Category Archives: Culture and society

There’s a parable in here somewhere . . .

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. . . but at the moment, it’s beyond me to know what it is. This from Neil Gaiman (who is, as my wife notes, an unabashed pagan):

I wound up strangely out of sorts today, after my journey down to Dave [McKean]’s. The toilets on many trains in the UK have ridiculously unintuitive ways to open and close doors, with mystery buttons inside the toilet to close and lock the door that are hard to find, even for the sighted. I watched a blind man head into the train toilet. He couldn’t find the door to close it, said “excuse me, can some[one] help me?” until a fat man in a suit sitting next to the toilet stopped pretending he wasn’t there and pressed the close door button for him. Then I watched the fat man hurry down the aisle and past me and back into the next compartment for all the world as if he was embarrassed by what had just happened. Soon enough there came a frantic knocking on the toilet door as, obviously, the blind man couldn’t get out (secret, randomly placed buttons would do it, but you have to find them first). And there was a carriage full of people between me and the toilet, so I waited for someone to get up, press the outside button and let him out. And nobody did. now the knocking started again, louder, and more panicked, and I looked out at a carriage filled with people who were pretending very hard they hadn’t heard, and were all now gazing intently at their books or papers. So I got up and walked down to the toilet and let the man out, and showed him back to his seat, because it’s the least I’d want if I was blind, and it’s how you treat a fellow human being, and for heaven’s sake. And then I went back to my seat, and everyone looked up at me and stared and smiled with relieved “thank god someone did that” smiles, and I sat down grumpy and puzzled and remain grumpy and puzzled about it still. I’m still trying to work out what on earth was going on there—I don’t think I did anything good or clever or nice. I just did what I would have thought anyone would do. Except a train filled with people didn’t, and in one case actively appeared to be running away in order not to. And I puzzle over, was this a carriage filled with particularly self-centred or embarrassed people, has something fundamental changed in the years I’ve been away from the UK (unlikely, and I don’t believe in lost Golden Ages), did those other people really somehow blindly fail to notice that there was a blind man trapped in the toilet…? I have no idea and I write it down because, as I said, it puzzles and irritates me, and if it ever turns up in a short story you’ll know why.

“It is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.”

—Romans 2:13-16 (ESV)

HT: Sara

Worldly heavens make me ill

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My wife already commented on this, but I think I need to as well, because it’s disturbing me more and more the longer my backbrain has to chew on it: “Heaven Is An Amusement Park That Never Closes.” It’s the latest thing up on Strange Maps (which is a great blog, if you’re a map geek like Sara and I are), and it’s both brilliant and sick. The brainchild of a California comic artist named Malachi Ward, it certainly does a brilliant job of capturing the vague cultural idea of what “heaven” is like, to the extent that it gets beyond clouds and harps and pearly gates; in the process, it also shows just how sick that idea really is.Of course, I could be taken to be biased on this point, since, as I’ve posted before, I firmly disbelieve in the whole popular idea of “heaven”—but I don’t think so. Rather, I think any notion of what God has for those who believe in him that a) makes any sense in earthly terms and/or b) makes any sense apart from the overflowing light and presence of the Triune God, God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit, is theologically appalling. I think any such idea of heaven both distorts and impoverishes our faith—even the best-intentioned versions. As for cultural ideas like the one Malachi Ward so powerfully captures (and satirizes? I hope): may the God of all truth deliver us from such poisonous rubbish.

Moral arguments and the political process

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I have believed for quite some time, as have many others, that one of the biggest problems with public discourse in this country is the insistence by folks on the left that religious and moral arguments are illegitimate in the public square; there are voices on the left who have sought to challenge this idea in a constructive way (as Sen. Obama did two years ago) but they’ve been few and far between. (There have been rather more who have followed the invidious lead of Jim Wallis in arguing that such arguments are permissible if they support liberal conclusions.) The idea that liberals should take the moral and religious arguments that undergird conservative positions seriously and engage them accordingly has mostly been anathema to folks on the left.

