Diversion as culture

Chapter 4 of Kenneth Myers's All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes is about our cultural restlessness.  When I looked these chapters over, it was obvious that my problem was not going to be coming up with anything to write;  it was going to be whittling my thoughts down.  And since this month I seem to be running in the same gerbil wheel of activity I deplore below, what seems to have happened is that I've cherry-picked the quotes from the book.  They give you the heart of the matter.

Early in the chapter, there's a telling quote from Blaise Pascal:

“Men...are overwhelmed with business...and they are made to understand that they cannot be happy unless their health, their honor, their fortune and that of their good friends be in good condition, and that a single thing wanting will make them unhappy.  Thus they are give cares and business which make them bustle about from break of day--It is, you will exclaim, a strange way to make them happy!  What more could be done to make them miserable?...[If we wanted to make them more miserable, we could relieve them of these cares, because] then they would see themselves; they would reflect on what they are, whence they came, whither they go, and thus we cannot employ and divert them too much.  And this is why, after having given them to so much business, we advise them, if they have some time for relaxation, to employ it in amusement, I play, and to always fully occupied.  

How hollow and full of ribaldry is the heart of man!”

In one sense, busyness has been a problem at least since Pascal's time.  Certainly it describes most everyone I know, even myself at times. We keep our kids out of school because we think they’d be overscheduled, and then we immediately fill their calendars up with activities--all good ones, of course.  

But there’s something even more hyper about the culture of today than that of Pascal’s time.  Pop culture not only keeps us shlepping to lessons; it’s a whole culture of ever-evolving diversion.  It thrives on it, celebrates it, makes itself at home in it.  But diversion seems intrinsically related not only to television and music, but to our ailing families, our ailing communities, and even an existential sense of restlessness.  What's the connection? And where does this competitive, disconnected sense of pop culture come from?

The Left claims that it is imposed from above, because capitalism depends on it. Mothering Magazine deplores our society's brazen marketing to children. It’s certainly easy for a parent to get that feeling if you’ve ever witnessed the launching of a new children’s product, often via television or movies.  Ninja Turtles, Teletubbies, Pokemon, plastic bracelets from Nike, does it really matter what it is?  Each time the latest fad hits a new crop of children who have no sales resistance, no awareness of how marketing works.  Then, just when the last kid gets the item in a Happy Meal, it becomes passe. Today's fad is forgotten, or even becomes tomorrow's pop culture joke. It may even be recycled, along with a cool layer of irony.

Cool hunters comb the city streets, looking for new trends to exploit.  But the left really only gets part of the story.  Often teens or artists start their own fads.  Their whole lives are consumed with being competitively hip, and sometimes their style really is interesting.  By the time the fad filters down to the Gap level, the trend setters are on to something new.  But wherever you catch it, it's always evolving, and it takes a lot of energy to keep up.  No wonder teens can’t concentrate in school.

John Taylor Gatto connects our obsession with the fashionable present to the breakdown of communities and a purposeful helplessness inculcated by our age-segregated schools:  He says, “Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent - nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that."  He also said: "[School] cuts you off from your own past and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does.” 

We might as well add the internet to that, except that at least we can choose to blog about our own past if we like.  Still, the challenge is to get any sort of involved conversation going.  Blog readers don't know your parents, or your family's past.  For that matter, all of Manhattan seems to live in a continuous present.  I'm lucky if I've briefly met another mom's parent. Mostly we talk about what we're doing this week.  

Myers seems to agree with Neil Postman (who figures into the book later on) and others that technological advances have changed the way we think. Artists and philosophers sense this change of consciousness and embrace it. Marshall Berman describes its essence:

“To be modern is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction...To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows.”

Art has always reflected the culture around it, but after Andy Warhol, high culture became primarily about an ever-increasing pace of change and conceptualization, and its motto, “In the future, everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes.”  But change in high culture is the subject of chapter 5.  For now, let’s look take a quick look at how the Industrial Revolution changed our basic mindset.  

