Everything, Everywhere, All at Mass
Our podcast Awkward Asian Theologians dropped its latest episode over the weekend, this time on a very complex subject: complexity itself.
Regular readers might remember some years ago, I put out a post on streamlining and the culture of death. This new episode put out by Daniel Ang and I can be understood as the spiritual follow up to that post (and by extension an old essay I wrote for The Other Journal entitled “The Rhizome of Life”).
In this episode, entitled “Everything, Everywhere, All at Mass”, we explored a cultural offshoot of streamlining, which is the attitude that militantly equates truth with simplicity. Complexity then constitutes the enemy of truth.
More concerning, however, was what I at least noticed concerning this drive towards simplicity working its way into the life of the Church. While I started with a resistence among students to deal with conceptual complexity in their class materials, the episode did go on to discuss how this has seeped into attitudes about Church authority and ecclesial identity, such that something is only seen as authoritative if it is simple. Conversely, anything deemed by that faithful as too complex is thereby deemed to fall outside the bounds of the Church. Even more disconcertingly, we brought up the attitude of equating simplicity with orthodoxy.
The episode went onto explore how this bespeaks not a tendency towards simplicity of faith, but rather a consumer mindset that masquerades as faith.
If I had the chance to re-record, I would probably have refered to how this attitude of an orthodoxy that “goes down easy” bespeaks what Byung-Chul Han identified as a condition of “pure positivity”, which culturally manifested itself as an emphasis on ease and simplicity. Drawing on Hegelian dialectics, Han saw this “synthesis” of ease as a default setting antithetical to a real life of desire. In Augustinian terms, “pure positivity” can be seen as a consumptive indulgence that, far from satisfying desire, winds up whithering it.
“Everything, Everwhere, All at Mass” can be listened to in full on Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Podcasts.
