The horror on my television

If you are of a sensitive disposition don’t read on.

Last night I had a very late TV dinner. Flicking through the channels I came across the following scene:

A gagged naked woman is hanging from chains around her ankles. She is absolutely terrified, spluttering her screams through the ball tied in her mouth. She is hanging over a tiled bath. The two men who have obviously tied her there are about to leave the darkened chamber in which this is taking place. As they do so, one of them plants a kiss on her mouth.

A few moments after they exit, another woman enters the chamber. She is wearing only a robe, which she removes. She lies naked in the bath, takes a scythe and begins to run it over the bound woman body. By now the latter is drenched in sweat and spluttering in terror. The second woman uses the scythe to cut away the gag, and the first woman’s screams now fill the room.

I slightly missed the next bit, but when I clicked back, the bound woman had clearly been repeatedly stabbed and was unconscious. The woman in the bath was washing herself in her blood. Then she reached up with the scythe and slashed the victims throat which sprayed blood in all directions.

Later, there was a similar scene of terror as a man threatened another bound and gagged woman with an angle grinder. I didn’t watch how that turned out.

But why, you may ask, did I watch at all? And why am I telling you this?

The answer is because, thank God, I was horrified. But I would be lying if I didn’t add that I was also strangely drawn to watch — and horrified that I could feel that impulse. That is my first reason — the horror.

The second is that this was on mainstream television. It wasn’t even particularly late (about 11pm as I recall). And the third reason is that his film was called Hostel II. That’s right, there was a Hostel I. (Look them up, if you want, I am not prepared to give a link here.)

In other words, there is a market for this stuff out there.

Of course, horror films are as old as the cinema itself. In the 1970s I used to enjoy watching the late-night Hammer films. And yes, they had screaming ladies as well. But Hostel II is in a totally different league. The acting, it has to be said, was superb. Here was total, snot running, eye staring terror, right before your very eyes. It was entirely believable.

And there is the problem. Watching a bosomy maiden succumb to Dracula’s kiss is one thing. Watching a human being in apparent paroxysms of fear and agony is another. This is the entertainment of the Roman arena, not Bram Stoker.

At this point, two questions are going round my head, which is why I am writing this. The first is, whatever happened to our society, that could move from Mary Whitehouse and the Festival of Light in the 1960s and ‘70s to this. For the problem with the likes of Hostel II is not that it is trash, but that it is actually convincing and compelling.

And that brings me to my second question which is what impact such material has on those who watch it for entertainment. The ‘Saw’ series, which has I believe a similar motif, has run to seven versions.

But get this: Thorpe Park has a Saw theme ride. So whilst children may not be allowed to watch the film, but they are familiarized with the concept of ‘torture as entertainment’.

As many of us know, the problem with some experiences in life is that once in our heads, we can’t get them out. I well remember a Malaysian female student of my acquaintance who had become a Christian saying it was very easy to learn English swear words, but very hard to stop saying them.

What, then, if you filled your head last night with images of beautiful tortured women (and they are invariably beautiful women — as one producer of such films said, given the choice people would rather watch a beautiful woman being killed than an ugly one)? And what if you did this for entertainment? What if you are still entertaining yourself with the same thoughts throughout the day today?

Back in the 1960s, I was one of those who thought Mary Whitehouse and her supporters a bit naive and limited. Why should we not be allowed to watch what we wanted as grown-ups? What was wrong with a bit of artistic nudity, for example? But of course the changing of our standards did not release a flood of ‘art’.

I am still minded to write to whichever TV channel it was last night that carried that film. But I suspect it will be a lonely little letter. Surely no one cares anymore? Maybe they’ll frame it.

Tom Davies, the wonderfully eccentric author of the equally eccentric Merlin the Magician and the Pacific Coast Highway (one of the few Christian books that have made me laugh out loud) wrote a sombre follow-up called The Man of Lawlessness, which he identified as the media, pouring a stream of violence and filth into the minds and lives of ordinary people, and especially the young.

Judging by what I glimpsed on television last night, he may have been right. For there is only one place such thoughts could have come from, and one place where they belong, and that is in the lowest pit of Hell.

Please give a full name and location when posting. Comments without this information may be deleted. Recommend:

Christians and Culture: Lessons for Americans and Anglicans

Some time ago, for reasons I’ve now forgotten, I made a note to read James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). A couple of weeks ago, I finally got round to finishing it, and in view of recent election results in the United States and the Church of England, I’m very glad that I did. However, I think that Christians in both regions are going to find his lessons hard to accept and apply.

Hunter writes as an American addressing the American religious scene. Nevertheless, his conclusions can, I think, be generalized to non-American, and even non-religious, settings.

His core thesis is that the American religious right, religious left and religious radicals are all making the same basic error, and taking the same fundamental approach to changing the world, by buying into the political system.

Yet immediately we must pause for the British audience. ‘What’s this,’ they will be asking, ‘About the “religious left”? Surely there is hardly any such thing, and if there is, it must be a tiny minority.’

But that is the problem with gathering all your information from the British media, who generally loathe right-wing politics and Christian religion with comparable vehemence and are therefore more than happy to lump the two together.

Of course there is an American religious right, but there is also, Hunter points out, a religious left. And in fact the history of the involvement of the religious left in American politics is actually older than that of the religious right. It is only comparatively recently that conservative churches have taken up the political cudgels. And whilst they have had some success, that is now being offset by a resurgence on the left.

One feature of this, incidentally, is the way that the Democratic Party has now realized it can no longer afford to ignore religion — something which apparently it tended to do in the post-war years. Thus President Obama has to have religious credentials, in order to capitalize on the support of the religious left-wing.

Similarly unknown to most British observers, however, is the American religious radical wing — what Hunter calls the neo-Anabaptists. The movement will nevertheless be known to some through theologians such a John H Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas.

Each of these three groupings is very different from the others. Yet in Hunter’s view they are actually variations on a theme — and a wrong one, to boot. Added to this is the irony that each believes itself to be the ‘authentic’ Christian voice not only in its own right, but over against at least one, if not both of the other two ‘false’ voices.

Moreover, each relies on a view of reality which differs from the others and, naturally, reinforces its own ‘narrative’. And yet each has actually bought into a narrative driven by forces and assumptions which have little to do with the faith in question.

Thus the right sees America as threatened by secularism, the left sees it as threatened by capitalism and the radical wing sees political powers themselves as the real enemy. So the right joins forces with right-wing politicians against the left and the left joins forces with left-wing politicians against the right. Meanwhile, the radicals simultaneously condemn politicians but present an agenda based on the ‘politics’ of Jesus — whilst saying some truly remarkably unpleasant things about other Christians.

And while all this is going on, Hunter observes that what really forms the ‘culture’ itself is largely unrecognized and ignored.

Thus at the beginning of the book, Hunter addresses the popular myth of many Christian cultural warriors, that if we can only get enough people converted and get enough people involved in the political system, we can change the culture. But as he points out, the level of religious belief amongst Americans is already high (staggeringly so by European standards). Faith in God is everywhere as is scepticism about ‘secular’ understandings of the universe. If sheer numbers were all that were necessary, the Christian cultural agenda would have succeeded long ago.

But as Hunter goes on to show, that is not how cultures are formed. What forms the culture is not the views of the majority but those moving the levers of power — those people, organizations and institutions whose own opinions shape the opinions of others.

This, I would observe, is why celebrity support for Obama was so important. A moment’s thought will show that a film star or pop singer knows as much, or as little, as the next person when it comes to economic policy. But in a ‘celebrity culture’, what celebrities support shapes what others feel comfortable with. They quite literally become the culture.

Similarly, as others have pointed out, what Fox news has to say may be true, but Fox is so tarred with the right-wing brush that even when its reports are accurate they do not count for anything like as much as some of the ‘liberal’ outlets. Fox is important, but it is not a culture-maker.