After finding what he considers to be the heart of the matter, Myers then discusses how the Industrial Revolution and its technological innovations changed our culture and our sense of time and ultimately produced pop culture. You might wonder what the aging Rustbelt has to do with technopop, but the common answer is obvious once you think of it:  Boredom.  Factory work is tedious and unsatisfying in itself. It is divorced from nature and liturgy. It ultimately destroys community life, and fosters a culture of diversion.  And John Taylor Gatto shows clearly how industrial models originated our present school system.

Jacques Barzun said:

“...industrial life requires something that would compensate the toilers for their loss of individuality, of self-will and self-regard, of free movement and dramatic effort.  Something, I say, had to be done to palliate their nervous fatigue, their self-contempt, and their boredom, which is only vital energy unused...and the compensation is the culture of cities, rooted in the newspaper and rising by degrees to spectator sports, organized betting, and panoptical sexuality.”

His words almost sound quaint now, but they’re still true.  Sure, the particulars have changed, and our educators sound alarms that we're "falling behind the times."  But the basic idea is the same:  We feel disconnected, but who's got time to figure it all out?  And does it really matter as long as we're having fun?  

I have developed my my own pet theory over the past several years that a "management" approach school and attraction to pop culture go hand in hand.  The most common outlook towards academics, not only in the dysfunctional public schools (in my neighborhood) that Gatto talks about, but even among classical Christian schools and homeschoolers, is what I call “managed workload.”  The primary lesson is not the subject itself, but the ability to manage one’s time and to master a certain quality of “output.”  One even sees it in Sunday school.  

I find that this approach is for the most part dependent on extrinsic rewards, of which the most common are related to pop culture.  ("Do your homework or no TV!") The management approach ultimately destroys concentration on substantive learning. Sure, there’s something to being able to manage your time well, but there’s even more to being able to say no and being able to answer the question, How do I want to live?  If I don't do what others do, am I willing to be alone sometimes, and poor sometimes? I prefer to foster interest in the subject itself.  This is why I am sympathetic to unschooling, even if I haven’t always got it worked out in practice.  No doubt some people think I'm not being realistic.

As I write this, C.Z. is working on a lesson in Jacobs’ Algebra. She wanted me to come check the first two problems (with several subparts each), because she suspected she was going off in the wrong direction, and her hunch turned out to be a good one.  I said, “You know, you’ll move along faster and do less work in the long run if you read the introduction to the chapters carefully.”  I said this because if she does her work well, I only require her to do the second set out of three in each lesson.  I was an A student.

“I prefer to do an extra set anyway,” she responded. “Otherwise I feel like a dog trying to hold a bunch of tennis balls at once.  I don’t learn anything.”  Now algebra is certainly not C.Z.’s favorite subject, but I admire her frank refusal to cater to efficiency at the expense of understanding.  She may even struggle with the workload at first when she gets to college, but at least she’ll know why she’s there.  And if she really wants to be there, she'll figure it out.

But what disturbs me most about the medium of school or work, with its artificial requirements for efficiency and its fostering of a culture of salient distraction, is that it overrides the student’s intuition and cuts off that part of the human mind that feels God’s presence most keenly.  As Myers says, 

“Modernity has not excluded God from the universe.  It has simply made it more difficult to maintain a consciousness of God’s presence in a culture that increasingly ignores him.” 

Case in point: My pastor preached two Sundays ago on the first sin.  It was a sort of Postmodern update on Lewis’ statement that most people are not reasoned out of our faith; they drift away. Dr. Keller said that the serpent didn’t tempt Eve by holding an Enlightment-style conversation on the probability of God’s existence.  He sneered.  “Did God really say that?”  Temptation is an atmosphere. And it's how rumors get started:  Eve exaggerated by saying that she wasn't even allowed to touch the tree.

