Maybe you’ve noticed this trend too: Lena Dunham’s Girls, despite critical acclaim, has suffered from reviewers saying it’s not racially diverse enough. Game of Thrones has been lambasted for its sexism and weak female characters. The Cosmopolitans has been written off for lacking socioeconomic variety.
Such things can be painful and troubling to watch, and sometimes it’s best not to view them, perhaps not even to screen them. But such criticisms, for me, are also strangely reminiscent of the one-dimensional cultural lenses prevalent in the Christian world. Drugs are bad, so watching media which contains drug use should be avoided. Affairs are bad, so Madame Bovary was listed on the infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Sexual attraction to adolescents is horrible, so sober-minded moralists in Britain and France banned Nabokov’s Lolita from their countries. Perhaps understandably; Madame Bovary might normalize adultery, just as Girls might reinforce people’s perverse tendency toward social homogeneity. But the worries about imitation may be misguided – the social world of Girls is sometimes scarcely more attractive than the dark psyche of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. And outright dismissal on the grounds of any perceived offense may lead us to overlook the benefits of the whole. Recently, Aronofsky’s Noah took liberties with the Bible’s original account, distorting, as some saw it, the truth of God. But the film reflected upon God at a level of depth to which its Christian critics have rarely attained.
I wonder what these moralists, many Christians, were (and still are) trying to accomplish. One reason would be the assumption that we mimic things we read or view. This assumption is spurious – Requiem for a Dream, for example, made me more scared of drugs than all the parents and pastors in the world. Boogie Nights attenuated me to the fallacies of seeking meaning through sex or success. Two ideas that Christian moralists who try to control our media consumption miss: (1) that humans tend to rebel against things you tell us to do, and (2) that sin, when it is portrayed accurately and artfully onscreen, leads to revulsion. And (3) that “it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.” (Matthew 15:11). As DZ has written, “Sin flows inside-out rather than outside-in.”
Whenever we perceive that we have authority and an audience – even when that authority is well-grounded – the same impulse to control, the same ignorance of our audience’s agency and reactivity, and the same failure to trust the audience’s consciences and sensibilities arises. The laws of society are still “holy and just and good”, but they’ve shifted from conservatism’s respect for authority and deference to history toward liberalism’s ideals of tolerance and equality – again, all are equally “holy and just and good”, or seem so to me. Along with constant of goodness, the other constant is our proclivity toward using these laws to criticize others and build up ourselves; those who know the law well enough and are smart enough may dispense with Solzhenitsyn’s wisdom and use their knowledge to draw the line separating good and evil in such a way that I am in the right, and you are in the wrong.
There is the same sense of “never-enoughness”, too. Sara St. Martyn Lynne, for years a tireless supporter of women’s rights, was forced to resign from the board of a camp for girls, on account of her association with a (cis) women’s-only music festival, which excludes transgender women. Like the poor abbot Eutyches (3rd-4th century), who fought tirelessly against the Nestorian heresy, until history outpaced him and he was banished for monophysitism.
For practical purposes, a good definition of an ideologue might be anyone who views someone transgressing their ideology as wholly condemned. Like poor Eutyches, benevolent father of hundreds of faithful monks, cut off from home and sacraments and unity because he couldn’t honestly come in line with the diophysites.
So I wonder, since most of the constellation of political views falling broadly under the category ‘progressive’ is (1) morally sound, (2) doesn’t require a traditional faith, and (3) is clearly sounder ground than the ideology of health and wealth, how many characteristics of the old Christianity it will start to display. Sometimes it conflicts with business piorities – Hawks owner Bruce Levenson is selling his team after suggesting it boost season ticket sales by advertising more to white people – and sometimes there are inner conflicts, like the Eutyches’s exile or Lynne’s. However things go, conservatives would do well to remember that they had (and still do) a similar fixation on ideological purity, and liberals do well to remember that tolerance – in every sense of the word – is a historically central, and immensely valuable, part of their platform.
Randall Munroe over at XKCD drew a comic featuring a two-sentence conversation. Person 1: “Personally, I find atheists just as annoying as fundamentalist Christians.” Person 2: “Well, the important thing is that you’ve found a way to feel superior to both.” Turns out there’s really no way out of the political line-drawing game (I’ve just drawn my own) – Lord, have mercy.
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“Personally, I find atheists just as annoying as fundamentalist Christians.”
Reminiscent of Will Barrett’s amusing rant, in Walker Percy’s The Second Coming, about the “two classes of people,” which “between them exhaust the class of people in general” – “the believers and the unbelievers. The only difficulty is deciding which is the more feckless.” He decides it’s the unbelievers.
Great insight! Yes, these kinds of rejections based on a morality coming from the left are just as silly as those coming from the right. I was thinking about this after a discussion group I go to with a lot of atheists and agnostics, which we formed intentionally to cross-pollinate ideas without the threat of evangelizing one another. If I had never seriously watched some things like “A Clockwork Orange” or read some of the things I’ve read which are decidedly immoral and dirty, I couldn’t have the level of conversation I have there. Clockwork is one of the greatest expressions I can think of that shows us that a human is far more than his behaviors. If you successfully control a person’s behavior, it does not mean they have changed at all. In fact such control is itself more of a monstrosity than the immoral behavior that is being controlled. So being “clean” in the sense of not watching such a dirty and profoundly immoral movie means being disconnected and ineffectual. The entire movie stands as a judgment of the imposition of behavioral morals upon an unwilling subject.
However, more importantly, I was watching “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology” with Slavoj Zizek, and he had a section on the Last Temptation of Christ, where he makes his main point: Christianity is the only and best expression of true atheism. You’ll have to watch it; it’s on Netflix. Apparently there is a huge current of European thought right now that looks at American discussions of theism and atheism as hopelessly polarized and ridiculous. To him, Christ’s death expressed ultimately that there is no great Other, that God had not just forsaken Him but that in that moment He expressed the utter lack of any unifying coherence or meaning to suffering. I profoundly disagree with his main point — you’d have to ignore the resurrection to agree with him — but I watched that section about 5 times and I’ve been reflecting on it a lot. The man truly has a breathtaking intellectual insight into these things. I think he brings a much much greater depth of insight about what it means to think that we have “died with Christ” than I would have ever been willing to reflect on. And I never would have gone there without the willingness to be taught by a guy like Zizek with whom I continue to strongly disagree.
Peter Rollins made a point a few years back that we are all monsters to one another. I have some ideological stance that is monstrous to someone somehow. We have to learn to talk to and learn from monsters. That means allowing monstrous creative people to creative their monstrous art and to carefully and respectfully hear them and respond with meaning and dignity and kindness.