If they want to change the culture, therefore, Hunter argues that Christians first need to understand and engage with how the culture is formed. At the same time he asserts that by buying into the political system as the basis for cultural change, Christians of all persuasions both compromise their message and, unwittingly, accept that the final arbiter in human affairs is the ‘will to power’, since all political decisions ultimately rely on the use of power — even the threat of sanction and violence — for their enforcement.

Thus what Hunter offers instead is a programme which begins both by relinquishing the political approach and by engaging with the things that really shape the culture — a policy of what he calls ‘faithful presence’, which seeks to excel in those things and those areas which are truly the expression of our humanity transformed in Christ.

And this is where the Anglican bit comes in, for there are many in the Church who believe that essentially political processes are not only the right way but the best way to bring about desirable change. Yet the current debate over women bishops is surely revealing the inadequacy of that approach.

Some will argue, for example, that the General Synod will soon express ‘the mind of the Church’ by introducing women bishops, but how can that be so when there are many who clearly oppose the move? Is the ‘mind’ dependent on ten or twenty votes? And if the decision is forced on others, is this not just the ‘will to power’ in action?

Over against this, I have been more than willing to argue for political involvement by traditionalists and conservatives. But this must not be a case of simply attempting to use power in the same way as others — just to different ends. The political process is necessary — the polis is the community, of which we are all a part. But there needs to be a much clearer understanding that the culture of the Church does not rely on politics.

A bishop once observed in my hearing, for example, that despite the growth of evangelicalism, in the ‘corridors of power’ the prevailing ethos was still ‘liberal catholic’. That is what I mean by ‘culture’. If Oak Hill college, for example, is producing excellent ministers (and it is), that may not affect the culture of the Church if Oak Hill is regarded as the theological equivalent of Fox News (and in many circles it is).

What we are left with, then, is a challenge — in the Church and in the world — to understand how things not only work in fact but how they should work when we apply Christian thinking. For Christians in America and for Anglicans in England, the challenge is immense. But I believe that unless we understand the things Hunter observes, many well-intentioned efforts here and there will be wasted.

Please give a full name and location when posting. Comments without this information may be deleted. Recommend:

TV Soaps: Garbage in - garbage out?

My revelatory moment came with the words, "Coronation Street's on, they're having a row."

Back came the question, "Who's having a row?" and suddenly I realized: I didn't know who, but there's always someone having a row, or having a go at someone else, or cheating on their partner, or plotting something.

Wherever you go in soapland, there's always sour looks and mean deeds.

Now there's an acronym in the world of computer programming: GIGO, which means 'garbage in, garbage out'.

If you input erroneous data your results won't suddenly become Nobel Prizewinning stuff. If your programme is corrupted, don't expect it to run.

And it is often assumed that the same applies in the world of home entertainment. If someone constantly watches violent horror films, it is hardly likely to have an edifying effect. If they are addicted to violent pornography, not only is there something suspect about their inner workings, but they are likely to be exacerbating, rather than helping, the problem.

So why do we assume TV soaps are any different?

Of course there is the excuse, they're not real life. They just exaggerate the kind of things that go on in real life for entertainment.

True, but there are other things that go on in real life, that don't get exaggerated for entertainment in the soaps. There's heroism, there's self-sacrifice, there's kindness and helpfulness.

According  to a report in the Daily Mail, Pam St Clement, who used to pay Pat Butcher in East Enders, voiced something of the same concern: I'm not too sure that one little area of London has quite so much violence and adultery as ours does," she is quoted as saying, adding, "Maybe in the search to be over [sic] more interesting we are always pinning stories on things that are ever more 'out there', rather than remembering that good stories are about what happens in people's hearts and in their relationships."

But as we know, in their efforts to be 'out there', soap writers have aimed to be opinion shapers on the subjects of death, sexuality and so on, as well as entertainers. Yet if they believe they can shape opinions, would they deny they can shape a 'mood'?

When I was a schoolboy, our deputy head always seemed to end the last assembly of every academic year with a reading from St Paul's letter to the Philippians, ending with these words: "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."

It was meant as a moral exhortation, and by constant repetition it must have got through even my schoolboy skull. And there's a double lesson in itself.

Please give a full name and location when posting. Comments without this information may be deleted. Recommend:

“Right becomes wrong and left become right”

I am still immensely enjoying Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia, as I blogged about last week. As I continue to read, however, I am struck by a recurring theme regarding the makers of Western culture about whom James writes.

Many of them have been victims of one, or sometimes even both, of the two secular ideologies which dominated so much of the last century — to the right, Nazism, and to the left, Marxism. Almost inevitably, these individuals come across as tragic, and indeed are often heroic.

Yet at the same time there are others, for the most part no less talented or dedicated to their particular field, who have actually lent their support precisely to these ideologies. And this surely raises some interesting questions about the whole ‘cultural’ enterprise.

Here we have people who can rightly be regarded as cultured intellectuals. Indeed, they are themselves culturally creative. Yet sometimes they are entirely blind to movements and forces inimical to human, and therefore cultural, flourishing.

It has to be said, moreover, that this is particularly noticeable regarding attitudes on the ‘left’. Here, it seems, people of considerable intellect have, nevertheless, been constantly willing to justify self-evident wrongs and to deny every allegation of moral deviance, in a manner that seems entirely at variance with their own evident capacity for understanding and analysis in other respects.

Thus people who really should have known better have supported, at various times, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and even Pol Pot.

To go beyond James’s own examples, many of us remember Jane Fonda’s visit to, and endorsement of, North Vietnam in the 1960s. And what of the World Council of Churches’ support for violent ‘liberation’ movements in the Third World?

Part of the picture is, of course, that the political left tends to align itself with causes that appeal to the best of human instincts — the desire to help the physically poor and the socially oppressed.

The problem is that organizations and individuals who have been able to talk the right talk in this regard have often walked a very different walk. There may even, as seems to be the case with Mao Zedong, be a transition from a good start to a truly disastrous finish.

Nevertheless, it is a lesson of history that intellectual and cultural brilliance is by no means a guarantee that the individual will possess an accurate moral compass, or pay any attention to it even if they do.

It should also, however, be an encouragement to the rest of us, who do not possess such brilliance, not to be intimidated into silence. Sometimes it is possible to wonder whether, given the mental abilities of those who lend their support to one dubious-looking cause or another, the Emperor for whom they are cheering really is wearing the fantastic outfit they describe, rather than being as stark-naked as the objective evidence suggests.

Reading through the ‘broadsheet’ media today, the Western intellectual opponents of the West, for example, seem to be overwhelming both in their numbers and in their evident learning. “Surely,” we find ourselves thinking, “they must be onto something.” And so we go on listening to the argument that the real threat to human flourishing today comes not from the radicalization of Muslims or the growing brute economic power of China, but from America, or from our own history.

It is said by clever people, and it is said well — so who are you, or who am I, to contradict it?

At times like this it is good to remember that clever, erudite people have been notoriously wrong about such things in the past. They really have done the same for mass murderers and political sociopaths. And sometimes what we need is common sense, not intellectual brilliance.

The title for this post comes from the Dire Straits song, Ride Across the River. There is another Dire Straits line I am fond of quoting as an antidote to the modern mindset, which comes from Industrial Disease: “Two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong.”

Of course, it is possible that they are both wrong, but certainly during the 1990s it became possible to scandalize quite intelligent people with the first suggestion: “Who are we to say who is wrong?” became the typical response, even when it was self-evidently true that someone was.

But it is this same moral certainty about the uncertainty of our moral judgement that allows perfectly sane commentators and journalists to condemn ‘Islamophobia’, for example, without ever coming down hard against Islam, or to judge the West by ‘Western’ standards whilst excusing the otherwise unpardonable when it is part of a non-Western ‘culture’.

There is, however, a third Dire Straits line, again from Industrial Disease, that comes to mind at this point: “Philosophy is useless, theology is worse.” When the intellect fails us practically, then only the truly practical person can help us. The wise person in such circumstances may well not be the clever one. They will just be the one who can accurately see and declare what is going on.

John Richardson

Please give a full name and location when posting. Comments without this information may be deleted.