And this is the way of pop culture.  It doesn’t reason us our of our faith, but it pokes fun at everything until we become afraid to take anything seriously.  What is truth, anyway? 

Adam Stenbergh recently reviewed David Denby’s book Snark.  Denby thinks that snark (bascially a sarcastic ad hominem attack) is ruining our public discourse. Stenberg answered that snark could be defended as a way of constructively criticizing a society that's already almost completely obscured by spin, but I beg to differ. There’s nothing constructive about snark.  It destroys, but doesn’t build. Or as Myers says, “A steady diet of such astute humor merely takes us to a third level of emptiness.”  (pg. 63)

Ernest vanden Haag took the place of boredom in pop culture in faith seriously: “In pop culture,” he said, “even the second coming would become just another barren thrill...No distraction can cure boredom, just as the company so unceasingly pursued cannot stave off loneliness,  The bored person is lonely for himself, not, as he thinks, for others.” 

Perhaps Hell is partly that level of cynical unawareness that makes us blind to grace and joy, like the Dwarves in the barn at the end of Lewis’s The Last Battle.  One thing I do know: When Christians are called to live in the present, that doesn’t mean a continuous present of the sort that can’t entertain itself.  It means a timeless present.  And it fellowship doesn’t mean constant companionship of peers, but the presence of the Love that casts out all fear.

Near the end of the chapter, Myers explains what’s at stake in a culture of diversion:

“Family and community are only one media of meaning, of the source.  High culture is another medium of meaning, one we’ll explore in more detail...The transcendent reality of God Himself, and the experience of fellowship with him in Christ, is the source of meaning.  The question remains whether popular culture cans serve as an able medium of meaning, or whether it is instead a distraction from confronting meaning, as well as meaninglessness.” (pg. 64)

 I hope to be able to blog about chapter 5 soon.  But I'm not sure when I'll get to it.  Ironically, my calendar is too full. 

It's partita time!

The concerto competition went just fine today, and C.Z.'s performance was quite respectable, which is what you hope for in a first competition. This is not false modesty, but just an acknowledgement of that the general level of playing is quite high. I enjoyed listening from the balcony, and was probably able to stick around for about half the contestants, including the eventual winner.  Wow!

I hope this doesn't sound ungrateful, but do you know what I'm looking forward to?  After three Mozart concertos in two years, C.Z.'s next solo piece will be a Bach partita.  (There's a link to the Grumiaux version on the right, along with her Dvorak chamber piece.)  We're all looking forward to something new, even C.Z.'s teacher.  Another nice thing about Bach partitas is that they're unaccompanied, so you can take them along anywhere without having to hire a pianist. 

Though it's hard work and I've occasionally wondered what our lives would be like if C.Z. didn't play violin for hours every day and attend a music program every Saturday, when I listen to the students play on a day like today, and realize what a wonderful opportunity she has to get first rate training and listen to top notch performers in the city, I'm extremely thankful.  Even if she doesn't become a professional musician, our lives have been changed by so much exposure to good music and the pursuit of excellence.  And that is its own reward.  

This and that

C.Z. sitting on our warm living room radiator, her favorite spot, watching it snow yesterday

It has been a busy week, which makes it hard to sit down and write an organized post, but here are a few odds and ends.

First of all, it's that cold time of year. There's always about a month-and-a-half where the weather can get so cold that it's unpleasant to be outside for long.  The high temperature might not get above freezing for two weeks at a time.  The high today should be 19. Of course, I do realize that discomfort in weather is a relative matter, and that Jody, for one, would probably find this weather a breeze. (Jody, I've added your town to my collection of dashboard weather widgets, just for inspiration!) And Bob likes this weather.  Just to toughen his girls up, he announced from the living room earlier this week, "There is no bad weather, only wrong clothing!"

A couple of seconds later, I heard a voice mutter from the study, "When it's this cold, I prefer my outer layer to be a building."

That said, she's really quite tough.

