Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Thank you.
This is a bit of a daunting challenge to address a group at this hour on Friday night on such substantive issues when I should just be showing my music video.
Alas, it's still in production and awaits its debut.
The topic before me in the two lectures and the issues we'll discuss during the workshop tomorrow concerns what could be labeled cultural apologetics.
It's kind of a vague term, and I think what it means is the aspect of apologetics which is concerned with understanding the culture in which the arguments that defend the faith are being made.
Because the task of apologetics is principally the task of defending Christian truth against its deniers or despisers.
And the form of that defense, as Professor Geisler has ably demonstrated and reminded us tonight, has classically been the making of logical arguments.
Now, there have always been those who avoid the rigor of these arguments as presented by apologists by retreating to some form of irrationalism.
And apologists who are worth their salt are usually quick to ferret out irrationalism and shame people by it.
But that was, For the deniers of the faith, a sense of admitting defeat.
And it was a sense of admitting a defeat, because the culture at large was generally sympathetic to logical discourse as a means to discover truth and was generally sympathetic to truth as an ordering principle of life.
It was that great skeptic himself, Thomas Jefferson, who said, truth is great and will prevail if left to herself.
But Mr. Jefferson had not watched MTV, and truth has not been left to itself. And therein hangs our tale for the next hour and tomorrow I'd like to read from an Op Ed piece that appeared in the New York Times a couple of months ago, written by Robert W. Pittman, one of the great cultural icons of our day. I'm sure all of you are familiar with Robert W. Pittman.
He's a senior executive at Time Warner Incorporated. But more significantly, he's the man who dreamed up MTV and probably will have at least a footnote in the cultural history of the late 20th century.
Let me read part of this. This is under a subheading of occasional pieces that the Times has been running in the Op Ed section under the heading Voices of the New Generation.
Generations who grew up with TV communicate differently than previous generations, yet many have not caught onto this phenomenon. This is a problem because we're losing the younger generation to a host of societal ills, despite all our efforts to reach it. We're talking the wrong language. What is this new mode of communications? Here are some examples. In 1984, Ronald Reagan summed up his presidential campaign with an 18 minute music video in 1988. George Bush communicated an attitude, not issues, through powerful images. His grandchildren Willie Horton, Boston Bay, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren did not need copywriters for their recent magazine advertisements. There's no copy, just pictures in newspapers, from USA Today to the New York Times. Graphs, charts and larger than ever pictures tell the big story at a glance.
Today's movie scripts are some 25% shorter than those of the 1940s for the same length movies look too at cable TV programming such as MTV, little plug there, and CNN Headline News. These are all reflections of a new way of communicating that is most effective with those who have grown up with tv. Call them baby boomers, TV babies, or the post Watergate generation. They have one thing in common that distinguishes them from their parents. The way they receive and process information, inform ideas. These are the people who are now creating magazines, newspapers, books, movies, fashion and art, not to mention recreating TV.
In 1981, when developing MTV, we identified this profound difference. The pre pre TV adults are the one thing at a time generation.
They read a magazine article straight through from beginning to end.
Then they make a phone call or watch tv. The TV babies, by contrast, seem to be happy processing information from different sources almost simultaneously. They really can do their homework, watch tv, talk on the phone and listen to the radio all at the same time.
Jay Leno's remarks on a similar comment was no wonder the Japanese are ahead of us.
It's as if information from each source finds its way to a different cluster of thoughts. I would have put the word thoughts in quotation marks at that point and at the end of the evening, it all makes sense.
Because of tv, perhaps. TV babies seem to perceive visual messages better. That is, through sense impression, they can read a picture or understand body language at a glance.
Now listen to this last paragraph that I'll read, which I think is the most interesting. At least part of the generation gap of the 60s was a communication gap.
I am a member of the first wave of this TV generation, and I remember receiving a totally different message about the Vietnam War than my parents. From the same TV newscast, I watched the pictures.
My parents who grew up on radio, listened to the commentary.
The video message conflicted with the narrative one. And so when it came to an opinion about the war, I was in conflict with my parents.
I'd like to enter this as Exhibit A.
Exhibit B is from a recent issue of Christianity Today magazine, a short piece by David Wells, who teaches historical and systematic Theology at Gordon Conwell Seminary. A rebuttal of his to a well, not really a rebuttal response that he was offering to an article that they had published about recent trends in the evolution of evangelical theology. Just one paragraph in moving from a print oriented to an image oriented culture, our mental habits have been profoundly transformed. Print requires linear thinking following the sequence of ideas as they unfold through the words our video culture destroys. This society asks of us not logic, but an emptiness that will be filled with images whose interconnections may be non existent. I should say whose logical interconnections may be non existent. So we distrust logic but not feelings which we feel compelled often to share.