That’s why it was so encouraging to see Austin Dacey’s book The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, which came out two months ago from Prometheus Books. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus commented quite positively on the book at the time, writing,

On almost all the hot-button issues—abortion, embryo-destructive research, same-sex marriage, Darwinism as a comprehensive philosophy, etc.—Dacey is, in my judgment, on the wrong side. But he is right about one very big thing. These contests are not between people who, on the one side, are trying to impose their morality on others, and people who, on the other side, subscribe to a purely procedural and amoral rationality. Over the years, some of us have been trying to elicit from our opponents the recognition that they, too, are making moral arguments and hoping that their moral vision will prevail. But in the world of secular liberalism, morality is the motive that dare not speak its name. Austin Dacey strongly agrees. I expect he would not agree that the secularist moral vision entails a quasi-religious understanding of reality, but one step at a time, and The Secular Conscience is a critically important first step. . . .

Dacey recognizes the gravely flawed view of John Rawls that public decisions must be advanced by public reasons recognized by all reasonable parties. That is not the case with most questions requiring political decisions. He writes:

“A policy can be justified when it is favored by a convergence of citizens’ varying reasons, without there being any consensus on those reasons themselves. And there is no reason why the claims of conscience can’t be a part of such convergence. . . . So long as our reasons converge, the decision is justified to each of us and the ideal of legitimacy is preserved. There is nothing necessarily illegitimate about conscience.” . . .

On many questions of great public moment, most of us will disagree with Austin Dacey. At the same time, he should be recognized as an ally in his contention that these are moral questions that must be addressed by moral argument.

Two months later, the New York Times’ Peter Steinfels has taken note of the book (and also, incidentally, of Fr. Neuhaus’ comments on it); and though it seems clear that his main concern is whether Dacey’s approach will in fact benefit the liberal agenda, he lets Dr. Dacey have his say. This is important, because while Dr. Dacey, too, seeks to strengthen secular liberalism, he believes that having “a fundamental conversation” is important enough to risk the possibility that it might not produce the results he wants.

The most interesting part of Steinfels’ article, at least to my way of thinking, is the last paragraph:

“The Secular Conscience” glows with Mr. Dacey’s confidence in John Stuart Mill’s principle that every idea should be “fully, frequently and fearlessly discussed,” lest it “be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.”

The thing that interests me about that is the implicit admission that secular ideas can be dead dogmas just as easily as religious ones can; which is a truth that points to the big admission that secularists need to make, that secularism is in fact a faith like any other, and no more rational than other types of faith commitments (though there are certainly forms of both religious and secular faith which are less rational). That way lies the recognition, which we all need, that we should regard those with whom we disagree as equals with whom we should argue with respect and from whom we have much to learn, rather than as inferiors whom we may freely mock, berate, or dismiss. If Dr. Dacey’s argument leads eventually to secularists abandoning their self-assumed (and self-congratulatory) assurance of superiority to argue with their opponents humbly rather than dogmatically, he will have done our culture a great service indeed.

HT for the NYT article: Presbyweb

Children as buying machines

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That’s one of Heather McDougal’s complaints about TV on Cabinet of Wonders, in her post to which I linked last week:

2. People are trying to sell me stuff the whole time and are counting on me not noticing that they are trying to sell me stuff.2a. When people are trying to sell me stuff, they are willing to do anything they can to get me to buy it, including working really hard at making me hate myself so their product can be the solution.2b. The people who want to sell me stuff are also thinking of my children as a commodity to be bought and sold, and have absolutely no compunction about trying to turn three-year-olds into buying machines (or using the whine factor to try to get little ones to turn me into their own personal buying machine). Also, they want to make my daughters feel bad about themselves so they will buy things. Yuck.

