By J. Michael Parker
For Today’s Catholic

Megatrends affecting today’s culture will require many new relationships, said the Oblate School of Theology’s Father Ron Rolheiser.

More than 100 people heard Father Rolheiser speak recently during the school’s annual three-day Summer Institute at the Oblate Renewal Center. He discussed how external megatrends are affecting people’s inner consciousness, especially in secularized parts of the world.

Global awareness, he said, brings the whole world together in unexpected ways.
“Everyone is everyone’s neighbor. We know where our coffee comes from. You watch the evening news and you know what’s happening around the world, “the Oblate priest said.

When Jesus met the Samaritan woman on the border of Samaria, the priest said, the border wasn’t merely a geographical fact. Jesus stood on the edge of a different ethnicity and a different religion from his own, and he was speaking to a person of a different gender.

“If Sept. 11 didn’t wake us up to this, we’ll never get it. Our most important agenda for the next 50 years is our dialogue with Islam. We face the whole issue of how different races, religions and genders interrelate,” Father Rolheiser said.

Social justice issues have become more important in the past 50 years as conditions in different parts of the world have become more widely known.

“When Father Pedro Arrupe was superior general of the Jesuits, someone asked him why the Jesuits were talking so much about social justice when many of the church’s most famous saints had never mentioned it. He said, ‘Because we know a lot more now.’”

This increased global awareness, he said, also brings negative reactions — fear, insecurity and growing fundamentalism.
“This is happening all over the world and in every religion — in Roman Catholicism, in Islam, in Buddhism and so on. People fear losing their identity, and security begins to trump wider concerns.”
Pop culture and the global spread of technology also influence people’s attitudes in what Father Rolheiser calls “the imperialism of Microsoft and Starbucks” — a new label based on author Philip Rieff’s so-called “imperialism of Coca-Cola and Hollywood.”

“Rieff, in his 1967 book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, said, ‘The imperialism of Coca-Cola and Hollywood will succeed where no army can succeed,’ because, in the words of Karl Marx, the poor want what the rich have,” the priest said.

When the Berlin Wall was broken down in 1989, he said, “East Germans weren’t singing songs and waving flags of liberty. They were looking in the shop windows.”

Father Rolheiser described a 1999 conference he attended in Johannesburg, South Africa, in which he noticed sharp division between middle-aged and young  people.

The middle-aged, including a bishop, were denouncing globalization, saying it was destroying the country’s culture, he said. The young were applauding it for leveling the playing field between the rich and the poor.
“A young man asked, ‘What is my culture?’ adding: ‘I’m a Zulu, but I speak English, I wear Western jeans, I have access to the world through the Internet and I have an iPod so I can listen to music from around the world,’” Father Rolheiser said.

When the man asked the bishop where this ideal culture is that he wanted to preserve, the bishop described his own mother, who lived in a tribal village with no electricity, never having seen a computer and speaking only the tribal language.
But the young man countered by reminding the prelate, “you have doctoral degrees from two Western universities.”
Then he added, “What you don’t like [about globalization] is that it’s giving us all equal access to power.”
That same access to communications technology, Father Rolheiser said, is causing what he called “sociosis.” He said that cell phones, the Internet and e-mail have made us the most efficient community ever, but they’ve also increased our life pace 1,000 times over.

“When’s the last time you went on a vacation and didn’t take your cell phone or check your e-mail every hour or two? At a certain point, we’re going to be so accessible to everybody that we’re going to be accessible to nobody,” the priest said.

He illustrated the point with a story about a satirical picture of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting “The Last Supper,” in which one of the apostles is seen talking on a cell phone while Jesus blesses the bread. The others all have cell phones beside their chalices.
“Global consciousness is driven by pop culture. Until the last generation, we all lived in patriarchal cultures that were authoritarian. You had to respect your parents, your teachers and your ministers, and you had to measure up to all sorts of standards,” Father Rolheiser said.

“Today, we no longer have parents, grandparents and elders. Parents want to be their children’s best friends. They want to be siblings, not elders.”

He said the media are overstimulating people’s egos in the wrong ways by glorifying celebrities, leaving many people with a painful restlessness and the false sense that “everyone has an interesting life except me.” 
Meanwhile, many people experience an inner battle among the forces of modernism, pre-modernism and postmodernism.             

Modernism, he said, is the 16th-century philosopher Rene Descartes’ notion that reason must be the final arbiter of all things in both our private and common lives. Premodernism is the idea that divine authority is the final arbiter. Postmodernism has an equal distrust of both divine authority and reason.

Descartes’ ideas helped give rise to the American and French revolutions, democracy and the U.S. Constitution, Father Rolheiser said. It also provides the basis for dispute between al-Quaida and today’s Western culture. 
“Beatniks were the original postmodernists. They were well educated authors who dropped out and didn’t trust the churches, the government, the media or anybody and weren’t too sure what anything meant.”

There’s not much serious postmodernism around today, he said, although some commentators claim to be postmodern. 

“They point to their use of the Internet as an example, but just as Garrison Keillor said porridge is ‘Calvinism in a box,’ the Internet is modernism in a box,” Father Rolheiser said. 

Postmodernism is most visible in comedy, such as in Jay Leno’s and David Letterman’s jokes, which makes everybody and everything fodder for satire — the pope, the government, both conservative and liberal presidents and candidates, celebrities and public people of every stripe.

But he said it’s common for people today to be influenced by all these concepts in different parts of their lives.
Meanwhile, culture is being dumbed down in many ways.

Father Rolheiser recalled seeing a young man in an airport sitting on the floor in a waiting area using a laptop while listening to an iPod in one ear and a cell phone in the other.

“He seemed to be managing pretty well,” the priest said. “But in many ways, multi-tasking can mean, ‘I can be inattentive to several things at once,’ or ‘I can be impolite to several people at once.’

“How can we be contemplative with any depth when we’re all over the place but not really deep? Depth, where you find it, is ever, ever more shallow. The only thing we’re really deep in is our shallowness.”  
 
Sex, Father Rolheiser said, has been split from the sacred, from marriage and from permanent commitment. Fear of God’s wrath and of hell no longer scares many people.

The near-deification of celebrities is another sign.
“When I was a kid, we read about the lives of the saints. But contemporary ‘saints’ are athletes and celebrities,” the priest said.
Today’s youth are driven by celebrity, and there’s a “cult of the body” in which the heroes have to look much younger than they are.
Some people are like Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, the priest said. “They never want to grow up. They don’t want to be mothers and fathers.”

He said they also don’t have hope — a confidence that things will turn out well in the end. In times past, Father Rolheiser said, “most people had a larger vision, a hope that was based on God’s promise. They had fear of God’s wrath.

Sex was viewed in the context of marriage and permanent commitment. Now it’s been divorced from that and is seen as an extension of dating or a form of recreation. Hell no longer scares people.”

At the same time, he said, there is a widespread sense of helplessness and insecurity which was forcefully brought home to Americans on Sept. 11, 2001.
“We’re vulnerably like everyone else.”
It’s a new experience for Americans to encounter a world that doesn’t completely revolve around a European culture, he said.
“This one culture has dominated the planet since Christopher Columbus, but now it’s over. How readily are we going to accept that the world no longer revolves around us?”

J. Michael Parker, religion writer for the San Antonio Express-News for 23 years, is director of communications for Oblate School of Theology and a freelance writer. Contact him at mparker@ost.edu.