Liquid Modernity is the name that Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman gave to the vision of today’s highly globalized, technologized and interconnected world of our global societies. He writes that we as individuals in today’s world have to constantly be making choices, defining ourselves, forming our identities, adapting to the ever constantly changing (liquid) aspect of our societies. It’s an exhausting existence that drives us towards anxiety, depression, fear, and exhaustion.
The implication of this philosophical worldview is that we are constantly adapting to the world around us. If we call ourselves Christians that we are forced to incessantly redefine that in terms of what is happening in the world, the new products being sold and marketed by our economies and the continually reformulating societal norms, values and highlights (which are most often formulated by the economies which see as as purchaser of objects, rather than subjects in life). All this movement, re-movement and new movement leads to ambivalence and exhaustion. Jesus speaks to this exhaustion of finding meaning that we experience today (wether or not, or how much we are aware of that effort) in our liquid modernity.
“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
-Jesus of Nazareth (John 13:35)
He says this after washing his disciples’ feet, doing the work of a slave, undermining and revolutionizing the ways in which his students were to see the world, each other and God. He then goes deeper modeling that radicalizing love in his reaction to the disciple, Judas, who would betray him to force Jesus to be the Jesus Judas wanted to see.
We are social creatures. The african notion of ubuntu points to the paradox and truth of which Jesus spoke so long ago. Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee defined ubuntu as : “I am what I am because of who we all are.” Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes that “a person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, based from a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.”
And so the only way for us to affirm the value of life is to affirm that of the lives of others, to make ourselves available for community, to make space for the other in all that we are, do and say. Today take a few moments to tell someone with whom you have a relationship – deep or small – that you care about them, appreciate them, or need them. Do it in a phone call, a card, an email, or even over coffee.