Lest we forget - 'Cultural Amnesia' and the future of our culture

I am just in the process of reading a book I would rank alongside Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence for its breadth of scope and value to the reader. At the same time, it is wonderfully well written. Yet it ought also to carry something of a health warning for the average person, who will probably feel, as I do on almost every page, humiliated by their own comparative lack of knowledge.

The book to which I am referring is Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of my Time. Basically a collection of short essays, James has taken a character, usually (though not exclusively) from the twentieth century whom he feels has made a significant contribution to our culture, and more or less written about them.

Sometimes there is a great deal ‘less’ than ‘more’. The book is not ‘an introduction to’ whomever, but rather almost a ‘stream of consciousness’ reaction to or reminiscence about them which sometimes veers off in unpredictable, but fascinating, directions. The discussion of Richard Burton’s haircut in Where Eagles Dare is a particularly good example, occurring as it does in the essay on the Viennese physician and writer, Arthur Schnitzler.

At times I have found myself simply embarrassed by my ignorance. Last night I began reading about Einstein, but couldn’t match the picture of the balding ‘bank managerial’ figure at the beginning with the usual ‘mad hair’ image one associates with the name. Then I realized it was actually Alfred, his cousin and music critic, not Albert the scientist, about whom I was reading.

There followed a wonderful piece (mostly about Schubert as it happens), but all the way through I couldn’t help thinking, “How have I lived so long and not known there was an Alfred Einstein?”

Many of us will know James as a TV pundit and, perhaps, writer — not least of the autobiographical Unreliable Memoirs. Those who do will be aware that he can be very funny indeed — something like a cross between Jeremy Clarkson and Ian Hislop, though the sardonic Australian style sometimes calls for small doses.

There is a laugh-out-loud line, for example, in Unreliable Memoirs about the visiting ‘dunny man’ — like dustmen, only for the outside toilets typical of pre-war Australian homes — who tripped over the boy James’s bicycle left lying in the alleyway, thus spilling the contents of the said dunny. “The amazing thing,” wrote James (as I recall), “Was how almost none of it missed him.”

The same wit carries over into Cultural Amnesia. James can be eloquently amusing at astonishing length in the way that Rowan Williams is astonishingly lengthy but baffling.

Yet there is much more here than amusement. There is an intensity about the writing, shot through, I felt, with that melancholy which comes with age — the realization that not only must ‘all this’ pass but so, too, must one’s own accumulated awareness. The ‘amnesia’ of the title is, I think, not that we forget so much we have read or experienced, but that entire cultures forget because the only repository of ‘remembering’ is our own fragile and finite selves.

There is also a constant reminder of the dreadfulness of the last century. So many of James’s subjects were victims of — but sometimes participants in — Nazi or Soviet persecution: Einstein (of course), but also virtually every other Jewish or Russian character (and there are many) in the entire book, plus several others:

The whole of modern Polish literature ... might have had an utterly different layout if some Nazi thug ... had not put a bullet through the head of Bruno Schulz ... (187)

The overall impression is of a century which, perhaps more than any in human history, sought to create its own ‘cultural amnesia’ by the deliberate and systematic elimination of the bearers of that culture. Hitler and Stalin between them have far and away the most references in the index, simply because they ruined or terminated the lives of so many of the others in the book. Close third is Jean-Paul Sartre who, as James writes, “looms in the corner of this book like a genius with the evil eye”:

For the book’s author, Sartre is a devil’s advocate to be despised more than the devil, because the advocate was smarter. (669)

You get the idea. Perhaps most painful of all is the essay on Sophie Scholl (1921-1943), about whom, James writes, “there are few facts to record, because she did not live long.” The reason for this is that in 1942 she joined, with her brother Hans, the White Rose resistance group, and was (along with him and their fellow ‘conspirators’) subsequently guillotined by the Nazis:

The chief executioner later testified that he had never seen anyone die so bravely as Sophie Scholl. Not a whimper of fear, not a sigh of regret for the beautiful life she might have led. She just glanced up at the steel, put her head down, and she was gone. Is that you? No, and it isn’t me either. (709)

Don’t worry. It isn’t all gloom, but there is, by my reckoning, a sense of frustration — that this book on ‘amnesia’ is James’s way of saying to the rest of us, “Remember! Remember!” That, and perhaps, “Take and read!”

And this is where the book sits so well, and so tellingly, alongside Barzun’s even more monumental work (this is not a small book!).

At the end of From Dawn to Decadence, Barzun imagines a Western world which somehow rediscovers a culture. Yet there seems to be no actual prospect of this happening. The terrible awareness that grows whilst reading Cultural Amnesia is that virtually everyone in it is dead: Miles Davis, Frederico Fellini, Franz Kafka, Marcell Proust and so on. There are perhaps three dozen essays, but the index contains hundreds of names, mostly from the past.

The world today is vastly less threatening to the typical Westerner than it was for most of the twentieth century. Even the threat of terrorism must be balanced against the equal unpredictable, but vastly more probable, ravages of diseases which, a mere century ago, could carry one off in an afternoon.

Yet what has happened to the culture? There is a great section in James’s essay on Duke Ellington which, to my mind, sums it all up:

The aesthetic component was standard for all the arts in the twentieth century: one after another they tried to move beyond mere enjoyment as a criterion, a move which put a premium on technique, turned technique into subject matter, and eventually made professional expertise a requirement not just for participation but even for appreciation. (In architecture, the turning point came with Le Corbusier: laymen who questioned his plans for rebuilding Paris by destroying it were told by other architects that they were incompetent to assess his genius.) (192)

‘Culture’ today is for the experts. ‘Mass culture’ is ever more empty of either meaning or ambition. Meanwhile, our universities have become ‘degree factories’ whose controlling ethos is increasingly their observable contribution to the economy.

Who is creating a cultural ‘stir’ today? Or who is providing any inspiration about the present or the future either in the arts or society?

By the time this century is over — and it is already well under way — we may wonder what the equivalent of Cultural Amnesia will have to say.

John Richardson
30 April 2011

Please give a full name and location when posting. Comments without this information may be deleted.

U-571, female detectives, it’s all the same

When the film U-571, depicting the American capture during World War 2 of a submarine carrying an Enigma cypher machine, hit the cinema screens, I was one of those who greeted it with derision.

Those who know a bit about the War will be aware that the first Enigma machines were actually captured by the Poles before hostilities broke out between Germany and Britain. Then, in 1941, another machine was captured from a U-boat, but by the British destroyer HMS Bulldog.

One argument for this rewriting of history went that the film would not otherwise have been economically viable in the US. According to an article on Wikipedia, the screenwriter David Ayer pretty much confessed to this later:

It was a distortion ... a mercenary decision ... to create this parallel history in order to drive the movie for an American audience.

Well, stupid him, I thought, and stupid Americans for not being able to stomach anything other than a world re-coloured to suit their own view of what ought to have been ‘reality’.

But then it turns out American producers and scriptwriters aren’t the only ones whose fictional world has to shelter their audiences from reality, for apparently BBC One controller Danny Cohen has said he plans to limit the number of male detectives in the channel’s dramas.

“Detectives and crime is the real staple of quite a lot of BBC,” he said, but added, “I felt that we risked having too many male detectives.” Hence, in particular, the series ‘Zen’, starring Rufus Sewell, apparently had to go.

Now the question that has to be asked is, “Too many for what?”

Amongst male detectives, reference was made to Sherlock, Luther, Wallander and Inspector George Gently. Personally I’m only familiar with the first and the third, but I must admit the one thing that never crossed my mind whilst watching either was, “Shame he’s a bloke.”

Nor, oddly enough, did I find myself thinking, “Given all the female crime-fighters one sees in daily life, isn’t this a bit unrealistic?”

So whence the drive to change what appears on our TV screens? Whatever it turns out to be, I’ll guarantee that tucked away in it somewhere you’ll find an ‘ought’ — “There ‘ought’ to be more fictional detectives on television who are women because ...”

Fill in the gap and you’ll learn a lot about modern society and culture.