***

And even if you're like me and don't always check up on the news, you probably know by now that a commercial plane landed in the Hudson yesterday. I remember thinking yesterday afternoon, "That's an odd low plane sound," but I'm so used to monitoring odd sounds since 2001 that when I didn't hear a crash, I forgot about it until Bob called me to let me know. Anyway, I'm extremely thankful that the pilot's skill saved all aboard, and I'm also thankful that he avoided Harlem and the Upper West Side, which it appears that he purposely did from the graphics on the NY Times website.

***

And speaking of crashes, I'm trying to learn to ski. We're going with a group of homeschoolers to the Poconos about every other week during January and February. I'm still in that stage where every time I try to turn to slow myself down, I fall, and then spend much longer than I ever spent skiing trying to get up without sliding rapidly down the hill. My goal for the year is to get out of this stage. 

***

C.Z. has started physical therapy for a shoulder injury she developed over the summer while playing violin.  The doctors didn't seem to be concerned at first, and we spent all fall making various adjustments to her playing, thinking they would do the trick, but the pain persisted. So now we're biting the bullet and making the trip to the therapist's twice a week. Things probably won't improve in time for her concerto competition this weekend, but she's managed to hold her own fairly well, considering.  We're hoping have her completely pain free by spring.  

***

Other than that, we're just trying to get into a good winter routine.   I'm enjoying my mornings reading Proverbs and writing in my journal, and we're trying to get schoolwork done as happily as we can despite a lot of interruptions.  Right now things are just a bit bumpy with our routine, but we'll settle in eventually.

Photos from another place

Without too much comment, these photos from our Christmas trip reflect other moods than the one we usually inhabit.  They reflect the moods that were normal for us until we moved to NYC eleven years ago.

The first was taken on my inlaws' property north of Atlanta on Christmas Day.  As you can see, there are no leaves and the grass is brown, but the cousins were perfectly comfortable running from house to house without jackets.  It was almost seventy degrees.  This sunshine, this freedom of movement because of both weather and privacy, this ability to scatter bluebirds and chipping sparrows at will and run accompanied by dogs, are all rare and lovely Christmas gifts for a city child.  

The next two photos were taken in downtown Athens, Georgia.  The first is of my sister and brother-in-law's store, Helix.  I'd like it even if I weren't related to the owners!  This year we C.Z. bought some jewelry and I bought a lovely carved wooden spoon that rests on the side of a pot, and my usual supply of greeting cards to mail throughout the year.  

The second is just a night scene downtown.  We were showing my cousin's children around on campus and reliving our youth at the same time.  Bob and I met in Athens when we were students, and we also lived there when C.Z. was born, because Bob was in law school.  My parents live there now.

Anyway, I've been so busy since we got home that I never really had time to do any sort of Christmas/New Year's post, so this is as close as it will get.  It was a nice break.

Why readers read

I finished An Experiment in Criticism today.  As usual, C.S. Lewis ended his book in a state of very quotable elegance.  Here he's talking about why good readers read--because literature enlarges the soul. For one not familiar with Lewis, it might almost sound like he's being snobbish, but please don't take it that way.  I really don't know any other way he could have said what follows and still get his point across:

"Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world.  In it, we should be suffocated...

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.  There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege.  In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality.  But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.  Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."  

Enough said.

Reading Year 2008

Below is my booklist for 2008.  I just wanted to store it somewhere after I took it off my sidebar:

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter, ed. (January 18th)

The Case Against Adolescence, Robert Epstein (February 10th)

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (March 17)

Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity, Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart (March 21)

The Marketing of Evil, David Kupelian

The Value of Solitude, John D. Barbour (April 17)

The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark (April 23)

For the Time Being, Annie Dillard, (May 16)

The Reason for God, Tim Keller (May 21)

The Living, Annie Dillard (June 3rd)

The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Women’s Work, Kathleen Norris (probably first week of June)

My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell 

The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann (August 6th)

