Social Imaginary: Conversations Across the Divide

I have just returned from three weeks in California, mostly in my hometown of Santa Barbara. Among the good conversations with friends old and new was one that reminded me of the challenge of bridging the gap with people who live in widely divergent understandings of life.

Jonathan is an eclectic thinker—a little Buddhism, a little universalism, a few remnants from a Catholic upbringing—who emphasizes ethics and trying to live by a few core values, but who has no interest in knowing God (“I don’t feel the need”). I am a Christian humanist who also believes in ethics but thinks them a by-product of a relationship with God, not the main point of life (which I believe IS knowing God).

What struck me, as is so often the case in the these kind of conversations, is that despite good will on both our parts, we each had a difficult time making the other even understand what we were saying (trying to get beyond cliches), much less alter in any way the other person’s master story. He couldn’t get me to see the attractiveness of Buddhism’s loss of self (even if it could lessen pain) and I couldn’t get him interested in the idea that God was knowable and wanted a relationship with him.

It brought home to me some reading I was also doing in Santa Barbara. I am curretnly slogging my way through Charles Taylor’s (no relation, alas) 800+ page tome, A Secular Age, which tries to explain the rise of secularism in the West, beginning with the Middle Ages and before. He speaks of the varying “social imaginaries” that characterize different cultures and ages—the entire complex of dominant symbols, metaphors, patterns of thought, vocabulary and so on that underlie the way a culture thinks, acts, and organizes itself. He argues against the idea that the current dominant social imaginary is necessarily better than past ones, the natural and inexorable flow of progress toward greater and greater enlightenment. And he also argues that people living within their social imaginary often have a difficult time even conceiving that it is anything other than “how things are and ought to be” (my words, not his).

I felt the difficulty of making myself understood to Jonathan even though we probably share large parts of the same social imaginary. At key points we simply lacked a shared vocabulary—not just of words, but of sensibility and values and imagination. We could use the same words but clearly filled them with different content.

I was reminded of an observation from another writer (whose name escapes me at the moment): “I know exactly what I believe until I have to explain it to you.” And another who said, “My faith doesn’t make good controversy” (or words to that effect).

It also reminds me that if anything I write or say is going to ever bring someone into a closer relationship with God, it is going to be because God is present doing the work in that person’s life, not because of any skill I have as an explainer of spiritual things. Thanks, Jonathan, for that reminder—and for a good conversation.