakthroughs in science and the challenge of important paradigms of humanity, including the fact that this is the first time in history where human inventions and life styles can even extinguish all life on the planet.

In relation to diversity, post-modernity tends to be more colorful, heterogeneous, ecological and multi-religious than modernity. And in relation to looking into the future, the construction of things like a global civilization seem to form part of the feasible horizon to man.

Throughout human history, two things have characterized what is new: a process of simultaneous unity and conflict with what already exists, and the fact that the new state of being is not necessarily better than its predecessor. Post modernity is united with modernity in the sense that it requires the preservation of the critical spirit of the Enlightenment. However, the two eras are separated in the criticism of what can be called the “superstitions of modernity”, namely that future solutions lie only in the application of ever growing doses of science and technology, and in the repression of religious instinct and of religion in general.

There is no guarantee that this new era we are calling post-modernity will be better than the previous one. The future that opens before us can be one of a “clash of civilizations” or a time where future generations will acknowledge as an era of global splendor. The fact of the matter is that we have already left the modern “comfort zone” a long time ago. We are on a trip into the unknown and depending on how well we are equipped for this journey, we stand a better or worse chance of arriving at a safe harbor.

As with any journey, regardless of how well or how little of it we know, it is important to understand what the destination might be. We have already said that the destination of post-modernity is in the quest for meaning and being. And the reason is simple: modernism was based on progress as a paradigm and the supremacy of man over himself and nature. That is, human intelligence promised to liberate us from political oppression, provide a higher standard of living, and attain “perfection” in every field of life through the application of human mastery over knowledge, science, and technology.

Modernity appeared as a reaction to the backward looking world of the Renaissance. Post modernity in contrast, is a quest for meaning. This quest is not a return to the past and starts with achievements of human consciousness that are worth preserving, like the fight for justice, freedom and equality, and against intellectual and religious obscurantism. This quest is making a special impact on re-signifying paradigms and conquests of modernity. All over the world, thousands of people are modifying their understanding about democracy, technological progress, high standard of living and reason.

This important process of soul-searching in our times is taking place amidst spiritually-mindful people all over the world. For them, the times we live in are not the “end of history.” On the contrary, self complacency with the so-called achievements of modernity in science and communication underscores the importance of social justice, care for the planet and transcendence as pillars of a new world, since this cannot be the end of history so long as there are wars, hunger and injustice.

As the chances for economic and political systems to be radically transformed are high today, spiritually-mindful people will play a very large role in this transformation. The main reason for this is that truly spiritually-mindful people have little to no expectation in the so-called “comfort zones” because they always live to balance between what they know and the expectation of a world that has been promised to them by God. Whatever the culture he or she may have been born into, the seeker of the Truth is sensitive to the emerging probabilities where the human condition can be improved and they opt for them.

In this unconditional commitment for dynamic love lies the freedom of the spiritually-mindful person. This love is not only limited to the act of knowing but also to the act of choosing. He or she knows that unless action is undertaken, the elements that constitute a new world will never come to be. In the ethic to permanently destabilize his or her own self with already acquired ideas about the world, religion and culture, in thought and action, is implied the contribution of spiritually-mindful people to the world that is opening before us today.

A caveat however is that believers do not seem to be united across religions and cultures. Despite progress in communication, increased religious dialogue and an openness to alterity, there is little concerted interfaith action. Yet, this will only change in time if spiritually-mindful people can adequately identify and correct the many biases existing in every belief structure that in the name of God, have kept separation and strife amongst religions.

Human consciousness today is in need of an active and meaningful recognition of religious diversity. For some religions like Islam, such recognition has been established since its foundation, but has not been always followed in some regions and times in history. The same applies for Eastern philosophies and religions that have focused particularly on the discovery of God inside the heart of man. However regarding Christianity, which has only after 1965 recognized that salvation is possible outside of the Church, there is still a lot of progress to be made.

In the new world that is opening before us, it is probable that religions will not live side by side to each other in a juxtaposed manner as they do today. Instead, growing numbers of people will be able to make a clear distinction between the diverse manifestations of the names of God, and the way in which they have been interpreted and communicated. They will be more aware about the things that unite religions than the ones that separate them.

This will ultimately enrich all of them. There is a lot to be learned in the religious sense from the Arab Spring in the Middle East or from the many types of theologies that have evolved out of Vatican II all over the word or from the many teachings of Eastern beliefs. It is time for spiritually-inclined people all over the world to raise their heads and watch what their brothers from other religions are doing, inspired by the spirit of love and mercy. These people should speak to one another as this can only contribute to make the quality of their faith grow stronger.

All religions have prophets and saints that stand as a common heritage of humanity. Today, there are many people in every religion whose devotion, love of God and mankind, and heroism should be known and praised by all. They have a series of qualities important to the present quest into post modernity: they teach us that it is necessary to leave the “comfort zone” advertised by many worldly powers, they set the example in terms of the authenticity of their actions and they inspire us to transform ourselves from the inside as a precondition to make changes on the outside possible and meaningful.

