Traditional body signage seems largely to have disappeared. Well, many of the old symbols and names are still around, of course, but they are part of the commercial range of options. Seeing someone in a Harvard or Oxford sweatshirt or a kilt or a military tie now communicates nothing at all significant about that person’s life other than the personal choice of a particular consumer. Religious signs are still evocative, to be sure, but are far less common than they used to be. Why should this be? I suspect one reason may be that we have lost a sense of significant connection to the various things indicated by such signs. Proclaiming our high school or university or our athletic team or our community has a much lower priority nowadays, in part because we live such rapidly changing lives in a society marked by constant motion that the stability essential to confer significance on such signs has largely gone.
But we still must attach ourselves to something. Lacking the conviction that the traditional things matter, we turn to the last resort of the modern world: the market. Here there is a vast array of options, all equally meaningless in terms of traditional values, all equally important in identifying the one thing left to us for declaring our identity publicly, our fashion sense and disposable income. The market naturally manipulates the labels, making sure we keep purchasing what will most quickly declare us excellent consumers. If this year a Chicago Bulls jacket or Air Jordan shoes are so popular that we are prepared to spend our way into a trendy identity, then next year there will be something else.
The author guesses that religious sign are used less commonly because…