Fiction is, of course, just that. It is not real-life, and it has always involved the projection of the hopes and aspirations of the author. Yet we must never underestimate the power of fiction to move us as if it were reality. Indeed, there have been works of fiction which have had a seminal influence on society — think Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Grapes of Wrath.

This is why, personally, I think the Puritan suspicion of the theatre had something going for it. Our easy acceptance of the deluge of popular fiction on our televisions, particularly the ‘soaps’, may be a reflection, as much as anything else, of our blindness to its effects, rather than our robustness regarding its impact.

Indeed, there is no doubt whatsoever (and there is probably a book out there to prove) that the popular media have been used quite deliberately to reshape popular culture. What the ‘fictionalizers’ deem acceptable is thus at least as important as what their audiences find palatable.

I was inclined to pity an American audience that could only cope with ‘historic’ events which featured themselves. But it is not just Americans who demand a parallel universe for their contemplation. Our own producers and writers also insist creating worlds in their own image.

Back in the ‘70s (I’m tempted to say, when Greenbelt was evangelical) there was talk of raising up a generation of Christian artists and writers to influence society. At the time there was also a big debate about whether art should be ‘for art’s sake’ or to convey a ‘message’. I was then, and still am, a fan of the former. Nevertheless, it is clear that there are powerful figures in our modern media who have no compunction at all about operating on the basis of the latter.

Perhaps it is time we woke up to the fact.

John Richardson

Please give a full name and location when posting. Comments without this information may be deleted.

Why 'Piss Christ' was crap art

When I read that Andre Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ had been destroyed, allegedly by Christian protesters, I must admit to feeling a frisson of satisfaction that those who live by the sword do occasionally get their comeuppance the same way.

For decades it seems that one of the key elements of art generally, and visual art in particular, has been to shock. It is surely therefore a testimony to the success of an artwork, in these terms, to provoke its own destruction. That ‘Piss Christ’ finally achieved such an accolade arguably moves Serrano into the ‘Premier League’ of this particular genre.

Whilst reading the reactions to this event, however, I was struck by two particular things. One was those who attacked those who had destroyed the work as ‘vandals’. Surely they should have been welcomed as a necessary part of the whole artistic ‘event’. How can a work of art which sets out to make a statement be regarded as successful if no-one reacts? And how can the shocking be shocking unless people are — well, shocked?

The other was a comment about the ‘beauty’ of the work itself — the delicate light and colour of the photo of a crucifix.

At this point, however, I was reminded of a visit I made to the Tate Modern a few years ago which finally brought home to me the hollowness of much contemporary art.

I should say, incidentally, that I grew up in a home where modern art was freely available and readily embraced. My parents subscribed to The Studio magazine, and I loved to browse through the back numbers we kept in a vast cupboard halfway up the stairs.

As I traipsed around the galleries, however, I became aware of first a pattern, then a change, in what I was doing. At first I looked at the artwork, then at the label on the wall. Reading the labels told me what the work was ‘about’ — not just the title, which itself could be quite enlightening, but the thought behind the painting, sculpture or installation.

After a while, however, I found I was reading the label first, then looking at the artwork.

Finally, I realized that I actually didn’t need to look at the artwork at all — I could read the label and be just as well-informed, indeed sometimes more so. On the other hand, without the label, I would say that most of the time I entirely missed the point.

And so we come to Immersion (Piss Christ). This, we are told (by The Guardian), was part of a series of such images intended by Serrano as “a criticism of the ‘billion-dollar Christ-for-profit industry’ and a ‘condemnation of those who abuse the teachings of Christ for their own ignoble ends”.

To which I can only reply, “Oh no it isn’t.” Look at it. It is a blurry yellow picture of a crucifix.

There is no discernible hint of ‘billion-dollar industries’ or ‘ignoble ends’ in the work itself. Its all on the label.

And in fact it is the label which ‘makes’ the art ‘work’, for without the word ‘piss’ (and who can tell it is piss without the label?), you just have a blurry picture of a crucifix. The picture, in fact, is not shocking. The ‘shock’ and the ‘message’ are entirely in the label.

By contrast, and almost at random, let us consider Michelangelo’s ‘David’. Actually, given the conspicuously uncircumcised nature of the subject, the label is probably useful here as well — at least if we are supposed to think it is the biblical King David. But who cares? It is just a fantastic sculpture. You don’t want to go up to a label and peer at it in order to ‘get’ what it is about. You just want to look — that, and ask everyone else in the room to shut the hell up.

One day, as an experiment, someone should try just removing all the labels from the Tate Modern and insisting that any new works should also be presented and displayed without labels.

I wonder how the artists would react?

“So Mr Serrano, it’s a crucifix.”

“Yes, but you have to understand, it’s not just a crucifix, it’s ...”

“Thank you, Mr Serrano, but to us, it’s a picture of a crucifix. Very nice. Have you got anything else? OK, a Madonna and Child, and is that a little Satan in that picture? Tell you what, we’ll give you a ring.”

John Richardson
20 April 2011

Please give a full name and location when posting. Comments without this information may be deleted.

"I want it all, and I want it now" - cultural decline and the demand for gratfication

A couple of days ago, I posted a piece on the differences one woman identified between Chinese and ‘Western’ approaches to parenting. I didn’t realize at the time that the woman concerned had just written a book on the entire subject, nor did I know that there is a phenomenon called the Tiger Mother.

“How did I miss this?” you may ask. The answer is that the original article caught my eye because of a number of other concerns.

The first, and most pressing, is a conviction that the hegemony of the West is over. Europe and North America, in particular, have had their day and by the end of this century will simply be ‘bit players’ on a very different global stage.

That, I think, is an unremarkable suggestion, but the reason for it I myself would advance is that the ‘NATO’ culture is exhausted. The book to read is Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, where one can see how the astonishingly vibrant culture of medieval Europe finally gave way to dullness and indifference somewhere in the second half of the twentieth century. We have reached almost the end of a long trail, and are witnessing the passing of the old culture and the advent of the new.

That is life — cultures come and cultures go. But my second concern lies with the influences on, and from, this exhaustion. What human qualities are fed by, and feed into, our present Western culture? And that is where parenting comes into the picture.

One of the great challenges of being human is the delay of gratification. That is to say, we set aside an immediate pleasure (whether it be of doing one thing or stopping doing another) for the sake of a future pleasure, either of enjoying the same thing later or of enjoying something else even more.

Indeed, I would suggest that a conscious delay of gratification is one of the defining qualities of being human. Experiments with animals show that the greater the reward, the more strongly reinforced tends to be the behaviour that elicits that reward. (Combine this with frequent but irregular supply of the reward and the behaviour can become compulsive.)

Because we have an animal nature, the same is also broadly true of us. Why else does sex have such a powerful effect on the way we behave, especially when we are younger? However, human beings can also, by nature, step back from the action-gratification cycle. We can reflect on it, and rationalize about it, and therefore we can actually make choices as to how and, importantly, when we are gratified.

Thus an adult may choose not to eat sweets (delaying the gratifying experience) in order to achieve, later on, the pleasure of weight-loss. Or they may choose not to buy something they would quite like now in order to save up for something else they really want in the future.

Such observations are commonplace, but the underlying attitude depends on two fundamental considerations. The first is a conviction that there will be a future point at which such delayed gratification can finally be enjoyed. The second is that the future gratification will be, in some way, greater than the immediately available gratification.

To the extent to which these considerations are weakened, however, delayed gratification will tend to give way to immediate gratification. If I knew that I would die tomorrow, I would certainly not be abstaining from chocolate today.

This is the presumption behind the ‘Bucket List’ phenomenon. There are things to do ‘before you die’ precisely because you are going to die and then you will not be able to do them. The same, however, can be applied within our individual lifespan. There are things you can do when you are young which you will not be able to do when you are old, and so on.

Of course there is a balance to be struck between delay and gratification. Without eventual gratification, there would be nothing to provide motivation for the delay. On the other hand, if the possibility of gratification seems too remote, or if the immediate gratification seems too desirable, then again delay will lose its attraction.

