Sometimes important ideas show up in unexpected places and challenge us.
I was recently waiting in a doctor's reception area which featured a vast array of current and recent periodicals–talk about unexpected! I picked up the April 7 issue of Fortune. I never read Fortune, perhaps because I think I am not very interested in what I presume to be its world view. The title of Editor Andy Serwer's opening essay caught my attention: "Ruled by Pop Culture." Likely a positive regime in his eyes, I thought. Pop culture makes huge fortunes for people of widely differing abilities and talents–including celebrities with none at all.
A quote Serwer attributes to novelist Philip Roth fully engaged me:
"The power in any society is with those who get to impose the fantasy. It is no longer, as it was for centuries throughout Europe, the church that imposes its fantasy upon the populace, nor is it the totalitarian super state that imposes the fantasy, as it for 12 years in Nazi Germany and for 69 years in the Soviet Union. Now the fantasy that prevails is the all-consuming, voraciously consumed popular culture, seemingly spawned by, of all things, freedom. The young especially live according to beliefs that are thought up for them by the society's most unthinking people and by the businesses least impeded by innocent ends. Ingeniously as their parents and teachers may attempt to protect the young from being drawn, to their detriment, into the moronic amusement park that is now universal, the preponderance of power is not with them."
“Impose the fantasy?” I think I understand what Roth is getting at, but characterizing it as fantasy strikes me as needlessly combative. Institutions that Roth writes once had the power to impose the fantasy on society – Serwer points to organized religion, government, sports, and yes, big business – were and still are confident that what they were imposing is not fantasy, but fact, truth, reality.
I'd like to substitute "self-understanding" for Roth's "fantasy". In other words, who most compellingly and pervasively tells us who we are and where we are headed and in what context? Who wields the power to impose their understanding and vision of us upon us?
Serwer is less willing than Roth to view the overwhelming power of pop culture as sinister. But he claims to stand absolutely with Roth in his view that, like it or not, the power to impose fantasy/self-understanding now rests in less-than-thinking and often less-than-innocent hands, and that the clout of such people and institutions is multiplied many times over by technology. We think we are free when we can say and read and share anything it all on Facebook, Twitter, and the like, or Google the world, but in fact we are playing mindless games invented by those who have little motivation but to make money from us...invisible people whose "product" range and influence we barely appreciate.
Strangely (in a sentence that cries out for revision) Serwer nearly gives higher education a pass in the confrontation with pop culture: "One of the few institutions I could think of that even begin to rival the unfettered rise of popular culture is our colleges and universities…"
If I understand Serwer, I disagree. I do not share his confidence in higher ed's effectiveness as fantasy/self-understanding-imposer in competition with pop culture: consider Jim Tressel being named President of Youngstown State University, and almost of The University of Akron.
My real interest is organized religion, which wrote my paychecks for nearly fifty years, and now deposits my pension in our bank account each month.
Well before I began my service as a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), many of us were sneering at "the institutional church," some even longing for its demise. We, the young-growing-ever-older, continued our sneering as our mainline churches shrank like an iceberg under a polar bear. We actually called this reduction of institutional size and clout good, crediting Jesus himself with our slide into irrelevance and ineffectiveness..."right-sizing" under divine authorization.
Here's just one example of how the institutional mainline church I love shot itself in the foot through its choice of terminology: sometime ago my own presbytery stopped "meeting" and started "gathering." The change in words told us and the world that we no longer intended to meet to wrestle with one another to accomplish anything...as if it wouldn't be our fault if something challenging or important or noteworthy should happen on our watch. Now we gather to be social and festive and informal, to enjoy one another's company and quirks. Woe unto him or her who raises an unpleasant voice!
We sit in gathering after gathering where nothing happens that anyone, including ourselves, cares much about. We spend endless hours closing churches or dismissing them to other denominations. Oh! how we lament our loses! Lacking any sense of urgency or responsibility, we continue to create a vacuum where we once had stood, and then wonder why no one is paying attention to us anymore. Do we think conservative churches have been garnering all the attention by mimicking our passivity in the face of a hostile culture?
While we have been letting our beloved institution fail someone else has been putting together institutions of social media, popular culture, and technology that elevate the individual and his or her taste above the joy, responsibility, and challenge of significant human interaction. For these newer, technological institutions the ultimate measure of things is what I "like," not what is good for all or even for many of us. They are meeting and collaborating and strategizing...and we "gather."
Impose the fantasy, or impose the self-understanding: if responsible and intentional and transparent institutions are not strong to create and communicate positive and just understandings of public good and human flourishing, then all we will be left with are the cheap and momentary fantasies and understandings of ourselves created by outrageous celebrities and viral videos. As much fun as they may be for the moment, we cannot build a strong or a good society upon their likes. We don't need no institutions (talk about needing revision!) – we need accountable, transparent, and effective institutions articulating visions of our common welfare. Including mainline churches.
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An postscript from Far as the Curse is Found: the Art of Scott Kolbo by Cameron J. Anderson in Image, No. 80 (Winter/Spring 2014), p. 27:
"Logged, tuned, or dialed in, our increasingly digital world is training us to consume the sound, images, and text that stream toward us. We have learned to fill our apparently empty hours with this nonmaterial spectacle – one that appears to us as an unending admixture of unremarkable postings, comments, and images that are shot through with vivid, though random, instances of wonder. These brilliant moments are so dazzling that we willingly sift through the residual flotsam and jetsam as if panning for digital gold. If you or someone you know spends countless hours on Facebook, watches sports around the clock, or plays video games to the exclusion of all else, then you have experienced – or are at least a witness to – this reality. While this spectacle is surely not all cultural pap, it tends to belittle history and routinely sidesteps the prospect of meaning. But so long as our 'disbelief' is 'suspended,' it no longer seems needful to speak of things as if they should or even could cohere.”
Somehow, it seems to me related to the main essay.