I think Wells has hit on the tip of an iceberg that I would like to try to diagram a little more closely over the course of the next and what I'd like to do is to try to look at some of the cultural setting in which television's role as a dominant medium of communication fosters more than just feel good religion.
And I'm particularly interested in the extent to which Christians have accepted this thesis that is advanced by people like Pitman that truth is really an outmoded print based concept and that argument is about as compelling as a threat of excommunication.
I'm also interested in the way in which the rejection of argument in our culture is not something that people argue about.
Pittman's op ed piece is the closest that I've seen to making an argument for and actually he doesn't even make an argument for the propriety of it. He just says that it's there. This is now the spirit of the age, this is now the sensibility of our time.
And I don't know of any media theorist who says that who makes an argument as to why an image based culture that rejects traditional forms of logic and rejects argument in favor of a theory of communication that emphasizes how you respond at a level of feeling. I haven't seen any of the theorists say that this is better or superior and they can't make that argument because that is to rely on the very print based logic that they reject or feel is outmoded or can't even remember. Relate to.
That last point is the most important and the most terrifying to me because I do believe that there can be in the evolution of a culture a point at which the gospel falls on deaf ears not merely for spirit spiritual reasons, but because of the fact that there is literally the cultural inability to understand the premises.
Many missionaries to non Christian countries that have not been touched at all by Christianity or the Western tradition, often talk about how necessary it is for them to teach concepts of truth and concepts of forgiveness and concepts of history and concepts of time and trans transcendence and all these other things that are often taken for granted, or at least to this point, have been taken for granted in our own culture. But these concepts have to be taught before any reasonable proclamation of the gospel can be made.
And I fear that we are entering a phase in our culture that is post Christian, not only in the sense of the values that dominate, but in terms of the sensibility, the mood and consciousness, if you will, the spirit of the age, which has no feeling for truth, which has no sense that an argument ought to be something that is compelling, that an argument requires a response, that an argument articulates a crisis that I must react to.
And that is a terrifying state of affairs.
I think it's desperately needed for the Church's apologists to become more alert to the sensibilities of our culture. Not so that they can pander to them, which we see a lot of, well, catechisms are kind of out because they're so linear. Why don't we do a video of what we believe?
That is not the answer, I don't think.
Instead, I think the apologists need to counsel the church on ways in which the church itself unwittingly fosters the very sensibilities that are undercutting the message and are ripping the ground out from under us as we try to take a firm stand and defend the faith.
That is a difficult task because it requires an alertness to the culture and a history of the culture that is sadly lacking in orthodox circles. That lament, however, is a topic for another lecture.
Much of our own culture sensibilities have a long history. They're not something that just happened in 1981, when MTV was invented or when they took prayer out of the schools, or there's not some neat point that we can point to and say that was the turning point in these sensibilities.
I will focus tonight principally on relatively recent crystallization of those sensibilities in the 1950s and 1960s, and look back at some of the anticipation of that in the 19th century.
But first, a word from our sponsor. Actually, a word from my sponsor.
I. I will be drawing heavily on material from my book, which was mentioned earlier, and I hope it's at the book table.
And tomorrow you will be given, through some mechanism or other, a flyer that looks like this for the newsletter that I edit, which is an effort to engage in an ongoing dialogue about these very issues.
So I would heartily commend that you look at that and take it seriously.
And now back to our story.
When people talk about the 60s, they're not really talking about a decade, but about a revolution in culture.
The 60s is a phrase that happens to have a numerical form, but it's a phrase that's more like the Reformation or the Enlightenment, because it summarizes a range of ideas of social and cultural realignments and of changes in popular consciousness.
So we can summarize. We can just say, oh, yes, that's from the 60s.
Now, many of you, the 60s is virtually ancient history, which I'm starting to feel like an adult finally, which is probably good for me.
Now, Strictly speaking, the 1960s lasted from 1960 until 1969.
But the 60s, capital T, capital S, really began in about 1952 and lasted until about 1973.
It was like a flying saucer landed, said Bob Dylan, Looking back at that turbulent period from the vantage point of 1985. That's what the 60s were like.
Everybody heard about it, but only a few really saw it.
Not only did everybody hear about it, but the lives of all Americans, and increasingly of almost everyone in the world has been changed by these changes in the 1960s, whether or not they're aware that anything happened.
One of the things that happened was an apparently lasting change in attitudes about culture. At least its. It has persevered till now. It's not a great time, but I don't see signs of this easily being reversed.
The book by a person named William L. O', Neill, who wrote a book called Coming Apart, which was an aptly titled book about the 1960s. And he described it this way. During the decade, cultivated people, excuse me, cultivated people used to feel that there was a clear line between high culture and popular culture.
