Feature
5 May 2025
A) From Mimesis of Sacred Order to Autonomous Human Poiesis
Since antiquity, society has acknowledged that there exists a natural order of law and morals. Life is best lived when it is lived in accordance with the embedded order of nature. In ancient Greece, the Stoics taught that man must live in harmony with the rational and purposive order of nature. Ancient Israel also acknowledged that the natural order is implanted into creation by the Creator. Faith in God’s providence means trusting in the reliability of the creation which the benevolent God has ordered to support human life and guide man in his moral choices.
John Calvin declared that the world is a theatre for God’s glory and represents his endowment for men’s welfare: “The whole order of this world is arranged and established for the purpose of conducing to the comfort and happiness of man” (Commentary Psalm 8:6). Gerhard von Rad explains,
This order [of creation] was, indeed, simply there and could, in the last resort, speak for itself. The fact that it quietly but reliably worked towards a balance in the ceaselessly changing state of human relationships ensured that it was experienced over and over again as a beneficent force. In it, however, Yahweh himself was at work in so far as he defended goodness and resisted evil. It was he who was present as an ordering and upholding will in so far as he gave a beneficent stability to life and kept it open to receive his blessings. (Wisdom in Israel, pp. 191-192)
The idea of creation order and natural law was widely upheld in the pre-technological world because the natural world was perceived to be a stable and unchanging order, in contrast to the frailty of human life and the ever-changing vicissitudes of human society. Furthermore, if God has established the orders of the world for the benefit of man, then a fulfilling and flourishing life results when one lives in harmony or in conformity with the orders. Carl Trueman describes such an outlook as “mimesis”: “A mimetic view regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it.”
The mimetic view of the world made sense in medieval agrarian society. Farmers were not in control of the environment or the weather. Hence, the best way to achieve a good harvest was to ensure their farming activities were aligned with the environment and changing seasons. However, with the advance of science and technology resulting in benefits such as fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation water supplied by massive dams, farmers today understandably think they have the power to manipulate nature to serve their own purposes.
As a result, the modern imaginary now is one of “poiesis”, which sees the world as raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual. Modern man no longer seeks to live a good and godly life based on conformity to God’s normative order embedded in creation. Instead, he sees himself as an agent of technological innovations who can master and exploit the world around him. This new vision of autonomous human agency actively shaping the world has become the basis for the pursuit of a good life.
B) Liquid Modernity and Therapeutic Sexual Identity
Social cohesion depends on a variety of supportive social networks which give individuals a sense of belonging as they navigate increasingly complex and changing social landscapes. These networks include social clubs, religious and civic organizations and community centres, which bring together people of different races, religions and social classes with the goal of fostering a more harmonious society. These social institutions serve as traditions or repositories of moral and spiritual resources which shape the identities of individuals and guide their moral decisions and life choices.
However, these institutions and traditional networks of social relations which define personal and social identity have been shaken by the powerful global forces of modernity. For example, the occupations of most people in pre-technological society remained much the same for most of their lives. The lack of social mobility meant that people were conveniently identified with the occupational services which they provided within the confines of local communities. Thus, one could be known as the blacksmith of Bethany, the tailor in Tyre, or the carpenter of Capernaum.
Today, however, modern mass education has created new opportunities for people to change their occupations during the span of their career life. Modern workers find it easy to travel elsewhere, away from their hometowns to gain new employment. The ease of travel to multiple locations and communities makes it inevitable that modern workers frequently switch their identities, depending on their ever-changing social location.
The conditions of modernity have rendered personal identity fluid, with the ever-changing flux of social relations and work life in urban society. Peter and Brigitte Berger in their book, The Homeless Mind, have demonstrated how the componential processes of mass production assembly lines and the anonymous social relations of modern bureaucracy have resulted in the fragmentation of human consciousness and experience of meaninglessness and anomie for the modern worker.
Marshall Berman describes the unsettling consequences of the paradoxes and promises inherent in modern life. He posits that while modernity offers transformative power and new opportunities, it also brings about alienation and upheaval. He gives a graphic and disturbing description of the impact of modernity on North Atlantic societies:
To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are… modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity; it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, “all that is solid melts into air.” (All that is Solid Melts into Air, p.15.)
Not surprisingly, a sense of anomie and collective futility has become pervasive in modern society. The individual tossed about by the maelstrom of overwhelming change is driven to look within in a desperate attempt to get a grip of his floundering self. The unintended consequence of modernity is an obsessive focus on one’s inner self. However, the self that is isolated from supportive social relations will become an empty and undefined “self”. This has resulted in the widespread perception of the modern mindset that there is nothing permanent or substantial within oneself to ground one’s personal identity. This in turn leads to the idea that one may carve out one’s surface identity by adopting bohemian lifestyles and aesthetic pursuits, or remodelling one’s outward appearance with features such as distinctive tattoos.
But surface appearances are by nature too transient and superficial to anchor one’s identity. Hence, the attraction of the LGBT ideology which seeks to ground personal identity on sexual drive, which is arguably the most powerful psychological drive experienced by human beings. But biological sex—which is based on sexual organs and chromosomes—comes across as too restrictive for the modern poietic imaginary. As such, LGBT activists propose that sexual identity is better determined by one’s “gender”, which is defined by one’s subjective sense of being male or female and augmented by appropriate cultural practices. It should be noted, however, that if one’s sexual identity is a social construct, it may be deconstructed and reconstructed at whim by the “therapeutic self” in its quest for personal fulfilment.
Nevertheless, critics have expressed concerns that the idea of gender being fluid—and therefore may be constructed according to one’s impulse—is inimical to the well-being of society. Specifically, it pits the autonomous, self-defined individual against time-tested tradition and authority; it discards shared religious commitments and communal ties in the quest for individual fulfilment; it is hostile towards the traditional, heterosexual family institution.
In particular, the LGBT ideology, which disconnects bodily-determined sexuality from gender, rejects the self-evident truth that human nature is biologically designed as sexually dimorphic for the purpose of sexual reproduction. This would effectively dismantle the heterosexual family which is historically the fundamental institution which perpetuates society by producing children and providing a holistic environment for the nurture of children, who need the combined psychological support of both the “father” and “mother” figures.
To conclude, the pervasive experience of anomie and dissipation of personal identity caused by liquid modernity has engendered a therapeutic culture which seeks to appropriate all social symbols and institutions in the ongoing task of reconstructing the self and its sexual identity. Philip Rieff’s observation remains pertinent: “By this conviction a new and dynamic acceptance of disorder, in love with life and destructive of it, has been loosed upon the world.” The therapeutic of the unencumbered self represents “a calm and profoundly reasonable revolt of the private man against all doctrinal traditions urging the salvation of self through identification with the purposes of community.” (Triumph of the Therapeutic, pp. 5, 242-243)
Dr Ng Kam Weng is Research Director of Kairos Research Centre in Kuala Lumpur. Previously, he had been a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies and a member of the Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton University. From 1989 to 1992 he taught at the Malaysia Bible Seminary Graduate School. He has a PhD from Cambridge University.</em