Time and the Art of Living, Robert Grudin (August 17th)

Cradles of Eminence, Victor and Mildred Goertzel (August 27, second reading)

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (September 2)

History of the Church, Eusebius

Twelve Types, G.K. Chesterton

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens (October 14)

Reaching Out, Henry Nouwen (October 20)

History in English Words, Owen Barfield (November 9)

John for Everyone, N.T. Wright (November 19)

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

Black Hearts in Battersea, Joan Aiken (November 28)

Stillmeadow Daybook, Gladys Taber (December 3)

Socrates Meets Jesus, Peter Kreeft (December 8)

On Writing Well, William Zinsser (December 23?)

For what it's worth, here's my "philosophy" of books:  I have a lot to choose from, about 1200 at home.  For a family that lives in an apartment and doesn't have many children, that's a good many books, because a large proportion of our books are adult books, and also not series books. The list above, in fact, is somewhat representative of what's on our shelves, but if you're the sort that likes to peek on others' shelves (I am) you can also have a look at our Library Thing account on the sidebar.  

I usually have about three or four books in the wings as I finish each one I read.  On the day I finish a book, I enjoy making a stack of candidates.  Sometimes I read the runners up next, but sometimes my mood has changed entirely by the time I choose again.  I have a general idea of what would make for a good reading year, but I'm not tied to it.  I like my method because it suits my personality.  It's not totally random, because if it were, the easy book might always win out. But it's not a rigid syllabus for education, either.  Come to think of it, this is also how we homeschool.  

Usually I don't read more than one or two books at a time.  Experience tells me that if I do, I will eventually drop one.  I do finish most books I start--eventually.  One notable failure was Plato's Republic.  I got almost to the end about eight years ago.  I am thinking of trying again this year, now that I have a fourteen-year-old instead of a six-year-old. It certainly wouldn't hurt to start over.

Speaking of which, my current read is C.S. Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism.  This is just my kind of book!  I've wanted to read this book since I first heard of it about twenty years ago. Back then I only had a few books and never dreamed I'd be able to afford extra books, much less click on some website and have them show up at my door.  An Experiment in Criticism is primarily about different kinds of reading, and it has shown me that as a child, I was sometimes not truly a literary reader, but an escapist reader.  Not entirely, though.  I always felt vaguely uncomfortable when people pushed pulp fantasy fiction on me just because I liked a couple of fantasy authors. (C.Z. had that same experience this week when a bookstore clerk tried to persuade her to buy all kinds of morbid teen fiction just because she likes Joan Aiken.)  Lewis is helping me  to understand why.  Some books are about receiving what the author has to say, while others are more "assisted daydreams" for self.  This is related to our Blue Suede Shoes discussion, so I hope to work some of Lewis's ideas into that discussion, too.

And finally, what did I think of my reading year?  It was typical, and I'm fairly satisfied with it.  I don't care how my list compares with anyone else's.  It's about right for me.  Some of the books were challenging (War and Peace, Eusebius) , while others were just for fun (Joan Aiken, Gerald Durrell).  Sometimes I alternate.  

And perhaps it goes without saying, but I am able to read more books now that I'm not reading aloud for homeschooling.  I'm still involved, of course, but I do have pockets of reading time that aren't spent on children's fiction.  But if you're in the midst of those read-aloud years, enjoy them for me, please, because I miss them!  

The only book I thought might have been a waste of time was The Marketing of Evil.  I read it for a book club, and I think we all thought it was going to be more about marketing, and less sensational and politically charged.  But that's okay.  And there was one book I didn't finish: Consuming Religion.  I loved the title and the premise, which is not unlike Blue Suede Shoes, but it read like someone's Postmodern doctoral thesis.  It was practically indigestible and I decided to spend my time on something else.  Who knows, it could have been my mood or the time I read it, but I'm pretty sure the points could be made in clearer prose.

