POINT OF VIEW
The Wake for Printed Books
May 21, 2010 - J. Mark Bertrand
Surely the most naive of Sumerian writers must have understood that cuneiform was a doomed writing system anyway, and that anybody still pressing wedges into soft clay was a fool. It must have made for a sour panel at the Euphrates Writers Conference when the participants showed up for 'The Death of Clay Tablets.' Technological advances were threatening the writing arts, with clay itself soon to be replaced by papyrus and then paper and then satellite dishes for high-definition television. How would the written word survive?
—Robert Clark Young in "The Death of the Death of the Author" (The Southern Review, Winter 2008)
I went to the same graduate school as Robert Clark Young, though our terms didn't quite overlap, and after reading his piece in The Southern Review, I ended up in touch with him. We spent an afternoon in San Francisco chatting about all things book-related, after which I very nearly got him run over—but that's another story. Since I'm prone to cynicism (in the same essay, Young quotes Sidney J. Harris to the tune that a cynic "is prematurely disappointed in the future"), I've kept his essay handy as a vade mecum, invoking the sentiment wherever applicable, sometimes to my detriment.
When Ken Myers interviewed me for Mars Hill Audio Volume 90, for example, he kept asking about the decline of literacy, only to have me scoff at the pessimism. Little did I know that the flipside of Volume 90 would feature an extended chat with Dana Gioia about the NEA's depressing literacy study. Fortunately that part of my interview was excised from the final version, sparing me the indignity of appearing unsuitably optimistic and glib. Ever since, I've kept what little optimism I possess to myself.
The Euphrates Writers Conference and the biennial Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing would seem to have little in common, but the most recent festival featured a panel called "The Case for Printed Books." Five minutes into the proceedings, I had to double-check my program to make sure it wasn't titled "The Wake for Printed Books." The book was doomed and anyone still pressing ink onto paper (albeit metaphorically in our digital age) was a fool. The only difference? The gathered assembly consisted of self-professed fools, book lovers determined to rage against the dying of the light. Our friend the Book was terminally ill, practically dead, but we weren't going to let the ones who did him in get off scot-free.
There were booksellers forced to close up shop, printers retrenching in the face of lowered demand, even all-powerful editors forced to justify their very existence. I'm now accustomed to the lament of independent booksellers. Once a Meg Ryan movie is made about the dilemma, it's safe to say the concern has gone mainstream. But to see editors stumbling over their words, making a defensive case for their continued relevance in a world of e-books where a generation of authors have been told they have to market themselves or not be marketed at all . . . that was new. Publishers have gone from sneering at self-publishing to getting in on the act. Strange new world. Even the publishers' role as "risk aggregators" (to borrow OK Go singer Damian Kulash's term for the record labels) might not guarantee them a bright future.
Naturally the iPad came up. Some panelists seemed delighted by the device and how it might change our perception of what a book is. Most were wary. A fun toy, yes, but with the potential to destroy the world as we know it. The Espresso Book Machine, which cranks out a printed book on demand, met with more enthusiasm, perhaps because it seems to reverse the trend of disembodiment: instead of turning hard copies into ether, it pulls forgotten books from the ether and turns them back into hard copies. [Ed: watch Cardus publications being produced on a local Espresso machine.]
The End of Civilisation
Speaking of machines, in the 1960 film version of The Time Machine, Roy Taylor finds himself among the blond-haired Eloi. The time-traveling representative of the Scottish Enlightenment is at first delighted by the leisure society, assuming that freedom from toil must translate into full-time study and experimentation. He fires off one question after another, but the Eloi remain indifferent until he mentions books. They have books, they tell him, much to his relief. The books will answer his questions, he says. They'll tell him everything he needs to know.
His blond-haired, blue-eyed guide conducts him to the shelves, where a screening curtain promptly falls at the touch. Opening a dusty volume, the time traveler smiles. Then he turns a page and it crumbles in his hand. More pages dissolve.
"Yes," he says, "they do tell me all about you."
He sweeps his hand through a row of shelved books, creating a cloud of dust.
Until now, the End of the Book has been a symbol of the End of Civilization. The anaesthetized drones of the leisure society have no time to read. More to the point, they have no interest in the process. They are too busy being entertained.
When I returned from the Calvin Festival, one of the friends I'd re-connected with there forwarded a link from Richard Mouw's piece in April's Books & Culture, a reassessment of "Calvinist suspicion of fiction and poetry," specifically eighteenth century Scottish Presbyterian skepticism:
The reasons for this widespread suspicion of novels and poems were different than I would have guessed, though. The concerns were due . . . not so much to "ignorance or philistinism" as to a "stridently Calvinist view of labor." For one thing, folks worried that imaginative writing was the kind of thing that drew on "solitude and isolation" rather than social engagement—they were thinking here of the British Romanticists. The kind of person who spent considerable time imagining and constructing fictional and poetic scenarios was like to be someone who disdained the ordinary rhythms of work and sociability, thus fostering a sense of self-importance and a pattern of excessive introspection.
It might seem that the Eloi have little in common with eighteenth century readers of fiction—books are certainly not the cause of their self-absorption, and they don't lack for a sense of community—but the time traveler's problem with their society sounds very similar to the Presbyterian's problem with novel readers: they lack work. The only thing that's changed is that by the late nineteenth century, literature can be seen as a kind of work: the work of civilization.
Ironically, I read Mouw's piece via my iPhone while attending a presbytery meeting. During the examination of a new minister, a question from the floor asked what "non-theological" reading he'd recently undertaken. The answer was Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and it was given without any self-consciousness. None of the Presbyterian elders in attendance expressed concern at the amount of leisure and "excessive introspection" the completion of a Russian novel requires. At least one of them, the iPhone-wielding novelist, was in no position to throw stones.
The critique Mouw cites of fiction hasn't exactly gone away over time. Only the target has shifted. Reading novels is a virtuous activity, assuming they're the right kind of novels. Today's bogeyman is social networking. Blogging and Facebook and Twitter, virtual substitutes for embodied social engagement. Substitute a few terms and the diatribes could be republished today. As e-books, no doubt.
Is the Book the Body or the Soul?
What's at stake in the End of Books? The sense of embodiment. Obviously the content will survive. The question is, in what form?
Book is a shifty word, denoting both the physical object and the content within. As an author, I think of myself as having "written books," when in fact I've typed hundreds of pages of fiction and nonfiction into various word processing files, e-mailed them to my editors, and only much later seen them take physical form. To say all that, however, seems pedantic. To describe myself as, say, a "content provider," however fitting the term might seem, strikes me as something akin to insult. I write books.
And I'm a lover of books, too, unaccustomed to making a body/soul distinction where the printed word is concerned. The book is the object and its contents, inseparable in my mind. I dwell in a house lined with shelves, most of them bowed by the weight of their printed content. Beautiful books and ugly ones. Read and unread. Objects of comfort, outrage, derision, admiration. Some pristine and others scarred. Some bound in leather, some in paper (at least one in shagreen). Prized and cheap side by side. Tangible things, each with a history. I can tell you where they came from, where they've been. The ones I sought out and the ones I discovered unexpectedly. The ones kept under glass in dark bookstores and, all too often, the ones overnighted from the clean, well-lit warehouses of Amazon. All of that will disappear when the book's body does.
Perhaps nothing can stop the change. Perhaps nothing should. As at the wake for the dead friend, that's not the point. Sure, he was sick. Sure, we all saw it coming. In a way, we're even relieved that his suffering is finally over. But don't expect us not to miss him. And don't expect us not to pity you for never having the chance to know him. Those of us who did will never forget.
Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Friday, May 7, 2010
Article of the week #2: Culture's Fallow Ground: The Shame of Biblical Illiteracy
POINT OF VIEW
Culture's Fallow Ground: The Shame of Biblical Illiteracy
May 7, 2010 - Joe Carter
"When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my pistol," said the Nazi playwright Hans Johst. I suspect that if our paths had ever crossed, Johst would have shot me on sight. For I am what he would have despised most: a culturist.
I love culture. I love high culture, low culture, and middlebrow culture. I love pop culture, folk culture, and church culture. I love Texas culture, American culture, and the culture of Western civilization. I worry about culture wars and wars on culture. I despise cultural relativism and fret about the decline of culture. I read about the theology of culture and how to transform, redeem, and restore culture. I think about culture. A lot.
And through all this thinking about culture, I've concluded that the single most important activity we could undertake to change and improve culture is to read the Bible.
One of the most significant cultural disasters in the West is the loss of Biblical literacy. From the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the Bible was the bedrock for our culture's shared heritage. The term culture comes from the Latin cultura, meaning "to plow" or "to till," and for centuries, the Bible was the rich loam our civilization would plow. The Old and New Testament provided the fertile soil in which the Western literary imagination took root, and from the scriptural terra firma grew the metaphors, allusions, narratives, and archetypes that fed the soul of our civilization.
But like the story of the Tower of Babel (remember that one?) we have lost our shared language. As Adam Nicolson argues in an article in the Wall Street Journal:
Up until, say, 100 years ago, biblical literacy would have been practically mandatory. If you didn't know what "the powers that be" originally referred to, or where "the writing on the wall" was first seen, or what was meant by "the patience of Job," "Jacob's ladder" or "the salt of the earth"—if you didn't know what an exodus was or a genesis, a fatted or a golden calf—you would have been excluded from the culture. It might be said that a civilization consists, at its core, of these easily transmitted packages of implication. They are one of the mechanisms by which cultures can be both efficient and rich. You don't have to return to first principles every time you wish to communicate. You can play your present tune on a received instrument, knowing that your listener hears not only your own music but the subtle melodies of those who played it before you. There is a common wisdom in common knowledge. But does this Bible-informed world still exist? I would guess that on the whole, and outside committed Christian groups, biblical literacy is a thing of the past. That long moment of Christian civilization is over. The idiom of modern, English-speaking people is not dense with scriptural allusion, just as the conversation of educated people no longer makes reference to classical civilizations. If you dropped the names nowadays of Nestor, Agamemnon or Pericles—every one of which would have come trailing clouds of glory up to a century ago—you would, I think, draw a near total blank from even educated listeners.