In synthesis, a new world is emerging in a dialectics of many powerful forces: economic, political, military, scientific and social. A new force is required in the process: a divine spiritual guidance. This force that is depended on by millions of spiritually-mindful people is crucial, for they are in a privileged position to stand their ground on the basis of the authenticity of the process. They have not only evolved interested patterns of knowing and deciding, but by the nature of their belief, they seek a disinterested desire to know which is aimed at an unrestrictive objective, which is the finality of mankind as it unfolds into the universe of being.

Juan Fernando Lucio, a former adviser to presidential candidate Sergio Fajardo in Colombia, has advised on peace and reconciliation issues and done extensive research on the foundations of interfaith dialogue. He is currently an independent consultant and does research on the topic of liberation in contemporary religious thought.

Not a day goes by without the media mentioning a fundamentalist attack on modern society. Questions race through your mind: Who are these people? How and why did they come into existence? What are they trying to accomplish? Karen Armstrong, author of The New York Times bestseller A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, has written her latest book in an attempt to answer such questions from a position of empathy, instead of the more common one of crude judgment.

Armstrong diligently analyzes the evolving perception of religion from the 1500s to the 1990s by exploring fundamentalist movements in Judaism (Jewish fundamentalism in Israel), Christianity (American Protestant fundamentalism), and Islam (Muslim fundamentalism in Egypt and Iran).

Opposing the general perception that fundamentalism is inherently conservative and wedded to the past, Armstrong argues that it is essentially modern and highly innovative. She observes that people of the past developed two ways of thinking: mythos and logos. Mythos was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence: meaning. In the context of this book, it is defined as: Mythos (Greek): A mode of knowledge rooted in silence and intuitive insigh which gives meaning to life but which cannot be explained in rational terms. Logos, on the other hand, was the rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought that enabled us to function well in the world. Regarded as complementary ways of arriving at the truth, each had its own special area of competence.

But by the eighteenth century, Europe’s startling success in science and technology caused it to begin considering logos the only means to truth and mythos as false. Armstrong argues that fundamentalism, which interprets the truths of mythos as though they were logoi, is a response to modernity’s resulting attack on religion, a response rooted in the fear that modernity will destroy religion. She cautions, however, that such a reactionary fundamentalism reduces religion to an ideology that admits only one interpretation, thereby negating religion’s inherently life-valuing, positive attitude.

Armstrong builds her argument carefully. Starting from the life and world order of the premodern era, she traces how modernity came about and how people and societies reacted to it. It took the West nearly 300 years to become modern. Once it became established there, it was ruthlessly directed outward to the world at large. Faced with the West’s global hegemony, the peoples of the Middle East had to become modern in a much shorter span of time.

The author points out that modernism wears one face in the West and another one in the Middle East. In the West modernization was characterized by independence and innovation; in Egypt and Iran, however, it was accompanied by dependence and imitation.

Quick fixes for modernization did not work very well. She writes: Frequently, modern society is divided into ˜two nations’: secularists and religious living in the same country cannot speak one another’s language or see things from the same point of view. What seems sacred and positive in one camp appears demonic and deranged in the other. Secularists and religious both feel profoundly threatened by one another Although this separation was deeper in the Middle East, similar divisions have occurred in Jewish and Protestant communities.

Armstrong looks for a solution to this escalating spiral of hostility and recrimination. She writes that fundamentalists must remember religion’s more compassionate and life-valuing aspects, whereas secularists must embrace modern culture’s benevolent, tolerant, and respectful characteristics. Her wealth of comparative religious knowledge has interesting insights to offer both fundamentalists and secularists in this search for a better understanding of the other side.

Abstract: Appadurai’s work offers a very critical and deep analysis of modernity and globalization. He believes that no single theory can describe modernity’s complexity, for he believes that a theory cannot be universalistic, and because societies are much messier than our theories about them. His focus is more on globalization’s cultural dimensions, as opposed to its economic ones. In addition, he looks at globalization in terms of homogenization and heterogenization, for migration and media create both sameness and difference in today’s globalized world. Migrating people and media, particularly television, produce different cultural spheres in different countries. As a result, he looks for irregularities as much as he looks for regularities in the modern or postmodern social world.

Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization

In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Appadurai examines new dimensions of globalization, particularly cultural ones. He argues that few theories describe modernity, and that all of them either declare or desire universal applicability. Looking at modernity and globalization from a historical context, he argues that modernity was very much a product of the Enlightenment. However, he is not convinced that the Enlightenment created modernity and made people wish to become modern (p. 1).

Modernism originated in the late-sixteenth century after the rise of capitalism. However, it is not limited to economic dimensions, for it also contains cultural and political ones. Becoming more visible after the Industrial Revolution, modernism eventually became the dominant culture of the West and then of the world.

