OUR CULTURE AND SIN

'Our sinless society, which promised liberation from the psychological harm that externally imposed guilt brings, has begun to feel a bit suffocating. No one is really responsible for anything, but neither can anyone really be forgiven. Two seemingly incompatible moral universe have meshed in a toxic brew. On the one hand, the ways we hurt each other are simply social conditioning. We might be able to unpack the triggers through therapy, but it's a tragic project of entanglement in trauma. On the other, there are certain beliefs and identities that function like unforgiveable sins - and these will be unique to your tribe. Some days the whole worlds seems high on self-righteous rage, locating evil conveniently outside ourselves and our group. I regularly feel tempted to performatively avoid causing offence, signal my moral purity or publicly align myself with whoever is the right tribe that day. It doesn't leave much energy for actually becoming more loving or more just.'

Elizabeth Oldfield, Fully Alive: Tending to the soul in turbulent times, p.29.

LIFE SKILLS

'The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another's point of view.

These are some of the most important skills a human being can possess, and yet we don't teach them in school. Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance of how to perform the most important activities of life.'

David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, p.8.

OUR SOCIETAL SELF-HARM

'Language is only language; we need, rather, to hear the cries of those who don't feel happy in their skins, to dare to find out the source of their misery. We, as a society, need to be brave enough to hear the truth: 'It's you we don't like, the society which nurtured us, or forgot to nurture us. You haven't made a good home for us here. We hate our stupid gender scripts you foisted on us, we don't feel beautiful, we don't feel successful, and we don't feel we matter.' 

And aren't they right? Isn't it time to do away with the male tribe and the female tribe and become people again? Hasn't the time come to unravel our uber-sexualisation? To put the spotlight on what joins us, and not what divides us?' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.270. 

IN RELINQUISHING JUDGEMENTALISM WE'VE RELINQUISHED IDEALS

'Nowadays, there are few greater character defects than being judgmental. But in relinquishing judgement, we also relinquish ideals. The ideal of fidelity, the ideal of a family life, with a mother and a father; the ideals of honour, self-control and reverence. The old establishment, the clergy, schools, family and community life were by no means perfect and squeaky clean, but they offered a backdrop that was safe in this tricky business of being human. Sometimes, perhaps, it's better, easier, not to have too much choice. There's a word in German, angst, which perfectly describes the mental anxiety we experience when too many options are presented to us. This hyper-individualism is not good for us, this obsessive introspection isn't making us happy. Sometimes our young don't even know they are boys or girls, men or women, and nobody bothers to point out to them that bodies are just bodies, they can't be blamed. It's only societies which make mistakes.'

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.190  

RENEWING SOCIETY

'Above all, any existential revolution should provide hope of a moral reconstitution of society, which means a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to what I call the "human order," which no political order can replace. A new experience of being, a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of higher responsibility, a newfound inner relationship to other people and to the human community - these factors clearly indicate the direction in which we must go.' 

Vaclav Havel, 'The Power of the Powerless' in Open Letters, p.209. 

PLAUSIBILITY STRUCTURES

'Because of the strength of the plausibility structures supporting the majority views in a society, if you have ideas different from everybody else, it is generally a good plan to be part of a support network...Kindred spirits are crucial to keeping minority ideas alive. And so cognitive minority groups, if they want to survive as a minority, must start to act like a minority. They need to make active efforts to nourish their beliefs and patterns of life in ways that make them plausible to their members. They need intellectual leaders, attractive role models and the opportunity for members to rehearse and consolidate their ideas in the conversational fabric of their group, juts like the majority outside.' 

Glynn Harrison, A Better Story, p.72.  

CULTURAL CHANGE

'Many of the key players in the sexual revolution understood the need...for cultural embodiment. They showed they were willing to swim against the flow. They braved the stigma of difference, marched the streets, formed pressure groups and conjured up the determination to show the world what love could like. And if there's to be a Christian sexual revolution capable of turning the the tide, it will need to do the same.'  

Glynn Harrison, A Better Story: God, Sex & Human Flourishing, p.48.

