M. A NEW AND BETTER WORD -- 'LIQUIDITY'

There is a report that Daniel Boone was once asked if he'd ever gotten lost. "Lost?" he said. "No. never. I was once mighty confused for about three weeks, but never lost." If we are not lost in this fast-changing world at least we are confused In discussing relativity I said that it's the word "absolute" that is being called into question. Everything is so "on the move" that there seem to be no fixed points, no objective standards.

So a word that's come into increasing use to describe this increasing ephemeral quality of life is "LIQUIDITY." It is a metaphor for the world around us. Sociologist Sigmund Baumann speaks of "liquid modernity" by which he contrasts the present with the "old days" which were more solid. In those days people built cathedrals and value was placed on things that were permanent, established. But that's true no more. (We can't even guarantee the permanence of the World Trade Center towers!) "Liquidity," Baumann says, "is the great post-modern virtue."

It used to be in your great-grandparents' day that students went to college to train for a job which they kept most of their lives, changing home base maybe two or three times in a lifetime. But the average American today can expect to change jobs and place of work at least eleven times in a lifetime. Your own college degree may have very little to do with the job you end up doing. In most fields every achievement is temporary. Even marriage and family lives are less secure. In this world you can stand still and the internet enables you to be mobile. So Baumann says your choice is to be either a tourist or a vagabond. Hence the denial of absolutes.

Not only personally, but we are having to change some of our perceptions globally and beyond. We are having to accept some new ideas about our relationship with the rest of the world. We are having to question some previously held notions about the eternity of what we have called "natural laws." We are having to rethink our understanding of the nature of nature, all of which is to say some "traditions" and traditional ways of thinking no longer stand the tests of Truth. The necessity of these new ways of thinking requires a radical break with tradition and that comes hard because the power of tradition is strong.

No doubt the word "liquid" is a useful one to describe our transient society, but I do not believe that the liquid state of our existence requires us to abandon all notions of fixed points. There is still the North Star and Greenwich Mean time on which we depend and quite possibly some other "stars" from which we can measure behaviors. That, of course, will take some serious arguing and we'll get to that many pages later.

Meanwhile I think we are called to be faithful to what we know, but open to what we don't and what we don't yet know is vaster by far than what we do know. As someone wiser than I said, "We are not what we know. We are what we are willing to learn."



            NEXT TIME:  
N.  THE ETERNAL TRIANGLE:  A CONTEXT FOR OUR LIFELIFTING EXPLORATION

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