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"...or that you seem to be losing."
One of the most memorable parables for the modern world was created, unwittingly, by the great cartoonist Bill Watterson. Watterson's strip CALVIN AND HOBBES, for the unfortunate people who have not read it, tells of the adventures of a remarkably pestiferous single child called Calvin, and of his stuffed tiger, Hobbes. Hobbes "is" also Calvin's best friend and something like an imaginary elder brother. Thanks to the secondary reality of comics art, we are not called to make a decision, to decide whether Hobbes really "is" an animated person that, for some reason, only Calvin can perceive, or whether he "is" only a stuffed toy on which Calvin projects a wildly overdeveloped imaginative life; he can be both. He frequently says and does things that cannot possibly come from the subconscious of a six-year-old child, over-imaginative or not; on the other hand, all the "objective" reflections in Calvin's world, from the reaction of every other adult and child to the photographs that Calvin takes of Hobbes one day - which, to him, show Hobbes performing all sorts of antics, but, to his father, repeat the same image of a motionless stuffed tiger - confirm that "objectively", Hobbes really is nothing but a toy. Watterson places us between the two alternatives, and, far from leaving us to make our minds up, forbids us to.
Inevitably, Calvin and Hobbes fight a lot. And so it happens that one day Susie Derkins, the little girl who is frequently dragged into the by-products of Calvin's imagination and mischief (and who, like everyone else, can see nothing in Hobbes except a stuffed toy tiger) passes by and sees them at it. Her comment is memorable: "I do not know which is weirder - that you seem to be fighting a stuffed toy, or that you seem to be losing."
I do not know which is weirder: that you fight something that does not exist, or that you seem to be losing. I simply cannot mention all the areas and ways in which this describes the relationship of the modern world with Christianity and traditional morality. I will just give one instance: what I hear of the "girls gone wild" movement. I do not pretend to know much about this. I am a middle-aged single man living a quiet life in one of London's less riotous neighbourhoods; and likely enough the stories I read are exaggerated, both in the description of what goes on and in the suggestion that this is a mass movement among teen-agers. But in so far as it exists at all, it would seem to involve very young women throwing themselves into long bouts of promiscuity. And what I want to underline is this: that these girls will have grown, in a large part, in an environment which makes that sort of thing barely surprising. Our culture is shot through with sex. If teens do really indulge in large-scale promiscuity, they are only replicating what they saw in the pop videos, the ads, the magazine stories they grew up with. And, what is more, they do nothing but apply the basic tenet of the modern faith - that sex is value-neutral, that it is simply meaningless to imagine it as in any way a profanation, that so long as it is "safe" there is nothing to be said against it.
Do you not see the inherent, evident, unmissable contradiction here? Well! That being the case, why do we talk of "girls gone wild"? Why do the people themselves who take part in it imagine that they are being rebellious, risky, on the edge? They are not; they are in the mainstream of youth culture since the sixties - since, that is, the time of their grandfathers. What is more, we hardly imagine that those who take part in this kind of thing had a profound or serious grounding in Christian ethics. Surely, most of them, if they have any notion of God at all, are stopped at the Britney Spears stage, where "God has a plan" which happens to involve whatever the person finds desirable - "state whatever it is that you want out of life and then place the word 'God' as the agent in the sentence."
In this context, the idea of rebellion and revolt has no social meaning at all. This form of behaviour is, if not the mainstream, at least so close to the mainstream as not to be surprising at all; and, what is more, it is the direct heir and successor of forms of behaviour that have been a part of "youth culture" since our grandparents were young. It is like the extraordinary success of Coca-Cola in managing to market its drink as a youth drink since the 1920s. And indeed, it is similar in that it is also supported by capitalist marketing: just as Coke has been associated with youth for decades by smart and expensive advertising, so the association of attractive female youth and promiscuity is promoted by fashion, advertising, pop music - all the panoply of shareholder value. Teenage orgies enhance investment fund incomes.
It is not social rebellion that is really going on here. Oughties "Girls gone wild" present themselves as rebels, just like their parents in the eighties and their grandparents in flower-child time. That is, this is something that has become a cultural heritage without ever shedding the sense of being in revolt, outside normality, running risks, on the edge - even though society as such does nothing to justify any of these assumptions. No, it is not against society as it is that "girls gone wild" and their parents and grandparents were in rebellion: it is against something intangible, something that has no gross political or economic power - and yet something that does not go away; something that has not ceased to make them feel its power in three generations.
