Homeland Mythology: Biblical Narratives in American Culture

7. Secular Modernism, Biblical Style

As I noted in my preface, the concept of master narrative was introduced by Jean-François Lyotard in  with The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. His two modernist master narratives, or “metanarratives,” were scientific objectivity (the “speculative narrative”) and social progress (the “emancipative narrative”). These were the founding principles, he said, of a cultural consensus that began to take shape in the seventeenth century and defined itself fully in the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “Modernist master narrative” is a paradoxical phrase, because modernism was ideologically opposed to narrative explanations of either human or nonhuman phenomena, preferring instead to induce “natural laws” from verifiable and quantifiable data. Modernist principles of objective inquiry and human rights were themes that did, however, find expression in countless narratives read in books and journals, heard in popular oratory, and spread through such casual phrases as “It’s only natural,” “You can’t stand in the way of progress,” and “Everyone has a right to his own opinion.” These principles —upon which actual narratives were constructed—were the tacit conclusions that hearers and readers felt that they themselves were deriving from these stories. If, as Voltaire said, “men use thought only to justify their misdeeds , and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts,” then narrative is speech raised to an even higher level of deception, one at which speakers conceal the concealment of their thoughts by making them seem the thoughts of their audience. By referring so broadly to “modernism,” Lyotard evidently alluded to the old historical division between Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern 7  ,   190   Era. Modernity therefore represented the repudiation not only of superstition and feudalism but also of those ethnic myths that seemed the legacy of that benighted past. He strove to reveal how bourgeois elites had encouraged science in order to enrich themselves on modern technology and had freed the rural poor in order to employ them in their urban factories. All this they had accomplished by using the demystifying narratives of modernism to re-mystify their control over the masses. As the preceding six chapters would suggest, I find that applying Lyotard’s model to American cultural history is problematic. I have instead proposed that the American master narratives, being biblical at base, are not modern at all but rather late medieval. If we characterize medieval culture as oral, narrative, land-rooted, and governed by a system of inheritable privilege, and modern culture as literate, analytic, cosmopolitan, and governed by an ideal of universal reason, we will recognize in America the significant continuance of that earlier culture. The postmodernist project that Lyotard defined as an incredulity toward modernist metanarratives makes more sense in a culture that has uncritically absorbed Enlightenment principles—in “Old Europe,” as former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once called it. But for most of the rest of the world, including eastern Europe, Asia, Muslim nations, and America, there is far more need for a modernist critique of premodern medievalism than for a postmodernist critique of a modernism that has as yet only shallowly taken root. That the three-centuries-old conflict between biblical religion and Enlightenment science is by now a cultural cliché should not blind us to its historical and ongoing consequences. Most Americans, for example, accept the notion that the earth is billions of years old and that all life forms have evolved over time, yet most of them also believe that the same person who appears as the central character of the Bible created the earth and the entire universe for one purpose—to house the tiny family of man, or some even tinier group that calls itself a chosen people. And most Americans, it is also safe to say, do not look forward in Wigglesworthian glee to the incineration of the planet. Yet, according to polls, most profess to believe in the biblically described return of Jesus. Cognitive dissonances of truly cosmic proportions , it would seem, beset the collective American psyche. I proposed earlier that narrative is the “talking cure” we humans have always resorted to when troubled by our contradictory beliefs. Whenever narrative is used to solve a societal problem, Lyotard maintains, it is customary for “such a question to solicit the name of a hero as its response: Who has the right to decide for society? Who is the subject whose prescriptions [52.15.63.145] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 12:31...