“The Church Must Keep Up with the Times”

July 28, 2021 By Gene Veith

I came across this bit from a discussion of whether it was right for a conservative student group to ban a conservative porn star who wanted to participate:

There’s a scene in Mel Brooks’s 1970 movie The Twelve Chairs, which is set in the Soviet Union in 1927, in which a Russian Orthodox priest played by Dom DeLuise expresses sympathy for communism in a fight with another character. His interlocutor asks him how he, as a priest, could be a Communist Party member since atheism is a requirement for membership. DeLuise shrugs and replies, “The church must keep up with the times.”

I thought of this too in the controversy among Catholics, with Pope Francis essentially banning the traditional Latin mass. The big convocation in the 1960s known as Vatican II sought to make the church “keep up with the times.” So they jettisoned old identify-forming traditions like abstaining from meat on Fridays and installed a new mass that was not only in the vernacular–something we Reformation types would certainly support–but also made it possible to tone down the mystery by incorporating contemporary Christian music and a host of informalities. The post-Vatican II mass can still be reverent–there is even a Latin version–but in many parishes it comes across as far too casual, with 1960s-Peter-Paul-and-Mary style guitar music (not referring to the saints of those names but to the folk singers) and trying-too-hard attempts to be up to date.

(One problem with trying to “keep up with the times” is that, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, the times they are always changing. By the time one style of “contemporary” music gets incorporated into a church service, it will have gone out of fashion. There is nothing that seems more outdated than yesterday’s fashion, especially when older adults try to do it. This is why, when the church tries to be contemporary, it is generally a step or two behind and thus comes across as old-fashioned.)

So some Catholics pushed for a return to the old Tridentine Latin mass (named for the council that launched the counter-Reformation), with all of its genuflections, prostrations, incense, rituals, and symbolism, and Pope Benedict XVI gave them permission to do so. The return of the old mass, in parishes that chose to go that route–at least for some services–did attract die-hard traditionalists, including those who disapprove of Pope Francis, but it also attracted young people, who were captivated by how different it was from the pop culture they were used to and yearned to escape from. This kind of worship seemed to them to be mysterious, transcendent, and holy.

But now Pope Francis, who is interested in modernizing the church, has reversed his predecessor’s permission. In the name of church unity, he says, we need to go back to the vernacular, contemporized mass. We must keep up with the times even when the times want to go back to something better.

Lutheran that I am, I don’t mean to defend the mass, whether traditional or modern, which is shot through with theological errors. But we too have had our worship wars between those who want the traditional Lutheran liturgy–a form of the mass purged of its errors, but keeping the structure, the set-pieces, and the chanting–and those who want a more contemporary service, similar to those of evangelical megachurches. There are also those in between, who blend some contemporary elements and contemporary music into the liturgical structure. The debates were fierce a few decades ago, but my impression is that the worship wars among Lutherans have died down.

Our confessions actually allow for variations in “ceremony.” The main issue for Lutherans is doctrinal unity. And this is where the desire to “keep up with the times” is most caustic to Christianity.

The notion that the church should keep up with the times is perhaps the best definition of liberal theology. The idea is that for the church to be relevant, it must change its teachings to accord with the beliefs of the day. Thus, liberal theology has championed at various times, the social gospel of 19th century progressivism, New Deal liberalism, Marxist liberation theology, and now post-Marxist critical race-sex-gender theory; also, enlightenment rationalism, romantic emotionalism, civil religion, existentialism, feminism, queer theory, etc., etc. Also psychology, the self-esteem movement, encounter groups, New Age, and becoming “woke.” Paradoxically, just about every secularist idea can be found in churches; that is, among liberal theologians and the mainline Protestant–and liberal Catholic–churches they call home.

In fact, some liberal theologians have made a reality of what Mel Brooks intended as a joke, actually adopting what they call “Christian atheism”!