In the 1960s, this simple faith, already badly strained, collapsed.
The resulting inability to distinguish between art and entertainment was one of the two most important cultural facts of the 1960s.
The other was the growth of what became known as the counterculture. It was related to the first in that critical standards had to blur if what the counterculture did was to be called art.
And as morality followed art, the old moral values had to give way if the new standards were to be called virtuous.
In 1968, David Cross, a critic who was quite sympathetic to the changes that were underway, wrote in the journal Radical America that high culture has lost its transcendent spirituality and has become subject to the laws of the market.
Art Critic Hilton Kramer, who was at the New York Times when the flying saucer landed, has a similar analysis. In an article written after the death of andy Warhol in 1987, Kramer attributes Warhol's success to his genius for the world of fashion. A lot of people don't realize, but Andy Warhol was originally a fashion illustrated. He did shoes.
And Kramer argues that by the late 1950s, the values of the fashion world had come to dominate the world of high culture. The world of high culture used to be dominated by notions of truth and beauty and eternal values and transcendence and all those sorts of things.
By the late 1950s, the fashion world and its sense of ephemeral, trendy values had already taken over the bastions of high culture, and Warhol was simply one of the first to recognize that fact and to capitalize on it so well.
Warhol had worked, as I said, drawing shoes, but he quite cannily realized where the prestige and the money was. It wasn't in drawing shoes, but it was in the increasingly degraded world of high art.
And now, a quote from Kramer, art, no matter how debased, still offered a kind of status that was denied to advertising. But otherwise, there were now fewer and fewer differences separating the art world from the advertising world. The ethos was getting to be essentially the same. Success was the goal. The media would provide the means of achieving it. And what the media loved more than anything else, certainly a lot more than art, was a product that was based on their own stock in trade.
As everyone knows, the art world never really recovered from this fateful incursion as a movement. Pop art came and went in a flash, but it was a kind of flash that left everything changed. The art public was now a different public, larger, to be sure, but less serious, less introspective, less willing or able to distinguish between achievement and its trashy imitation.
Moreover, everything connected with the life of art, everything anyway, that might have been expected to offer some resistance to this wholesale vulgarization and demoralization was now cheapened and corrupted. When the boundary separating art and fashion was breached, so was the dividing line between high art and popular culture, and upon all those institutions and professions which had been painstakingly created to preserve high art from the corruptions of popular culture, the effect was devastating.
Some surrendered their standards with greater alacrity than others, but the drift was unmistakable and all in the same direction. And the momentum has only accelerated with the passage of time.
Hilton Kramer High culture, with its discipline, with its standards, with its convictions about truth, about objective reality, about the Dignity of man, all convictions that it owed to the Christian influence in Western civilization, High culture surrendered to popular culture and adapted its ways.
And as long as art was dominated by the dynamics of fashion, such serious concerns about truth, about beauty, about the dignity of man, these concerns were out of the question. They could not be raised by artists, as one observer has explained, of clear distinctions, of question, of good and bad, of how things really are. The fashionable mind could hardly care less.
It never asks of itself, what do I truly think? What do I really believe? But instead, what can I get away with appearing to believe?
But the artists and the collectors and the art promoters aren't the only ones to blame for this culture of degeneration that set in the late 50s and 1960s. The critics themselves, those who have traditionally been the guardians of culture, were worse than negligent.
Joseph Epstein has observed that when the art critics are performing their proper job, art is in the position to adopt a sports metaphor of a confident and well coached.
But these rigorous duties have been ignored.
Epstein says, Instead of performing the function of a coach, over the past 15 or 20 years, criticism has become a cheerleader, jumping up and down, screaming on the sidelines, displaying its knobby knees, and occasionally revealing itself to be wearing no underpants under its short skirt. It has not only lost control of the game, but has become an off the field exhibition of its own.
Meanwhile, out on the field, players shuffle in and out, every man for himself, each running his own eccentric patterns, while confusion reigns and the game all but falls apart. Such as the condition of art in our day.
Now, the story of how and why this chaotic state of affairs came to be is one that Christians ought to familiarize themselves with more.
But before we begin to examine that story, let's say something about the place of American evangelicals in the in the midst of that cultural change.
And I find it one of the great ironies of history that evangelicalism was doing what it was doing at the time when the culture was doing what it was doing. And one of the things I'm looking forward to in heaven is finding out how God in this master script connived that these intersecting paths would cross when they did.
At the Beginning of the 1960s, evangelicals were, for the most part, inhabiting a cultural ghetto.
They were invisible to the mainstream culture, and they really preferred it that way.
They were not engaged with the kinds of cultural debates that were dominated by intellectual leaders of the 1950s, thinkers and writers such as Hannah Arendt, T.S. eliot, Reinhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzin in a sense, kind of the last great harvest of intellectual life in our culture.
