Anthropology and the Possibility of Hope

Abstract

Anthropology and the Possibility of Hope1 Dermot A Lane There is a widespread recognition that anthropology is a factor underlying much of the social, political, economic and religious malaise of modern Ireland. Anthropology is the study of what it means to be a human being, an examination of what is at the core of human identity, an analysis of what promotes human flourishing, an exploration of human nature in the light of the social sciences, history, philosophy and religion. The surest sign of a deep crisis in anthropology is our contemporary inability to talk seriously about death in the public forum. The aim of this article is to construct an anthropology that builds bridges between human beings, that paves the way for a new dialogue between secularists and believers, that facilitates the formation of a coalition of hope among people of secular and theistic convictions. The article will seek to do this in four steps. Part One will show that anthropology is in crisis in a number of different disciplines. Part Two outlines some of the elements that could contribute to a reconstruction of anthropology in the twenty-first century. Part Three shows how a renewed anthropology could build bridges for a new coalition of hope among secularists and believers. Part Four concludes with a brief introduction to the shape of a theology of hope within this coalition. Anthropology – a contested area Anthropology is a thread running through many areas of life: ecology, economics, ethics, education, philosophy and theology. In ecology, Pope Francis and the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Paris both agreed in 2015 with the scientific view that the ecological crisis is caused mostly by human activity and certain expressions of anthropocentrism. Pope Francis is explicit in his criticism of what he calls ‘tyrannical’, ‘distorted’, ‘excessive’ and ‘misguided’ forms of anthropocentrism. Further, he points out that there can be no ecology without an adequate anthropology.2 In economics, Jeffrey Sachs, US economist and UN adviser, gave a key-note Studies • volume 107 • number 426 167 address on ‘Economics for the Common Good’to a conference in the London School of Economics, on 12–13 December 2016 . In his opening remarks he pointed out that ‘Economics went wildly off-track by a profoundly flawed model of human nature and a flawed model of human purpose’.3 In the area of ethics the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, has sought to open a national debate on ‘Ethics for All’. He has suggested that part of the problem has been the rise of ‘extreme individualism, grounded in a hegemonic version of the market without limit’. Further, he argues that the failure to ‘question the concept of individualism and insatiable consumption’ has been a contributing factor to our recent economic crisis.4 In the field of education, there is concern about the increasing influence of technology, metrics and managerialism at all levels of education in Ireland. A new emphasis is placed on production, where outcomes are prescribed in advance of the learning experience. A major difficulty with this approach to education is the presence of an anthropological reductionism which neglects areas such as the holistic development of students, interpersonal skills, collaboration, leadership, empathetic memory and the exercise of the creative imagination. In philosophy, modern and post-modern, anthropology has been, and continues to be deeply debated. Modern philosophy has been marked by a turn to the subject, and this has resulted in the emergence of the sovereign subject of modernity. The separated self was, and is, so strong, so confident and so independent that it became the ground of its own being: self-sufficient, selfdefining , and self-sustaining without reference to any reality outside itself. By way of reaction, post-modern philosophy radically deconstructed the self-sufficient subject of modernity. This programme of deconstruction can be summed up in the words of Michael Foucault: ‘Man is an invention of recent date’and will be ‘erased like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea’.5 For some post-moderns the self is just a rhetorical flourish, a linguistic and cultural construct to facilitate the interaction of differences. Within Catholic feminist theology, there is a storm...