So in what sense should Christians “keep up with the times”? The Bible commends the men of the tribe of Issachar, “who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do” ( 1 Chronicles 12:32). I think that Christians should try to keep abreast of what is happening–the news, the new ideas, emerging worldviews, and contemporary issues. Not only because of their vocations of citizenship but because awareness of “the times” can help them from being unduly influenced and can identify areas that call for a Christian response. Orthodox theologians should follow the new trends in their field, not to adopt them, necessarily, but to answer them. And “the times” might also bring up trends, ideas, and technologies that Christians can put to good use.

How else might Christians keep up with the times without selling out to the times? Are there some lines that can be drawn between accommodations that are acceptable and those that aren’t?

Photo: The Tridentine Latin Mass by the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, available from http://fssp.org., Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons

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Cultural Suicide

July 31, 2020 By Gene Veith

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There have been lots of cultures and civilizations that no longer exist. The ancient Greeks. The ancient Romans. The Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians. The Egyptians and Kushites. The Ottoman, Mongol, and Maurya Empires. The Aztecs and Incas.

What happened to them? Some were defeated by other military powers, though other kinds of weakness often led to those defeats. Some of them fell due to what some historians call “social cannibalism.” That is, they turned against themselves. That is, they committed cultural suicide.

Victor Davis Hanson, who is not only a popular columnist but a professor of ancient history, fears something like that is happening to American culture and American civilization today. (Note: “Culture” refers to the organic values and customs of the people. “Civilization” refers to the accomplishments–the art, ideas, inventions, and government–of the culture.)

From Our Summer of Cultural Suicide:

Cultural suicide used to be a popular diagnosis of why things suddenly just quit.

Historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee cited social cannibalism to explain why once-successful states, institutions, and cultures simply died off.

Their common explanation was that the arrogance of success ensures lethal consequences. Once elites became pampered and arrogant, they feel exempt from their ancestors’ respect for moral and spiritual laws — such as the need for thrift, moderation, and transcendence.

Hanson then examines what has happened to three of our cultural and civilizational institutions: sports, film, and education.

Sports, he says, has been one of those interests that unite Americans, apart from their politics or ideologies. Now, the millionaire professional athletes will be allowed to stage national anthem protests and to include political statements on their helmets and jerseys. “They will virtue-signal their moral superiority to increasingly turned-off fans — as if to make sure that their sources of support flee.”

The great American art form of movies is in a state of creative decline and stagnation (something that could be said, I would add, of all of the arts). “Hollywood counts on bringing comic books to the big screen, or on making poor remakes of old classics. When directors try to make a serious new movie, the result is often the monotony and boredom of thinly veiled woke propaganda,” Hanson writes. “And will viewers seek out theaters for more lectures from beautiful multimillionaires on their racist, sexist, homophobic country?”

Most to blame for our cultural suicide, though, is our educational establishment. Instead of passing on our cultural and civilizational heritage, our schools and universities have been trashing that heritage, teaching students to despise it, while keeping them ignorant of what it is. A civilization that hates itself and a culture that thinks its own customs, values, and traditions are evil and not worth continuing has committed suicide.

Those are my thoughts. Hanson delves into the self-destructive corruption that is bringing on institutional suicide. Universities, he says, shot up in status, putting out the notion that every successful American needs a bachelor’s degree. “But soon, $1.6 trillion in aggregate student-loan debt, lightweight and trendy curricula, ideological hectoring, administrative bloat, reduced teaching loads, poor placement of graduates, and the suspension of the Bill of Rights on campus began turning off students as well as the public.”

Because the schools, for all of their self-congratulations, are doing such a poor job of educating students, they are graduating adults who don’t know what they need to conserve, being unable to tell the difference between racist and anti-racist monuments and destroying them both, remaining ignorant of and unable to respond to beauty, truth, and goodness, and having been made intellectually stunted so that they cannot think through the important issues of our time.

What a culture or civilization does not pass down to the next generation is lost. It ceases to exist. That is how a society commits cultural suicide.

Nathan Stone shows the depth of our cultural problem in his article Civilizational Confidence Is The Key To Preserving And Restoring America. The issue, he says, is not just the critics of American civilization. He cites evidence that ordinary Americans have lost confidence in the ideas, values, and symbols of their own civilization. The critics, though, have lots of confidence in theirs. Though they are a minority, their ideology is prevailing, since few people in the majority have the cultural confidence to stand up to them. The newly-found confidence of the hard left–which had been demoralized itself in the aftermath of the Cold War–heralds the emergence of a very different kind of society, one that is totalitarian, collectivist, and opposed to individual liberty, once our civilization has killed itself off.