But evangelicalism began to emerge from this self imposed cultural ghetto in the 1960s, in this fateful decade. And one of the signs of that emergence was in the late 1960s, the publication of the early works of Francis Schaeffer.
This was the very first time within evangelical circles that issues in the arts and humanities were deemed appropriate areas of consideration for non specialists.
And by the late 1960s, early 1970s, evangelical laymen were reading about John Cage and Jean Paul Sartre, which they never had before. A friend told me he once heard Billy Graham talk about that existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. Now I don't know if that's, I don't know if it's true or not, but it does illustrate the level of understanding of evangelicals of the culture at large.
In 1970, InterVarsity Press published a book by an art historian from the Free University of Amsterdam, H.R. ruckmacher, called Modern Art and the Death of the Culture.
Evangelical Christians began to pay serious attention to high culture at the very moment when high culture was no longer serious about itself.
And that is one of the greatest of tragedies, because I use the analogy of this being like being denied entrance to an art museum. Imagine you grew up in a European city and all of your life you've seen this beautiful building and you were told, no, Christians don't go in there. Christians don't look at paintings. We don't have anything to do with culture at large.
And one day it finally dawns on your church that we ought to be looking at those pictures.
And unbeknownst to you, the night before they took all the masters out and they brought in a bunch of mavericks.
They brought in the kind of, they brought in Andy Warhol and they brought in a lot worse.
But you were just so excited to get to the museum that you thought, gee, this is great art. I mean it must be great art. It's here in the museum. And I've been wanting to get in this all my life.
And it's almost like a cruel trick was played. And I don't think that evangelicalism has recovered from that to this day.
When I was at Eternity magazine, we were doing a review of an exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of an artist named Jonathan Borowski, who by many critical standards I don't think is a very good artist.
But one of my colleagues there who was so eager to bring evangelicals further and further out of that cultural ghetto, warned me, don't say anything negative about modern art.
I said, why not?
He said, if you say anything negative, it's just going to encourage the Philistines. It's just going to encourage all these people who think they already know that modern art is bad. I said, well, a lot of modern art is bad. He said, yeah, but you know enough about it to make that judgment. They don't know enough about it to make that judgment. I said, well, we ought to help them make that judgment. We ought not to say modern art is good.
And he said, well, if you're going to say anything about modern art, you ought to say something nice.
I said, that's why.
But I think that the psychology of it is because precisely that those two paths crossed when they did.
Again, it's something I'm interested in asking God why his providence took that particular turn.
Some evangelicals responded to the Schaeffer and Ruckmacher critique by staying away from high culture altogether and never getting as serious about understanding John Cage and Rauschenbusch and whoever as they might have.
But others who felt liberated by the fact that attention was being given to the arts began to do things that they called celebrating creativity rather than providing any kind of serious reflection on culture and what its presuppositions were.
And they, I'm afraid, began to add to the problems. Like my colleague at Eternity magazine.
To this day, many of those people reject Shaffer's and Ruckmacher's critique as merely reactionary. And those people are trying to embrace whatever the commercialized art world has dished up.
Now, the vast majority of evangelicals never heard of Rukmacher or Francis Schaeffer as critique.
And for those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 60s, all we knew, or all many of us knew, was that we were once told that rock and roll was something we weren't allowed to listen to. And then one day, Sometime in the 70s, all the Christian performers were rock performers.
By 1970, the birds were singing Jesus is just all right.
They had earlier paved the way by singing Turn, Turn, Turn with his text from Ecclesiastes.
Judy Collins sang Amazing Grace, took it to the top 20. Larry Norman was asking, why should the devil have all the good music? And BJ Thomas was extolling the mighty clouds of joy.
By the late 70s, rock was well entrenched, not only as an acceptable option for Christian listening, but as an increasingly prevalent form in church services, which were once dominated by high culture or traditional culture.
Now, I think something happened here, and it's not something I will go into at length, but I think that evangelicalism's embrace the values of popular culture and not just in music, but in starting television talk shows and games. Well, not game shows. We don't have a Christian green show yet, do we? There's an idea, there's a concept.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: Is there one?
[00:27:48] Speaker A: There was a Christian soap opera, Another Life, it was called I'm Serious, it was on cbn and in fact I almost played a bit role in it once, but that's another story.
But the dominance of popular culture in the church and the uncritical acceptance of popular culture and the uncritical acceptance of the fashion minded view of high culture is one of the ways that the church has uncritically appropriated the values of the world. And again a way in which the church is encouraging the pulling out of the ground from under the Christian apologist.