The most lamentable aspect of this loss is that the "committed Christian groups" Nicolson refers to are often as illiterate as the unchurched. I have been a Christian for over thirty years, and yet my knowledge of the Bible is shamefully lacking. This point was illuminated for me several years ago when I was invited to join an Internet discussion group on Biblical inerrancy. The moderator of the list was Farrell Till, an elderly retired English teacher and editor of Skeptical Review. Till was indisputably one of the most surly, churlish, and impolite men I've ever had the misfortune to meet. But he also possessed more knowledge about the Bible than a pew full of Baptists.
In our debates I was able to siphon from my memory some of the basic stories that I had learned in Sunday School, while Till was able to draw from a deep well of familiarity with Scripture. His disdain for the Bible was palpable—but he thoroughly knew the text he despised. Till's scholarship was as shallow as his reasoning, so he was never able to prove Scripture to be "errant." But he was a masterful spelunker who showed me the cavernous depths of my own Biblical illiteracy.
I wish I could say that I was an unrepresentative example of an evangelical. But I suspect that most of my fellow classically orthodox Christians—from the KJV-only crowd to the emerging church conversationists, and not forgetting those who dwell across the Tiber—are equally illiterate. We may possess enough basic knowledge to best a common or garden agnostic at Bible Trivia; we may even be able to hold our own in a proof-texting duel with the village atheist. But we are rarely as saturated in the Bible as we are in pop cultures. We can recite more lyrics from Beatles than we can from the Psalms, and quote more lines from Monty Python movies than from the letters of the Apostle Paul.
Imagine what might happen, though, if we took a different approach. Imagine if we treated the Bible as if it were an actual book that we read from beginning to end. Imagine that instead of reading a chapter a day (as proscribed in our devotionals) that we hunkered down and read large chunks, the way we would read Melville, Dostoevsky, or Stephen King. Imagine if we stopped treating it solely as a reference work, to be pulled off the shelf when we need some advice, but as a coherent narrative, a work of literary art co-produced by the very Creator Himself. Imagine if the names Onesimus, Naaman, and Mordecai were as familiar—and as meaningful—to us as the names Ross, Rachel, and Chandler. Imagine how we might be able to speak with those from the distant past and pass on this cultural vernacular to future generations.
Ironically, Camille Paglia, an art critic and self-avowed atheist, seems to have a sounder grasp of the importance of the Bible for culture than most believers:
[T]he Bible is a masterpiece. The Bible is one of the greatest works produced in the world. The people who all they have is the Bible actually are set up for life. Not only do they have a spiritual vision given to them but artistic fulfillment. They don't even recognize just the pleasure of dealing with this epic poetry and drama. Everything is in the Bible.
Can you imagine what could happen if Christians thought like that? Can you imagine the thinkers, artists, and saints that we could produce if we had that attitude about Scripture?
If you can imagine any of these things, then ask yourself this: Why you don't you spend more time with the Bible?
Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.
Culture's Fallow Ground: The Shame of Biblical Illiteracy
May 7, 2010 - Joe Carter
"When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my pistol," said the Nazi playwright Hans Johst. I suspect that if our paths had ever crossed, Johst would have shot me on sight. For I am what he would have despised most: a culturist.
I love culture. I love high culture, low culture, and middlebrow culture. I love pop culture, folk culture, and church culture. I love Texas culture, American culture, and the culture of Western civilization. I worry about culture wars and wars on culture. I despise cultural relativism and fret about the decline of culture. I read about the theology of culture and how to transform, redeem, and restore culture. I think about culture. A lot.
And through all this thinking about culture, I've concluded that the single most important activity we could undertake to change and improve culture is to read the Bible.
One of the most significant cultural disasters in the West is the loss of Biblical literacy. From the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the Bible was the bedrock for our culture's shared heritage. The term culture comes from the Latin cultura, meaning "to plow" or "to till," and for centuries, the Bible was the rich loam our civilization would plow. The Old and New Testament provided the fertile soil in which the Western literary imagination took root, and from the scriptural terra firma grew the metaphors, allusions, narratives, and archetypes that fed the soul of our civilization.
But like the story of the Tower of Babel (remember that one?) we have lost our shared language. As Adam Nicolson argues in an article in the Wall Street Journal:
Up until, say, 100 years ago, biblical literacy would have been practically mandatory. If you didn't know what "the powers that be" originally referred to, or where "the writing on the wall" was first seen, or what was meant by "the patience of Job," "Jacob's ladder" or "the salt of the earth"—if you didn't know what an exodus was or a genesis, a fatted or a golden calf—you would have been excluded from the culture. It might be said that a civilization consists, at its core, of these easily transmitted packages of implication. They are one of the mechanisms by which cultures can be both efficient and rich. You don't have to return to first principles every time you wish to communicate. You can play your present tune on a received instrument, knowing that your listener hears not only your own music but the subtle melodies of those who played it before you. There is a common wisdom in common knowledge. But does this Bible-informed world still exist? I would guess that on the whole, and outside committed Christian groups, biblical literacy is a thing of the past. That long moment of Christian civilization is over. The idiom of modern, English-speaking people is not dense with scriptural allusion, just as the conversation of educated people no longer makes reference to classical civilizations. If you dropped the names nowadays of Nestor, Agamemnon or Pericles—every one of which would have come trailing clouds of glory up to a century ago—you would, I think, draw a near total blank from even educated listeners.
The most lamentable aspect of this loss is that the "committed Christian groups" Nicolson refers to are often as illiterate as the unchurched. I have been a Christian for over thirty years, and yet my knowledge of the Bible is shamefully lacking. This point was illuminated for me several years ago when I was invited to join an Internet discussion group on Biblical inerrancy. The moderator of the list was Farrell Till, an elderly retired English teacher and editor of Skeptical Review. Till was indisputably one of the most surly, churlish, and impolite men I've ever had the misfortune to meet. But he also possessed more knowledge about the Bible than a pew full of Baptists.
In our debates I was able to siphon from my memory some of the basic stories that I had learned in Sunday School, while Till was able to draw from a deep well of familiarity with Scripture. His disdain for the Bible was palpable—but he thoroughly knew the text he despised. Till's scholarship was as shallow as his reasoning, so he was never able to prove Scripture to be "errant." But he was a masterful spelunker who showed me the cavernous depths of my own Biblical illiteracy.
I wish I could say that I was an unrepresentative example of an evangelical. But I suspect that most of my fellow classically orthodox Christians—from the KJV-only crowd to the emerging church conversationists, and not forgetting those who dwell across the Tiber—are equally illiterate. We may possess enough basic knowledge to best a common or garden agnostic at Bible Trivia; we may even be able to hold our own in a proof-texting duel with the village atheist. But we are rarely as saturated in the Bible as we are in pop cultures. We can recite more lyrics from Beatles than we can from the Psalms, and quote more lines from Monty Python movies than from the letters of the Apostle Paul.
Imagine what might happen, though, if we took a different approach. Imagine if we treated the Bible as if it were an actual book that we read from beginning to end. Imagine that instead of reading a chapter a day (as proscribed in our devotionals) that we hunkered down and read large chunks, the way we would read Melville, Dostoevsky, or Stephen King. Imagine if we stopped treating it solely as a reference work, to be pulled off the shelf when we need some advice, but as a coherent narrative, a work of literary art co-produced by the very Creator Himself. Imagine if the names Onesimus, Naaman, and Mordecai were as familiar—and as meaningful—to us as the names Ross, Rachel, and Chandler. Imagine how we might be able to speak with those from the distant past and pass on this cultural vernacular to future generations.
Ironically, Camille Paglia, an art critic and self-avowed atheist, seems to have a sounder grasp of the importance of the Bible for culture than most believers:
[T]he Bible is a masterpiece. The Bible is one of the greatest works produced in the world. The people who all they have is the Bible actually are set up for life. Not only do they have a spiritual vision given to them but artistic fulfillment. They don't even recognize just the pleasure of dealing with this epic poetry and drama. Everything is in the Bible.
Can you imagine what could happen if Christians thought like that? Can you imagine the thinkers, artists, and saints that we could produce if we had that attitude about Scripture?
If you can imagine any of these things, then ask yourself this: Why you don't you spend more time with the Bible?
Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.
Article of the week: Loving Faithful Institutions
Loving Faithful Institutions: Building Blocks of a Just Global Society
by Jonathan Chaplin
2010-04-14 23:58:50
Institutions and organizations are out, networks and relationships are in. Or so goes conventional “postmodern” wisdom on how to transform society—at least among those who still hold out any hope that societal transformation is still possible at all and who resist the despair implied in a consistent logic of deconstruction.
Yet I want to propose that a credible twenty-first-century Christian voice on the theme of economy and hope needs to affirm loving institutions as key building blocks in any constructive response to our current economic and political malaise.1 To complicate this thesis, I also propose that Christians needs to reckon with the fact that all institutions are in some sense faith-based and that Christians should be unapologetic both about working to shape existing institutions from within according to their own vision of hope or, where necessary, founding their own institutions.
The current narrative favored by many Christian progressives isn’t very congenial toward these proposals. “Institutions,” so the story goes, are the classic instruments of social control generated by “modernity.” Shaped according to the imperatives of instrumental rationality and bureaucratic efficiency, they serve the interests of oppressive global capital, entrenching economic inequality, stifling human creativity, and suppressing dissent. They march toward their hegemonic goals regardless of the welfare of the people they purportedly exist to serve—those whom they promised to liberate from the supposed bondage, ignorance, and squalor of pre-industrial society.
But many critics now observe that modernity and its leading institutional bridgeheads are beginning to teeter. They point to deep fault lines appearing on the smooth surface of institutional bureaucracies and to new social formations emerging in the wings. To many people, the cumulative and interconnected failures of modernity—economic, political, environmental, and spiritual—seem to herald the decline of institutions and the arrival of new models of social interaction rooted in open, dynamic relational networks. These networks, it is said, are flexible enough to adapt to ever-changing contexts and spacious enough to allow human beings to continually redefine their identities and projects and to realize greater freedom and authenticity.
It is also claimed—by, for example, heralds of the emergent church movement or by neo-Anabaptists—that the appearance of a network model of social change provides new openings for Christians to bear public witness. Breaking free from the constraints of mainstream institutions, Christians can join the “subaltern” flux on the margins of society, generate their own relational networks, and inject messages of hope (justice, peace, community, etc.) in the interstices of the current system. They can “speak truth to power” from a position of institutional powerlessness. The language of “bringing institutions under the Lordship of Christ” seems to such postmodern Christians like the controlling language of a dying Christendom.