Photo By: Gloria Hol via U.S. Army Reserve Photo Gallery, public domain

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My Christmas Gifts to You

December 24, 2019 By Gene Veith

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I wanted to give all of you readers, who have brought this blog to such heights, a Christmas present. I could have ordered you something online, but there are thousands of you and my budget is already strained after buying presents for my numerous grandchildren. Also, I don’t know your size.

So, since blogs are part of our new information technology, I am giving you information by means of that technology, information that you probably will not know about otherwise, which will give you substantial, significant pleasure and satisfaction throughout the year.

These gifts are (1) works of art–which is what highly comical cartoons are–from a new website; (2) a highly comical television show that you can stream for free; (3) a highly non-comical forgotten literary masterpiece that you can download for $0.00.

I wrap them in explanations.

Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” Is Back, but Online

Everyone who remembers Gary Larson’s zany, faintly-disturbing universe has favorite “Far Side” cartoons. I think of the one showing the blessed dead going up an escalator to Heaven as an angel hands them a harp, while a devil hands those going down to the other place an accordion. Also the one about the farm that raises boneless chickens.

Larson’s cartoons were on the comics pages of newspapers across the country between 1980 and 1995, when he retired. But now, as of last week, the 69-year-old humorist and artist is back. Not to newspapers–many of which have shut down–but to the internet, which, Larson says, now has the capacity of rendering high-quality visual images that can faithfully reproduce his drawings. On his new website, The Far Side, you can see some of his hilarious collections, take a look at his sketchbooks in which he has developed his ideas, and buy his books. It also has a feature known as the “Daily Dose,” which gives you a fresh cartoon every day, like we had when newspapers existed. These so far are taken from his 15-year body of work. But, what I am really excited about, in 2020, he will include new stuff!

Read this story about Larson and his comeback. To access your present, go here. Then bookmark the site and make it part of your daily internet regimen, along with the Cranach blog, of course.

Oh, and Gary Larson is listed as a Famous Lutheran, whatever that means.

Corner Gas, the Free Streamable Small Town Comedy

Some relatives put us onto Corner Gas, a half-hour Canadian comedy that we now watch at the end of our TV binges of British murder mysteries, historical dramas, and other heavy stuff, a way to cleanse our palates with something light and hilarious to put us in a good mood before going to bed.

Think Seinfeld, except instead of New York City, it’s set in fictional town of Dog River, Saskatchewan, population 500, on the flat empty prairie, as they say, 40 kilometers from nowhere. The main characters are the comic-book loving Brent, who runs the corner gas station; his elderly parents, the cantankerous Oscar and the formidable Emma; his employee, the over-educated Wanda; his goofball friend Hank; Lacey, who moved in from Toronto after inheriting the local diner; and the local police force, Davis and Karen, who don’t have much to do, since there is hardly any crime in Dog River.

Hilarity ensues. For example, there was the one about Lacey trying to bring the local food movement to Dog River through her diner. The customers were outraged, insisting that they wanted food made in a factory. She offers a chili special, featuring local, grass-fed beef. Whereupon everyone realizes that the beloved local cow isn’t there anymore. No one wants to eat the cow (I forget her name), except for Oscar ,who felt the cow had insulted him, so he eats all the chili he can to get revenge. Also, the cow, in the field just outside of town, had been a landmark for truck drivers, who learned to turn left at the cow to get to Dog River. Now the outside world can’t find the place.

Then there was the Christmas episode, in which Brent’s his parents threw out the shiny aluminum Christmas tree and got a real one. But Brent gets upset because he wants a “traditional Christmas.” “We had that artificial tree since 1974!” His mother gives him a taste of her homemade cranberry sauce, and that also sets him off. “Cranberry sauce is supposed to come out of a can! With a big plop!” This crystallized for me something that I had observed in the worship controversies, that for lots of young adults, contemporary worship styles is all they have ever been exposed to. Contemporary worship is their traditional worship. And when they experience liturgical worship, they are excited because it feels brand new!