Now, since Christians believe that the human condition of rebellion against God is a constant, they're sometimes tempted to flatten out history and to present cultural movements as mere variations on a theme first enunciated in the Garden of Eden.
Now certainly all human activity is that, but it's not only that.
There is shape to the contours of history and things. While there's nothing new under the sun of that which is essential and, and eternal, there is something legitimately called the spirit of the age.
You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, Jesus once warned, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. Now he was talking there about epochs of redemptive history, but in the period between the comings of Christ there are also signs and seasons.
And one of the times, one of the times, the signs of which ought to be interpreted, that posted some very significant signs was the age of romanticism in the 19th century.
And a lot of what happened in the 60s really began to take shape in the 19th century under the general heading critics use of Romanticism.
And I want to spend the rest of the evening looking at at that.
The unquestioned dominance of fashionable ideas and finally the unquestioned dominance of much that undercuts the gospel really has its genesis in an era long before the 60s in garrets and studios and cafes that are quite far away from Hollywood and New York.
Jacques Barzin, one of those great minds of the 50s that I mentioned a moment ago, pointed out that 18th century liberalism, which he calls the cult of the self liberalism, introducing the principle of individualism, liberating people from the constrictions of traditional society and traditional traditional mores.
18th century liberalism, the cult of the self and 18th century rationalism, the cult of reason, had the effect of making religion seem superfluous.
If man is his own master, and not only man as a species, but each individual his or her own master, and reason is the only judge, then what is man to do with this lingering sense that there is more to life than reason and the material world can contain and bars? Son answered this.
When life has been stripped and sanitized by reason, or at least by discourse that sounds like reason, the unsatisfied desires that are left over must find some outlet.
What happened in the 19th century was that the thoughtful, the cultivated, the restless and disaffected, I'll add in parentheses, those who couldn't conceivably in good conscience retain their status by becoming religious, these people made a religion of art. The artist, renamed genius, became a hero.
And for all those who could not recapture their lost faith in the ecclesiastical revivals of the 19th century, the devotion to art became a passion.
It's in Romanticism that we really see the beginnings of what was later called, in the 60s, the adversary culture, the notion that intellectuals and artists had an eternal calling to oppose whatever the dominant norms of the culture at large were. It's a novel idea. It's not always been so.
By the late 19th century, many artists and intellectuals believed, in fact, that in their circles alone was there any virtue in the world.
Barzin says that this angry, despising cultural elite became dedicated to the cult of contempt for whatever is not art, society, government, business, the professions, common taste and manners, ambition, faith, morals, anything that savored of the norm was condemned with as fierce animus as ever moved nihilists to throw bombs at emperors and kings.
But I would like to add there was a great irony in this rebellion, because just as a Christian view of the dignity of man as creat created in the image of God, gave rise to the heresy of philosophical liberalism, the idea that man was all that mattered.
So liberalism's individualism and rationalism provided the social freedom for a movement that shook its fist in the face of liberalism, Liberalism created the demon that would threaten to destroy it.
That demon was evident in Romanticism.
Many portents of the 60s were evident in the romanticism of the late 19th century.
One critic named Roger Shattuck cites four traits that characterize the era and think of these traits as they relate to what has sometimes been called the youth culture or the culture since the 1960s. Four things. The cult of childhood, which attacked education and society at large for introducing concern about self control.
The delight in humor, especially in the absurd, the confusion between reality and fantasy, and the preference for ambiguity over clarity.
And Shattuck says that these four qualities, quote, manifest an unrelenting desire to dredge up new material from within, from the subconscious.
The pursuit of this inner truth by the Romantics was encouraged by two other factors, again identified by Shattuck, uninhibited subjectivity and interest in occult knowledge. These sound so contemporary, but they really started, had their genesis in the 19th century.
And there's a sense in which the 60s. I'll anticipate my conclusion. The 60s are really the full flowering of what was established in the 1960s in the Romantic era, in the 19th century.
In fact, there is a book that came out from Oxford Press a couple of years ago called the Triumph of Vulgarity.
And the subtitle was Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism.
[00:35:40] Speaker B: And.
[00:35:41] Speaker A: And essentially the author's contention was that rock music was a mechanism for popularizing the kind of Romantic impulses in a very vulgar form that dominated many of the artists and bohemians that Barzun has described here.
There was a book, another study of Romanticism called Deliberate Regression by a person named Robert Harbison. And Harbison argued that Romanticism began in the despair of a world without God and continued because of man's continuing need for transcendence even after the supernatural is gone.
Harbison says that the furthest excess of Romantic individualism is to create a God in the self out of just those parts beyond one's conscious control, so that the unconscious and the ungovernable is elevated as the true beyond.