The understanding and theorizing associated with modernity is very much a part of Western social science, for it was shaped by such leading Western social scientists as Karl Marx (d. 1883), Auguste Comte (d. 1857), Max Weber (d. 1961), and Emile Durkeim (d. 1917). Appadurai sees Western social science as problematic, for it reinforces the sense of a single moment (which he calls the modern moment) serving as a dramatic and unparalleled break between past and present. Western social science has focused on categorizing and typologizing traditional and modern societies, practices that Appadurai argues distort the meanings of change and the past, and assumes that the Western experience of modernity is universal.

Modernity, however, is irregularly self-conscious and unevenly experienced in different parts of the world. This causes Appadurai to disagree with modernization theory’s identification of societies as modern vs. traditional, urban vs. rural, small family vs. large family, and so on, for he sees irregularities within so-called modern and traditional societies. He claims that modernity is experienced differently over space and throughout time. For instance, such modern metropolitan cities as Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and Cairo experience modernity and tradition simultaneously. The same is true of Germany, the United States, or any other modern state in which both traditional and modern ways of life are practiced at the same time in different parts these countries.

Appadurai thinks that the media and population migration are the most important factors defining today’s global world. He explores their joint effect on the work of the imagination, as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity. Both media and migration create specific irregularities. For example, he analyzes both print and electronic media, while claiming that electronic media, especially television, has been much more influential in terms of modifying cultural spaces and cultural worlds: Electronic media give a new twist to the environment within which the modern and the global often appear as flip sides of the same coin (p. 44). He believes that the electronic media’s ability to transform the sense of distance between viewer and event transforms everyday discourse. It also shapes and reshapes society and the self in all different types of societies and people.

Migration is the second constitutive force. This is not limited to moving or migrating people; rather, he includes within this concept a process of transporting ideas, values, life styles, and everyday lives from the home of origin. As he puts it: When the story of mass-migration is juxtaposed with the rapid flow of mass-mediated images, scripts, and sensations, we have a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities (p. 44).

Migrants create diasporic public spheres that confound theories that depend on the continued salience of the nation“state as key arbiter of important social changes (p. 4). For instance, Turkish guest workers in Germany watch Turkish movies and gather together to celebrate religious and traditional festivals. This is an irregularity in modern German society, as different cultural groups lead everyday lives that have nothing to do the dominant culture of the country in which they live.

When discussing migration, one must realize that the young or new generation are the agents of social challenge and change, not the elderly. The new generation experiences and pushes new ways of life, and is people’s minds migrate along with their bodies and produce change.

Appadurai considers globalization as both cultural homogenization and, at the same time, cultural heterogenization (p. 32). He urges us to think of the new global cultural economy in terms of complexity, overlap, and disorder. Moreover, he is unsure if existing center-periphery models can address such complexity and irregularity. Nor is he convinced that traditional models, such as the pull“push migration model or surpluses and deficits, can explain the global cultural economy.

Therefore, he proposes a new framework for understanding the new global cultural economy’s complexity and messiness. This consists of five dimensions of global cultural flows: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, techno-scapes, financescapes, and ideocapes (p. 33). He uses the suffix -scape to point out the fluid and irregular shapes of landscapes. These deeply perspectival constructs are inflected by nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as religious, political, and economic groupings and movements confronting such groups as neighborhoods and families.

I am not going to discuss each cultural landscape. Suffice it to say, as Appadurai asserts, that these cultural landscapes are the building blocks for imagined worlds. He quotes this from Anderson’s discussion of imagined communities. These worlds are socially and historically constructed by historically situated people and social groups all over the globe.

Appadurai disagrees with the idea that goods and services end in consumption. Calling it an illusion, he urges us to re-situate consumption in time and place. He especially focuses on history, periodicity, process, and how demand is produced and consumption is achieved. How do people make their preferences? How is demand produced?

Although people seemingly make free choices in their everyday lives, their choices are structured through the market. Everything is commodified, from food and medical care to transportation and housing, from education and leisure to body and knowledge. Everything is bought and sold in the capitalist market. Thus, it is important to know that commodities are socially constructed and humanly produced.

Expanding capitalism allowed scholars and philosophers to rework time and space. New philosophies showed social constructions of time and space. We know that they are not natural; rather, they are human constructions.

I conclude with a few words about knowledge“ relations. Appadurai proves that different cultural landscapes exist. It also is important to realize that all cultural landscapes are socially made, and that we produce those landscapes with our everyday practices, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

Landscapes, maps, and cultural spheres are social products, and their construction reflects ongoing power relations. Appadurai deals with this when discussing how Britain measured its Indian colony (e.g., census and maps) to control it. The resulting knowledge served British imperial interests, not those of India. Maps as social texts were not used for social betterment, but as tools of social control.

As a result, Appadurai urges, if we are to understand today’s cultural, economic, and political globalized world, we need to understand it in those time“ space contexts and knowledge“power relations that have shaped both its homogeneous and heterogeneous cultural, economic, and political realities

• References:
• Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.
• Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.