Not that Corner Gas usually takes on religious themes. The closest it came was when Lacey tried to start a Pilates class, but no one would come because it was named after the man who killed Jesus. But there is hardly anything objectionable. The satire is gentle, the stories stay away from sex (except for an occasional mild innuendo), and there is little bad language (except for Oscar calling everybody “Jackass!”).

The series isn’t really making fun of small town rural life, as if city life were any better. It isn’t condescending or mocking. Rural small towns are celebrated, in a way. The key to the show is the theme song, which has these lines:

You think there’s not a lot going on.

Look closer, baby, you’re so wrong.

That’s why you can stay so long,

Where there’s not a lot going on.

I’m learning this every day where we now live, in small town Oklahoma. There is just as much human drama here as anywhere else. “Look closer.”

The other good thing about Corner Gas in the new era of streaming on-demand-TV is that it’s nearly inexhaustible. The show, which ran from 2004 to 2009, has 107 episodes! You can’t just binge-watch it in an evening and it’s over. You can watch as much as you want, and there is always more! After watching those 107 episodes, there is also now an animated version–which is even edgier (the locavore episode I told you about is from the animated show)–that is still going on! There is also a movie!

The show was extremely popular in Canada. There were some U.S. showings on WGN and Comedy Central, and yet I had never heard of it. Today you can watch it for free on Prime Video via the free streaming service IMBd TV. (On a smart TV, if you have Amazon Prime, go to that app, then search for Corner Gas. It will take you to the episodes on IMBd, which are shown with a few commercials. If you don’t have Prime, I think that you can still get the IMBd app.)

Night-Thoughts and the Literature of Christian Melancholy

Lest you think those first two gifts are too frivolous, too humorous for these depressing times and your gloomy mood, my final present will strike a different chord. It’s a book–which you can get for free–that has been hailed as a literary masterpiece, which does something you almost never see today: delving into the depths of melancholy and finding the Christian faith.

In the course of just a few years, Edward Young (1683-1765) lost his wife, his daughter, and his son-in-law. After his wife’s death, Young was overwhelmed with sorrow. And, among his other torments, he couldn’t sleep. He began writing a series of poems about the night in which he explored the darkness not only in the world but in his heart.

Night-Thoughts, published between 1742 and 1745, are meditations on death, life, love, suffering, time, injustice, society, nature, the soul. And God. Young plunged into the depths of darkness, but he was a Christian. Strangely, by what we are used to, his suffering and the suffering he chronicles in the world do not make him question God’s existence; nor is he writing a Job-like lament, asking God why He is doing all of this to him. All of this darkness does not cause him to doubt God. Rather, it causes him to doubt the world.

Yes, your dreams are going to be dashed. Yes, the ones you love will die. Everything changes. Life is beautiful, but it doesn’t last. The world will disappoint you. But this is because this world is not your home. You cannot be satisfied here because your soul is immortal. The only light in the darkness is the light of Christ. I suspect that one of the imaginative sources for C. S. Lewis’s Great Divorce was Young–whose work Lewis certainly would have known–when he wrote,

All, all on earth, is shadow, all beyond

Is substance; the reverse is Folly’s creed:

How solid all, where change shall be no more! (Night I, lines 20-22)

But none of this is just an intellectual exercise. Young’s poem is known for its evocative descriptions and melancholy musings. But it is also known for its passages of rapturous communion with God.

This is a daunting poem, especially for modern readers. It is long, consisting of some 10,000 of lines of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), divided into nine separate “nights.” The language is elevated. The poem employs personifications of abstract qualities (such as night coming from her ebon throne), pseudo-classical names for actual people (such as the “infidel” Lorenzo, based apparently on his wastrel son), and a high-flown rhetoric that often seems over the top to those of us in this informal age. The poem is uneven, with passages of tedium relieved by utter brilliance.