Now, you see, when Freud comes along and establishes theories of his psychological theories in which the truest things are those things that are hidden, his theory of the subconscious, that fits into, in a sense, that grows right out of the premises of Romanticism as it existed in the arts and in other cultural forms.
By the late 19th century, we had another movement that had grown out of Romanticism, which is often labeled Modernism.
And it's difficult to really appreciate how new modernism in the arts was felt to be when it burst on the scene in the late 19th century.
And one of the things I think that would be useful for us as apologists is to understand how different the things we take for granted are from other ages.
I think that I'm always struck by how much we learn about human nature by looking not merely at what is constant throughout human history, but also looking at how our sensibilities have changed, because things that we take for granted, experiences and sensibilities that we just assume are normative and normal are in fact, quite different. And modernism in the arts introduced some incredible changes in sensibilities, and it's difficult to appreciate how new it was felt to be.
Art historian Herbert reed, writing in 1933, pointed out that every generation sees a significant change in artistic style.
And he said that about once a century there was a wider or deeper change of sensibility, which is generally recognized as a period. So we have the Baroque period, the Classical period, the Romantic era.
But Reid went on to say that modernism was not so much a revolution, which implied a turning over, even a turning back, but rather a breakup, a devolution, some would say a dissolution. The character of modernism was catastrophic.
The aim of five centuries of European effort was openly abandoned.
This is 1890. This isn't when the Supreme Court took prayer out of the schools. I want to remind us that a lot of the problems that we're facing today that we think are relatively new origin have their roots in cultural history. That goes back quite a ways.
C.S. lewis, I think, had a profound sense of the difference that modernism brought to culture when he made his inaugural lecture at Cambridge in 1954. He argued that what happened between 1890 and 1910 in culture, especially in the arts and in philosophy and other disciplines, it was the greatest division in the entire history of Western man.
It was greater than the difference between antiquity and the Dark Ages.
It was greater than the difference between the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages. It was greater even than the difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which is usually pitted as the chasm.
One of the factors that rendered this chasm so deep and so wide was what Lewis called the un christening of Europe, the lapsing of Western civilization from a Christian ethos to a post Christian one.
This, Lewis argued, was much more traumatic to the culture than the christening of Europe was during the time of Constantine, because Christians and pagans have much more in common with each other than either has with a post Christian.
The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not.
Some Christians might balk at this, arguing, well, everybody worships something, but not everyone worships something consciously and has acts of devotion that they consciously recognize as being religious. And Lewis is concerned not with the spiritual realities, but with cultural change.
A society in which visible and influential religious belief and practice are the norm is culturally exceedingly different from one in which they are the exception. And Lewis warned his audience not to equate post Christian culture with Pagan culture, he said. A post Christian man is not a pagan.
You might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce.
The post Christian is separated from the Christian past and therefore doubly cut off from the pagan past.
The post Christian is not only cut off from the theistic world of Dante, but also cut off from the polytheistic world of Virgil.
Now, as to the radical transformation of modernism on culture as it expressed itself in the arts, Lewis was quite clear and especially concerning its effect on poetry. Here's another quote from that address. I do not think that any previous age produced work which was in its own time as shatteringly and bewilderingly new as that of the Cubists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists and Picasso has in ours. And I'm quite sure this is true of poetry. I do not see how anyone can doubt that modern poetry is not only a greater novelty than any other new poetry of any previous age, but it is new in a new way, almost in a new dimension.
It was the dislocating effects of modernity that called modernism into being.
Modernity, sociologists and historians used to describe the social state of affairs after the Industrial Revolution, after machines made it possible to travel over great distances, to communicate over great distances and to produce great quantities of goods.
And the social dislocations that came about and the changes in in consciousness that came about as a result of modernity gave rise to modernism.
The Romantics had paved the way, but they never could have foreseen the social and cultural metamorphosis that was to occur during the lifetime of the generation that came to maturity at the turn of the century. The earth was in many ways a completely different planet.
Modernism was the necessary cultural response to. To the sense of being strangers in a strange land. When I say it was a different planet, it was different because political configurations have changed so radically as well as social configuration.
I'd urge you to read Paul Johnson's Modern Times to get a sense of
[00:43:54] Speaker B: the changes literary aspects of modernism.
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarland said that modernism is the one art that responds to the scenario of our chaos.
It is the art which is the consequence of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, let's say uncertainty principle as misunderstood.
It is the art that is also the consequence of the destruction of civilization in the First World War, of the world changed and reinterpreted by Marx, by Freud, by Darwin, of capitalism and constant industrial acceleration, of existential exposure to meaningless, meaninglessness or absurdity. It is the literature of technology.
It is the art that is the consequence of the disestablishing of communal reality and conventional notions of causation, on the destruction of traditional notions of the wholeness of the individual character, on the linguistic chaos that ensues when public notions of language have been discredited and when all realities have become subjective fiction.
