Though couched in the rhetoric of liberation, late modern capitalism has enslaved us in the most primal and comprehensive way imaginable: through deconstructing the sense of self. And the most potent method late modern capitalism has achieved this deconstruction is through eradicating our connections with others, chiefly through the erosion of hierarchy. Consider how our techno-economic systems have made possible what our structures of democracy made plausible and what Enlightenment liberalism made desirable, namely, a world liberated from hierarchical bonds. This includes hierarchies rooted in the state (aristocracy, kingship, inherited rank), the church (sacerdotalism, sacral hierarchy), and especially metaphysics (order of being, cosmic vertical stratification).
But exchanging this rich tapestry of connections for a flattened, reductionist world has proved a fool’s bargain. For rather than liberating the self, this exchange has engineered the ultimate negation of selfhood.
Consider that what we know about the social construction of the self—that a stable identity is contingent on the myriad connections around us from the very day we enter the world—is also true metaphysically. We know ourselves only in the context of a great chain of being, stretching from heavenly beings down to the smallest molecule. And as the classical Christian philosophical tradition has reminded us, the whole chain is sustained and held together by God, the ground and source of all being.
When this structure is denied, and more especially when we attempt to live as if this cosmic-metaphysical stratification does not exist, far from elevating the self, we deconstruct it, isolating the human person from any larger context of meaning. Then we forget who we are not only in relation to the cosmic hierarchy, but even in relation to our fellow humans.
Consider how this plays out in the issue of authority. In the ancient tradition, hierarchy is baked into the very fabric of reality itself. Reality is patterned vertically, with higher and lower places in the great chain of being, from the celestial hierarchy at the top to the church, family, kingdom, and living things. Traditionally, these structures have been understood as not merely arbitrary but reflective of patterns at the heart of reality. As such, they offer grounding for meaningful authority. It isn’t the case that a father has authority over a child merely because he is bigger and smarter, but because fatherhood is part of reality on a primal level. Moreover, as Hans Boersma has reminded us in his work on Dionysius the Areopagite, hierarchy is not inherently oppressive but works to raise up—to hierarchize—those on the lower levels. Plants are elevated through mankind’s loving stewardship, humans are elevated through angels, and all things in the chain of being are linked to God, who sustains the entire cosmic hierarchy while remaining outside it.
Once this ontological hierarchy is rejected, however, it isn’t that authority goes away. Rather, we have to find other ways of grounding the inevitable authority structures that exist in our world. If hierarchical patterns are not ontological, then they become socially constructed and thus ultimately arbitrary. Which is to say, when authority is no longer rooted in the nature of things, its legitimacy ultimately rests on mere power. Once power becomes the fundamental category for interpreting social relations, we have the situation before us today, whereby almost every relationship is being systematically reimagined in terms of oppressor and oppressed, victim and perpetrator, powerful and powerless, dominant and subordinate. This is the irony of our situation: a rejection of hierarchy has led to an intense preoccupation with hierarchy understood in terms of power dynamics. This helps explain the strange combination of egalitarianism and authoritarianism, of atomization and tribalism, that has created the precarious equipoise of modern life.
And here’s the rub: having exchanged hierarchy for a purely constructivist understanding of authority, we lose the inbuilt limits of God-given ontology. What remains are authority structures that rely primarily on pragmatic outcomes for their justification, with power as the only method left for securing those outcomes. Then our relationship to others—if not our relationship to our own body—becomes something to merely use and manipulate at will. Lacking ontological grounding, our relationships (both vertical and horizontal) become fungible. Other people become things to be used, manipulated, resisted, or controlled.
There is something deeply isolating about this state of affairs. My story only has meaning in relation to your story, and all our respective stories as humans only have meaning by our situatedness in the great chain of being. But in forgetting who we are in relation to this larger cosmic-drama, we forget who we are period. Perhaps this is why Spider-Man: Brand New Day hits a chord.