LIBERALS

'Liberals stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion. They fight to break down arbitray barriers (such as those based on race, and more recently on sexual orientation). But their zeal to help victims, combined with their low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, often lead them to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital. For example, the urge to help the inner-city poor led to programs in the 1960s that reduced the value of marriage, increased out-of-wedlock births, and weakened African American families. The urge to empower studets by giving them the right to sue their teachers and schools in the 1970s has eroded authority and moral capital in schools, creating disorderly environments that harm the poor above all. The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.

On issue after issues, it's as though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really  does need their help) even if doing so damages the hive. Such "reforms" may lower the overall welfare of a society, and sometimes they even hurt the very victims liberals were trying to help.' 

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p.361. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNITY

'To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.' 

Edmund Burke in Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p.359. 

SOCIETY & MORALITY

'Religions are moral exoskeletons. If you live in a religious community, you are enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions that work primarily on the elephant to influence your behavior. But if you are an atheist living in a looser community with a less binding moral matrix, you might have to reply somewhat more on an internal moral compass, read by the rider. That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for anomie - Durkheim's word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order. (It means, literally, "normlessness."). We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago. 

Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don't really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever know at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).' 

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p.313. 

BACK TO WHERE WE STARTED

'God's long funeral is over, and we are back where we started. Two thousand years of history have melted into the back story that no-one reads any more. We have returned to Year Zero, AD 0, or rather 0 CE, because we are in the Common Era now, the years of our Lord having expired.

So much about society that is now emerging bear an astonishing resemblance to the most prominent features of what we call the classical world - its institutions, its priorities, its recreations, its physics, its sexual morality, its food, its politics, even its religion. Often without our being in the least aware of it, the ways in which we live our rich and varied lives correspond, almost eerlily so, to the ways in which the Greeks and Romans lived theirs'. Whether we are eating and drinking, bathing or exercising or making love, pondering, admiring or enquiring, our habits of thought and action, our diversions and concentrations recall theirs. It is as though the 1,500 years after the fall of Rome had been time out from traditional ways of being human.'   

Ferdinand Mount, Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us, p.1.

COMMUNITY

'...for most people in our culture anonymity is the default condition: community is an option. People in cities and suburbs have to choose  to be in a community. They have to find one or start one and actively seek to be part of it. If things don't go well in that community, they can always leave it and start a new one without even changing jobs or houses.'

Michael Mangis, Signature Sins, p.168.

THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

'The great social experiment of the sexual revolution - an experiment performed on an entire population without controls, and without reasonable safety precautions - has been a horrible failure. If it were a hair-care product or a aerosol cheese spray, the FFA would have pulled it from the shelves, and the companies responsible for releasing it in the first place would be facing bankruptcy class-actioon suits. And yet here we are, fifty years in, blithely swallowing the same mental sewage, calling if "freedom" and "love" and wondering why we're all dying of depression, stress, and loneliness.'

Melinda Selmys, Sexual Authenticity, p.80.

CHURCH & SOCIETY

'Because we live in a plural world that no longer gives us privileged place and power, we have the choice to confine our business to the private realm of self and its leisure choices or to find new patterns for faithful public deeds. The calling to seek first the reign of God and God's justice means reorientating our public deeds away from imposing our moral will onto the social fabric, and toward giving tangible experience of the reign of God that intrudes as an alternative to the public principles and loyalties.'

George Hunsberger in Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Everyday Church, p.117.

CHURCH & SOCIETY

'It is a common assumption that, in order to survive, churches must accommodate to the age. But in fact, the opposite is true: In every historical period, the religious groups that grow most rapidly are those that set believers at odds with the surrounding culture. As a general principle, the higher a group's tension with mainstream society, the higher its growth rate.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.261.

ELITES

'...Vilfredo Pareto...argued that change occurs through a "circulation of elites." His theory was pretty complex, though in its simple and sanitized form, he argued that elites were either foxes or lions. Foxes, as he puts it, were those who innovated, experimented, and took risks. Lions, by contrast, were those who defended the status quo in the name of social stability. Foxes and lions were in tension over power. When lions were ascendant, foxes challenged their authority and would seek to infiltrate their ranks in order to replace them. Yet because it is difficult for foxes to maintain a stable social order, the lions would eventually replace them or - more interestingly - the foxes became lions.'

James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, p.43.