I don't know which book was my favorite, but I thoroughly enjoyed The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann.  That was a Susan recommendation.  I got a lot of laughs, or at least a happy, serendipitous feeling, out of Battersea, My Family and Other Animals, and Socrates Meets Jesus.  The classics, War and Peace and Jane Eyre, were both rereads from my teens, and perhaps it's good that I reread them, because they were almost different books and well worth rereading.  But if I didn't mention another book on the list, that's not to say it wasn't worthwhile.  I always love an Annie Dillard book, and I read two this year.  I finally dipped into Gladys Taber.  I enjoyed reading first hand about how Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.  And now my writing time is up, and another reading year has begun!

The pervasiveness of pop culture

At Cindy of Dominion Family's invitation, I am happy to be joining her 2009 blog discussion of All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes.  I've never done a blog book discussion before, so I'm looking forward to it, albeit with a certain curiosity as to whether I'll be able to contribute any original thoughts!

Like Cindy, I read this book the first time in about 2002, and it wasn't the first book I'd ever read critiquing pop culture.  Particularly, I'd read Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind in 1988 (and two other times since), but as Myers quotes Bloom extensively, I'll save Bloom's influence for another post. In 2002 I was a relatively new homeschooler, doing background reading on education, popular culture, and parenting--anything I could think of that might help me to homeschool effectively.  I wanted a large vision, and the reading I did then still serves me well.  I read books like Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, Richard Mitchell's The Graves of Academe, the Goertzels' Cradles of Eminence, Frank Smith's The Book of Learning and Forgetting, and everything by John Holt and John Taylor Gatto.  I had vaguely unschoolish sympathies in education, but the closest thing I could find to a Christian cultural commentary on early education was Charlotte Mason's series, written in Victorian times.  I wanted to find something that would address the culture of the new millennium, so I was delighted to find this book.  

There's a lot to like here, and upon rereading I have found bits of close reasoning that I didn't pick up on the first time, which I hope to discuss here later.  But as a critique on Christian response to pop culture, which is what the first chapter discusses, I find that the landscape has shifted.  In their response to the pop culture of the late 1980s, Christians concentrated on producing wholesome, bubble-gum pop alternatives to rock n' roll like Amy Grant or Sandi Patti. Mr. Myers critiques this approach effectively, but it was not one that ever appealed to me even at the height of my interest in pop culture, which was also in the 1980s. 

Nowadays Christians that I know are much more likely to consume mainstream media, even edgy varieties (though it's now well-known that the edges evolve at warp speed), viewing them through the lens of "worldview education."  What this means in everyday language is that I often hear intelligent moms who are known for their generosity and service justifying the latest sub-par PG-13 movie release as having "wonderful Christian themes," and hear the phrase "engage the culture" from blog and pulpit to such excess that it has become a sort of location joke in its own right.  As with the subcultural approach, it seems like we Christians are just trying too hard.  I think we need to admit that not every instance of pop culture can be redeemed by a sprinkling of Christian theological analysis.  It might not even bear analyzing by secular criteria.  If you're a Christian who wants to go to a movie, just say so.  And meanwhile, trust that your faith will shine on its own terms.  

But overall, I think direct confrontation is an improvement over the subcultural approach. Christian subculture always had an icky ten-years-behind feeling, and the quality was often embarrassing.  As my art professors used to say snidely, it was derivative, and what's worse, it was derivative at a time when art students were gleefully covering velvet Elvis paintings and Virgin of Guadalupe statues in a protective layer of irony.  Now Christians themselves seem to have adopted this view.  It is better to play the Pomo game along with the artists, or to try to recover some sense of honest culture for ourselves?  I prefer the straightforward approach, but then the question becomes, how simply can we live in our times without setting up rigid rules or isolating ourselves?  Is it even possible to ignore pop culture?  