Young’s style is basically that of Milton, whom he is constantly referencing (“fast by the throne of God”). The effect on Milton fans like me is to be reminded of the subject of “Paradise Lost”–the Fall–on Young’s every page. But instead of writing epic verse about great events, such as Biblical history, Young is pioneering the “subjective epic,” writing epic verse about a journey into himself and the combat of the soul.

As alien as Young’s poem seems today, it was enormously popular and enormously influential in both the 1700s and the 1800s. Enlightenment-era rationalists and neo-classicists loved it, having a big impact on Sir Edmund Burke and with Samuel Johnson’s biographer James Boswell calling Night-Thoughts “the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced.” But the Romantics of the next century, who you would think would have a quite different sensibility, also loved it greatly. It was especially influential in Germany, especially with Goethe. And it was an important book for J. G. Hamann, whom I’m studying right now.

And yet today, Night-Thoughts has been virtually–if not completely–forgotten. I have a Ph.D. in English literature and I had never read it, except for some brief excerpts in an 18th century class. It has taken my work on Hamann to make me seek it out. And just as he has perspectives that can help us post-moderns recover Christianity, the same might be said of Young. Our approach to suffering is to medicalize it, seeing melancholy feelings a disease we need to cure or a pain that we need to find a remedy for. (“Stop feeling like that!” “Cheer up!”) And as we have blogged about, some people today are saying that any kind of suffering makes life not worth living. Our recent ancestors would find that attitude absurd, if not contemptible. My impression, not just based on Edward Young but on many other writers from earlier times, is that people back then–who, as a whole, probably suffered more than we do–did not flee from their sorrow, but rather drank it to the dregs, often learning something from the process.

At any rate, Night-Thoughts is available as a Kindle download at Amazon for free. Go here. You can also read it online here.

Feel free to regift these presents to your friends and family. If you don’t like them, you can exchange them for other free websites, streaming videos, and e-books. But these may give you jolts of pleasure and satisfaction all through the year and beyond. They may be some of the best presents you are going to get!

So, Merry Christmas, everybody!

Image by monicore from Pixabay

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Horror and the New Nihilism

October 8, 2019 By Gene Veith

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God created the Heavens and the Earth. “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen 1:31). Then an alliance between human beings and the devil brought sin into the world and all our woe. Then sinners, to excuse themselves, see everything that God had made and behold, it is very bad.

Augustine said that evil is an “absence of being,” that is, a lack of something God created good. Death is the absence of life, and murder attempts to negate someone else’s God-given life. Sexual sins reflect the absence of life-giving sexuality according to God’s design. False witness, stealing, coveting, cruelty, hatred, and other sins against our neighbor exhibit the absence of love. In this view, sin amounts to a rebellion against reality.

What provoked these thoughts is a post by John Ehrett, former student and fellow Patheos blogger, entitled Lovecraft and the Metacrisis of Liberalism. It is a masterful example of how literary criticism can illuminate a worldview issue and give us insight into our times.

The post is about the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), whose writings are enjoying a comeback, along with the horror genre generally. Lovecraft developed the Cthulhu Mythos, in which human beings inadvertently awaken the underlying deities of the universe, who are utterly malign. I’ll let Ehrett explain it:

Lovecraftian “cosmic horror” is built around the premise that the cosmos is utterly indifferent to human beings. But that’s not to say the cosmos is empty. Rather, the most powerful forces in reality are ancient, godlike beings of chaos—the Great Old Ones—whose intentions are inscrutable and who care nothing for humanity. These Great Old Ones cannot be comprehended within the frame of normal human experience: even momentary exposure to the Great Old Ones’ presence is enough to reduce a human consciousness to gibbering madness.

This, of course, is very different from horror stories influenced, if only implicitly, by Christianity.

Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic horror reflect a metaphysical picture wholly alien to Christianity. Other stories like Dracula, The Exorcist, or even Event Horizon emerge from a distinctly Christian milieu. The forces of evil in those stories are understood to be evil by virtue of what they oppose: Dracula sets himself up over against God, a demon seeks to claim the soul of an innocent girl, and an ancient power of evil defiles the image of God in man. That is to say, there is a distinct moral duality at work in these tales and others like them—one that allows the descriptor “good versus evil” to be properly applied to them. The heroes are on God’s side, and the villains are on the devil’s.