That is, to say the least, an abridgement of a much more complex story (actually a set of stories), but I hope it’s not a complete caricature. And let me add at the outset that I actually share much of the critical analysis it implies toward the modernist characteristics of some of the institutions that have come to dominate the modern West, notably many transnational corporations, larger professional organizations, universities, and governmental bureaucracies—what even Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus (hardly postmodern progressives) dubbed thirty years ago the “megastructures” of society.2
Because this piece is intended as a polemic, and in order to get something on the radar screens of Christian postmoderns, let me get my central beef off my chest right away: many Christians who have been understandably, and often rightly, drawn to postmodern ways of thinking (there may be one or two among the readership of TOJ—and I’d welcome their responses) need to learn to love institutions again, and they won’t get very far in transforming society unless they do. And such Christians also need to see that existing institutions, especially the larger ones, are already “faith-based.” Contrary to the ruling secularist mindset, institutions like corporations, universities, government bureaucracies, and professional bodies are not devoid of faith-based influences; they merely deny their presence. The key questions, then, are: which faith (or faiths) drive these institutions? And how can a biblically inspired faith make any impact on them in a secular, plural society?
I’m obviously not saying that Christians must love modernist institutions as I’ve just depicted them: those kinds of institutions need to be resisted and reshaped in ways I’ll gesture toward shortly. But if my sketch of a postmodern view of social formations is anywhere near on target, then Christians, I’ll suggest, have to move beyond a model of mere ”dynamic relational networks” if they are to exercise the kind of cultural influence that actually advances justice and peace.
Consider some illustrations (they are only that) of why I think the relational networks model alone, useful corrective though it is, won’t cut it. I’ll start with the church itself. Christians drawn to postmodern thinking are also often attracted to new, “emergent” models of doing church. For the sake of the gospel, they claim, we must leave behind—or at least work around—mainstream denominational institutions with their hierarchical authority structures, inflexible mission strategies, and lifeless antiquated liturgies.
I happen to agree with much of that diagnosis. Yet history suggests that every authentic renewal movement in the church, if its unique gifts are to be passed on to succeeding generations and not die out with the first, will need to take on some durable institutional form at some point. Even the radical sixteenth-century Swiss Anabaptists emerging in reaction to the compromises of the “magisterial” reformer Zwingli would not have bequeathed their remarkable gifts of peaceableness and toleration to the world had Anabaptism not assumed denominational forms like that which became the Mennonite church.
One immediate implication of this suggestion is that ecclesial emergentists should exploit every opportunity to transform existing defective denominational practices from within before launching out on a course that, however successful and intoxicating in the short run, may eventuate in yet another deficient denominational structure appearing just around the corner. Many Christians, I realize, are already busy with precisely that work of internal transformation.
My point, however, is that we can’t “do church” in a long-term, transformative way unless we begin to crystallize and codify new mission initiatives within institutional structures, however much these structures may be leaner and fitter than previous ones (they’ll certainly need to be). This kind of institutionalization is what happened in the early church, before its leadership started to go off the rails in a corrupting alliance with Roman imperial structures. I doubt we will be able to improve on their act today.
My main interest here, however, is how Christians can contribute to the generation of “loving, faithful” institutions outside the church, and to unpack that, I’ll develop another illustration at greater length and use it as a platform for some broader remarks.
Consider what has been happening in the corporate world over the last couple of decades. There we have witnessed, at least in certain sectors, a notable paradigm shift away from the traditional modernist model of bureaucratic, hierarchical, vertical-line management toward a model of horizontal, decentralized, participatory decision-making processes in which employees are situated within networks and ceded much greater autonomy and flexibility.
All to the good. This may have led to increased worker satisfaction and perhaps even to greater productivity. But as far as I can tell, this internal shift in management style has not made much difference to the way corporations conduct themselves outside the factory gates (if you’ll forgive a lapse into old-fashioned modernist language—but actually, lots of “factories” still exist; in fact, most of our stuff is still made in them. You might try visiting one sometime—they are much cleaner than they used to be).
For example, I don’t see much evidence that this shift has pushed corporations toward a change in their investment or growth priorities, modified their commitment to maximizing “shareholder value” as the overriding corporate goal, caused them to redesign their manipulative marketing strategies, or inspired them to redefine the reductionist indicators of efficiency and productivity on which they have hitherto relied. In other words, a network model of management hasn’t been able to challenge the dominant “faith” in the corporate world, which is essentially a secular, utilitarian, and materialistic one.
Introducing a relational networks model may be a good thing as far as it goes, but it won’t be enough to move large corporations closer toward a genuine commitment to economic justice and solidarity. A much broader structural transformation is required, and this will involve asking a very basic question that is hardly ever asked in mainstream debate, and the answer to this question will be inescapably shaped by one faith-perspective or another: what unique human purposes can business corporations properly serve, and how can they be (re)designed to serve them better? A Christian vision of economic life will have some distinctive things to say about that.3
Fleshing this out further will require that we imagine models of what normative business corporations within a globalizing twenty-first century would actually look like. And we won’t get such models if we only continue to indulge in perpetual deconstructive critique. Instead, we need to take up (again, we won’t be the first) the difficult, slow, unflamboyant—and often unremarked on—task of constructive institutional thinking and institution-(re)building.
Nor will we get normative business corporations if we suppose that the only suitable models are dusted down medieval guilds or small-scale workers’ cooperatives. Both of these have exemplary virtues, and I certainly wish there were more of the latter. But if greater economic justice and solidarity are to be achieved against the constraints of the mega-structural architecture of our globalizing society, we will need bigger players than that.
I’d add, however, that some big players started out as very small players indeed. The amazing Grameen Bank began its work in rural Bangladesh providing low-interest microfinancing to groups of poor women, boasting repayment rates rivaling the biggest banks in the world. It won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.4 And while Grameen is not officially religious, it undoubtedly operates out of a very different economic faith than the mega-banks whose naive faith in mathematically sophisticated, short-term, profit-driven, risk-management investment strategies led the global financial system to the brink of collapse in 2008.
To transform the institutions that are shaping our globalized world, then, involves not only the deconstructive task of exposing their dehumanizing characteristics, but also the much more demanding constructive task of identifying their normative purposes and fleshing out how to advance these more adequately through specific and attainable institutional changes—tasks which will be decisively shaped (inevitably) by one faith or other.
Let me state my general point from a rather different angle by invoking some biblical terms: those who want to be prophets had better first immerse themselves in law and wisdom. This, of course, is what biblical prophets actually had to do before any of their fellow prophets would let them loose denouncing the idols of their time: most prophets weren’t lone-rangers (the progressive equivalents of “one-man ministries”) but tended to hang out in “schools.” So, for example, everyone’s all-time-favorite prophet Isaiah wouldn’t have been able to come up with a denunciation like “woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room” (5:8), unless he’d spent a lot of time “meditating on the law of the Lord”—from which he’d have learned (from sources like Leviticus 25) that economic activity Yahweh-style involves a legal guarantee of an equitable distribution of productive resources (i.e., land) for every Israelite family. Without the law of Jubilee—a cardinal component of the Covenant—how would any prophet have had the right to denounce the rich for the injustice of unlimited capital accumulation?
Prophecy is calling people back to covenant obedience, and the content of that obedience is laid out in the rich array of norms (or pathways) governing the social, economic, family, political, and religious life of Israel—norms that called for institutional embodiment and that pointed the way toward a common life of justice and solidarity (shalom). And while the people of God in the New Testament are no longer bound by the specific rules of ancient Israel, they are indeed bound by the “law of love,” which, as Jesus and Paul both make clear, is the fulfillment not the abrogation of the law.
This, I hope, begins to sharpen the sense of what I mean by “loving institutions.” I mean institutions that, even in limited ways, can embody the central norm of love, a norm which in turn needs to be fleshed out in more specific directives about justice, solidarity, peaceableness, stewardship, and so on. Our challenge is to work toward developing institutions that can serve as conduits of this kind of love, with all its differentiated concrete applications on the ground. Such institutions we should indeed learn to love. But they will be loving institutions only if they are directed by a faith that is responsive to the Creator’s pathways for flourishing.
One illustration of this task, I’ve been suggesting, is to develop faith-guided models of normative business corporations (rather than just lambasting the shortcomings of existing ones). This won’t come easy. It will require a combination of extensive practical experience of the business world at many levels and extensive knowledge of the traditions of Christian-inspired social and economic reflection. Without the resources of business entrepreneurs, theologians, philosophers, or ethicists can fulminate against “oppressive global capitalism” until the cows come home (if you’ll now forgive a lapse into pre-industrial language), but Christian business practitioners will not give them the time of day.
Yet without the resources of the traditions of Christian social thought, the result will be similar to what I have all too often encountered from business students at (even) Christian colleges. From their accounts, it becomes clear that their business professors often have neither the training nor the inclination to take any real critical distance from the reigning secular, utilitarian, liberal economic paradigms in their field. And the result of that deficiency is that generations of young Christian businesspeople will be sent out into the world of work thinking that the currently dominant structure of the business corporation is already normative from a Christian point of view. Some of these young businesspeople may turn out to be generous benefactors to Christian causes, but few will be transformers of the corporate sector in the direction of an economy of hope, justice, and solidarity.
I’ve dwelt on just one example of a large social institution that needs to be reckoned with and transformed if we are to nurture hope of greater justice and solidarity. But my point applies to all types and sizes of institutions.
One could, for example, run the analysis through political institutions; let me briefly hint at how it could go. The conclusion would be similar: we need to develop creative models of what normative governmental structures might look like. Equally, such models need to be forged out of dialogue between seasoned political practitioners—public officials, elected politicians, but also civil society leaders and grassroots campaigners—and Christian political theorists or political theologians.
Such discussions would need to ask some tough questions: not only, what is the normative purpose of the state in classical Christian thought?—the kind of question theorists like me love to spend lots of time on—but also, how can our existing labyrinthine, lumbering, bureaucratic administrative structures be incrementally restructured to enhance citizen participation rather than kill it off?—the kind of question theorists like me would love other people to spend lots of time on. Proposals for such incremental changes at the margins of our current systems probably won’t sound very prophetic; they’ll be more sapiential in tone. It’s certainly a lot more fun to declare to a sympathetic academic audience that “our dehumanizing modernist bureaucracies must be replaced by human-sized communities of reciprocity,” than to propose to a skeptical audience of government officials that “health care cost centers should devolve control of budgets to local stakeholder boards.”