Modernism is then the art of modernization.
What these men are saying is that the art that came out of this period was simply a reflection of the kinds of ideas that were being fostered by Marx, by Darwin, by Freud, by others.
If Nietzsche was right, if Freud was
[00:45:20] Speaker A: right, if Marx was right, if all
[00:45:25] Speaker B: of these things were true, we couldn't go on and continue painting nice idyllic landscapes and composing wonderfully coherent symphonies.
There certainly is no question that modernism produced a great wave of creativity.
By the way, I don't know if I mention it in my notes here, I don't think I do, but there's a book that's out that just came out, though it's coming out in paperback, I think, this month, called Rites of Spring by. By Morris Eckstein, I believe, and I have not yet read it. I've only read reviews of it, but I'm waiting to get it in paper.
The Rite of Spring was one of the more infamous works of Stravinsky, and when it was premiered, I don't know all the details, but there was virtually a riot when this piece of work was premiered. Now, you don't hear about that much anymore.
You hear about riots at rock concerts, but the idea that the audience at a symphony orchestra performance of a ballet suite would nearly riot shows the kind of radical changes in sensibility that were occurring at this time. And Eckstein's book is a chronicle, as I understand it, of all these momentous, tumultuous changes that were going on culturally, including using Stravinsky's the title of Stravinsky's work as a set piece to summarize it.
So there was an incredible amount of creativity. I would also recommend you read, if you're interested in the visual arts, the Shock of the New by Robert Hughes.
It was originally a series produced, and I don't know if it was a BBC series. I have my English representative here to Keep Me Straight, shown on PBS in a very insightful series on the changes wrought by modernism in the visual arts.
And what is most interesting to me, there is Hughes discussion about how the dominance of machines, especially machines of transportation, changed the consciousness of artists. Visual artists deal with representations of space, and suddenly you had the capacity to move across Great distances of space, you had the capacity to look down on the earth from an incredible height.
These were unexperienced experiences, never before experienced new visual possibilities, which naturally has to give rise to some kind of new aesthetic.
Unfortunately, those new visual experiences were happening in a time of incredible spiritual and philosophical dislocation as well. And that dislocation was also informing the aesthetic.
So it is a time of incredible creativity. But as Daniel Bell has remarked, the cost was extremely high, including the loss of coherence in culture and particularly in the spread of an antinomian attitude to moral norms and even to the idea of cultural judgment. It's.
And the proponents of modernism were fully self conscious that they were riding on this great wave of destruction. In 1905, the impresario Serge Diaghilev of the innovative Ballets Russes proposed a toast.
We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing up in history in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us and which will also sweep us away.
That is why, without fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a new aesthetic. The only wish that I, an incorrigible sensualist, can express is that the forthcoming struggle should not damage the amenities of life and that the death should be as beautiful and as illuminating as the resurrection.
That was before World War I.
The same year, one of the first schools of truly modern art had its first major exhibition in Paris. It was called Les Fauves, which is French for wild beasts. Charming name.
Sounds like a rap group.
These painters, which included Matisse and others, worked in a style that was characterized by an unprecedented freedom of expression.
Today it looks rather tame. It looks like most commercial art we see.
But Maurice Vlaeminck, one of the artists in this group, looking back years later, reflected my enthusiasm, allowed me to take all sorts of liberties. I did not want to follow a conventional way of painting. I wanted to revolutionize habits in contemporary life, to liberate nature, to free it from the authority of old theories and classicism, which I hated as much as I hated the general or the colonel of my regiment. I was filled neither with jealousy or hate, but I felt a tremendous urge to recreate a new world seen through my own eyes, a world which was entirely mine. Here we have the romantic ideas again of the artist as a heroic creator.
And it's interesting that Vlaemen would associate his hatred of military authority and his hatred for the rigors of high culture. They have Some interesting resonance with our own experience in the 1960s, and his urge to recreate a new world that was entirely his own is reminiscent of an American Romantic poet of an earlier generation, whose work would be read by many of the prophets of the 1960s, including Allen Ginsberg. I'm speaking here of Walt Whitman, his famous work Leaves of Grass, the section entitled Song of Myself.
Whitman had written, I celebrate myself and sing myself, and what I assume, you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
The hatred that Vlaeminck both acknowledged and in his way denied was characteristic of modernism. Barzun I cited earlier referred to the cult of contempt that originated with the Romantics.
Daniel Bell, in his book Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, says that one of the characteristic themes of modernism was a rage against order.
For the Modernist, the crucial insistence is that experience is to have no boundaries to its cravings, that there be nothing sacred.