But that is not how Lovecraft’s tales proceed. “Evil” is an unintelligible concept in Lovecraft’s literary world, because there is no transcendent ideal against which “evil” might define itself. There is no good or evil, only comprehensible or incomprehensible power. Indeed, the very essence of the Great Old Ones is near-absolute coercive authority that feels no need to justify or legitimate itself. They will do what they will do, and be what they will be, regardless of what human beings might think. There is nothing democratic or deliberative about these power relations; Lovecraft’s cosmos is ruthlessly, relentlessly hierarchical—and the human species is at the bottom of the ladder. The primary objective of any human character in a Lovecraft story is simple: escape!

I remember watching a modern Dracula movie that purported to be more faithful to Bram Stoker’s original 1897 story (1897) than the iconic black-and-white 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi. But it wasn’t. In the Lugosi film, as in Stoker’s novel and as in vampire folklore, Dracula is vulnerable to sacred symbols and cannot remain in the presence of a crucifix. But in the modern version, Dracula attacks a man who, cowering, holds up a crucifix. The vampire swats it away to general laughter.

Consider today’s hit movie Joker, which portrays the comic book villain in terms of the isolated involuntary celibates associated with today’s school shooters and mass murderers. His world is “utterly indifferent” to him, wholly bleak and ugly and evil, which eventually transforms its victim into someone who himself becomes “utterly different” to other human beings, wholly bleak and ugly and evil, his “human consciousness” reduced to “gibbering madness.” In this Joker, there is no Batman.

Ehrett relates this nihilistic worldview to the “postliberal” mindset that we have discussed.

The increasing popularity of Lovecraftian horror, I think, tracks (at least in part) a broader cultural shift away from the good/evil conceptual duality. In Lovecraft’s pitiless world, the traditional “good/evil” dyad is replaced by the dyad “freedom/oppression”—as it has in much contemporary discourse.

Leftists think all authority is a Cthulhu-like imposition of oppressive power. The only hope is for the oppressed to assert their freedom by resisting the power structure and its imposed values until they can seize a similar power for themselves. But conservatives, while being very different, sometimes think in terms of the same dichotomy, with government, by its nature, exercising oppressive power, with individuals needing to assert their freedom against it.

We have lost the basis of legitimate authority and legitimate power, the sort that is “very good.” Vocation teaches that God, in His providential love, works through human beings–in their ordinary callings in the family, the workplace, the church, and the state–to care for His creation. We not only lack that understanding, we have a lack of people carrying out their callings in love and service to their neighbors, preferring instead to use them for their own Cthulhu-like self aggrandizement.

In the absence of God and His righteousness, people assuming that “the real world” is intrinsically evil. When people do talk of God, they often project Him as being intrinsically evil too! This is evident in the new atheist’s moral arguments against God’s existence. And sometimes even believers in God present him as an arbitrary, indifferent, amoral power not much different than Cthulhu! Ehrett notes that we sometimes hear this view of God from extreme Calvinists–of the sort Lovecraft grew up with–though the Reformed folks that I know do not go nearly that far but always insist on God’s radical and inherent goodness.

Still, I appreciate Ehrett’s Lutheranism:

As a Christian, I would argue that the legitimation of power (in the very deepest sense) begins with the fundamental ontological hierarchy inscribed into the very fabric of creation: the infinite God calls into being the order of finite things. This foundational hierarchy can never be transcended, try though we might. But the Lutheran tradition goes a step further: God’s power is revealed in the death of Jesus on the cross and His subsequent resurrection—not through explosive demonstrations of sovereign will that shatter human categories. And in the cross, the categories of power relations are accordingly subverted: the truest and best leader is the one who voluntarily dies for his people. Power, in short, manifests as love.

Without God all you have is the devil. The Biblical worldview recognizes the darkness inherent in a sinful world. Those who feel trapped in that world–the depressed, the hurting, the unfortunate–are not abandoned in their suffering. God Himself entered that dark and sinful world, bearing it all in the cross, bringing redemption. And then He rose from the dead. He now calls us to join Him in the battle against the Cthulhu in the world and in ourselves.

