Probably one of the most telling things about our current state of society came to me in the contrast of two completely unrelated news stories and how they were handled. As I was perusing my normal social media outlets for the news of the day, I noticed that the two biggest stories of the day revolved around the landing of a rocket on an asteroid, a feat that can be described as nothing short of a monumental achievement for Aeronautics, and the story about Kim Kardashian baring her posterior for a magazine. Sadly, the new marketplace of ideas that the internet has made itself was far more interested in discussing a married woman who decided to pose nude for the public en masse than the fact that over a decade of work and research culminated in the European Space Agency hitting a moving target 310 million miles away. Of course, I’m not surprised in the least.
This is nothing short of a continuation of a norm of our society. We prefer celebrity news and info-tainment over hard facts and important events of the day. We don’t want to be bored with pertinent information or feel too moved over things like salvific and pedagogical narratives. Many in our culture, even some who do their best to live out their faith in everyday life, would rather tune in to short, uncreative and voyeuristic reality shows that do nothing to elevate or inform the mind or the spirit. Rather than enjoy stories about love triumphing over adversity and marriage prevailing through difficulties, we need to watch a bride-to-be break down over the kind of dress she can’t have or watch the “Real Housewives” of Who-cares-city melt down and hookup in a pithy 42-minute segment.
And of course it’s not surprising that the nature of posterior-gate is wholly pornographic as well, this of course being a natural progression of our cultural voyeuristic indulgence. And the statistics show us that, regardless of how we talk about it in the public sphere, our culture really likes porn. It’s a 13.3 billion industry in the United States alone. Its web traffic dwarves almost any other topic on the internet. Studies have shown its narcotic effect on our culture and its increasingly toxic effect on our marriages both in their survival and creation. But the culture likes it, the same way we like voyeuristic television.
And how dare I say these things really? I’m certain that someone will read my indictment of our behavior as a society and the problem of a married woman with a child posing nude for the public being headline news as somehow being “archaic”, “oppressive”, “antiquated”, or say that I’m “forcing my morality” on the situation. Perhaps by saying that an action or worldview is morally suspect, I’m “needlessly shaming” someone rather than discussing the merits of their thinking. And why shouldn’t they say that? In order to think these things are a problem I have to buy into the crazy idea that constant, self-induced euphoria isn’t necessarily a path to happiness, much less the Truth. And how dare I take issue with a culture that is so painfully dealing with the ill-effects of the sexual revolution that it no longer has any concept of intercourse being anything more than a contractual, pleasure exchange dictated only by ephemeral preference and passing fancy, or that marriage is anything more than a contract that makes it financially more comfortable to cohabitate? What of the ridiculous idea that lust within the heart is tantamount to adultery in spirit?
This isn’t an issue of shaming an individual, but merely realizing that this fascination with Mrs. Kardashian’s photo is an indicator of the culture and society in which we now live. We have completely lost our ideas of elevating ourselves and preserving our culture through entertainment. We don’t see any issue with things like this because even some Christians have bought into the myth that anything is okay as long as it “doesn’t hurt anyone else”, which we know to be false. The fact that we have a culture problem as a result of what we’ve been shoveling into our minds is now as evident as the fact that we have an obesity problem as a result of the garbage we’ve been shoveling into our mouths. We talk for days on end about the dangers to the public health, but not the public virtue or the public spirit, mainly because the modern schools of thought in the public square tell us that a public virtue or spirit is somehow oppressive and restraining.
It doesn’t surprise me in the least that Mrs. Kardashian’s bottom is headline news. It doesn’t surprise me because it’s a natural logical end of a society knee-deep in fast food, throwing away, and tuning in. We simply have forgotten, in many ways, the idea that, as C.S. Lewis puts it, “there are no private affairs.” We can click on the link, imbibe our base desires, clear our internet history and pretend that we have done nothing to hurt ourselves or others, but the believer must believe that this simply isn’t possible or true. If we truly see these things as problems, then we must turn our attention to the good, the inspiring and the elevating rather than the base, the destructive, and the tempting.
Nate Madden is a current Fellow at the John Jay Institute and a graduate of The Citadel, where he received degrees in International & Military Affairs and German Language and Culture. His work experience and research have included United States military policy in Washington, DC, International and Agricultural Development in rural Uganda, and teaching English as part of a bridge-building program in former East Germany.
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