Where culture goes to die
It’s 100 years ago. You’re a detective. You arrive at the scene of a grisly murder. A corrupt politician has been killed. The agent at the scene informs you that the attacker caught their ankle nastily on a nail in the skirting board, leaving a small pool of blood. You move further into the room and notice greasy fingerprints on the outside of the window — apparently the point of entry. The victim’s limp fist contains a small clump of hair.
‘Aha!’, you exclaim, ‘A lead!’ You head down to the street to ask the vendors of the vile, greasy, street meat if they’d served a red head in the past 5 hours (the body was not yet in rigor mortis) whilst your partner checks the local garage. You’re looking for a greasy-handed ginger who might walk with a slight limp.
You have all that DNA, all that information, but you don’t know you have it. You couldn’t test it if you did. Later, when you find semen stains in his hideout, you will remark that that is gross.
Cultural information is everywhere. We have so much DNA by which we can assess and access the worldviews around us. We just have to learn how to read it.
The Philosophical Policeman
There was a time when detectives were logicians. When Sherlock was a marginally more believable fantasy than he is now. But even then, there was a level to their detection which did not explore all that they could or should.
In ‘The Man Who was Thursday’ (the opening chapters of which, incidentally, are amongst the best examples of literature I’ve read), a detective meets a man who outlines a new branch of Scotland Yard.
“The work of the philosophical policeman,” replied the man in blue, “is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime.
This was, of course, long before Orwell came along and made writers nervous of phrases such as ‘intellectual crime’. Intellectual crime here is not the ‘thought crime’ of 1984, but rather an exploration of the path that certain worldviews will set a man upon.
Burn the Phoenix
This blog tries to both teach and exemplify methods of examining the dangers and virtues of worldviews — of putting them through that pre-mortem autopsy. Somewhere in the attic of the world there is a ravaged portrait of our culture, which has been left to wither and rot on the inside, but not to die. We believe that it must be killed in order to be reborn. By means of illustration, think how Germany, having been forced to reflect upon and pay for its crimes as a nation in the early and mid twentieth century, has been able now to come through that catharsis and thrive, and even be instrumental in holding other countries above the water during the 2008 financial crisis. Other countries such as Hungary were not given the chance to publicly repent, as it were, and so struggle to move on within their European context. Or take the criminal who has served his time and is able to rejoin society, as opposed to the thief who skips bail and is on the run forever — there is no resolution, no possibility for redemption. So, too, with every aspect of culture, which we must put through the flames, destroy that which harms and raise that which gives life.
We kill the ailing phoenix, that something new might be reborn. We love culture and life but we know the world is fallen. Redemption can only come through death and renewal.
This is not an attempt to cheapen culture but to cultivate it. We are not an army of spray-can-equipped clergy who graffiti crosses all over the walls of our society.
The key lesson to learn is that we don’t kill the things which look alien — the things which make us suspicious. We kill the things that don’t make sense, that have an internal dissonance.
Watch this clip from the now ancient movie, Men in Black. (It’s only about a minute long)
In case you didn’t get it — the point was that the only threat was the one which was hiding itself. There’s an alien working out, an alien sneezing… and an alien disguised as an 8-yr-old girl studying quantum mechanics in Hell’s kitchen. It is dissonance which threatens — it is when worldviews directly contradict themselves that we know that they are lying.
Sometimes aliens just sneeze
And so we must allow for things to be weird — sometimes aliens just sneeze — but we do not allow for that which is contradictory. Very briefly, we can demonstrate some political examples:
We’ll start on the left, and then move to the right: recently Jeremy Corbyn declared ‘We are the many, they are the few’ immediately after losing an election (where it was literally counted to see who were the many, and who were the few.) There’s a relative innocence, but it teaches people to ignore the results of democratic elections… you can do the maths yourselves on that…
Or take Hillary Clinton, who, in her publishers words, “speaks [in her new book] about the challenges of being a strong woman in the public eye” — We should be suspicious of someone who claims to be a feminist who wants to make a ‘strong woman’ sound like a lesser-spotted sabre-toothed mammoth, or some other object of curious rarity. Such a person relies on an overtly patriarchal society in order to carve out their niche. Hillary wants Americans to be sexist — to believe that she is the only strong woman, so every virtue signalling hack looks to her and her alone, so that the likes of Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirstin Gillibrand et aliae are not given a second look. This is part of a worldview that treats power as a birthright, rather than a thing which is entrusted by the people, for the people.
The dangers of political dissonance have been demonstrated most clearly on the right. For years, in America, the GOP hiked up their votes by stirring fear — they would say that the Mexicans are pouring over the border, injecting your children with drugs, raping and murdering… So let’s have a continuing resolution and try to add a couple of hundred border guards. Their rhetoric didn’t match their action! If they believed the threat, then they would be doing far more than chucking small change at the problem. If they really believed, as Jon Stewart said, that there were visigoths at the gate… then they would build a huge wall… thus the dishonest rhetoric paved the way for a man who was willing to build policies upon dishonest rhetoric. But that is the world we live in — entire kingdoms have been built upon lies. We can’t just carry on. It must be torn down and rebuilt on solid, safer ground. There is no aspect of culture that should be omitted from the Christian worldview. As the theologian, John Calvin said ‘there is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice’. But it can only be built on Truth.
So ask questions. Ask questions of everything. Ask yourself why Christians recently came under fire over sexuality conversions, yet were attacked for their opposition to sex conversions. Or, on the flip side, ask how Christians can, in affirming sexuality conversions, justify teaching a gay man to look at women lustfully, when they tell straight men that that is adultery to do so.
Why, if Pythagoras was certain that the universe could be comprehended under the umbrella of rationality, did he drown Hippasus in a fountain for proving the existence of irrational numbers? Ask how your English lecturer could possibly be so certain that Roland Barthes contested the authority of authorship, or why your solipsistic philosophy lecturer bothers to proselytise his view. Ask why Russian history never happened.
Do not allow contradiction in your worldview — it means that you are conscious of a lie and deliberately continuing to live upon its foundations.
These examples have all been of logic, but as you read this publication you will see us trying to challenge the full body of culture, every smell, colour, texture and taste.
The ultimate mistake is not actually to build upon faulty logical foundations; the ultimate mistake is to switch the order in which we build: if we use human culture as the foundation, and God’s creation as the building — trying to plonk the fabric of the universe on top of our own creation as if it’s duplo, then everything will collapse.
We cannot simply add religion to culture, we cannot distort the hierarchy between our creation and God’s. That is neither safe nor right. Kill the phoenix. Bring culture to the pyre.