The point, though, is that the interplay between gratification and delay is both influenced by, and has influence on, a given cultural group, whether that be, to give just a few examples, a family, a tribe, a community, a team or a nation.

Thus Amy Chua’s ‘Tiger Mother’ approaches the question of music practice or homework on the principle, first of all, that not doing these things is itself a ‘gratification’ which must be delayed. Why she thinks this doubtless has much to do with her own enculturation — how she was brought up and what she learned about motherhood — but the effect is obvious: her children now excel at these things which required so much effort and, indeed, caused so many tears.

The contrast with a family where the immediate gratification of not doing homework or music practice takes priority will be obvious. The children will, doubtless, be happy with their immediate lot, but in general they will not advance academically or artistically as far as the children of the ‘Tiger Mother’ household.

Which, then, is better? The answer depends on your views on a number of issues. The most obvious would be parental discipline, the application of which is itself a form of delayed gratification. Who wants to spend hours making children do their homework when we could all sit and watch the TV?

Another obvious issue would be one’s view of later attainment in life. If you want academic or artistic success, the foundations are best laid in childhood. But is this worth the actual price at the time? Who really cares whether you get good piano grades? What does it matter in the final analysis?

But there is also the basic question of what it means to be human. Is, for example, the person who enjoys — who indeed can play — Mozart a better human being than one who cannot share that enjoyment, someone whose musical development goes no further than, say, the ‘top twenty’? If the answer is ‘yes’, then delayed gratification is not just a means to material ends but a key to human development.

And if we find these examples from academia or the arts too culturally biased in themselves, consider the area of sport, where again great achievement demands great sacrifice. This is masked, of course, by the fact that sport, especially in its early stages, involves ‘play’. Nevertheless, to progress is intensely demanding.

Indeed, it is worth asking, again, whether a culture which emphasizes practice and discipline at an early stage will not produce more able athletes than one which relies on self-motivation and the emergence of the odd ‘genius’.

There is no doubt in my mind that a culture of delayed gratification is not only conducive towards, but essential for, developing both greatness in our achievements and fullness in our humanity.*

What has happened in the West, however, is the shrinking of our perspective regarding the extent to which gratification can and should be delayed. Not least, of course, this is affected by the decline of religious faith. In one sense delayed gratification is of the essence of faith — especially (though not exclusively) the Christian faith. Thus the believer is willing to delay gratification even of sexual desires if this is seen as conducive to a greater gratification that lies beyond this world.

But there are other ‘horizons’ which have contracted, whilst the immediate ‘moment’ has extended its demands.

To give one example, I remember reading the complaint of a football coach that the skills of young players were defective because the emphasis on Saturday mornings in the park was all on winning. What he pointed out was that to be able to improve some skills you had to try something you couldn’t do. Thus you had to accept ‘suffering’ your own incompetence at kicking with your weak foot if you were to emerge on the other side as a different kind of player. The ethos of the football-playing culture, however, meant that neither coaches nor players were prepared to live with short-term deprivation of success and admiration for the sake of the long-term future of either the player or the game.

Above all, there is the overarching question of what a culture as a whole sees as its collective ‘rationale’. And here is a key question for the West: “Why are we here? What is our purpose in handing on the gift of life itself from one generation to another, and how should we encourage our children to live in the short-term in order to achieve these longer-term goals?”

These are surely fundamental questions. And I am not saying that the ‘Tiger Mother’ has a good answer. On the contrary, I have no doubt that many such parents living in the West are simply running on the momentum of their cultural inheritance, without yet realizing the tank is dry. But we who are more embedded in Western culture are confronted with the questions more starkly precisely because we are no longer able to maintain the trajectory generated by that faith in the future or sense of duty towards family and country which motivated our grandparents.

If, in the end, there is really nothing much for the individual to look forward to, then the delay of gratification will become increasingly pointless. The result will be an unwillingness to struggle or strive in the present. Instead, carpe diem will come to mean ‘seize the pleasures of the day’. As Queen put it, “I want it all, I want it all, I want it all, and I want it now.” Or as it says in the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures, “Let us eat and drink ... for tomorrow we die.”

John P Richardson
13 January 2011

Anonymous users wishing to paste in the comments box need first to select 'preview', then close the preview box. When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may be deleted.

* "Carol Dweck from Stanford University in the US, has demonstrated that students who understand intelligence is malleable rather than fixed are much more intellectually ambitious and successful.

The same dynamic applies to talent. This explains why today's top runners, swimmers, bicyclists, chess players, violinists and on and on, are so much more skilful than in previous generations.

All of these abilities are dependent on a slow, incremental process which various micro-cultures have figured out how to improve." See here.

Will parenting decide the ascent of China and the decline of the West?

Back in October 2009, I posted some speculative concerns about the decline of the West and the corresponding ascent of Eastern cultures in general and China in particular. Amongst other things, I wrote,

My real worry is that the Western world will be surpassed by the East not only economically but culturally. And the danger here, I believe, would come from an intellectual decline of the West, manifesting itself through a decline in cultural vitality and scientific endeavour.

I was therefore interested to come across a provocative article in the Wall Street Journal, titled, Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.

Here is a sample (though you need to read the whole if you are to get the true picture):

Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn’t get them, the Chinese parent assumes it’s because the child didn’t work hard enough. That’s why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)

Now I’m certainly not saying I agree with every word. Indeed, I think many children know what it is to be forced to study or practice something not only that they dislike but which never results in any sense of achievement — just of relief when they’re allowed to stop!

It is also reasonable to ask whether achieving top grades or practical excellence is worth the angst the article admits that this involves. Nevertheless, the underlying premise is that this is not about what the child wants, but rather what the adults know is best:

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences.

And I cannot help thinking that a culture which approaches the nurture of its young on that basis will rapidly overtake one where what the child wants, and the limits the child sets, are key determinants of what the child is able to achieve.

In short, those who give up when things get difficult are surely liable to be overtaken at every level by those who persevere despite the desire to give up. It is, of course, much more pleasant to take things easy. The question, though, is whether we can afford to.

John Richardson
10 January 2011

Anonymous users wishing to paste in the comments box need first to select 'preview', then close the preview box. When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may be deleted.

A 'random act of culture' stills the tills

If you enjoyed that bit in The Shawshank Redemption where all the convicts stand listening as Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) locks himself in the warden's office and plays opera over the prison loudspeakers, you'll probably enjoy this real-life version.



Anonymous users wishing to paste in the comments box need first to select 'preview', then close the preview box. When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may be deleted.

EastEnders: anti-Atheist bias

An e-mail I received this morning has drawn my attention to complaints of an ‘anti-Christian’ bias in the BBC ‘soap’ EastEnders.

My reaction, as someone who remembers when this long-running drama first reached our screens is, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

If there is any ‘religious’ bias in EastEnders, it is clearly directed almost entirely against atheists and agnostics.

Anyone watching the programme would realize it is meant to portray the lives of the ordinary unbelieving and half-believing folk of inner London. Yet even allowing for dramatic license, what we see is a deeply unattractive presentation of these people’s lives.

Almost no-one is every nice to anyone. Nobody smiles. Everybody seems to hate somebody. Their lives are a litany (if that is the right word) of destructive behaviours, punctuated by adultery, unfaithfulness and even murder.

It is almost as if the writers are saying, “This is how people behave when there’s nothing to live for and no moral anchor to prevent such outrageous actions.”

As such, this surely is a caricature of the ‘unbelieving’ life — and it has to be said, this is not least because no-one ever just sits in front of the telly watching EastEnders.

John Richardson
17 July 2010

Anonymous users wishing to paste in the comments box need first to select 'preview', then close the preview box. When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may be deleted.

What next for the West?

Recently I have been revisiting Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, and have been struck by the importance of his definition of decadence for what we now see happening in the Western world:

All that is meant by Decadence is “falling off.” It 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. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

It is this which we surely see in our own culture, and it is important not just for those of a ‘religious’ persuasion but for us all.

To put it in its most simple terms, as we look at the present state of the Western world and ask ourselves “What next?” the question is difficult to answer at every level.