Illustration: “Cthulhu,” by Reiner Zaminski [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons

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The Imagination Recession

September 17, 2019 By Gene Veith

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Hollywood is disappointed with the summer movie box office. Though there were a few hits, the public seems to be tiring of sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, and recycled formulas. But the problem isn’t just with movies. Can you name a new musical style? A new artistic movement? A ground-breaking literary style? Will Lloyd, in Spectator USA, says that we are in an “imagination recession.”

From Will Lloyd, Disney and the imagination recession:

Today Hollywood’s undoubted creative power is spent updating and reimagining stories that are decades old. Like medieval monks endlessly toiling over classical manuscripts, they’ve added little to these stories aside from fancy marginalia. The sense of stasis that results is proof an imagination recession. Of course, there are probably millions of 38-year-old men, with their cookie-cutter apartment shelves lined with collectible dolls, who await, with epic rapture, the next Wonder Woman movie. They feel as if they are living in an unprecedented cultural paradise. For the rest of us there is the British painter David Hockney’s judgement: ‘most fields of art and culture seem to be stuck somehow.’

Lloyd focuses on films, saying that 1999 was “the last imaginative year of mainstream American cinema.” Now there is hardly any originality, as Hollywood concentrates on “sequels, remakes, franchise extensions, products shaped from existing intellectual properties,” such as old comic books from sixty years ago.

Lloyd blames the once-creative Disney Corporation, which today dominates the American film industry financially and which the few remaining studios that Disney has not purchased seek to emulate. “In film it is Disney that’s most responsible for driving the culture into a ditch,” he says. “On a creative level it has been gruesomely disenchanting to watch them harvest audiences’ nostalgia for pictures that are barely a few decades old.” (Notice that Disney is now taking its animated classics–many of which were indeed masterpieces especially when Walt was alive–and remaking them with ersatz live-action animated technology, as in the new Dumbo, Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King, etc.)

Star Wars was a genuinely creative and innovative series, Lloyd observes, but then Disney bought the franchise from their creator George Lucas. “In the last seven years Disney has released four Star Wars movies, each worse than the last,” Lloyd says. “Incredibly, their creative teams have managed to make movies that are slavishly imitative of Lucas’s originals, as well as alienatingly different from them.”

What has happened to American movies has also happened to American music. So says Ed Driscoll, who applies Lloyd’s point to rock music, which has become an “exhausted genre” fixated on “nostalgia.”

I myself am interested in literature and the arts, and I have to agree with David Hockney that “most fields of art and culture seem to be stuck somehow.”

Even for the avant garde, it is as if all of the experimentation has already been done. The attempts to be “transgressive” no longer shock, since we have seen them all before. The same holds true for politicized, sexualized, and group identity art.

Meanwhile, literary and artistic critics and theorists are rejecting concepts such as beauty and aesthetics, insisting that works of art are nothing more than impositions of power, and artists are little more than tools of the oppressors. If the works of the past are this way, why should we think contemporary artists and writers are any different–unless, of course, they are “transgressive” of the ruling order, but that still leaves their art as being determined by that order. So why should anyone care about them?

With the loss of any kind of transcendent worldview, art loses its meaning and its value, turning into just one more commercial commodity. As our culture repudiates its foundational institutions–family, nation, education, religion–of course the arts, from the high to the low, will lose their vitality.

Now, having said all of this, I must also point out that intellectual, artistic, and cultural deadends are often the heralds of renewal and Renaissance.

Perhaps it is already happening.

Part of the problem is the fragmentation created by our information technology. Network television was all about broadcasting to the largest mass audience possible, but digital television–as well as the internet as a whole–makes possible narrowcasting to niche audiences and catering to the tastes of individuals.

There are likely highly original works of film, art, literature, and music. But they are known only to a few. Even as the new technological media makes new work more accessible, the torrent of uncurated information also makes it more difficult to know about.

Certainly, the new technology has made possible new art forms, such as video games and short-form videos. Musicians are no longer dependent on getting a record deal to share their music with the world, but can do so with a YouTube video, which may well find an audience. Authors and poets can now bypass publishers playing the role of gatekeepers by putting up their works directly on Amazon.com.