Of course, one must ask if such rage isn't justified, that is, if there's no God, if there's no source of order, how dare society impose an arbitrary order on me?
Another significant attribute of modernism, which would blossom in the 60s and which characterizes our own age, is what Daniel Bell calls the eclipse of distance. And we'll talk about this tomorrow when we talk about television.
And this is what is so dominant in much of our culture, especially popular culture. But culture at large, which promises, which makes.
Writes a big blank check for immediacy and says that we can have all experiences without any mediation, no mediation of time, we don't have to wait for it, no mediation of wisdom, we don't have to learn anything, no mediation of formal relationships.
Everything is promised to us immediately.
Our culture essentially says that nothing that is worthwhile is beyond your reach right now. Any experience, sensation, idea or fantasy can be yours if you have enough money, which easy credit can of course guarantee, if you have enough confidence, which an underarm spray can make you sure of, and if you have enough sex appeal, which the right toothpaste might help, you need not wait for greater maturity, for insight, for wisdom, for perceptiveness. There's no distance between you and any good thing.
And that was characteristic of modernism's project. Also, it was relatively cheaply consummated in our own culture. But Bell said that the effort to achieve immediacy, impact, simultaneity and sensation by eliminating aesthetic and psychic distance was characteristic of modernism. And I argue in my book that it's also characteristic of the two prominent features of our cultural life, television and rock. And Roll television, the ultimate medium of our culture, and rock and roll, the ultimate idiom of our culture.
I think we'll stop there and pick up tomorrow. We covered a lot of ground, more than I thought we might.
And should we open for questions here or should we.
Okay, I'll take a couple questions and then tomorrow for the workshop, I have some things I'd like to discuss. But we will start off by just taking questions on anything covered here tonight and spend some time discussing. Yes, LSD was Lord Byron's dream. I mean, LSD was an immediate mechanism to achieve the kind of ecstasy that the Romantics were longing after in the 19th century. And one of the things that, again, is, I think, helpful for Christian cultural apologists is to realize that LSD just didn't come out on the scene out of nowhere, that there was already fermenting for 100 years a desire for this kind of experience. If the self was the ultimate source of meaning and if the unconscious was the layer of the self that we needed to get down to, then these sorts of experiences are. I mean, this is great. It's better living through chemistry. This is just what we've been looking for.
Yes, I think the easiest way around that debate for other reasons in addition to this.
Boy, I don't think the government should fund the arts at all.
And that's not a form of censorship any more than the fact that the government doesn't fund religion is a form of religious persecution.
There are reasons why most artists shouldn't want the government to fund the arts. And one of the reasons is Jesse Helms.
I mean, in fact, there's nothing.
And I don't say that out of disrespect for Senator Helms, but he's obviously the target of the arts community. Now, if government is in the business of defining what is art and what is good art and what isn't, there's no reason in principle why a Jesse Helms shouldn't be the Minister of culture.
Now, just mention that in most arts groups and they might be willing to withdraw government funding.
I think I heard George will 15 years ago speak on a panel about arts funding, and he was on a panel with the Irish ambassador who. Ireland has a wonderful skin. Instead of funding the arts, they let artists live tax free, which is why Robert Ludlum and a lot of American writers move over and live in Ireland. They don't have to pay any money, any taxes on all those royalties.
But Will said that the biggest problem with the government funding the arts is that when a government gives money for something, it has to define what the something is. If the government says we're going to protect wilderness areas, then somebody has to say, well, what's a wilderness area? If the government says we have to preserve the wetlands, somebody has to define, well, what's a wetland?
If the government says we're going to fund the arts or we're going to fund art. And if you look at the charter of the National Endowment, I mean, there's a lot of nice language in there about uplifting of the human spirit and that sort of thing. But if the government can't agree on a definition of what, in fact uplifts the human spirit, then the government shouldn't be in the business of giving any money to it. So that's prior to Mapplethorpe and all the others. That was something I've felt for some time. Should we stop or. We'll take one more question.
One more question?
Oh, yeah, sure, definitely.
And I think that. I mean. I think that.
Do you mean in the 19th century particularly?
[00:58:14] Speaker A: Well, I think in general, like Rex Shaping book talked about the parents in the 50s, right?
[00:58:20] Speaker B: Oh, yes, yes, yes.
[00:58:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:58:23] Speaker B: I thought you meant principally in the 19th century, which. I mean, I think there's something to Kierkegaard's critique of the church in the 19th century. Oh, yes, definitely.
And the question is, if you move from one place, if you. If it's appropriate to move out of a bad neighborhood, what neighborhood do you move into?
And I think that was the problem, that the neighborhood that seemed to be the ideal utopia in the 1960s wasn't really a great place to live.
Okay, we'll stop and come tomorrow with more questions.