What next in art, for example? We have had modernism, and post-modernism. But as Barzun observes, it is the very fact of decadence itself which inspires “the repeated use of the dismissive prefixes anti- and post-”. They are symptomatic not of ideas, but of a lack of ideas. He continues, “The hope is that getting rid of what is will by itself generate the new life.”

And what next socially? One of Barzun’s ‘themes’ of the last five hundred years of Western civilization is emancipation —the desire to be ‘free from’ perceived constraints. The sexual revolution, and now the homosexual revolution, are simply the latest variations on this theme. But over against this, we see another set of forces at work, whereby the individual perceives increasing bureaucratic constraints, just at the point where God and respectability are losing their old power.

Or what of politics? There is an increasing ‘greyness’ about the old parties, whose agendas are no longer clearly distinguished from one another. What was ‘new’ about New Labour was not a radical socialist agenda but a departure from traditional socialism in favour of something much nearer to the middle ground.

As a culture, we are staring into the abyss, not of the unknown but of the completely, and repetitively, known. What we face, in our darkest moments, is not the fear of danger but the fear of ennui — that there really is nothing more to life than this.

This goes some way, I believe, to explaining the various responses to global warming, for what this provides is not simply a threat to be addressed but a moral cause. On the surface, climate-change is a ‘scientific’ issue, but the language of the ‘debate’ about climate-change is anything but ‘scientific’. One well-known campaigner, for example, refers to climate-change sceptics as ‘scumbags’.

Now my own view is that at the end of the day, such people may be wrong, but if they genuinely believe the evidence favours their point of view, then that is all they are. They may be frustratingly wrong, they may be dangerously wrong, but in strictly scientific terms, they cannot, as the term ‘scumbag’ implies, be morally wrong.

But addressing climate-change is not simply about the science —it is a cause, which is why, as we have seen recently, people are prepared to lie about it.

In short, for some people, the climate-change issue provides a welcome cause: a rationale by which to live. It is worth getting up in the morning in order to save the planet. We are moved and motivated by pictures of melting ice-caps and floundering polar bears. But what if we think beyond the challenge? What if we save the planet? What next? And what if we don’t? Will it matter, given that, in the great scheme of things, we know (‘scientifically’) that the planet is doomed anyway?

We have reached a stage where it is best not to think too deeply about anything. In such a situation, to become regularly and blindingly drunk, as some sections of our society now do, may be an entirely rational response. It was, after all the very rational philosopher David Hume who wrote that when his reflections brought on too much melancholy,

I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold and strained and ridiculous that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

Surely those who fill the streets of our towns and cities with ‘revellry’ on a typical Friday and Saturday night are simply applying (albeit unconsciously) the same remedy. We are developing at one level in our society a class which is not so much ‘under’ as consciously aimless.

Those who are fortunate enough to have the resources and the imagination to construct their own ‘micro-meanings’ will, of course, apply themselves to other goals. For most of the middle and upper classes, these consist of material acquisition and advancement, coupled with ambitions for their children and the ravelling and unravelling of their own domestic arrangements. The trick, however, is not to stop and ask why or for how long. For the inescapable truth, as Hume knew, is that these things last but the blink of an eye, then they, and we, are gone.

How can we of the West deal with that? This is surely as great a challenge to our cultural life as the threat of global warming is to our physical survival.

John Richardson
26 November 2009

Anonymous users wishing to paste in the comments box need first to select 'preview', then close the preview box. When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may be deleted.

Another Nightmare: The Intellectual Eclipse of the West

Last night I was literally lying awake around 3.30am thinking over the implications of the global economic crisis for what has hitherto been the economic hegemony of Western civilizations. The result was my earlier post about the possibility of a hyper-inflation being just around the corner. This, however, is not my only, or chief, worry.

I remember reading as a child a book which must have been written in the early twentieth century. I can recall neither the title nor the plot, but what has stayed with me was a remark made by an adult character in the book to the child-protagonists, to the effect that, unimaginable as it might seem, the British Empire would one day be a thing of the past.

Given that we were then living through the ongoing moves towards colonial independence, two things struck me forcibly. The first was that this ‘unimaginable’ event was coming true, and the second was that therefore other such changes as would seem unimaginable in the present might be just as possible in the future.

And it is that sense of ‘unimaginable possibilities’ that I feel when looking at where we are now. Everyone on this planet has grown up with the ‘normality’ of Western dominance. This has been most obvious economically, but it has also been true industrially, and, even more importantly, intellectually, culturally and scientifically.

I say more importantly, however, because economic downturns can come and go. The crisis of the ‘Great Depression’ gave way to a period of sustained economic boom and prosperity which might itself have seemed ‘unimaginable’ at the time. And the same could perhaps be true in the present economic climate. Western nations have maintained high levels of domestic product and living standards despite competition with one another and with the economies which emerged in the Far East during the post-war years.

It might reasonably be doubted whether all can have such generous slices of cake in a world of limited physical resources. This is why there can be no certainty that the living standards to which we have become accustomed can be made universal. But it is not necessarily the case that a global economy must always have great disparities of prosperity, and therefore the economic rise of the East need not entail the economic decline of the West.

What is in prospect however, is not merely a shift in the economic balance of power but in the vitality of civilizations.

At its most basic, this may simply mean that the West as a whole, including the United States of America, may be about to go through on an even larger scale what Great Britain went through in the 1950s and 60s, namely  an abrupt transition from being the key world power to an international bit-player. That, it must be said, is a process from which the British are still recovering, and which has yet to be fully played out. Our privileged position in the UN Security Council, for example, is beginning to look as anomalous as the position of Anglican bishops in our own House of Lords. The time cannot be far off when embarrassing questions begin to be put.

What is harder to imagine, however, yet is surely possible, is that the entire Western world faces the same situation —where, for example, a heavily indebted US, whose dollar no longer commands respect and which can no longer afford to maintain its armed forces (remember the rusting Russian submarines of the 1990s), is simply forced to take a back-seat in the decision-making councils of the world.

Yet even this is not my ‘worst case’ scenario, for it is possible to cope with a variety of outside threats, so long as one is inwardly strong. My real worry is that the Western world will be surpassed by the East not only economically but culturally. And the danger here, I believe, would come from an intellectual decline of the West, manifesting itself through a decline in cultural vitality and scientific endeavour.

The signs of cultural decay have been there for decades. All over the world, ‘Western’ artistic culture is admired and imitated, and we could take some pride in this —but it is not the artistic culture of the contemporary West which is admired. There is something slightly unnerving, for example, about Eastern prodigies in Western musical forms. On the one hand, it is slightly bizarre seeing someone excelling in a form of cultural expression quite different from their own. There is also something threatening about the sense that they are ‘better at it than us’ (not unlike the feeling we Englsih get when playing the rest of the world at football or cricket).

Worse than that, though, we are surely no longer producing art which will be much admired in two or three centuries time —as evidence of which we need only look at the succession of artistic ‘movements’ which come, and more importantly go, through the intellectual ‘upper echelons’ of our own society. If we have so little confidence in the durability of our best cultural efforts, can we assume that others will think differently?

Yet my concern is that this is still not the greatest threat, for an even more serious danger is that we will fall behind in the area of scientific endeavour and discovery. And if we feel that this is not merely ‘unimaginable’ but impossible, we might do well to remind ourselves how the Muslim world might have felt in the early middle-ages, when Western Europe might have seemed decidedly backward in this regard and where continued Islamic progress would have been taken for granted.

Specifically, I believe there are two possible contributors to such a decline which are already evident. The first is the transformation of our educational system from an intellectual enterprise to a business. Recently I was briefly involved in consultations regarding the future of the chaplaincy at the University of East London —a post I held for seventeen years. At one stage, in this I asked a member of staff what was the prevailing ethos of the institution —what was the core reason for its existence? The answer was to the effect that, “We are a business, whose product is academic degrees.”

