This quote made me think about the autonomous self.
The primacy of the autonomous self is a cornerstone of Modernism. Rejection of meta-narratives and relativisation of absolute truths may show that the autonomous self is also a major element of evolving Post-modernism.
All of the principal inputs received by young people today emphasize the autonomy of the self. The self is presented as something which is divorced from community and from history.
Those inputs also have made individual ambition an essential part of the autonomous self. Ambition is taught as something for the self - it is not presented as something which can be shared. (BTW, it's not just our Western European society. Witness the individual ambitions being generated in the emerging middle classes of Asia, Eastern Europe, South America and even Africa.)
The autonomous self is a fundamental driver of economic rationalism and thus globalisation, because that's what economic rationalism is about - a society of ambitious human individuals competing with each other, a society in which there have to be winners and losers (basically because competitive ambition is the driver, the pie is not big enough to satisfy all individual ambition, and in any case some will always want a bigger slice of the pie). Any notion of winners helping losers is alien to the model - ambitious competitors in a race don't help each other.
It seems to me that parts of the Christian Church have bought into the paradigm of the autonomous self as well, with their emphasis on personal salvation and with their promises of personal health and wealth through faith. Does that view of the Gospel mean that some must be saved and some must achieve health and wealth, at the expense of others - an economic rationalist model superimposed (very uncomfortably, I would think) over the Gospel?
More to the point, how can what's left of the church present the Gospel honestly to a society in which at least 3 generations have been immersed in this culture of the autonomous self? Does the church first have to roll back the idea that the autonomous self is paramount? How?
Are the claims of primacy for the autonomous self part of the cruel joke?
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