After the Future

October 25, 2009

Futile Culture Wars

I’m with Barzun. The West is decadent. Decadence happens, and like winter it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just a time that doesn’t have much exterior spiritual energy anymore–the…

My response (with a few slight edits) to a Jame Poulos post at Postmodern Conservative, "Why the Culture Wars Won't Die." My argument is that while he might be right that these wars won't die, like most wars they are futile waste of energy that serve the interests of people who are not on the front lines. I'm quoting commenter Matoko Chan in the opening epigraph:

There is no “Culture War”.

There is only cultural and demographic evolution.
No religio/demographic group can fight cultural evolution.

I'm with Matoko Chan. The anything-goes folks vs. the honor-the-ancestors-folks have been fighting a war that has little relevance to culture or to the future of culture. Culture happens. And cultures die or at least experience winter seasons, which perhaps will give way after a while to a springtime. The winter season of the 14th century gave way to the springtime of the 15th.

I'm with Barzun. The West is decadent. Decadence happens, and like winter it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just a time that doesn't have much exterior spiritual energy anymore–the spirit has gone underground, so to speak, into the soul's interior. And since the whole movement of salvation history has been a movement from outer to inner, from given to chosen, from the law given on slabs of stone on Sinai to the law written in the heart after Pentecos, it's understandable that the outer trappings of Christian Civilization should gradually become emptied and less relevant for the living of the faith.

I'm with Nietzsche. He was just observing what had become inarguable. Not that God was dead, but that He wasn't to be found in cultural/civilizational forms out there. Sure the forms exist, but with a few exceptions these forms have as much relevancy to the spirit that once animated them as the New York St. Patrick's Day parade has to the spirit St. Patrick. They are dead forms animated by the undead energies of nostalgia, jingoism, and other vulgar passions. Conservatives simply don't want to face up to this truth, and keep fighting this battle for a zombie culture, and in doing so are looking for love in all the wrong places–out there in the mainstream culture. They are fighting for the preservation of cultural forms that were shaped by spiritual cultural energies that simply no longer exist.

Look. I'm a trinitarian Christian. I go to mass and I believe in the real presence. I see the mass as the central event, the time when we reenact Christ's living into our death so that we may in turn die into his Life. I look forward to the retrieval of a kind of sensibility that naturally understands the world sacramentally, numinously, and I believe that's in our future, but it's not how we commonly experience the world now. And that retrieval, if it happens, will not depend on the preservation of medieval forms or some dream of Christendom's return. All that matters is that the mass be celebrated, that men and women of conscience, whether believers or unbelievers, respond to the ubiquity of grace that they, we all, swim in, and culture will take care of itself.

Focus your energies where they might actually bear fruit. This culture war business is futile nonsense. Let Christians live deeply their Christianity and let them find ways to renew the face of the earth, and if they do it, not through some head trip bent on preserving the unpreservable, but in radical trust that God has a future for us, all shall be well.

Comments

4 responses

Patrick

October 25, 2009

This post hits hard. I’m a fan.
Only one quibble. Why must decadence be morally neutral? Surely if we recognize that sin is something collective as much as individual (you’ve written about this before), we don’t need to suspend moral judgment when observing the emptiness of the values which drive a certain society.

Reply
Jack Whelan

October 25, 2009

Patrick–
Let me reply by quoting myself quoting Barzun:
“We are at the end of something and the beginning of something. Jacques Barzun in From Dawn to Decadence, his wonderful book about the birth, flourishing, and dying of the Modern Age, uses the word decadence in a non-pejorative way. For him the word simply describes objectively the end of something that once flourished. “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal,“ he writes, “the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur, it is a technical label.” Decadence, he says, “. . . implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns but peculiarly restless for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility.” ”
There’s a time for growth, and there’s a time for decay. It’s just the way things work in the organic life world, including the lives of cultures. Decaying plantlife is ugly, but it’s not immoral.
So if we accept that we’re in a period of cultural decay, it means that we have to accept that there is not a lot going on outside that helps us to live comfortably. We have to go inside, and that’s what a lot of people are doing.
My point in this post is that conservatives want to believe it’s still summer when it’s in fact winter. You can’t grow your tomatoes in winter, not outside anyway. You can’t keep alive what naturally decays out of season, and you can plant your seeds and water and fertilize them, but they just aren’t going to sprout until spring. The point is that not that there should be no moral effort during a decadent period, just effort that appropriate for the time.
That’s my beef with cultural conservatives. They don’t like the cold and so insist on bringing back summer. Rather they should be doing what’s necessary to prepare for spring. They don’t believe in the future, so they’ve made an idol of the wooden forms of the past. The forms don’t matter; only the life that gave them shape matters.
As should be clear from my post and other things I’ve written, I see the mass as in a transcultural category by itself. It’s as little understood by westerners as it is by a Chinaman. But I believe that the essence of Christianity is transcultural, but requires a childlike mode of cognition to get it no matter what one’s cultural background. This for the educated means learning second naivete.
PS Quote is from intro to a book I’m trying to write: Here’s a link to a page where you can see the whole intro: http://afterthefuture.typepad.com/afterthefuture/introduction-at-the-end-of-an-age-the-beginning-of-an-age.html#_ftn6
My wilderness metaphor is similar to the winter metaphor. Both are austere times when the pickens are slim. You have to find an interior strength in such seasons or places.

Reply
Patrick

October 26, 2009

Jack,
Thanks for the response. I’ll have a bit more to say at some point about the moral content–or lack thereof–of decadence in Barzun’s usage, but I’d mostly like to say thanks for the look at your book intro. It’s phenomenal.
One thing I would point out is that, if anything, the eschatological model you’re gesturing toward is *more* orthodox than most mainstream Christianity.
Have you read N.T. Wright’s “Surprised by Hope?” Here he is on Colbert last year: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/174352/june-19-2008/bishop-n-t–wright
Apparently Wright has been attacked by lots of the American neo-Calvinist crowd, which is quite rich because it’s essentially contextual exegesis. [As an Eastern Orthodox Christian, I must say there is an exquisite irony at the heart of most Western religion: the further a theology’s ostensible roots are from Hellas, the more Hellenistic its bedrock assumptions seem to be.]
Anyway, one thing to think about is that just as there are winter phases historically speaking, there are also winter person-types who, regardless of the present season have something valuable to teach the world. The Desert Fathers themselves lived largely during a Christian springtime; amidst the construction of grand cathedrals, a creative explosion of theology, and the end of State persecution for Christians, these monastics chose to focus on the inner spiritual life in a time of outer flourishing. You’ve gotten at this before (the warm day in autumn, the need to live in tension), but it’s worth bringing up in this specific context.

Reply
Jack Whelan

October 29, 2009

The Desert Fathers are models precisely for their seeking an interior springtime that has little to do with cultural cycles. As such they are models for us no matter what the season. But my point is that if for them it was necessary to flee into the wasteland, the wasteland has come to us, and the spiritual challenge for us as individuals and in groups is to find that interior springtime and to iive it no matter what the season.

Reply

Futile Culture Wars

Comments

4 responses

Leave a Reply Cancel reply