I have to say, that fitted entirely with my perceptions of the same institution coming towards the end of my tenure some fifteen years ago. When I started at what was then the North East London Polytechnic it was chaotic and wasteful, but it was fun, and it had about it still some sense of intellectual adventure (though not as much as one might have hoped). By the time I left, it was clean, tidy, reasonably financially efficient and intellectually as dull as ditch-water. What mattered most, it seemed, to both management and students was getting the qualifications for a well-paid job. The staff, caught in the middle, simply had to deliver in order to survive.

But the trouble is, you cannot build an adventurous intellectual class (from which will come great endeavours and great discoveries) on the basis of boosting your figures for ‘first destination returns’ —the number of students who, upon leaving higher education, go straight into what they themselves describe as ‘employment’, preferably relevant to their degree subject. A degree ought not to be evaluated first and foremost on the basis of its usefulness in obtaining gainful employment, and those who think it should have already abandoned the cultural foundations of Western culture, which brings me to the second contributing factor.

What gave our culture its past position of precedence was its relative ability to produce people who could think, and who could therefore produces scientific discoveries and advances —whether theoretical or applied —ahead of other nations and cultures. And a case could, I suspect, be made for the suggestion that this required a certain amount of what might be called ‘intellectual leisure’, the space for original thinking free from economic, or even academic, pressure.

Albert Einstein in his patents office, Gregor Mendel in his monastery or William Herschel in his back garden are all examples of what I mean —people who were not working to an agenda determined by assumptions about what they should be studying or how useful their discoveries should be. By contrast, what I fear is happening specifically in the sciences in the West is the limiting of investigation and discovery by both economic and intellectual constraints.

As an example of this I would point to our society’s current hagiolatry of Charles Darwin. The mention of Darwin’s name draws from many an inward response comparable to the Muslim’s “sall Allahu alayhi wa sallam” (May Allah bless him and grant him peace). Any criticism, expressed or implied, is taken as a sure sign of being an ‘unbeliever’ worthy, if not of death, at least of contempt. Darwinism (or, for the sophisticated, neo-Darwinism), and therefore Darwin himself, provides the ‘Great Explanation’ which saves us from intellectual darkness. Criticism, therefore, is not merely futile but dangerous.

Now in what follows I must stress I am entirely unconcerned with the question of speciation by natural selection. Whether that is true or false is irrelevant to the point I am making, as are questions about Creationism or Intelligent Design (so please do not post comments on these subjects).

However, through some reading around the subject of genetics and behaviour, I have become aware of just how strongly even neo-Darwinism has been challenged within the scientific community by other ‘evolutionists’, particular those working in the field of genes and behaviour. These are not covert Creationists or supporters of Intelligent Design, but ordinary scientists, yet they voice opinions which, one suspects will scarcely be allowed to see the light of day in the media or in our educational institutions.

Two writers, for example, expresses the following view:

... recognizing that there are epigenetic inheritance systems through which non-DNA variations can be transmitted in cell and organismal lineages broadens the concept of heredity and challenges the widely accepted gene-centered neo-Darwinian version of Darwinism.

Of course, their work must itself be open to scientific challenge. But the point is that, outside the scientific community you are unlikely to hear anyone who wants to be taken seriously repeating the phrase “challenges ... Darwinism”.

And in case it might be thought that only some kind of stubborn ‘anti-Darwinist’ can think like this, I found this from a critical review of work challenging neo-Darwinism. The author of the review was unpersuaded, but nevertheless wrote,

... the process structuralist critique does reveal some deep-seated problems with orthodox evolutionary theory and some of its suggestions may be employed to good effect.

Once again, the point is not that this ‘disproves Darwinism’, much less that it proves Creationism, but simply that the idea that there are ‘deep-seated problems with orthodox evolutionary theory’ is something you are unlikely to hear admitted in public debate.

A rather more trenchant critic, but still one who is apparently concerned only with evolutionary theory, wrote this:

Ignoring disagreeable literature became a frequent strategy of hardened neo-Darwinians [...]. ‘This intellectual degeneracy is the outward expression of the fact’ [concludes Milton 1997, p. 240] ‘that neo-Darwinism has ceased to be a scientific theory and has been transformed into an ideology . . .’ [...]. (Eugene K Balon, Epigenetic processes, when natura non facit saltum [nature does not make sudden jumps] becomes a myth, and alternative ontogenies a mechanism of evolution. This essay was also apparently reproduced as ‘Alternative Ontogenies and Evolution’ in Environment, development and evolution: toward a synthesis, edited by Brian Keith Hall, Roy Douglas Pearson, Gerd B. Müller, 2004, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)

And same author provides perhaps my favourite quote, albeit from another writer:

... the belief that unreconstructed neo-Darwinism is the all-sufficient explanation of evolution illustrates a survival of the polemically fittest.

Let me repeat, these are not quotations from anti-evolutionists. As far as I am aware, they are ‘natural selectionists’ to the core. The point is that the criticisms they voice of (neo)-Darwinism are unlikely to be met with a dispassionate, we might say scientific, response within contemporary debate. (Indeed, I await the comments on this blog which immediately leap to the defence of Darwinism and pour scorn on all critics.)

But that is my point entirely —we have reached a stage in our intellectual climate where a scientific theory has, as the writer above says, become effectively an ideology. And as history shows, such a transformation is inimical to true scientific enquiry.

And the worry is not so much that we are doing it —cultural history is full of such examples —but that we are so blind to the fact that we are doing it and that it goes against the hard-won Western tradition. We believe ourselves to be entering the highlands of free thought after the valleys of ignorance. In fact, we may be simply be descending from the peaks, unaware that we are moving in an intellectual fog. In short collective cultural fear and rejection of ‘unscientific’ religious views (and such undoubtedly exist), but more generally of religion, may actually be crippling our practice of science.

And what if, on the other side of the world, there is a scientific community unshackled by such fears and inhibitions? What if truly free thought actually is possible within their universities and academic communities? By definition, we cannot know what is yet to be discovered. What if their discoveries allow them to develop some hitherto unimagined source of, or store for, energy? What if they are able to produce weapons we cannot match or which neutralize our own? What if their discoveries make them ‘top dog’, yet leave their own cultural assumptions about the way the world should be unchallenged?

The crisis I imagine may not materialize, but if it does not, it will be our good luck, not our own achievement. Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence left off in the 1990s, and the title tells you what he thought of Western culture by that stage. If he is right, and if we have truly become decadent, we cannot assume that we will nevertheless continue the human voyage of enterprise and discovery uninterrupted. It may take a long time for us to realize we are culturally stagnating, but there is the very real possibility that we are.

Revd John P Richardson
6 October 2009

Anonymous users wishing to paste in the comments box need first to select the 'Anonymous' profile, then type in a couple of letters, select 'preview', then close the preview box and delete these letters.

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may be deleted.

Tarantino 'proves his critics right'

(A helpful review of Quentin Tarantino's work, in my view. Just a pity the reviewer didn't spell "Inglourious" right!)

[...] Violence has particular power on film precisely because it involuntarily activates our powers of empathy. We imagine ourselves, as an unthinking reflex, into the agony. This is the most civilising instinct we have: to empathize with suffering strangers. (It competes, of course, with all our more base instincts). Any work of art that denies this sense – that is based on subverting it – will ultimately be sullying. No, I’m not saying it makes people violent. But it does leave the viewer just a millimetre more morally corroded. Laughing at simulated torture – and even cheering it on, as we are encouraged to through all of Tarantino’s later films – leaves a moral muscle just a tiny bit more atrophied.

You can see this in the responses of Tarantino himself. Not long after 9/11, he said: “It didn’t affect me because there’s, like, a Hong Kong action movie? called Purple Storm and they work in a whole big thing in the plot that they blow up a skyscraper.” It’s a case-study in atrophy of moral senses: to brag you weren’t moved by the murder of two and half thousand actual people, because you’d already seen it simulated in a movie. Only somebody who has never seen violence – who sees the world as made of celluloid – can respond like this. Read more

Anonymous users wishing to paste in the comments box need first to select the 'Anonymous' profile, then type in a couple of letters, select 'preview', then close the preview box and delete these letters.