And on a larger scale, it has been said that we are in a new golden age of television, that the innumerable channels of streaming TV has overtaken cinema in its innovation, artistry, and absorbing drama. After all, a movie can show us a story that lasts only a couple of hours. A Netflix series allows us to binge watch a story that develops over ten or sixteen or twenty-one hours or more, allowing for a depth of character and twists of plot that were unimaginable in the one-hour time slots of traditional TV. And writers, producers, and actors are creatively meeting the challenge of the new media.

So, I ask you seriously, as I did rhetorically above, what new styles are you aware of? What TV shows, novels, poetry, films, music, paintings, digital art, etc., etc., have you discovered that are exceptions to the alleged “imagination recession”?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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The End of Mad Magazine

July 9, 2019 By Gene Veith

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Mad Magazine is ceasing publication after a 67-year run. The satirical magazine–which was a formative influence on young Baby Boomers like me–will still be available (sort of) using reprinted material and in special end-of-the-year editions, but as an on-going, regular periodical, it will come to an end this Fall.

Mad started as a comic book making fun of other comic books, eventually moving on to parodies of just about everything. It then morphed into a magazine, complete with fake ads making fun of products, fake news making fun of current events, fake features making fun of everything else, and cartoons that lacked redeeming social value but were just funny.

When we think of satire, today we immediately think of politics. Mad would target politicians in an equal-opportunity way–of the two brains behind the magazine, Bill Gaines was a conservative Republican and Al Feldstein was a liberal Democrat–but the broader subject of mockery was the culture itself.

Mad parodied movies, TV shows, commercials, and pop culture as a whole. It also mocked fashions, trends, and what popular kids considered “cool,” including hippies, drugs, and rock music. But I don’t remember it ever being mean-spirited, much less racist or antagonistic to any group a person couldn’t help belonging to. Also it made fun of the worst aspects of school and the teenage social scene, all of which endeared the magazine to young misfits like myself.

The magazine declined from its glory days in the 1960s. Some say it jumped the shark in 2001 when it moved from New York City to beautiful downtown Burbank. Whereupon it started taking actual advertising–as opposed to the hilarious parodies of advertisements that it had become known for–and concentrating on politics. Recently, under new ownership, it has been piling on Donald Trump like the rest of the media, oblivious that this was making it seem more conformist and less funny.

In my day, many parents, teachers, and other authority figures worried that Mad was having a bad influence on the young, encouraging a spirit of rebellion. Well, it did in my case, but it was a good kind of rebellion. Its satire of American culture–including the pop culture and youth culture of the 1960s–made it easier to resist. I learned how not to take it so seriously. It turned me into a cultural critic at a young age.

As classical literary theorists have pointed out for centuries, comedy–particularly satire–is intrinsically conservative. It pre-supposes a standard against which its subject and finding it wanting. The purpose of comedy, according to the ancients, is to ridicule vice. That means a classical comedy may have lots of vice in it, but the vice is presented as foolish and contemptible, presented in such a way that the audience does not want to imitate it. Thus, comedy has a moral purpose and structure.

This is why comedy is so terrible today, and why it is failing even in Hollywood. Instead of ridiculing vice, most comedians today ridicule virtue. Instead of satirizing the evils of society, satirists–lacking a moral framework–resort to mere mockery. This can be funny. Just as vulgarity and obscenity, also the stock and trade of today’s comics, can be funny for its violation of social expectations. But when the social expectations have lowered so much that there are no more traditional taboos and nothing seems shocking, that approach to comedy will no longer have an effect. In the meantime, new taboos are being erected and are taken so seriously that laughing is not allowed. Already, old-school comedians like Jerry Seinfeld are saying that political correctness will destroy comedy.

When President Trump gave the Democratic Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg the nickname “Alfred E. Neuman,” after the Mad icon and cover boy, the standard bearer of the Millennials said that he had to google the reference.

What, me worry?

Yes, me worry.

Illustration: Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman, Baris@rio via Flickr, Creative Commons License

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