As a guide, I like Myers' straightforward theme, stated in the introduction, that pop culture is permissible, but not everything that is permissible is constructive.  Pop culture, like junk food, presents "innocent" pleasures, but its principal attributes are obstacles to enjoying better things. Its triviality, while making it seem innocuous, also makes it pervasive. And therefore pop culture sets the pace, agenda, and priorities for social and (yes) spiritual experience.  I know this is true from my experience of trying to downplay pop culture at home.  (For the record, we don't ban pop culture in our home, but we don't cater to it, either.)  As C.S. Lewis says, if you want to test the strength of an invading army, try resisting it.

 

A big reason that many Christians, including myself, consume pop culture at all is to avoid social isolation.  My husband, who is well-known in his office for his humorous attacks on pop culture, nonetheless reads movie reviews so that he'll be conversant at lunch.  (He draws the line at People magazine, though.)  C.Z., who never watched Saturday morning cartoons or collected trading cards, nonetheless could rattle off all the Pokemon characters back in 2002 (or whenever it was that they were popular) so that she could talk to the other children in Sunday school.  As a teen, C.Z. is learning that in order to have a conversation she has to share others' interests--ring tones, movies, or maybe a book like The Lightning Thief or Harry Potter.  Last night on just such a mission, C.Z. started her first Harry Potter book.  Unfortunately she started it on the heels of Joan Aiken's Black Hearts in Battersea.  After eighteen pages, she sighed, "This doesn't even compare to Joan Aiken."  Today she went out and bought another Aiken book.*  

I face temptations of my own.  I discovered over Christmas that pretty much all of my relatives (the ones my generation and younger) are on Facebook.  I briefly considered joining.  After all, I don't see many of my relatives in person much anymore, so it might be a nice way to keep up with them. And you have to be invited to see someone's profile, so it's not like everyone on the net is going to be looking at your child's photos. But when I started hearing about the kinds of things that my relatives were posting, I realized that they weren't the things that caused me to have affection for them.  Mostly I love them in spite of these things, but they are just the sorts of things the medium encourages.  So I think I'll stay Faceless (and Twitter free) for now.  Besides, it would just be one more thing to keep me on the computer. 

All this is to agree with Mark Steyn that pop culture is not popular, it's omnipresent.  It's not like you can easily abstain and "be yourself."  You exist in context, in "community," whatever that means these days.  Even if you don't set out to be current, you can't avoid learning by osmosis. There are smutty ads on the subway cars, tabloids in the checkout line, and booming rock at Gap Kids when you take your six-year-old there to pick up a T-shirt or two.  As a nation, and as Christians, we are spending a remarkable amount of our time and energy on culture which is totally forgettable. Along those lines, I highly recommend Mark Steyn's 2007 article in The New Criterion, "Twenty Years Ago Today."  Unfortunately it requires a subscription to read it online, but it's one of my all-time favorite articles on pop culture.  I'll be discussing it later, along with Allan Bloom.  

Meanwhile, on the triviality front, I often hear people, even (or maybe especially) Christians, justifying the latest upward tick on the disgust meter as trivial by saying, "They're not paying attention to the words anyway," or "The girls aren't meaning to dress provocatively; they just like fashion." Well yes, but that very thoughtlessness is a big part of why I think pop culture is not always constructive.  I'm not fond of legalism, but that's because legalism is opposed to true spiritual understanding.  And so is a culture in which Christians participate in whatever is cool without thinking through why it's worth their time in the first place.  The rest of All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes discusses the mechanisms of pop culture in detail, and I'm particularly interested in the discussion of how pop culture intersects with high culture, but for now I'd simply like to encourage Christians that there's nothing wrong with being a little out of the loop. The best of culture and community is timeless.

*My point isn't even that Aiken is the next Dickens or that Rowling is pulp, but C.Z. has read Dickens, and Aiken does a fun and intelligent Dickensian spoof that adds something all its own. And I haven't read Rowling, but C.Z. gave some good reasons for preferring Aiken.  The issue is instead that she was reading Rowling primarily to have something in common with other kids.