This isn’t a secret, of course; anyone who pays attention (and especially anyone with children) can see it. Still, it’s no end galling how shameless media companies are about it; and perhaps the most galling thing is that the worst of all of them that way is Disney. Condé Nast Portfolio (an excellent magazine, btw, and a great read even if you don’t read business magazines) has an article up titled “How Mickey Got His Groove Back” which makes this appallingly clear. If you’ve never run across any of the Mouse’s cynical exercises in making money off so-called “tweens” (do we have to keep slicing childhood up into ever-smaller marketing segments?), Karl Taro Greenfeld’s opening paragraph should give you the idea:

Perhaps it was my daughters singing along with Hannah Montana—“Get up, get loud, we’re pumping up the party now!”—eight times in a row that morning. Or maybe it was the 16 times I overheard High School Musical and High School Musical 2 playing on the television in the living room, or the several hundred dollars my wife and I spend on Disney tween products—aimed at nine- to 14-year-old girls—every year. Or the fact that a magazine (thankfully, not this one) asked me to profile a Disney tween star and then, almost before I could ask “Who?,” told me that another publication had beaten them to it. Finally, after my eight-year-old daughter pointed to a picture of Hillary Clinton and said she was supporting her for president “because she’s named Hillary, like Hilary Duff,” I decided I had to know: Who is doing this to me?

I wonder what Walt would think.

Cognitive surplus, Web 2.0, and the transformation of media

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Clay Shirky, author of the recent book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has a fascinating piece up on his blog called “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.” An edited transcript of a talk he gave at the Web 2.0 conference, it’s the most remarkable analysis of societal transformations I think I’ve ever run across. He begins with the insight of a British historian

that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. . . .And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. . . . It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

The key insight here is that major societal shifts, if they happen quickly, require some sort of lubricant to get people over the hump until they can adjust to the change of circumstances. (When that lubricant is missing, we get relapses; the case of the USSR after the fall of the Communist Party might be taken as an example.) And for us?

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened—rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before—free time.And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. . . .And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

He overstates the degree to which that free time went into TV; a lot of that time went into volunteer service organizations as well, especially among homemaking women. Still, the broader point holds, and I think his analysis of the current situation does as well. The shift we’re beginning to see, as he presents it, is this:

Media in the 20th century was run as a single race—consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this [cognitive] surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer.

Media as triathlon—as an interactive activity rather than merely a consumptive activity. I think he’s on to something here. For example, how many people these days get their news surfing the Web, following links, blogging, commenting on blogs, and the like, not simply absorbing the news but participating (even if only on the fringes) in a conversation about the news? And perhaps most crucially, how many of our children are growing up with this as part of their mental framework?

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing. It’s also become my motto, when people ask me what we’re doing—and when I say “we” I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.

It’s a brilliant article, and I think offers a critical insight into what’s happening in Western culture, and what’s likely to happen next. I recommend you read the whole thing.HT: Heather McDougal

The audacity of Bill Cosby

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The May issue of The Atlantic is one of their best in a while, maybe the best since Michael Kelly’s much-lamented death. Of all the articles, I think the most interesting is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ take on Bill Cosby and his mission to transform the American black community. Read the article, watch the accompanying video, and see what you think:

I don’t know enough to evaluate Coates’ intellectual history, though his tracking of the arguments and influence and political descendants of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois makes sense to me on first read; and I don’t think racism is as endemic (among people of any skin color or ethnic heritage) as Cosby thinks it is, though my pessimistic streak tells me it’s probably more common in general than in my own experience. I find Cosby’s mission largely admirable, even if there are points on which I would disagree with him; I’m not sure how concerned I should be about those points, especially when it seems to me his message is fundamentally one of encouragement, and encouragement is in far too short supply. There’s a lot to chew on here—especially, I think, for the church.

HT for the video: Ray Ortlund

An unexpected gleam of light

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I don’t know anything more about it than this link—the show isn’t my cup of tea—but apparently Desperate Housewives decided to encourage the church to evangelism. Or something. One of the main characters, by the sound of things a woman who’s never given the church a serious thought in her life, decides to go to church; predictably (both for Hollywood and, let’s admit, for real life), the doing is harder than the saying, but despite that, she carries through. It sounds like a serious treatment of Christian faith, taken all in all, and an episode that was unafraid to point out something important: there are questions that we as human beings need answered that we aren’t capable of answering.It also sounds like a salutary reminder to Christians of just how alien the church is to those who stand outside its walls. That’s something that’s always been true, really, but in our culture it’s much more obviously so than it used to be; which isn’t entirely bad, but it means that if we’re going to be serious about evangelism—which we need to be, because there are a lot of folks out there who need to hear the good news of Jesus Christ—we’ll have to take that alienness into account, and be willing to answer questions seriously and respectfully. We can’t assume people will understand us and how we talk and how we do things, because all too often, they won’t.Which doesn’t mean, I don’t think, that we need to stop being alien; I think by now we’ve pretty well demonstrated that that sort of approach doesn’t work. The truth is, as Charlie Peacock pointed out, ours is a strange language; but it’s strange for the same reason it’s powerful, because “it’s haunted by an even stranger truth.” We can’t assume people understand it, but we can’t set it aside, either; instead, we need to take the time and effort to teach it, because there are folks out there who need to learn it.HT: grains of truth