Sometimes I sit in those academic gatherings and I think they have some value. But lasting institutional transformation will only emerge out of piecemeal, normally below-the-radar moves by principled practitioners advancing ideas like the one I mentioned, but who yet are guided by a larger, faith-inspired vision of justice and solidarity.
I am encouraged to see that there are many more budding sapiential institution-transformers active in British political life than there were a generation ago. I think of a prominent politician, John Battle, who, drawing deeply on the legacy of Catholic social teaching, works tirelessly as a passionate and articulate champion for many disadvantaged people living in his parliamentary constituency in Leeds, England. Such institution-transformers also exist in the corporate sector. I think of my friend Cal Bailey, the marketing and sustainability director of a medium-sized construction company (also in Leeds), who, inspired by a robust Christian vision, is doing his level best on a daily basis to edge this most wasteful of industries toward greater environmental responsibility.5 Such people do not receive enough honor within our churches, and they are not helped by theologians who simply demonize the modern state or capitalism and all their works without pointing toward attainable alternatives. Notwithstanding the brilliance and originality of theologian John Milbank, this is a charge that can be leveled against his own writing—though it is encouraging that some writers associated with the Radical Orthodoxy movement (for example, Phillip Blond6) are beginning to take up the challenge of devising constructive alternatives.
Let me conclude, first by calling attention to the rich historical resources Christians have at their disposal as they take up this challenge, and second, by recognizing the contexts of secularism and pluralism within which they do so.
Christians who aspire to transform institutions will certainly require great gifts of courage, imagination, and innovation. Yet at the same time, they will also need to rediscover the deep veins of traditional Christian insight into the nature and purposes of institutions,7 in order then to critically reappropriate and rearticulate such insight for the radically new challenges of globalizing twenty-first-century societies. As the Brazos Press strapline puts it, they’ll need to find ways of bringing “the tradition alive.” And “the tradition” must be read to include not just the intellectual tradition but also the legacy of the practical witness of the saints. Here I mean not just those whom the church has officially venerated as such, but all faithful believers from all walks of life and all ages who have left behind durable, concrete institutional embodiments of love—schools, hospitals, political movements, and yes, business enterprises—that can still speak to and inspire us today as we seek to be faithful witnesses to the gospel in the challenging context of a globalizing but fragile twenty-first-century world.8
But what are the prospects for developing “faith-based” institutional proposals or models in a context so deeply penetrated by, on the one hand, secularist modes of thought (such as economic utilitarianism) and, on the other, a deepening pluralism of faiths? One of the striking—and at the same time disorienting—features of our current situation is that the latter is actually opening up spaces to resist the former: pluralism is undermining secularism. The growing recognition that no single faith perspective is able any longer to dominate public institutional life isn’t only corroding what’s left of Christian triumphalism, it’s also problematizing the two-centuries-old secularist presumption of a sole entitlement to shape the terms of modern institutional life. Combined with the creeping erosion of the modernist project that is driving our larger institutions, the experience of pluralism is now beginning to crack open the door through which we can glimpse the possibility of a new, post-secular institutional settlement.
In such a settlement, the classic institutions of modernity—corporations, universities, governments—will no longer be able to get away with presenting themselves, unchallenged, as guided exclusively by secular, objective, universal standards of rationality and as reliable guarantors of progress. The influence of contestable and contested faiths on their mode of operation will be increasingly evident, leaving space for alternative faith perspectives to make their distinctive contributions. These contributions could either be made from within existing institutions, formerly marginalized voices now acknowledged as worthy of a hearing. They’d appear as, for example, courses on Christian or Buddhist perspectives on health care in mainstream public universities or as so-called “sharia-compliant” financial instruments offered by leading banks (these already exist—but why are there no Torah-compliant ones yet?). Or they could be mounted from the platform of distinct institutions: openly faith-based social investment companies, credit unions, environmentally-friendly mining enterprises, property developers committed to social housing, fair-traded food coops,9 and so on.
These faith-based contributions should not, however, speak in tribal theological languages unintelligible to the wider publics whom they must perforce address and engage. Yet nor will they merely mimic the dated secular Esperanto that liberal secularists would still like to impose on the rest of us. In striking the right tone and content, they will be guided by communicative guidelines such as the following.
First, a great deal of faith-inspired language, especially Christian language spoken in Western or Western-influenced societies, is already perfectly intelligible to secular-minded people, and sometimes we need to call secularists’ bluff when they feign deafness in the presence of religiously inflected language. When Desmond Tutu called for the end of apartheid because “every human being is made in the image of God,” he didn’t have secularists scratching their head in puzzlement. In this sense, faith-inspired language can be “public” if the audience has already been historically shaped by the relevant faith.
Second, to secure support in a mixed public audience for a proposal to reform a particular institution (e.g., a corporation, university, or government), it is normally prudent, to say the least, to couch the proposal in terms of the subject matter of that institution (e.g., production, knowledge, or law) rather than to lead with one’s explicit faith language (e.g., blessing, revelation, or judgment). Such language will certainly be “public” because the subject matter in question is public. Yet it will not thereby have become “secular” or “neutral,” at least so long as its content remains continually fed by its deeper faith-based sources. There may be Desmond Tutu moments when our faith inspiration has to rise to the surface, but they’ll probably be the exception. The norm is more likely to be the principled practitioner I cited earlier, working below the radar in government and speaking in a sapiential register but guided by a larger vision of faith.
Finally, Christians will seek to be those, on the one hand, who stand ready to declare the “reasons for the hope that is within them” when the opportunity arises or the occasion demands, and those, on the other hand, whose words are “seasoned with salt”—committed to truth, winsome in tone, inviting of dialogue, hopeful of agreement.
And the prospects for success? That’s a modernist question.
____________________
Notes:
1. I will be using the term institution very broadly to include all types and sizes of social organization, association, corporation, et cetera, though I’ll focus explicitly on the larger ones.
2. The term megastructures comes from Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus’s linfluential essay of 1977, To Empower People, reprinted in a twentieth-anniversary edition, To Empower People: From State to Civil Society, ed. Michael Novak (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1996), 157-208.
3. See Bob Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress: A Diagnosis of Western Society (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1979).
4. See http://www.grameen-info.org/.
5. Cal Bailey, “Building God’s Empire or Ours? The Purpose of Work in Business,” Ethics in Brief 13.4 (Winter 2008), http://klice.co.uk/uploads/EiB/Bailey%20v13.4%20pub.pdf.
6. See his new think tank, ResPublica: http://www.respublica.org.uk/.
7. See, for example, Jeanne Heffernan Schindler, ed., Christianity and Civil Society: Catholic and Neo-Calvinist Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2008); Gordon Graham, ed., The Kuyper Center Review, vol. 1 of Politics, Religion, and Sphere Sovereignty (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010).
8. For various Christian readings of globalization, see, for example Michael W. Goheen and Erin G. Glanville, eds., The Gospel and Globalization: Exploring the Religious Roots of a Globalized World (Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing/Geneva Society, 2009); Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Healing a Broken World: Globalization and God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2002); James K. A. Smith, ed., After Modernity? Secularity, Globalization, and the Re-enchantment of the World (Waco, TX: Baylor Universty Press, 2008).
9. Here’s my local one: http://www.dailybread.co.uk/.
by Jonathan Chaplin
2010-04-14 23:58:50
Institutions and organizations are out, networks and relationships are in. Or so goes conventional “postmodern” wisdom on how to transform society—at least among those who still hold out any hope that societal transformation is still possible at all and who resist the despair implied in a consistent logic of deconstruction.
Yet I want to propose that a credible twenty-first-century Christian voice on the theme of economy and hope needs to affirm loving institutions as key building blocks in any constructive response to our current economic and political malaise.1 To complicate this thesis, I also propose that Christians needs to reckon with the fact that all institutions are in some sense faith-based and that Christians should be unapologetic both about working to shape existing institutions from within according to their own vision of hope or, where necessary, founding their own institutions.
The current narrative favored by many Christian progressives isn’t very congenial toward these proposals. “Institutions,” so the story goes, are the classic instruments of social control generated by “modernity.” Shaped according to the imperatives of instrumental rationality and bureaucratic efficiency, they serve the interests of oppressive global capital, entrenching economic inequality, stifling human creativity, and suppressing dissent. They march toward their hegemonic goals regardless of the welfare of the people they purportedly exist to serve—those whom they promised to liberate from the supposed bondage, ignorance, and squalor of pre-industrial society.
But many critics now observe that modernity and its leading institutional bridgeheads are beginning to teeter. They point to deep fault lines appearing on the smooth surface of institutional bureaucracies and to new social formations emerging in the wings. To many people, the cumulative and interconnected failures of modernity—economic, political, environmental, and spiritual—seem to herald the decline of institutions and the arrival of new models of social interaction rooted in open, dynamic relational networks. These networks, it is said, are flexible enough to adapt to ever-changing contexts and spacious enough to allow human beings to continually redefine their identities and projects and to realize greater freedom and authenticity.
It is also claimed—by, for example, heralds of the emergent church movement or by neo-Anabaptists—that the appearance of a network model of social change provides new openings for Christians to bear public witness. Breaking free from the constraints of mainstream institutions, Christians can join the “subaltern” flux on the margins of society, generate their own relational networks, and inject messages of hope (justice, peace, community, etc.) in the interstices of the current system. They can “speak truth to power” from a position of institutional powerlessness. The language of “bringing institutions under the Lordship of Christ” seems to such postmodern Christians like the controlling language of a dying Christendom.
That is, to say the least, an abridgement of a much more complex story (actually a set of stories), but I hope it’s not a complete caricature. And let me add at the outset that I actually share much of the critical analysis it implies toward the modernist characteristics of some of the institutions that have come to dominate the modern West, notably many transnational corporations, larger professional organizations, universities, and governmental bureaucracies—what even Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus (hardly postmodern progressives) dubbed thirty years ago the “megastructures” of society.2
Because this piece is intended as a polemic, and in order to get something on the radar screens of Christian postmoderns, let me get my central beef off my chest right away: many Christians who have been understandably, and often rightly, drawn to postmodern ways of thinking (there may be one or two among the readership of TOJ—and I’d welcome their responses) need to learn to love institutions again, and they won’t get very far in transforming society unless they do. And such Christians also need to see that existing institutions, especially the larger ones, are already “faith-based.” Contrary to the ruling secularist mindset, institutions like corporations, universities, government bureaucracies, and professional bodies are not devoid of faith-based influences; they merely deny their presence. The key questions, then, are: which faith (or faiths) drive these institutions? And how can a biblically inspired faith make any impact on them in a secular, plural society?