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may be deleted.

The rise in teenage murderers?

For some time now, I’ve been trying to verify a hunch that whereas murder was once an ‘adult’ activity, it has recently become more a preserve of the young —indeed, the very young.

About three years ago, I noticed the astonishing number of news stories online about murders in which the victim or the perpetrator was in their teens.

Often, if the victim was in their teens then so, it seemed, was the perpetrator. What was even more alarming was that in the case of teenage perpetrators of all kinds of murders there were often two or more individuals involved.

Trying to get specific numbers is difficult. Curiously, I have twice tried requesting information on the numbers of teenagers convicted for murder from our own Ministry of Justice, but without success (even though the website says this is possible under the Freedom of Information Act).

Today, however, I found that the Google news archive now shows a timeline of results for a search, and this is very interesting.

If you click here, you will see the result for the search term "guilty of murder" (this should open in a new window or tab, so you will need to come back to this page afterwards). At first glance this might seem to suggest the murder conviction rate has gone up since 1860, declined in the 1940s, and then has risen again since the 1960s. But of course what we also have here is the number of filed news accounts and a dramatically increasing population. On its own, the graph is interesting, but tells us nothing about rates of increase or decline.

However, if you click here, you will see the results for the same search term, only this time just for the period 1950-2009, and this is where it starts to get interesting.

Now click here, and see the results for the search term 'teenager + "guilty of murder"', again for 1950-2009. This time, we have factored out the increase in news media and population. The difference is, I'm sure you'll agree, striking. Click between the two pages or tabs to compare the two. Whilst the rate per head of population may not have changed, the rate of reports has increased dramatically. Indeed, between 1975 and 1995 it increased exponentially. If you scroll down the page, you will also see that the stories are, indeed, generally about teenagers who have carried out, and been convicted of, murders.

However, there may still be other factors involved, so as a kind of control try comparing 'wife+"guilty of murder"' and 'husband+"guilty of murder"' over the same period as before. This time it can be seen that both rates of reporting have increased - and the 'husband' rate slightly more than the 'wife' - but that the rates are not markedly different (and, thankfully, both seem recently to have fallen).

It is, I agree, not absolute proof. But it is surely an indication of a trend.

John Richardson
4 June 2009

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may not be posted.

Modern Art and the death of ...

Here is another great piece by 'Theodore Dalrymple', this time on modern art:

The successful modern artist’s subject is himself, not in any genuinely self-examining way that would tell us something about the human condition, but as an ego to distinguish himself from other egos, as distinctly and noisily as he can. Like Oscar Wilde at the New York customs, he has nothing to declare but his genius: which, if he is lucky, will lead to fame and fortune. Of all the artistic disciplines nowadays, self-advertisement is by far the most important.

This is reflected in the training that art students now undergo. Rarely do they receive any formal training in (say) drawing or painting.

[...] It is true that they are sometimes taught just a little art history. I had what was for me a memorable conversation with an art student when she was my patient. She was in her second year of art school, and told me that one of the things she enjoyed most about it was art history. I asked what they taught in art history.

‘The first year,’ she said, ‘we did African art. But now in the second year we’re doing western art.’

I asked what particular aspect of western art they were doing.

‘Roy Liechtenstein.’

As satire would be impossible, so commentary would be superfluous. The task is not so much to criticise as to understand: that is to say, to understand how and why this terrible shallowness has triumphed so completely almost everywhere in the west.

I am reminded of the thesis of the late, great Hans R Rookmaker, put forward in his seminal Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, that the history of art shows us both the rise and the decline of Western civilization, at the heart of which lies the rise and decline of Protestant spirituality.

Although he eschews a spiritual analysis, Jacques Barzun also identifies a decline in the Western 'spirit', in his From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life.

One of the (several) tragedies of recent evangelical history is that in the 1970s some attempts were being made to integrate theology and artistic culture.  This relied, however, on what might be called a 'confident Calvinism', which on the one hand recognized that every area of life could and should be brought under God's sovereignty, but which, on the other hand, also had a very particular theological perspective.

Unsurprisingly, this has now largely ceased as some branches of evangelicalism have given up on the (Protestestant) theology and others have given up on the culture.

Perhaps there is still time for a reawakening. Personally, I have long been struck by the fact that the first result of someone being filled with the Holy Spirit in the Bible is that they are gifted with artistic endowment (Exodus 31:1-5).

A quick Google took me to this website for Christian Artists, but I wonder what happened to that earlier promise? (And also what happened to the old members of the CYFA Arts Workshop - now thereby hangs a tale!)

JPR

10 January 2009

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may not be posted.

Be very afraid

According to an article in The Independent newspaper, one Gerald Fredrick Töben, a “holocaust revisionist” was arrested yesterday (1 October) at Heathrow airport by officers from Scotland Yard’s extradition unit at the request of authorities in Germany. He will appear in court on Friday under an EU arrest warrant accused of committing offences in Germany, though in fact he had just arrived from the USA, and is an Australian citizen.

Now it may just be me, but I find this deeply, deeply, disturbing.

There is no doubt in my mind that the holocaust occurred pretty much as most people think — involving a systematic and deliberate attempt to exterminate the Jewish race in Europe, and resulting in the deaths of millions of Jews and others.

No one who has seen contemporary news footage can feel anything but horror, not just at Nazism, but at the human race, for what was perpetrated in a few short years. Nor can anyone who has read Mein Kampf, incidentally, have any doubt but that Adolf Hitler was a clear and deliberate anti-Semite who saw the Jews as being the root of Europe’s troubles.

To deny the holocaust is therefore unreasonable as well as unpleasant. But being unreasonable and unpleasant is not a crime. There are those (sometimes those who send comments to this blog) who think I personally am both. But surely so, too, is the denial of free speech.

We can hardly condemn the Nazis for burning books if we are a society which bans ideas. (Indeed I suspect that it is this very attitude which goads some people into the very attitudes they seek to ban.)

Moreover, there is undeniably a ‘slippery slope’ at work here. We should not forget what ought to be a notorious speech given by the Darwinist philosopher and scientist, Nicholas Humphrey, to the Oxford branch of Amnesty International in 1997, in which he argued that parents of certain religious persuasions which might question Darwinism ought not to be allowed “freedom of expression” with regard to their own children - in other words, I presume, that their children should, if necessary, be taken away from them.

There is no record that he was hissed, booed, or censured by his audience. Yet surely he should have been?

Similarly, we have seen in the last few days an eminent scientist levered out of his post in the Royal Society for saying something which was misquoted in the press.

What is truly frightening is the increasing silence which greets these pronouncements and actions. We have become a society which ignores the abuse of power when it is directed against those who are an easy target: the BNP-supporting teacher, the holocaust denier, the accidental ‘creationist’.

But the very fact that the innocent, such as Professor Michael Reiss, have already suffered should warn us things have gone too far. Moreover, we should surely take note of the fact that what some people warned against is happening before our very eyes, namely that you can now be arrested in this country for something which is not a criminal offence here, and which, in fact, is in accordance with a deeply held tradition, long exemplified by the existence of Speaker's Corner at Hyde Park, that no matter how daft your ideas, you should be allowed the freedom to express them. (There will be some who will observe that, nevertheless, certain expressions of ideas are illegal in this country. I would simply comment that this is not, in my view, generally a good thing.)

We have all heard the pious saying, “I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.” Unfortunately, almost no one seems to want to step in when real harm might result to their own reputation.

Our cultural leadership have, it seems, learned the ‘Frank McGarahan’ lesson. He, you will remember, was the banker murdered when he intervened to help a Lithuanian being beaten up by some young men in Norwich. Sometimes ‘defending to the death’ means just that.

And maybe declaiming ‘Free Gerald Töben’ would be social suicide. Much better, surely, to wait til they pick on someone everyone agrees is innocent. But that, trust me, will never happen. First they will turn society against them. Then it will be safe to pick on them. After all, isn’t that just what they did with the Jews?

John Richardson
2 October 2008

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may not be posted.