IN HIS BOOK Liquid Modernity, British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes the first decade of the twenty-first century as a time of unparalleled fluidity. Nothing is permanent. Even the solidity our parents counted on in terms of jobs, relationships, and social structures have all become as ephemeral as lace. Concrete has turned to gelatin, rock into shifting sand.
People are terrified. The great promise of globalization—freedom—not so long ago touted as an unparalleled blessing, has turned to ashes in the mouths of its beneficiaries. Blessed freedom, freedom beyond their wildest dreams, seems to produce nothing but anxiety. Religious terrorism doesn’t help. Leave it to the religions to use their freedom to press irreligious agendas.
The same nation states that have slowly but surely lost their centrality and power with the coming of new technologies and worldwide trading markets sense their chance to become important again. Nations begin to promise security. Freedom from fear, whether economic or military, becomes a mantra. In exchange for just a little of that freedom—that freedom that after all has caused much of the anxiety—we will give you back peace of mind.
It is a world gone mad. The religions and the nation-states, in the past our Rocks of Gibraltar, have turned into the agents of fluidity and anxiety.
IN THE BIBLICAL BOOK of Joshua, the author describes a time of great flux. The children of God are poised to enter the land long promised to them. Their assignment is to take the land by force. The inhabitants of the land are, according to rumor, gigantic, fierce, and ready to fight to defend their turf. Slavery in Egypt was bad. Forty years of wandering in the wilderness caused great suffering. But all-out war?
The Israelites are terrified. The promise of a new land filled with milk and honey not so long ago seemed like a dream come true. Now who can think it is possibly worth the anguish and fear that the prospects facing them will undoubtedly cause? It doesn’t help that they have had a leadership change, that the man who led them for forty plus years is gone and in his place a new, untested leader.
There were no nation-states to give Middle Eastern people of this era security. This was a tribal culture. Each tribe (extended family really) had its god. It was this family god that provided security. The god, through sign and wonder, told the people when to fight and when to flee, when to hunker down and when to move on. Security came from obeying the family god—and trusting that their family god was more powerful than their neighbor’s god.
It was a world gone mad.
TWO WORLDS, SEPARATED by up to 3,500 years and enormous social changes, faced with the same problem. Human anxiety caused by relying overmuch on our own technology, on our war-making ability, on false gods. Interestingly, the two worlds with the same problem have available to them the same, fail-safe solution:
Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go. Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written on it. Then you will be prosperous and successful. Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go. (Joshua 1:7–9)
The inhabitants of both worlds—liquid modernity and biblical tribalism—tend to make two fundamental errors that give free rein to uncontrolled angst.
The first error mistakes the source of freedom. The error is to mistakenly think that freedom comes from not having to obey anyone. Freedom is not the absence of obedience but the result of it. Anxiety, as we have seen, comes from the absence of obedience. True freedom comes after we choose to obey God and God’s law.
The second mistake is to think that we are strong and courageous because we somehow find these two virtues inside ourselves. Unfortunately we don’t—they are not there. Strength and valor come not from inside us but from God. When God speaks to Joshua, he does not tell him to look deep inside himself and somehow release the strong and courageous being that resides there. No, God commands him to be strong and courageous. Obeying this command produces the desired emotions.
What has come in our day and age as existential angst is cured by the 3,500-year-old words recorded in the first chapter of Joshua. Read and obey.
Terry C. Muck