I’m obviously not saying that Christians must love modernist institutions as I’ve just depicted them: those kinds of institutions need to be resisted and reshaped in ways I’ll gesture toward shortly. But if my sketch of a postmodern view of social formations is anywhere near on target, then Christians, I’ll suggest, have to move beyond a model of mere ”dynamic relational networks” if they are to exercise the kind of cultural influence that actually advances justice and peace.
Consider some illustrations (they are only that) of why I think the relational networks model alone, useful corrective though it is, won’t cut it. I’ll start with the church itself. Christians drawn to postmodern thinking are also often attracted to new, “emergent” models of doing church. For the sake of the gospel, they claim, we must leave behind—or at least work around—mainstream denominational institutions with their hierarchical authority structures, inflexible mission strategies, and lifeless antiquated liturgies.
I happen to agree with much of that diagnosis. Yet history suggests that every authentic renewal movement in the church, if its unique gifts are to be passed on to succeeding generations and not die out with the first, will need to take on some durable institutional form at some point. Even the radical sixteenth-century Swiss Anabaptists emerging in reaction to the compromises of the “magisterial” reformer Zwingli would not have bequeathed their remarkable gifts of peaceableness and toleration to the world had Anabaptism not assumed denominational forms like that which became the Mennonite church.
One immediate implication of this suggestion is that ecclesial emergentists should exploit every opportunity to transform existing defective denominational practices from within before launching out on a course that, however successful and intoxicating in the short run, may eventuate in yet another deficient denominational structure appearing just around the corner. Many Christians, I realize, are already busy with precisely that work of internal transformation.
My point, however, is that we can’t “do church” in a long-term, transformative way unless we begin to crystallize and codify new mission initiatives within institutional structures, however much these structures may be leaner and fitter than previous ones (they’ll certainly need to be). This kind of institutionalization is what happened in the early church, before its leadership started to go off the rails in a corrupting alliance with Roman imperial structures. I doubt we will be able to improve on their act today.
My main interest here, however, is how Christians can contribute to the generation of “loving, faithful” institutions outside the church, and to unpack that, I’ll develop another illustration at greater length and use it as a platform for some broader remarks.
Consider what has been happening in the corporate world over the last couple of decades. There we have witnessed, at least in certain sectors, a notable paradigm shift away from the traditional modernist model of bureaucratic, hierarchical, vertical-line management toward a model of horizontal, decentralized, participatory decision-making processes in which employees are situated within networks and ceded much greater autonomy and flexibility.
All to the good. This may have led to increased worker satisfaction and perhaps even to greater productivity. But as far as I can tell, this internal shift in management style has not made much difference to the way corporations conduct themselves outside the factory gates (if you’ll forgive a lapse into old-fashioned modernist language—but actually, lots of “factories” still exist; in fact, most of our stuff is still made in them. You might try visiting one sometime—they are much cleaner than they used to be).
For example, I don’t see much evidence that this shift has pushed corporations toward a change in their investment or growth priorities, modified their commitment to maximizing “shareholder value” as the overriding corporate goal, caused them to redesign their manipulative marketing strategies, or inspired them to redefine the reductionist indicators of efficiency and productivity on which they have hitherto relied. In other words, a network model of management hasn’t been able to challenge the dominant “faith” in the corporate world, which is essentially a secular, utilitarian, and materialistic one.
Introducing a relational networks model may be a good thing as far as it goes, but it won’t be enough to move large corporations closer toward a genuine commitment to economic justice and solidarity. A much broader structural transformation is required, and this will involve asking a very basic question that is hardly ever asked in mainstream debate, and the answer to this question will be inescapably shaped by one faith-perspective or another: what unique human purposes can business corporations properly serve, and how can they be (re)designed to serve them better? A Christian vision of economic life will have some distinctive things to say about that.3
Fleshing this out further will require that we imagine models of what normative business corporations within a globalizing twenty-first century would actually look like. And we won’t get such models if we only continue to indulge in perpetual deconstructive critique. Instead, we need to take up (again, we won’t be the first) the difficult, slow, unflamboyant—and often unremarked on—task of constructive institutional thinking and institution-(re)building.
Nor will we get normative business corporations if we suppose that the only suitable models are dusted down medieval guilds or small-scale workers’ cooperatives. Both of these have exemplary virtues, and I certainly wish there were more of the latter. But if greater economic justice and solidarity are to be achieved against the constraints of the mega-structural architecture of our globalizing society, we will need bigger players than that.
I’d add, however, that some big players started out as very small players indeed. The amazing Grameen Bank began its work in rural Bangladesh providing low-interest microfinancing to groups of poor women, boasting repayment rates rivaling the biggest banks in the world. It won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.4 And while Grameen is not officially religious, it undoubtedly operates out of a very different economic faith than the mega-banks whose naive faith in mathematically sophisticated, short-term, profit-driven, risk-management investment strategies led the global financial system to the brink of collapse in 2008.
To transform the institutions that are shaping our globalized world, then, involves not only the deconstructive task of exposing their dehumanizing characteristics, but also the much more demanding constructive task of identifying their normative purposes and fleshing out how to advance these more adequately through specific and attainable institutional changes—tasks which will be decisively shaped (inevitably) by one faith or other.
Let me state my general point from a rather different angle by invoking some biblical terms: those who want to be prophets had better first immerse themselves in law and wisdom. This, of course, is what biblical prophets actually had to do before any of their fellow prophets would let them loose denouncing the idols of their time: most prophets weren’t lone-rangers (the progressive equivalents of “one-man ministries”) but tended to hang out in “schools.” So, for example, everyone’s all-time-favorite prophet Isaiah wouldn’t have been able to come up with a denunciation like “woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room” (5:8), unless he’d spent a lot of time “meditating on the law of the Lord”—from which he’d have learned (from sources like Leviticus 25) that economic activity Yahweh-style involves a legal guarantee of an equitable distribution of productive resources (i.e., land) for every Israelite family. Without the law of Jubilee—a cardinal component of the Covenant—how would any prophet have had the right to denounce the rich for the injustice of unlimited capital accumulation?
Prophecy is calling people back to covenant obedience, and the content of that obedience is laid out in the rich array of norms (or pathways) governing the social, economic, family, political, and religious life of Israel—norms that called for institutional embodiment and that pointed the way toward a common life of justice and solidarity (shalom). And while the people of God in the New Testament are no longer bound by the specific rules of ancient Israel, they are indeed bound by the “law of love,” which, as Jesus and Paul both make clear, is the fulfillment not the abrogation of the law.
This, I hope, begins to sharpen the sense of what I mean by “loving institutions.” I mean institutions that, even in limited ways, can embody the central norm of love, a norm which in turn needs to be fleshed out in more specific directives about justice, solidarity, peaceableness, stewardship, and so on. Our challenge is to work toward developing institutions that can serve as conduits of this kind of love, with all its differentiated concrete applications on the ground. Such institutions we should indeed learn to love. But they will be loving institutions only if they are directed by a faith that is responsive to the Creator’s pathways for flourishing.
One illustration of this task, I’ve been suggesting, is to develop faith-guided models of normative business corporations (rather than just lambasting the shortcomings of existing ones). This won’t come easy. It will require a combination of extensive practical experience of the business world at many levels and extensive knowledge of the traditions of Christian-inspired social and economic reflection. Without the resources of business entrepreneurs, theologians, philosophers, or ethicists can fulminate against “oppressive global capitalism” until the cows come home (if you’ll now forgive a lapse into pre-industrial language), but Christian business practitioners will not give them the time of day.
Yet without the resources of the traditions of Christian social thought, the result will be similar to what I have all too often encountered from business students at (even) Christian colleges. From their accounts, it becomes clear that their business professors often have neither the training nor the inclination to take any real critical distance from the reigning secular, utilitarian, liberal economic paradigms in their field. And the result of that deficiency is that generations of young Christian businesspeople will be sent out into the world of work thinking that the currently dominant structure of the business corporation is already normative from a Christian point of view. Some of these young businesspeople may turn out to be generous benefactors to Christian causes, but few will be transformers of the corporate sector in the direction of an economy of hope, justice, and solidarity.
I’ve dwelt on just one example of a large social institution that needs to be reckoned with and transformed if we are to nurture hope of greater justice and solidarity. But my point applies to all types and sizes of institutions.
One could, for example, run the analysis through political institutions; let me briefly hint at how it could go. The conclusion would be similar: we need to develop creative models of what normative governmental structures might look like. Equally, such models need to be forged out of dialogue between seasoned political practitioners—public officials, elected politicians, but also civil society leaders and grassroots campaigners—and Christian political theorists or political theologians.
Such discussions would need to ask some tough questions: not only, what is the normative purpose of the state in classical Christian thought?—the kind of question theorists like me love to spend lots of time on—but also, how can our existing labyrinthine, lumbering, bureaucratic administrative structures be incrementally restructured to enhance citizen participation rather than kill it off?—the kind of question theorists like me would love other people to spend lots of time on. Proposals for such incremental changes at the margins of our current systems probably won’t sound very prophetic; they’ll be more sapiential in tone. It’s certainly a lot more fun to declare to a sympathetic academic audience that “our dehumanizing modernist bureaucracies must be replaced by human-sized communities of reciprocity,” than to propose to a skeptical audience of government officials that “health care cost centers should devolve control of budgets to local stakeholder boards.”
Sometimes I sit in those academic gatherings and I think they have some value. But lasting institutional transformation will only emerge out of piecemeal, normally below-the-radar moves by principled practitioners advancing ideas like the one I mentioned, but who yet are guided by a larger, faith-inspired vision of justice and solidarity.