Yes, I do not know which is weirder: that these people have spent three generations claiming to be in revolt against something whose existence they were ignorant of, or that they do not seem to be winning. Three generations of accumulated social culture and habit, three generations each further removed from the Church, have done nothing to remove from these people the instinct that promiscuity is dangerous, and not only dangerous but rebellious; that there is something normative, and that promiscuity is really against it; that in throwing themselves into promiscuity, they are in revolt against something. One hardly needs to prove the reality of sexual morality, or its normative nature; these people's own gestures shape it out of thin air.
Inevitably, Calvin and Hobbes fight a lot. And so it happens that one day Susie Derkins, the little girl who is frequently dragged into the by-products of Calvin's imagination and mischief (and who, like everyone else, can see nothing in Hobbes except a stuffed toy tiger) passes by and sees them at it. Her comment is memorable: "I do not know which is weirder - that you seem to be fighting a stuffed toy, or that you seem to be losing."
I do not know which is weirder: that you fight something that does not exist, or that you seem to be losing. I simply cannot mention all the areas and ways in which this describes the relationship of the modern world with Christianity and traditional morality. I will just give one instance: what I hear of the "girls gone wild" movement. I do not pretend to know much about this. I am a middle-aged single man living a quiet life in one of London's less riotous neighbourhoods; and likely enough the stories I read are exaggerated, both in the description of what goes on and in the suggestion that this is a mass movement among teen-agers. But in so far as it exists at all, it would seem to involve very young women throwing themselves into long bouts of promiscuity. And what I want to underline is this: that these girls will have grown, in a large part, in an environment which makes that sort of thing barely surprising. Our culture is shot through with sex. If teens do really indulge in large-scale promiscuity, they are only replicating what they saw in the pop videos, the ads, the magazine stories they grew up with. And, what is more, they do nothing but apply the basic tenet of the modern faith - that sex is value-neutral, that it is simply meaningless to imagine it as in any way a profanation, that so long as it is "safe" there is nothing to be said against it.
Do you not see the inherent, evident, unmissable contradiction here? Well! That being the case, why do we talk of "girls gone wild"? Why do the people themselves who take part in it imagine that they are being rebellious, risky, on the edge? They are not; they are in the mainstream of youth culture since the sixties - since, that is, the time of their grandfathers. What is more, we hardly imagine that those who take part in this kind of thing had a profound or serious grounding in Christian ethics. Surely, most of them, if they have any notion of God at all, are stopped at the Britney Spears stage, where "God has a plan" which happens to involve whatever the person finds desirable - "state whatever it is that you want out of life and then place the word 'God' as the agent in the sentence."
In this context, the idea of rebellion and revolt has no social meaning at all. This form of behaviour is, if not the mainstream, at least so close to the mainstream as not to be surprising at all; and, what is more, it is the direct heir and successor of forms of behaviour that have been a part of "youth culture" since our grandparents were young. It is like the extraordinary success of Coca-Cola in managing to market its drink as a youth drink since the 1920s. And indeed, it is similar in that it is also supported by capitalist marketing: just as Coke has been associated with youth for decades by smart and expensive advertising, so the association of attractive female youth and promiscuity is promoted by fashion, advertising, pop music - all the panoply of shareholder value. Teenage orgies enhance investment fund incomes.
It is not social rebellion that is really going on here. Oughties "Girls gone wild" present themselves as rebels, just like their parents in the eighties and their grandparents in flower-child time. That is, this is something that has become a cultural heritage without ever shedding the sense of being in revolt, outside normality, running risks, on the edge - even though society as such does nothing to justify any of these assumptions. No, it is not against society as it is that "girls gone wild" and their parents and grandparents were in rebellion: it is against something intangible, something that has no gross political or economic power - and yet something that does not go away; something that has not ceased to make them feel its power in three generations.
Yes, I do not know which is weirder: that these people have spent three generations claiming to be in revolt against something whose existence they were ignorant of, or that they do not seem to be winning. Three generations of accumulated social culture and habit, three generations each further removed from the Church, have done nothing to remove from these people the instinct that promiscuity is dangerous, and not only dangerous but rebellious; that there is something normative, and that promiscuity is really against it; that in throwing themselves into promiscuity, they are in revolt against something. One hardly needs to prove the reality of sexual morality, or its normative nature; these people's own gestures shape it out of thin air.