4.CONCERNING THE OLD THAT REFUSES TO DISAPPEAR: THE TRADITIONAL SOURCES OF MEANING IN MODERN SOCIETY

4.1 THE MAP OF RELIGIOUS MOBILISATION

The map of religious mobilisation has become more complex. It is true that the progressive institutionalisation of traditional religiousness has resulted in a rapid demobilisation in many countries. In numerous places a gradual distancing can be observed from both religious rituals and from the observance of beliefs, which as a form of secularisation is weakening these forms of collective identity. The origin of this weakening lies in the loss of the monopoly of cosmovision, the situation of pluralism found in almost all countries and the erosion of the community of believers (of its collective and public dimension). However, we find a strong revitalisation of the great religions (Catholicism in Latin America and Africa, Islam in Africa, Asia and Europe, Protestantism in the USA, Latin America and Asia), the proliferation of all types of cult and sect from the 1960s and 1970s onwards (Robbins, 1992) and the emergence of new religious movements throughout practically the entire planet (Wilson, 1990), as well as their rapid spread due to accelerated social change. As Beckford has indicated, although they do not affect the lives of those who are not members of these new religious movements, they are social and cultural laboratories where experiments are carried out with ideas, sentiments and social relations (Beckford, 1986), which constitute the foundation of individual and collective identities.

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4.2 WORK IS AN AMBIT……

Work is an ambit that became erected into a recurrent source of identity in the course of the last century. It was around work that the central conflict in modern society was articulated, and class identity has been one of the representative forms of social mobilisation of industrial society. However, this form of mobilisation has gradually been institutionalised. As C. Offe has pointed out, “the social, economic and political order adopted at the end of the 1940s and start of the 1950s was based on an extremely broad consensus on the liberal democratic Welfare State” (Offe, 1988: 170).

The drastic changes that have occurred in industrial societies have brought about the transformation of the plausibility structure of this form of collective identity. The highest rates of trade union membership and of class identification occurred in those sectors closer to the industrial sector (metallurgy, textiles, mining). In recent decades, the number of workers employed in these branches of production has been constantly declining, while at the same time their concentration in social enclaves, culturally homogenous from the viewpoint of class density, has been diluted. These are some of the factors that have led to class mobilisation losing its political relevance and to class identity losing its social signification (Lipset).

The social conditions of work in the post-Fordist society have restricted recourse to this source of identity. In the formulation of L. E. Alonso, “with a devalued past and such an open future, the unemployed, the pensioners, the workers or the executives in a state of permanent insecurity, have no option than to feel themselves deprived of identity. The dictates of the new spirit of capitalism dissolve both the profession – vocation – and the collective consciousness of the organisations, which are left diluted on the surface of the social network” (Alonso, 2000: 217). To the point where this process can put an end to work as a source of collective identity since, in the words of L. E. Alonso, postmodern society “which announces the loss of social references of the subjects at the place of production, as well as the opening up of paths for evaluating difference and identity, and which considers consumption as a form of adventure making plasticity and expressiveness possible, always forgets that in this situation the social subjects can become disintegrated into pure individuals locked into an autistic and egotistic world filled with lack of commitment and disinterest for the collective” (Alonso, 2000: 217).

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4.3 ETHNO-NATIONALIST MOBILISATION

Ethno-nationalist mobilisation continues to be a fundamental source of conflict even in a period of post-nationalist globalisation. However, it is not necessary to subscribe to the thesis of the end of ideologies (Bell), or even that of History (Fukuyama), to note the progressive weakening of the “political man” (Lipset) in today’s societies. Neither the passion with which political change is experienced in many countries nor the desire to recover the originating political spirit contradict the progressive loss of centrality of political ideologies and participation.

Following the moments of political effervescence experienced in the processes of democratisation, or of transition from authoritarian to democratic regimes numerous countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe have passed through this situation in the last two decades; there is a loss of the democratic impetus that usually results in a certain distancing from the political contest, to a relative decline in hope and to disillusionment.

The centres of political identification that correspond to the nation-State are being eroded both by the attrition of their everyday workings and their imperfections, and by the existence of other symbolic universes with a local or global character that enter into competition with it, reducing its capacity for symbolic mobilisation.

The limits of party politics have led, in the words of C. Offe, to the politicisation of a public space midway between the private sphere and institutionalised politics, giving rise to new social movements: “the new social movements try to politicise the institutions of civil society in a way that is unrestricted by the channels of bureaucratic-representative political institutions, in this way reconstituting a civil society that no longer depends on increasing regulation, control and intervention. In order to become emancipated from the State, civil society itself must become politicised […] through practices situated in a sphere that is intermediate between ‘private’ concerns and activities, on the one hand, and institutional political activities sanctioned by the State, on the other” (Offe, 1988:167).

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