I am encouraged to see that there are many more budding sapiential institution-transformers active in British political life than there were a generation ago. I think of a prominent politician, John Battle, who, drawing deeply on the legacy of Catholic social teaching, works tirelessly as a passionate and articulate champion for many disadvantaged people living in his parliamentary constituency in Leeds, England. Such institution-transformers also exist in the corporate sector. I think of my friend Cal Bailey, the marketing and sustainability director of a medium-sized construction company (also in Leeds), who, inspired by a robust Christian vision, is doing his level best on a daily basis to edge this most wasteful of industries toward greater environmental responsibility.5 Such people do not receive enough honor within our churches, and they are not helped by theologians who simply demonize the modern state or capitalism and all their works without pointing toward attainable alternatives. Notwithstanding the brilliance and originality of theologian John Milbank, this is a charge that can be leveled against his own writing—though it is encouraging that some writers associated with the Radical Orthodoxy movement (for example, Phillip Blond6) are beginning to take up the challenge of devising constructive alternatives.
Let me conclude, first by calling attention to the rich historical resources Christians have at their disposal as they take up this challenge, and second, by recognizing the contexts of secularism and pluralism within which they do so.
Christians who aspire to transform institutions will certainly require great gifts of courage, imagination, and innovation. Yet at the same time, they will also need to rediscover the deep veins of traditional Christian insight into the nature and purposes of institutions,7 in order then to critically reappropriate and rearticulate such insight for the radically new challenges of globalizing twenty-first-century societies. As the Brazos Press strapline puts it, they’ll need to find ways of bringing “the tradition alive.” And “the tradition” must be read to include not just the intellectual tradition but also the legacy of the practical witness of the saints. Here I mean not just those whom the church has officially venerated as such, but all faithful believers from all walks of life and all ages who have left behind durable, concrete institutional embodiments of love—schools, hospitals, political movements, and yes, business enterprises—that can still speak to and inspire us today as we seek to be faithful witnesses to the gospel in the challenging context of a globalizing but fragile twenty-first-century world.8
But what are the prospects for developing “faith-based” institutional proposals or models in a context so deeply penetrated by, on the one hand, secularist modes of thought (such as economic utilitarianism) and, on the other, a deepening pluralism of faiths? One of the striking—and at the same time disorienting—features of our current situation is that the latter is actually opening up spaces to resist the former: pluralism is undermining secularism. The growing recognition that no single faith perspective is able any longer to dominate public institutional life isn’t only corroding what’s left of Christian triumphalism, it’s also problematizing the two-centuries-old secularist presumption of a sole entitlement to shape the terms of modern institutional life. Combined with the creeping erosion of the modernist project that is driving our larger institutions, the experience of pluralism is now beginning to crack open the door through which we can glimpse the possibility of a new, post-secular institutional settlement.
In such a settlement, the classic institutions of modernity—corporations, universities, governments—will no longer be able to get away with presenting themselves, unchallenged, as guided exclusively by secular, objective, universal standards of rationality and as reliable guarantors of progress. The influence of contestable and contested faiths on their mode of operation will be increasingly evident, leaving space for alternative faith perspectives to make their distinctive contributions. These contributions could either be made from within existing institutions, formerly marginalized voices now acknowledged as worthy of a hearing. They’d appear as, for example, courses on Christian or Buddhist perspectives on health care in mainstream public universities or as so-called “sharia-compliant” financial instruments offered by leading banks (these already exist—but why are there no Torah-compliant ones yet?). Or they could be mounted from the platform of distinct institutions: openly faith-based social investment companies, credit unions, environmentally-friendly mining enterprises, property developers committed to social housing, fair-traded food coops,9 and so on.
These faith-based contributions should not, however, speak in tribal theological languages unintelligible to the wider publics whom they must perforce address and engage. Yet nor will they merely mimic the dated secular Esperanto that liberal secularists would still like to impose on the rest of us. In striking the right tone and content, they will be guided by communicative guidelines such as the following.
First, a great deal of faith-inspired language, especially Christian language spoken in Western or Western-influenced societies, is already perfectly intelligible to secular-minded people, and sometimes we need to call secularists’ bluff when they feign deafness in the presence of religiously inflected language. When Desmond Tutu called for the end of apartheid because “every human being is made in the image of God,” he didn’t have secularists scratching their head in puzzlement. In this sense, faith-inspired language can be “public” if the audience has already been historically shaped by the relevant faith.
Second, to secure support in a mixed public audience for a proposal to reform a particular institution (e.g., a corporation, university, or government), it is normally prudent, to say the least, to couch the proposal in terms of the subject matter of that institution (e.g., production, knowledge, or law) rather than to lead with one’s explicit faith language (e.g., blessing, revelation, or judgment). Such language will certainly be “public” because the subject matter in question is public. Yet it will not thereby have become “secular” or “neutral,” at least so long as its content remains continually fed by its deeper faith-based sources. There may be Desmond Tutu moments when our faith inspiration has to rise to the surface, but they’ll probably be the exception. The norm is more likely to be the principled practitioner I cited earlier, working below the radar in government and speaking in a sapiential register but guided by a larger vision of faith.
Finally, Christians will seek to be those, on the one hand, who stand ready to declare the “reasons for the hope that is within them” when the opportunity arises or the occasion demands, and those, on the other hand, whose words are “seasoned with salt”—committed to truth, winsome in tone, inviting of dialogue, hopeful of agreement.
And the prospects for success? That’s a modernist question.
____________________
Notes:
1. I will be using the term institution very broadly to include all types and sizes of social organization, association, corporation, et cetera, though I’ll focus explicitly on the larger ones.
2. The term megastructures comes from Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus’s linfluential essay of 1977, To Empower People, reprinted in a twentieth-anniversary edition, To Empower People: From State to Civil Society, ed. Michael Novak (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1996), 157-208.
3. See Bob Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress: A Diagnosis of Western Society (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1979).
4. See http://www.grameen-info.org/.
5. Cal Bailey, “Building God’s Empire or Ours? The Purpose of Work in Business,” Ethics in Brief 13.4 (Winter 2008), http://klice.co.uk/uploads/EiB/Bailey%20v13.4%20pub.pdf.
6. See his new think tank, ResPublica: http://www.respublica.org.uk/.
7. See, for example, Jeanne Heffernan Schindler, ed., Christianity and Civil Society: Catholic and Neo-Calvinist Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2008); Gordon Graham, ed., The Kuyper Center Review, vol. 1 of Politics, Religion, and Sphere Sovereignty (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010).
8. For various Christian readings of globalization, see, for example Michael W. Goheen and Erin G. Glanville, eds., The Gospel and Globalization: Exploring the Religious Roots of a Globalized World (Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing/Geneva Society, 2009); Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Healing a Broken World: Globalization and God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2002); James K. A. Smith, ed., After Modernity? Secularity, Globalization, and the Re-enchantment of the World (Waco, TX: Baylor Universty Press, 2008).
9. Here’s my local one: http://www.dailybread.co.uk/.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Friday, April 16, 2010
Article of the week: Rethinking Twilight (and friendly, sexy vampires)
The Problem with Twilight
By Josh Cacopardo
Published on April 9, 2010
http://www.curatormagazine.com/joshcacopardo/the-problem-with-twilight/
Before they became all the rage amongst sixth-graders, I wanted to write a story about vampires. I rode a wave of inspiration for about fifteen minutes before abandoning my project to the towering junk pile of books I never finished writing.
A few short years later, Stephanie Meyer would lead a parade of the tragically postmodern faux-undead in what is perhaps the most disappointing resurrection of an otherwise timeless monster. Now people ask me if I regret not finishing, that maybe I could have had some stake in the recent vampirical pay day. My answer is always no, which is typically met with accusations of jealousy. Don’t I wish I’d written a story like Twilight, they ask.
Now if a person has to ask me that question, they obviously don’t know me very well, because the answer is unequivocally no. But the Kool-Aid being served on the Twilight bandwagon is potent, and so I don’t take offense at such sentiments, misguided as they may be. In fact, I’ll even do you the favor of offering up my justifications for, up until now, ignoring everything that has ever spilled forth from the Twilight series.
First and foremost, Stephanie Meyer didn’t actually write a story about vampires. Instead, her version of the undead takes the fearsome mythological demons and turns them into emasculated prairie dogs, simultaneously delivering them up on an implied sexual platter to the freshly-excited hormones of the prepubescent and the perverted longings of the hopelessly romantic.
That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with fictional creatures evolving – I take very little issue with the Twilight vampires being able to wander around in the sun – but disregarding the root truth of vampires, which is that they are demonic and evil, and depicting any of the lot of them as capable of love for humans is irresponsible, and at the very least, ludicrous. As such, Meyer not only successfully bastardized the nature of vampires, but worse, she also encouraged (though I’d imagine unwittingly) a shamefully false sense of truth about that which is wholly good and that which is wholly evil.
Fantastical stories of romance have always been big sellers. From the Bible to Shakespeare to Danielle Steele, the tales that makes women swoon and men snicker (while swooning secretly so you’ll think we’re big and tough like the guys in those stories) continue to rank as The Most Read Stuff On The Planet. Trashy romance does exceptionally well; in fact, it makes up for the bulk of fiction novels sold. And granted, the rippling biceps described by the likes of Nora Roberts rarely, in reality, belong to men with a romantic sense of equal potency, but we tend to accept that on the premise that it is still within the potential of a man’s nature to behave as they do in those novels.
Meyer’s world, on the other hand, immediately breaks down in the consideration of nature because it is, by no means, natural for a vampire to fall in love with a human. And before the naysayers have a chance to play devil’s advocate here, let’s remember that one of the most defining characteristics of the undead is that they eat people. A vampire falling in love with a beautiful woman would be tantamount to me falling in love with a well-bred cow, and while you can argue that such a thing is disturbingly still within the realm of possibility, you should also admit that you wouldn’t want anything to do with me if that’s how it went down.
Such is not the case with dear Edward, whose warm tenderness manages to capture the hearts of women both fictional and otherwise as he insists that eating people makes him feel like a monster, although he seems to have accepted drinking animal blood as harmless enough.
And therein lies the rub: conflicted or not, Edward is a monster, not a man, and the consequence of Meyer’s fiction is that we are no longer able to see that through the trees. Not only that, but with his charming good looks and fairy-tale sensitivity, Meyer has made the monster into one of the Good Guys.