The clans of Yale and the tribes of America

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In the course of reading Redstate.com’s analysis of the Philly vote in this week’s Pennsylvania primary (an analysis which convinces me that, despite the smooth assurances that the Democratic coalition will come back together just the same as always once Sen. Obama limps to the finish line and finally secures the nomination, the Obama-McCain general election is going to look very different from what we’ve been used to seeing lately), I found a link to an old piece in the Village Voice written by Michael Gecan (a community organizer in the footsteps of Saul Alinsky, as Sen. Obama was) titled “The Tribes of Yale.” It’s a fascinating piece of cultural-political analysis; and if Gecan’s assertion that conservative political leaders “don’t know what in the world—in the bigger, broader world where most moderate Americans live and work, play and pray, and try to raise their kids—they are for” is inaccurate, as I’m quite sure it is, I think his broader argument that they’re driven more by what they’re against than by what they’re for is thought-provoking, especially in the context of his overall understanding of the liberal/conservative cultural clash. Even if his conclusions are incorrect, the story he tells is an important one, I think, for those who would seek to understand American politics in the first decade of the third millennium AD.

The erosion of language and cultural decline

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B. R. Myers, wielding his club like a rapier as usual, has an excellent piece up at The Atlantic on the work of Ian Robinson, a British critic (an evangelical, as it happens) who writes primarily on the ongoing collapse of the English language. The piece is partly a review of Robinson’s latest book, Untied Kingdom, and partly a look back at Robinson’s first book, The Survival of English: Essays in the Criticism of Language, but like any good review essay, it’s as much about Robinson’s subject as it is about his books—a subject on which Myers has a lot to say in his own right. I particularly appreciate his trenchant summary of why the state of our language matters:

Our language itself is losing its power to express moral disapproval. Obscene and sinful are headed the way of decadent and outrageous; perhaps depraved will be watered down next.Such changes affect the way we think, because we do so in words. This is why Karl Kraus, the founder of modern Sprachkritik, or “criticism of language,” was so hard on the Viennese press of the 1920s and 1930s. He is alleged to have said that “if those who are obliged to look after commas had made sure they are always in the right place,” the Japanese would not have set Shanghai on fire. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but the New York Times article speaks for itself. People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.

Holy discomfort

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E. J. Dionne has a good column up on the message with which Pope Benedict XVI is challenging America on his first papal visit. Given that Dionne is such a conventional American liberal Catholic, he’s surprisingly open to that message, with little more than a ritual genuflection to the “the Church needs to become more like us” altar; by and large, he seems to understand that the change needs to run the other way. To be sure, part of that is his recognition that the Pope’s message is in fact as countercultural and challenging in many ways for conservatives as it is for liberals, but even so, I’m glad to see him close with this:

For myself, I admire Benedict’s distinctly Catholic critique of radical individualism in both the moral and economic spheres, and his insistence that the Christian message cannot be divorced from the social and political realms. . . . Perhaps it is the task of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church to bring discomfort to a people so thoroughly shaped by modernity, as we Americans are. If so, Benedict is succeeding.

This is good news, because indeed, an important task for the church is to bring us to a holy discomfort with our lives and our world—to inspire us with a sacred disquiet with the selfish, reductionist assumptions we absorb from our culture, and with the ways in which that culture shapes us; and (as Dionne’s Washington Post colleague Michael Gerson notes) because of its size, ubiquity, and theological tradition, the Roman Catholic Church is and must be one of the chief standard-bearers in that work. It’s good to see that standard carried well.