Market economy plays with a certain art of enchantment of the present. This is the mark of decadence and herd conformity, a total surrender to the values and mode of life of the contemporary era. “No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same; whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse” wrote Nietzsche. This figure anticipates Weber’s conception of the Iron Cage and Marcuse’s notion of “one-dimensional man” and slave morality can thus be read as a critique of modernity, which has produced a condition of levelling and homogeneity what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty. “Democratic institutions are quarantine arrangements to combat that ancient pestilence, lust for tyranny: as such they are very useful and very boring.” There is dual attitude toward democracy: on one hand, it is useful as a counterforce to tyranny, but it is boring and promotes mediocrity. Jurgen Moltmann spoke of “utopias of the status quo” which is a “religious sanctioning of the present.” Some push hope into the future as they dream of escaping this world, others support the idea of a future hope so as to preserve the status quo of the present. The injustice, oppression, and suffering that currently plague the world are accepted as givens that will one day be overcome, but for now cannot be challenged.
Those who “enrich themselves at others’ expense” would often rather extend their present into the future than have future hope transform the reality of their privileged present. Hope is not simply an “opium of the beyond” that placates Christians as they set their eyes solely on escaping this world or the future realization of promised reconciliation. Instead the anticipation of the future advent of Jesus is possible because Christ has already broken into this world. Through community in Christ, believers therefore can affirm that hope is not something merely for the epilogue of the faith, but is at work “revolutionizing and transforming the present.” Moltmann’s theology there should never be a “religious sanctioning of the present, but a break-away from the present towards the future.” Nevertheless, as shown, the dangerous stances of hope as an “opium from beyond” or as affirmation of a “utopia of the status quo” to which he offered his theology of hope as an alternative continue to subvert the lived realization of this very hope. Instead of transforming the present, hope continues to be co-opted by those who insist that it must only inhabit the “already” or the “not yet.”
The individual in modern capitalist society is, as Max Weber sees it, “chained” to the bureaucratic apparatus, transformed into little more than “a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march.” It has become simply the immovable fatality. As bleak as man’s destiny appears to be under the material conditions of modem capitalism, on another, perhaps more profound level, Weber also spoke of the “iron cage” relative to humankind’s cultural or spiritual fate. Once capitalism invades the whole of life, then struggle involves the whole of life. The media teaches “ to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate… Herbert Marcuse wrote: “The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.” Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical function in a society.
Kierkegaard in the nineteenth century and Heidegger in the twentieth insisted that theology ought to relinquish its desire for conceptual tranquillity and revert to following the actual experience of life. Heidegger saw Christianity not as a body of contents but as a performance. Christian faith derives its significance not from its contents but from an experience of life, theology, as understanding of faith. For Ricoeur drawing on Kierkegarard, “hope makes of freedom the passion for the possible against the sad meditation on the irrevocable.”
The comedy of God’s saving the most unlikely people when they least expect it, the joke in which God laughs with man and man with God […] this is what King Lear glimpses at the end of his tragic life when the world has done its worst, he says to the daughter he loves, “Come, let’s away to prison We two alone… So we’ll live And pray, and sing, and tell old tales and laugh…”