In the Spider-Man canon, Peter’s relationships with MJ, Ned, Aunt May, and others are not merely pleasant additions to an otherwise complete individual; rather, they are part of what makes him who he is. His identity is fundamentally relational. But in the latest movie, Peter must live with the consequences of a choice he made at the end of No Way Home. To protect the people he loves, he consented to Doctor Strange’s spell of erasing Peter from everyone’s memory. But four years later, Peter discovers that the sacrifice has left him profoundly disoriented. Even with proximity to Ned and M.J., he has no community with them. Rather than seeking help from friends, he receives therapy from an AI. As an atomized individual, Peter isn’t merely lonely; in a real existential sense, he no longer knows who he is. He hasn’t merely lost his relationships. He has lost the shared memory through which those relationships existed. Community requires more than proximity; it requires a common world: shared memory, shared practices, shared stories, shared obligations, shared goods and goals.
Memories of relationships don’t have to be literally taken away for us to relate to Peter’s situation. In a sense, we have all become like Peter, having lost the sense of who we are in relation to others. Living in the world of late modern capitalism, the individual remains, but the web of relations through which the individual has meaning, and the metaphysical structures in which those relations are grounded, has been stripped away. For some thinkers, the severance of community bonds is the very pith of liberty (see my comments about George Will in my earlier article on “The Politics of Community.”) But in reconstituting our relationships as fungible and decontextualized from their larger metaphysical grounding, the self remains stranded without a clear identity.
Ironically, social atomization exists in a strange symbiosis with dependence on others as tools to be used and manipulated toward the end of self-actualization. If we can relate to Peter’s dilemma, we can also relate to his nemesis, Jean Grey, who approaches others as things to be used and manipulated. Through telepathic mind-jumping/body possession, she can control other people for her own purposes, so every person becomes a potential tool. Peter cannot commune with others because the minds of his friends have lost shared memory; Jean cannot commune with others because their minds have been instrumentalized for her own agenda. Peter’s proximity to Ned and M.J. is characterized by alienation, as seen by the fact that he can say hi but they have no idea who he is. Jean’s proximity to others (specifically, within 33 feet) is characterized by her ability to operationalize them. Both Peter and Jean experience proximity without community.
Whether the film was making a statement about modernity, the implications are obvious. I recently gave a keynote for the Parish Life Conference where I discussed how the modern world has produced people who live alongside one another without necessarily inhabiting the same world. This seems to be the existential dilemma explored in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. And the solution offered is a remarkably Christian one: Jean’s violence is broken when she vicariously re-experiences Aunt May’s love for Peter, and when Peter offers her friendship. And Peter’s epiphany comes when he says, “I’m not going to do this alone anymore.”
Loving dependence on others is the answer to the twin evils of alienation from persons and the instrumentalization of them. But for communities of loving dependence to exist, we need more than merely proximity with others: we need a common world, shared memory, shared practices, shared stories, shared obligations, shared goods and goals. And that is what the Church provides in the communities that form around the Blessed Sacrament. In Holy Communion, Christians are incorporated into a body that is both vertical and horizontal: we are connected horizontally because of our shared vertical connection with Christ and the heavenly beings. We enter and become part of a story we did not invent, occupying relationships that are stable precisely because they have not simply been negotiated according to preference. We discover who we are, not by freeing ourselves of our communal bonds, by being incorporated into a communion that precedes us and exceeds us. This communion, held together by the Eucharist, initiates us into a common world of shared memory, shared practices, shared stories, shared obligations, shared goods, and goals.
Those of us who feel we have lost our place in the world can rediscover it only in the connection we have with others through our Lord, who descends to us in the bread and wine. In Holy Communion, the priest does not eliminate hierarchy in order to produce equality; rather, he receives authority and orders it toward Communion, while each of us, after receiving the Blessed Sacrament, orders our lives toward community. The communities that form around the Eucharistic challenge both atomized individualism and the type of authority over others that would render their relation to the self a merely instrumental one. And through these communities, we not only recover our relationship with God that was severed at the fall, but we also recover our connection with others, and thus a true sense of self.
Further Reading