This is problematic because – whether we realize it or not – what we see, hear, read, and otherwise assimilate affects the way we see the world around us. For adults, perhaps this is permissible; we all need a little reality break from time to time. But Meyer’s base audience is not adults, but young adults who remain as easily-influenced as children while simultaneously being slammed by the same desires as their elders amidst the first inklings of developing a world view and morality – a dangerous recipe when it comes to stories as seductive as Twilight. In quiet suburbia, where no one understands poor Bella in a new and unfamiliar world, she finds solace in the mysterious bad boy with the intoxicating eyes, a wild smile, and an unclear sense of rebelliousness. After a flirtatious dance in a circle of mounting sexual tension, the bad boy sweeps the innocent girl from her feet and shows her what life (or is it death in this case?) is all about.
Still, the story of the good girl and the bad boy is as old as any story involving human nature, and I’ll even concede that vampire stories are often, if not always, sexualized in some way or another. Indeed, sexuality is part of the seductive nature of vampires, and arguably what makes them so dangerous in the first place (if you believe in mythological creatures, that is).
The problem with Edward and Bella – and most other surfacing stories of the undead – is that the seductiveness of the vampire is glorified, not condemned. Even in Bram Stoker’s original masterpiece, Mina feels nothing but wretchedness after being taken by Dracula; she dedicates herself to his destruction after the fact. Bella, on the other hand, takes a taste of damnation and decides to roll it around on her tongue for the rest of eternity. (An unfortunate irony, no doubt driven by the success of such stories, is that one of Bram’s descendents recently tarnished the revered name Stoker by publishing a sequel to Dracula which consists mostly of bloody lesbian sex, glorified alcoholism and morphine addiction, and, like Twilight, the choice to turn to the darkness for the sake of love.)
What’s worse is that both the Dracula sequel and Twilight are only extreme examples of a phenomenon happening to the modern vampire – indeed, even the modern monster – the world over. In our consumerist culture of sex and excess, fear has taken a backseat to desire. Monsters suddenly have feelings. Where feelings remain neglected, gore, sexuality, and general debauchery act as the springboards for tainted stories of torture and abuse, while other tales of misplaced redemption impair our ability to recognize evil for what it really is.
Whether rooted in mismanaged eroticism or flat out perversion, we have over-humanized creatures which, despite their appearances, have very little else in common with mankind. If the creatures themselves were the ones redeemed, then there might not be much to complain about; almost every decent work of literature relies on symbolism to convey a message.
But when the symbolism suggests that we humans can somehow safely cross to the dark side through a heart of erotic love, thereby finding some sense of eternal happiness, we jade ourselves and misguide our youths, thus further perpetuating the merciless consumerism which drives the majority of people and cultures. There’s nothing wrong with Eros and there’s nothing wrong with redemption. But the conveyance and use of such themes, like any other, bears a sense of responsibility which stories like Twilight disregard, while the people who read them continue to empower authors to propagate gross sublimation within the consumerism of a deprived race – namely, mankind.
Ultimately, this is the challenge and the curse for all artists: to commit to a responsible delivery and depiction of the stories and symbolism we use to better understand our world. A created world entirely devoid of evil wouldn’t do much good in helping us to better comprehend our own reality, but neither does a world where the evil is glorified – not only as desirable, but also as the thing which ends up being chosen. We will always have a choice between good and evil, but the idea that evil might ever be permissible as the right choice is both a tragically naïve idealism and a detriment to society as a whole.
If I ever do write my vampire story, I think I’ll make Bella and Edward part of its beginning. Five hundred years after Twilight, when the vampire couple is spending a romantic evening on a country hillside with a eclectic assortment of barnyard animals, innards spilled out on a picnic blanket in the worst distortion of prix fixe since Manhattan’s West Village, they’ll be seduced by Qumran, the vampire evangelist who convinces them that people are, after all, the finest of cuisines. Emotional and psychological chaos ensures, driving the Twilight twins to embark on a raging killing spree, numbing whatever human sympathy is left in them.
Then vampire-hunter extraordinaire, Abraham Van Helsing, ninety-seven years old but hell-bent on ridding the world of demons, will swoop down from the time machine he was secretly building with Jack Seward after the death of Count Dracula, single-handedly drop-kicking the heads off of all the world’s remaining undead, starting with Bella and Edward. Having put stakes in their hearts and garlic in their mouths, Van Helsing retires back to nineteenth-century England where, faced with the decision to properly publish his successful sojourn through time and his second victory over the damned, he decides instead to settle down in the isolation of a quaint villa in Messina, quietly passing from this life to the next without a single mention of the undead lovers he so valiantly slew. After all, some things are better left in the dusty, crooked confines of our imaginations.
By Josh Cacopardo
Published on April 9, 2010
http://www.curatormagazine.com/joshcacopardo/the-problem-with-twilight/
Before they became all the rage amongst sixth-graders, I wanted to write a story about vampires. I rode a wave of inspiration for about fifteen minutes before abandoning my project to the towering junk pile of books I never finished writing.
A few short years later, Stephanie Meyer would lead a parade of the tragically postmodern faux-undead in what is perhaps the most disappointing resurrection of an otherwise timeless monster. Now people ask me if I regret not finishing, that maybe I could have had some stake in the recent vampirical pay day. My answer is always no, which is typically met with accusations of jealousy. Don’t I wish I’d written a story like Twilight, they ask.
Now if a person has to ask me that question, they obviously don’t know me very well, because the answer is unequivocally no. But the Kool-Aid being served on the Twilight bandwagon is potent, and so I don’t take offense at such sentiments, misguided as they may be. In fact, I’ll even do you the favor of offering up my justifications for, up until now, ignoring everything that has ever spilled forth from the Twilight series.
First and foremost, Stephanie Meyer didn’t actually write a story about vampires. Instead, her version of the undead takes the fearsome mythological demons and turns them into emasculated prairie dogs, simultaneously delivering them up on an implied sexual platter to the freshly-excited hormones of the prepubescent and the perverted longings of the hopelessly romantic.
That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with fictional creatures evolving – I take very little issue with the Twilight vampires being able to wander around in the sun – but disregarding the root truth of vampires, which is that they are demonic and evil, and depicting any of the lot of them as capable of love for humans is irresponsible, and at the very least, ludicrous. As such, Meyer not only successfully bastardized the nature of vampires, but worse, she also encouraged (though I’d imagine unwittingly) a shamefully false sense of truth about that which is wholly good and that which is wholly evil.
Fantastical stories of romance have always been big sellers. From the Bible to Shakespeare to Danielle Steele, the tales that makes women swoon and men snicker (while swooning secretly so you’ll think we’re big and tough like the guys in those stories) continue to rank as The Most Read Stuff On The Planet. Trashy romance does exceptionally well; in fact, it makes up for the bulk of fiction novels sold. And granted, the rippling biceps described by the likes of Nora Roberts rarely, in reality, belong to men with a romantic sense of equal potency, but we tend to accept that on the premise that it is still within the potential of a man’s nature to behave as they do in those novels.
Meyer’s world, on the other hand, immediately breaks down in the consideration of nature because it is, by no means, natural for a vampire to fall in love with a human. And before the naysayers have a chance to play devil’s advocate here, let’s remember that one of the most defining characteristics of the undead is that they eat people. A vampire falling in love with a beautiful woman would be tantamount to me falling in love with a well-bred cow, and while you can argue that such a thing is disturbingly still within the realm of possibility, you should also admit that you wouldn’t want anything to do with me if that’s how it went down.
Such is not the case with dear Edward, whose warm tenderness manages to capture the hearts of women both fictional and otherwise as he insists that eating people makes him feel like a monster, although he seems to have accepted drinking animal blood as harmless enough.
And therein lies the rub: conflicted or not, Edward is a monster, not a man, and the consequence of Meyer’s fiction is that we are no longer able to see that through the trees. Not only that, but with his charming good looks and fairy-tale sensitivity, Meyer has made the monster into one of the Good Guys.
This is problematic because – whether we realize it or not – what we see, hear, read, and otherwise assimilate affects the way we see the world around us. For adults, perhaps this is permissible; we all need a little reality break from time to time. But Meyer’s base audience is not adults, but young adults who remain as easily-influenced as children while simultaneously being slammed by the same desires as their elders amidst the first inklings of developing a world view and morality – a dangerous recipe when it comes to stories as seductive as Twilight. In quiet suburbia, where no one understands poor Bella in a new and unfamiliar world, she finds solace in the mysterious bad boy with the intoxicating eyes, a wild smile, and an unclear sense of rebelliousness. After a flirtatious dance in a circle of mounting sexual tension, the bad boy sweeps the innocent girl from her feet and shows her what life (or is it death in this case?) is all about.
Still, the story of the good girl and the bad boy is as old as any story involving human nature, and I’ll even concede that vampire stories are often, if not always, sexualized in some way or another. Indeed, sexuality is part of the seductive nature of vampires, and arguably what makes them so dangerous in the first place (if you believe in mythological creatures, that is).
The problem with Edward and Bella – and most other surfacing stories of the undead – is that the seductiveness of the vampire is glorified, not condemned. Even in Bram Stoker’s original masterpiece, Mina feels nothing but wretchedness after being taken by Dracula; she dedicates herself to his destruction after the fact. Bella, on the other hand, takes a taste of damnation and decides to roll it around on her tongue for the rest of eternity. (An unfortunate irony, no doubt driven by the success of such stories, is that one of Bram’s descendents recently tarnished the revered name Stoker by publishing a sequel to Dracula which consists mostly of bloody lesbian sex, glorified alcoholism and morphine addiction, and, like Twilight, the choice to turn to the darkness for the sake of love.)
What’s worse is that both the Dracula sequel and Twilight are only extreme examples of a phenomenon happening to the modern vampire – indeed, even the modern monster – the world over. In our consumerist culture of sex and excess, fear has taken a backseat to desire. Monsters suddenly have feelings. Where feelings remain neglected, gore, sexuality, and general debauchery act as the springboards for tainted stories of torture and abuse, while other tales of misplaced redemption impair our ability to recognize evil for what it really is.
Whether rooted in mismanaged eroticism or flat out perversion, we have over-humanized creatures which, despite their appearances, have very little else in common with mankind. If the creatures themselves were the ones redeemed, then there might not be much to complain about; almost every decent work of literature relies on symbolism to convey a message.
But when the symbolism suggests that we humans can somehow safely cross to the dark side through a heart of erotic love, thereby finding some sense of eternal happiness, we jade ourselves and misguide our youths, thus further perpetuating the merciless consumerism which drives the majority of people and cultures. There’s nothing wrong with Eros and there’s nothing wrong with redemption. But the conveyance and use of such themes, like any other, bears a sense of responsibility which stories like Twilight disregard, while the people who read them continue to empower authors to propagate gross sublimation within the consumerism of a deprived race – namely, mankind.
