(If you haven't yet discovered Ken Myers and his Mars Hill audiotapes, you need to! Myers interviews some of today's most significant Christian thinkers, artists, writers and theologians in a continuing conversation about the relationship of faith and culture. However, Myers himself is an articulate observer. Here's one of my favorite of his articles.)
Self-Obsession and the Denial of God
By Ken Myers
As I write this, the Popular Culture Vulgarism of the Year Award is likely to be granted to the ad campaign for a new fragrance from Yves Saint Laurent. The ad, which appeared in several fashion magazines around the world in late October 2002, features a nude male model in a posture of all-revealing repose. One can only suppose that the designers of the X-rated ad could imagine no new way to be sexually suggestive, so they decided instead to produce something sexually explicit.
The trend in advertising that has been dubbed “ Porn chic ” is both new and sadly familiar. It is not, of course, a novelty to use sex to sell products. But in the past, with the exception of girlie calendars selling automotive supplies or beer, most such marketing relied on clever double-entendres and attractive but discreet models. Like movies of the 1930s and 1940s, advertisers could have it both ways by draping the sexual come-ons with some fabric of respectability. But there is indeed something new about “porn chic” advertising, in the willingness of advertisers to associate their products with raw and explicit images usually encountered only in the sleaziest and most obviously exploitative forms of sexual expression.
Those of us who are offended at the very idea of this Yves Saint Laurent ad (most of us will be spared actually having to look at it unless we work within the ranks of haute couture) might well ask, “Where will it stop?” But we should pause and ask a related question: “Why should it stop?” It would only make sense to be surprised at new levels of offensiveness in public life or in mass media if there were an agreed upon source of moral authority that guided our shared social experience.
But the essence of modern culture is the denial of any authority beyond the self and its desires . That theme is explicit in many influential philosophical writings that shape what we now think of as modern societies. For centuries, the idea that societies should be organized in order to reflect the laws of nature or of God has been on the wane, being replaced by a new ultimate goal: the promotion of individual self-fulfillment. Daniel Bell , professor emeritus of the social sciences at Harvard University, once described this as the enthroning of the self at the center of the moral universe.
I AM THE SUN
In his famous book The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis described the elevation of self-fulfillment in similar terms. Lewis observed that for both Christian and classical culture, the principle moral task was “how to subdue the soul to reality”—that is, how do we train our souls to fit in with the order of things in the universe. Social and cultural institutions in traditional societies were generally organized around this task. But the modern project, Lewis warns, turns that older and wiser goal on its head. The chief end of modern society is “how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.” Similarly, social and cultural institutions in modern societies have tended to follow the logic of this goal. The idea that divine or natural law should restrain or direct social activity was still widely plausible at the beginning of the twentieth century. But by century’s end, almost all social institutions were committed to encouraging the liberation and fulfillment of desires rather than their restraint.
For most of the modern period (the beginning of which has been recognized somewhere between the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution), the idea of a self-centered universe was kept at bay by traditional institutions in Western societies. But the commitment of those institutions to divinely established moral boundaries for social life became more and more tenuous. Moral conservatives tend to blame that decay on a succession of prophets of liberation, from foul-mouthed disk jockeys to publishers of pornography to progressive activists and lawyers and judges. But the loss of certainty about the existence of moral absolutes and the reduction in recognition of moral authority has more to do with technical, social, and economic changes in American culture than in the deliberate crusades of libertines.
Consider the sheer pace of change in American society. Daniel Bell has observed that “The United States was probably the first large-scale society in history to build cultural change into the society.” Such accommodation to change was necessary in a young nation composed of an ever-shifting population of immigrants, energized more by the future (as symbolized by rapid technological developments) than the past (the presence of which, in the Old World, was felt through ancient institutions and their buildings, rituals, and relics). America was a place of new beginnings, and so Americans soon came to love change. But as Bell notes, this had serious consequences for the social commitment to eternal moral truths. “Though at first the changes were primarily in manners, dress, taste, and food habits, sooner or later they begin to affect more basic patterns: the structure of authority in the family, the role of children and young adults as independent consumers in the society, the pattern of morals, and the different meanings of achievement in the society.”
Bell reminds us how changes in the structures and institutions of society often pave the way for changes in the underlying beliefs. Sometimes, ideas or convictions come first and effect a change in social structures (e.g., the abolition of slavery followed certain convictions about human dignity). But in many other instances, changes in social institutions that come about because of technical or economic forces will lead to changes in patterns of personal behavior, and in turn to changes in how one feels and thinks about the world.
