notes and quotes
1. Reimagining the Self
Charles Taylor, Canadian philosopher. Coined term 'social imaginary'
I want to speak of 'social imaginary' here, rather than social theory, because there are important difference between the two. There are, in fact, several differences. I speak of 'imaginary' (i) because I'm talking about the ordinary people 'imagine' their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, it is carried in images, stories, legends, etc. But it is also the case that (ii) theory is often the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that is is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society. Which leads to a third difference: (iii) the social imaginary is that common understanding which makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.
Taylor says that the social imaginary... refers to the myriad beliefs, practise, normative expectations, and even implicit assumptions that members of a society share and that shape their daily lives. It is not so much a conscious philosophy of life as a set of intuitions and practices.
Philip Reif. Late Professor of Sociology at University of Pennsylvania:
Wrote a book in 1966 entitled 'The Triumph of the Therapeutic'. He says that cultures are primarily defined by what they forbid.
A culture survives principally... by the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood.
A second important aspect for Rieff is the idea that culture, at least historically, directs the individual outward. It is in communal activities that individuals find their true selves; the true self in traditional cultures is therefore something that is given and learned, not something that the individual creates for himself.
historical moments.
Rieff argues that the way a society constructed its members to think changes over time and that broadly speaking the different moments and social identities can be labelled as follows:
Political man. From the sort of ideas put forth by Plato and Aristotle. In contrast to the idiotic man (literally, the private man), the political man is the one who finds his identity in the activities in which he engages in the public life of the city.
Religious man. eventually political man gave way to the man of the Middle Ages, the man who found his primary sense of self in his involvement in religious activities: attending mass, celebrating feast days, taking part in religious processions, going on pilgrimages. This can also be seen in the way medieval society was structured - from the dominance of the church buildings to the liturgical calendar that marked time itself. Religion was the key to culture during this time.
Economic man. Economic man is the individual who finds his sense of self in his economic activity: trade, production, the making of money. Rieff himself saw economic man as an unstable and temporary category. Economic man gave way (owing to the continuously revolutionising nature of capitalisms impact on production) to...
Psychological man. Defined not by outward things but by the inward quest for personal psychological happiness. Rieff says that psychological categories and an inward focus are the hallmarks of being a modern person. This is what Charles Taylor refers to as 'expressive individualism'.
Expressive individualism: the idea that each of us finds our meaning by giving expression to our own feelings and desires. for Taylor, this kind of self exists in what he describes as a culture of authenticity. He defines this culture of authenticity in the following way:
The understanding of life which emerges with the Romantic expressivism of the late eighteenth century, that each of us has his/her own way of realising our humanity and that it is important to find and live out one's own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.
This shift to psychological man and expressive individualism is far reaching in its implications.
Trueman uses the following example to illustrate:
My grandfather left school at fifteen and spent the rest of his working life as a sheet metal worker in a factory in Birmingham, the industrial heartland of England. If he had been asked if he found satisfaction in his work, there is a distinct possibility he would not even have understood the question, given that it really reflects the concerns of psychological man's world, to which he did not belong. But if he did understand, he would probably have answered in terms of whether his work gave him the money to put food on his family's table and shoes on his children's feet. If it did so, then yes he would have affirmed that his job satisfied him. His needs were those of his family, and in enabling him to meet them, his work gave him satisfaction... If I am asked the same question, my instinct is to talk about the pleasure that teaching gives me, about the sense of personal fulfillment I feel when a student learns a new idea of becomes excited about some concept as a result of my classes. The difference is stark: for my grandfather, job satisfaction was empirical, outwardly directed, and unrelated to his psychological states; for members of mine and subsequent generations, the issue of feeling is central.
Chapter 4. The unacknowledged legislators
Bad ages produce bad poets and have their decadence and moral decline reinforced thereby. Virtuous ages produce virtuous poets and have their greatness and moral superiority strengthened thereby. And in this turn means that the poet is someone of great political significance: both a sign of the moral strength of the times and a means for maintaining the same.
/PART 4 - triumphs of the revolution
8 triumph of the erotic
Surrealism. The name given to a school of artistic expression that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century... there were many aspects to the surrealist project but the nature of the self and of identity was central... the foundation for surrealist though was Freud. The artistic philosophy that it espoused sought to give concrete artistic expressionto the unconscious, following Freu'd idea that everything there - evertyhing - is significant.
Dream. Dreams were important to surrealism since in dreams the dreamer is able to be whoever or whatever she wanst to be in whatever kind of world she chooses to envisage. .. and that points to the basic contention that it is the unconscious that is thr realbedrock of the indivifusl identity, the thing about the person that is most real.
Building on Rouseau: tge nisr authentic self is the self that is totally detached from and uninhibated by any of the conditions of material life.
The message of surrealist thought is clear enough: The unconscious is the guide to truth. For the surrealists, it was key to individual authenticity... that which has always been assumed to be obvious [material/social realities say] is to be regarded as inauthentic or problematic.