Ultimately, this is the challenge and the curse for all artists: to commit to a responsible delivery and depiction of the stories and symbolism we use to better understand our world. A created world entirely devoid of evil wouldn’t do much good in helping us to better comprehend our own reality, but neither does a world where the evil is glorified – not only as desirable, but also as the thing which ends up being chosen. We will always have a choice between good and evil, but the idea that evil might ever be permissible as the right choice is both a tragically naïve idealism and a detriment to society as a whole.
If I ever do write my vampire story, I think I’ll make Bella and Edward part of its beginning. Five hundred years after Twilight, when the vampire couple is spending a romantic evening on a country hillside with a eclectic assortment of barnyard animals, innards spilled out on a picnic blanket in the worst distortion of prix fixe since Manhattan’s West Village, they’ll be seduced by Qumran, the vampire evangelist who convinces them that people are, after all, the finest of cuisines. Emotional and psychological chaos ensures, driving the Twilight twins to embark on a raging killing spree, numbing whatever human sympathy is left in them.
Then vampire-hunter extraordinaire, Abraham Van Helsing, ninety-seven years old but hell-bent on ridding the world of demons, will swoop down from the time machine he was secretly building with Jack Seward after the death of Count Dracula, single-handedly drop-kicking the heads off of all the world’s remaining undead, starting with Bella and Edward. Having put stakes in their hearts and garlic in their mouths, Van Helsing retires back to nineteenth-century England where, faced with the decision to properly publish his successful sojourn through time and his second victory over the damned, he decides instead to settle down in the isolation of a quaint villa in Messina, quietly passing from this life to the next without a single mention of the undead lovers he so valiantly slew. After all, some things are better left in the dusty, crooked confines of our imaginations.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Movie (Review) in a Moment: Avatar
This past weekend I had opportunity to see the new James Cameron film, Avatar. Judging by the astounding box office sales (75+ million over 3 days), I was not alone. Courtesy of the Galleria 6 and not a few contractual obligations relating to screening Avatar, I was also among the many who had a very pleasant 3D experience. As to the film itself, well...
Visually, Avatar is stunning. Cameron's dedication to producing film technology in order to produce film has ensured that the world of Pandora and its people, the Na'Vi, are quite compelling to watch. Perhaps the best compliment I can pay Cameron is to note that the world he has created is the best I have seen since Star Wars. (In addition, Cameron's inhabitants engender far more sympathy than Lucas' Jar Jar Binks who later came to Tatooine). Because this is a 'movie in a moment' I will neither gush nor go into great detail about the mimetic world of Pandora. I will simply repeat that visually, Avatar is stunning. Undoubtedly this is one of those films that will redefine cinema.
In terms of story, Avatar holds its own (at least for two out of three acts) but it is definitely a visual feast first. This is not to suggest, however, that Avatar is without something to say. On the contrary, costing between 300 and 500 million Avatar is one of Hollywood's most expensive sermons. It's three points seem to be a critique of Bush doctrine ('winning hearts and minds," alongside a campaign of "shock and awe"); an expose of human greed and rapaciousness (primarily practiced by economically developed and militarily capable cultures); and an apologetic for pantheism (in which 'god' is identified with a monistic universe and the Gaia hypothesis is championed).
This sermonic element is not new, indeed we have heard Avatar's message before in films like Dances With Wolves. Broadly summarized: Military man pushes forward into new territory, trusting in the military hierarchy and its doctrine. Military man becomes detached from the military and its vision as he sees afresh the flora and fauna of an area untouched by developed or dominant culture. Contact with native peoples moves from suspicion and fear through curiosity, to appreciation, to deeper understanding, all the way to acceptance and finally identifying and belonging. The military man is now no longer. He has become -showing himself to be truly cultured and properly fulfilled- one with nature and with those who live in harmony with nature; even to the point of siding with his new family and tribe against dominant culture and its agenda. I am not sure that Dances With Wolves was terribly subtle in its critique and criticisms, but Avatar has all the subtlety of a brick thrown through a plate glass window. The almost 3 hour long sermon that Avatar preaches was, to my ears, simply shrill.
To be fair, there are some good things that could be said. From a biblical-theistic point of view there are 'echoes of Eden' that can be discerned in Avatar. There are also instances of critique that would resonate with those of the biblical prophets. And so my advice is not to shun this film. But overall I left my seat in the cinema relieved that this sermon had ended. The imprint on my nose from my 3D glasses helped to remind me that I had seen something amazing. But the Na'Vi's psychic/sexual(?) bonding with their creatures, their orgiastic worship at the Tree of Souls, their trust in and communing with an impersonal deity (Eywa), who promises little more than to 'maintain balance of life,' all left me concerned at the promotion of the fatally flawed worldview that animates the Avatar story. More positively, it also left me thankful for the infinite-personal God of the Bible.
In the biblical tradition, God, infinite in his being, power and goodness, made this world and all in it. Although distinct from the created order yet he is nonetheless personally acquainted with the world and personally active within it. Moreover, because He is a person, we can cry out to Him and expect to be heard and helped. (In this regard, one wonders how the impersonal Eywa can actually answer the prayers of the Na'Vi and of Jake Sully? At this point, James Cameron is borrowing from the Christian tradition to bolster his pantheism). Certainly this God does call us, his image-bearers, to steward and to manage the created order, but with compassion, with wisdom, and with the knowledge that we as creatures are in many ways quite dependent upon our earthly environment. That Cameron draws attention to our serious failures in this regard ought to rest heavy with us. Rather than becoming defensive about the source of this barb, let us instead confess our ecological sin, repent of our arrogance toward nature, and keep a beneficent relationship with all that God has created and given us to care for and live amid. Psalm 8 comes flooding to mind. Read it prior to heading off to the theatre. Read it again post-Avatar and employ it as a rubric for thinking through what you heard.
Surely much more could be said, but as this is intended to be just a 'movie (review) in a moment' I will sign off here. For fuller reviews, see:
Ty Burr: http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2009/12/17/avatar_is_an_out_of_body_experience/?page=full
Roger Ebert: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091211/REVIEWS/912119998
Ross Douthart: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-douthat_1224edi.State.Edition1.244baae.html
Visually, Avatar is stunning. Cameron's dedication to producing film technology in order to produce film has ensured that the world of Pandora and its people, the Na'Vi, are quite compelling to watch. Perhaps the best compliment I can pay Cameron is to note that the world he has created is the best I have seen since Star Wars. (In addition, Cameron's inhabitants engender far more sympathy than Lucas' Jar Jar Binks who later came to Tatooine). Because this is a 'movie in a moment' I will neither gush nor go into great detail about the mimetic world of Pandora. I will simply repeat that visually, Avatar is stunning. Undoubtedly this is one of those films that will redefine cinema.
In terms of story, Avatar holds its own (at least for two out of three acts) but it is definitely a visual feast first. This is not to suggest, however, that Avatar is without something to say. On the contrary, costing between 300 and 500 million Avatar is one of Hollywood's most expensive sermons. It's three points seem to be a critique of Bush doctrine ('winning hearts and minds," alongside a campaign of "shock and awe"); an expose of human greed and rapaciousness (primarily practiced by economically developed and militarily capable cultures); and an apologetic for pantheism (in which 'god' is identified with a monistic universe and the Gaia hypothesis is championed).
This sermonic element is not new, indeed we have heard Avatar's message before in films like Dances With Wolves. Broadly summarized: Military man pushes forward into new territory, trusting in the military hierarchy and its doctrine. Military man becomes detached from the military and its vision as he sees afresh the flora and fauna of an area untouched by developed or dominant culture. Contact with native peoples moves from suspicion and fear through curiosity, to appreciation, to deeper understanding, all the way to acceptance and finally identifying and belonging. The military man is now no longer. He has become -showing himself to be truly cultured and properly fulfilled- one with nature and with those who live in harmony with nature; even to the point of siding with his new family and tribe against dominant culture and its agenda. I am not sure that Dances With Wolves was terribly subtle in its critique and criticisms, but Avatar has all the subtlety of a brick thrown through a plate glass window. The almost 3 hour long sermon that Avatar preaches was, to my ears, simply shrill.
To be fair, there are some good things that could be said. From a biblical-theistic point of view there are 'echoes of Eden' that can be discerned in Avatar. There are also instances of critique that would resonate with those of the biblical prophets. And so my advice is not to shun this film. But overall I left my seat in the cinema relieved that this sermon had ended. The imprint on my nose from my 3D glasses helped to remind me that I had seen something amazing. But the Na'Vi's psychic/sexual(?) bonding with their creatures, their orgiastic worship at the Tree of Souls, their trust in and communing with an impersonal deity (Eywa), who promises little more than to 'maintain balance of life,' all left me concerned at the promotion of the fatally flawed worldview that animates the Avatar story. More positively, it also left me thankful for the infinite-personal God of the Bible.
In the biblical tradition, God, infinite in his being, power and goodness, made this world and all in it. Although distinct from the created order yet he is nonetheless personally acquainted with the world and personally active within it. Moreover, because He is a person, we can cry out to Him and expect to be heard and helped. (In this regard, one wonders how the impersonal Eywa can actually answer the prayers of the Na'Vi and of Jake Sully? At this point, James Cameron is borrowing from the Christian tradition to bolster his pantheism). Certainly this God does call us, his image-bearers, to steward and to manage the created order, but with compassion, with wisdom, and with the knowledge that we as creatures are in many ways quite dependent upon our earthly environment. That Cameron draws attention to our serious failures in this regard ought to rest heavy with us. Rather than becoming defensive about the source of this barb, let us instead confess our ecological sin, repent of our arrogance toward nature, and keep a beneficent relationship with all that God has created and given us to care for and live amid. Psalm 8 comes flooding to mind. Read it prior to heading off to the theatre. Read it again post-Avatar and employ it as a rubric for thinking through what you heard.
Surely much more could be said, but as this is intended to be just a 'movie (review) in a moment' I will sign off here. For fuller reviews, see:
Ty Burr: http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2009/12/17/avatar_is_an_out_of_body_experience/?page=full
Roger Ebert: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091211/REVIEWS/912119998
Ross Douthart: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-douthat_1224edi.State.Edition1.244baae.html
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