In addition to the social ferment in this young nation, the technological developments that allowed for the advent of mass-produced consumer goods meant that large numbers of people suddenly had the ability to change the material condition of their lives. The possibility of economic betterment was a major incentive for most immigrants who arrived here from Europe. Changing the material conditions of one’s life is often associated with the desire to change one’s identity. As a person acquires new wealth, they also have access to new possibilities of behavior once denied them. New circles of friends and acquaintances are entered, sometimes (but not always) replacing the old. The experience of this social mobility or fluidity often encourages doubt about old certainties and suspicion of old structures of authority. Once again, this was dangerous for the survival of traditional values. For, in Daniel Bell’s words, “mass consumption meant the acceptance, in the crucial area of lifestyle, of the idea of social change and personal transformation, and it gave legitimacy to those who would innovate and lead the way, in culture as well as in production.”
CULT OF THE NEW
Cultural innovators, people who push the boundaries back, seem to be in sync with the dynamic qualities of a society committed to newness and the corresponding abandonment of the past. Cultural conservators seem unnatural and out of place in such a society. And, as Bell notes, there is a link between the central ideal of self-fulfillment in modern culture and the celebration of the new (at the expense of what is old or what is eternal and permanent). “By turning one’s back on the past,” Bell observes, one “shreds the ties which compel continuity; one makes the new and the novel the source of interest, and the curiosity of the self the touchstone of judgment.”
We use the term “popular culture” to describe both those cultural forms disseminated through mass media (music, television programs, radio, popular publishing, etc.) and the values and sensibilities associated with those forms. Popular culture played a large role in promoting the acceptance of perpetual cultural change. The producers and distributors of popular culture are our most influential cultural innovators. In traditional societies, leaders of cultural institutions were custodians of permanence. But the only permanent thing in the matrix of a society dominated by popular culture is the necessity to do something new.
What happens to moral authority in such a setting? Popular culture places a high premium on novelty; in other terms, novelty is highly valued. Those people who violate old standards of behavior, paving the way for innovative behavior, are the ones who are most energetically acting out our commitment to novelty. In a paradoxical way, those who challenge values of morality are doing so in the name of the value we place on freedom, innovation, and self-expression.
Encouraging a deep commitment to novelty is only one of the ways popular culture undermines systems of authority. Moral authority is usually strongest in the context of moral communities . Healthy communities have the power, poet and novelist Wendell Berry reminds us, “to enforce decency without litigation.” But it can do so only if “it lives and acts by the common virtues of trust, goodwill, forbearance, self-restraint, compassion, and forgiveness.” These virtues require that a community sustain a sense of membership and obligation within the community, which is often undermined by popular culture, not because of its content but because of its form.
REGARD FOR STRANGERS
Most popular culture comes to us from strangers, not from those within our community. When people give a higher regard to the cultural influence of strangers than those in their own community, moral authority is difficult to sustain. Communities are vulnerable to disruption from without; as Berryreminds us, “A community cannot be made or preserved apart from the loyalty and affection of its members and the respect and goodwill of the people outside it.” In the past century, largely due to the invasive character of mass media, “communities have been more and more victimized by opportunists outside themselves. And as the salesmen, saleswomen, advertisers, and propagandists of the industrial economy have become more ubiquitous and more adept at seduction, communities have lost the loyalty and affection of their members.” And so, they have lost the essential role in God’s ordering of human society of shaping behavior by informing the conscience.
Modern culture destroys confidence in eternal ethical norms by first separating the individual from the sustaining and restraining institutions of family and community that are, in God’s providence, the normal mechanism of moral instruction and authority. Popular culture, by detaching individuals from family and community, has a tendency to encourage an attitude of moral autonomy. Not all popular culture is explicitly rebellious in its content, but the overall dynamic of popular culture, when it is not recognized as subservient to the specific moral demands of one’s family and community, tends to encourage personalities committed to preserving independence above all. As long as our most valued cultural experiences are delivered to us by strangers whose only interest in us is as sources of revenue, we should not be surprised that standards sink lower and lower and behavior becomes more and more depraved.
It is imperative that Christians pay greater attention to the way the forms of popular culture undercut efforts of families and churches to sustain moral conviction and build character. All too often, parents turn their children over to the moral impresarios of mass media, hoping that by leavening the mixture with some Christian popular culture that their children will not depart from the faith. But if the priority of family and community (especially the local church) is not sustained, we will lose a greater percentage of our children over time. We will also fail to display for the benefit of our neighbors those structures that are in keeping with the demands of building character.
The late German psychologist Alexander Mitscherlich wisely observed that modern cultures long for a “society without fathers,” by which he means a society that has rejected any pre-existing structures of authority. Popular culture has played a key role in that rejection. While there are many delightful opportunities for innocent entertainment and pleasure within popular culture, as a cultural system, it poses a threat to moral order. Societies have always had persons who provided amusement and entertainment, but rarely were court jesters given the throne. Only in our own society has the place of having fun become so central that we risk amusing ourselves to death.
Ken Myers , a fellow of the Wilberforce Forum , is the president of Mars Hill Audio , which produces a bimonthly audio journal with notable guests addressing a variety of topics. He is the author of All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture (Crossway, 1989).
This article first appeared in the December 2002 issue of BreakPoint WorldView.
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