Later Truman says: the purpose of surrealism was profoundaly and aggresively political: to overthrow Christianity and its corollariers - families and moral codes governing secial behaviour)
Surrealisms legacy... what it did was a play a part in the general and radical eroticization of modernity. It did not simply make sexual images more widely available under cover of intellectual responsibly; it actually served to help the process by which society's judgment of the cultural value of pornogrpahy changed frm seomthign bad and detrimental to something good and healthy.
The pornification of Mainstream Culture:
By the time of his death aged 91 in 2017 Hugh Hefner was a classic exampe of a hero of the anticulture... his life had bee dedicated to overthrowing the sexual codes of earlier generations and his career proved thr truth of the old adage 'sex sells'.
But consider how tame the extreme Play Boy of the 60s looks compared to casual viewing on Netflix. Gail Dines professor of sociology and women's studies at Wheelock College says: Today there is almost no soft-core porn on the internet, because more of it has migrated into pop culture.
Interesting observation of the changes:
Commenting on American women's magazines in 1946 George Orwell made the following observation:
Someone has sent me a copy of an American fashion magazine which shall remain nameless. It consists of 325 large quarto pages of which no fewer than 15 are given up to articles on world politics, literature, etc. The rest consists entirely of picture with a littler letterpress creeping round their edges: picture of ball dresses, mink coats, step-ins, panties, brassieres, silk stockings, slippers, perfumes, lipsticks, nail varnish - and of course f the women wearing unrelievedly beautiful who wear them or make use of them...
One striking thing when one looks at these pictures is the overbred, exhausted, even decadent style of beauty that now seems to be striven after. Nearly all of these women are immensely elongated... A fairly didilgent search through the magazine reveals two discreet allusions to grey hair, but if there is anywhere a direct mention of fatness or middle-age i have not found it. Birth and death are not mentioned either: nor is work, except a few recipes for breakfast dishes are given.
Truman says:
The desctription speaks eloquently of the American preoccupation with physical beauty, but what is really interesting about Orwell's commentary is how unsexy it is. there is a matter-of-fact nonerotic aspect to the mannger in which he describes the few articles the magazine contains and even the representation of the female form.
Comparing this to today Cosmopolitan magazine he says: the cult of beauty has become the cult of sexuality.
The Triumph of the T:
Where a sense of psycholigcal well-being is the purpose of life, therapy supplants morality - or perhaps better, therapy is morality - ad anything that achieves that sense of well-being is good.
Being a woman is now somethign that can be produced by a technique - literally prescribed by a doctor. The pain, the struggle, and the history of oppression that shape what it means to be a woman in society are thus trivilised and rendered irrelevant.
Jenner's 2015 cover for Vanity Fair and the accompanying photo shoot all operated within the aesthetic norms of standard American cover girls.
Germaine Greer:
No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-overies transplant; if uterus-and-overies transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight.
Concluding Prologue:
What should the church do?
1) The church should reflect long and hard on the connection between aesthetics and her core beliefs and practice.
The highest form of authority in an age of expressive individualism is - personal testimony. This concern for personal testimonies reflect the power of sympathy and empathy in shaping morality.
Mario Vargas Llosa writes: Today images have primacy over ideas. For that reason, cinema, television and now the internet have left books to one side.
The role of aesthetics through images created by camera angles and plotlines in movies, sitcoms and sopa operas is powerful.
The biblical narrative rests on (and only makes sense in light of) a deeper metaphysical reality: the being of God and his act of creation.
2) The church must be a community. Hegel's basic insight so compellingly elaborated by Taylor, that selves are socially constructed and only come to full self-consciousness in dialogue with other self-consciousnesses if of great importance. Each of us is in a snese, the sum total of the network of relationships we have with others and with our environment.
The task of the church in cultivating a different understanding of the self is, humanly speaking, likely to provoke despair. Yet there is hope: the world in which we live is now witness to commmunities in flux. The nation-stae no longer provides identity as the globalised world makes it seem impotaent and decades of being told in the West that patriotism is bad have taken thteir toll... Many cities are anonymous places and suburbs function as giant commuter motels.
3) Protestants need to recover both natural law and a high view of the physical body. It is unlikely that an individual pastor is going to be able to shape a Supreme Court ruling on abortion (though he should certainly try if he is able), but he is very likely to be confronted with congregants asking questions about matters from surrogacy to transgenderism. And in such circumstances, a good grasp of the biblical position on natural law and the order of the created world will prove invaluable.
One last comment.
Hisotrical precedent.
We can't look to a high point in R. Caholic or Protestant history for help. But if there is histrocail precedent it is earlier: the second entury.
In the second century the church was a marginal sect within a dominant pluralist society... the second century world is in a sense our world where Christianity is a choice - and a choice likely at some point to run afoul of the authorities.
It was the Second century world of course that alid doen the foundations for the later successes of the third and fourth centuries. Annd she did it by what means? By existing as a close-knit doctrinally bounded community that required her members to act consistently with their faith and to be good citizens of the earthly city as far as good citizenship was compatible with faithfulness to Christ.
