I was a teen when Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, but can still remember reports about one Harry Truman, an old man who lived on the mountain and refused to evacuate in the weeks before the blast.
“I’ve been here fifty years, and I know this country,” he told reporters. “The mountain isn’t going to hurt me.”
Truman, rest his soul, made the mistake of equating geologic time with the span of his personal life lived on that site.
Millions of older Americans are now making a similar mistake. I see them equating long historical time with their own lived experience since the 1970s.
“I know this country,” they say. But in fact they don’t. Or rather: Their knowledge leads them to downplay evidence of radical changes in the body politic. Changes that point to a grim future.
Truman’s years on the mountain blinded him to the meaning of the tremors that shook his cabin in the weeks before the end. Having scoffed off all the signs of impending disaster, he was buried under an avalanche of ash.
Many of us are similarly scoffing, supposing our constitutional republic is a permanent reality. Believing so, we come to assume it will take care of itself, that it's an innate part of nature, that our political order "grows on trees."
Unfortunately, something like the opposite is true. In a republic like ours, once citizens forget their rights must be defended, those rights are first eroded, then taken away.
The West loses its liberty slowly at first, inch by inch, then all of a sudden.
Governing elites across the West are wet-dreaming of the point when that “all of a sudden” comes within reach. They have their blueprint, a sophisticated array of digital tools, and a population softened up by decades of safetyism and divisive identity politics. They’ve been inching their way toward frictionless, full spectrum population control since at least Obama’s second term.
The takeaway should be obvious. America’s elections are for the time being a matter of thwarting their project. That and nothing else. It’s the best we can do, and if we refuse to do it out of distaste for the candidate, then we are failing liberty.
Still, some refuse to see it. Many otherwise smart, well-meaning folks keep nursing the notion that America now is basically the same America they knew back in the 20th century. I don’t know how they pull this off, given the evidence. Our current America is a husk of that one, its institutions and culture fallen to forces who’d be glad to dispose even of the husk.
What we’re suffering here is form of normalcy bias. It’s a dangerous cope, akin to the old man Truman’s logic just before his mountain buried him.
Normalcy bias is a variety of judgment error to which all of us are prone. Faced with evidence of a serious threat, we tend to assume all will be well, if only because we personally have never experienced that particular disaster.
In our current America, this often takes the form of “nothingnewism.” Claims that start with, “Yeah, but we’ve seen this kind of radicalism before. Reminds me of [then follows some example from the ‘60s or ‘70s—one that precisely misses the crucial differences of the present].”
What we face now is not like the ‘60s. At that time there were upheavals, but the governing class was not with the radicals. Now much of the governing class is. Even our corporate elites have signed on.
The nothingnewists refuse to recognize the threat. Since the excesses of the ‘60s didn’t undermine our republic, so the logic goes, no current leftist nonsense, however entrenched, can do so. “Our basic liberties are safe.”
It’s naive. From Silicon Valley to Washington to London and Brussels, there’s an emergent new political order frantically trying to establish itself. Among its many ground rules, as you may have noticed, is one that already offends the basic liberty we enjoyed until yesterday.
As follows: “Citizens shall not presume to discuss [X, Y, and Z topics] as we elites will rule such discussion either ‘hate speech’ or ‘disinformation,’ and there will be consequences.”
This threat is backed up, with ruined careers or closed career paths in the US, with literal jail terms across the pond, and with worse to come if entrenchment continues.
This really is new, hardly more than a decade old.
Look at Germany, the UK, Canada. Unprecedented government claims to a prerogative to control and censor. In the US, the same elite push. We see the smooth mechanics of cancellation, banana republic shifts in judicial practice, the Orwellian new normal that stretches from our captured universities through corporate media.
All of it is new, and it’s all part of the same thing.
If you’re over fifty, you grew up in an America that valued free speech and open debate. Think about how much has changed in the past fifteen years alone. Younger Americans now risk much if they dare have independent thoughts on: crime, sexuality, the basic difference between male and female, immigration, medicine, child-rearing.
A rather wide list of topics, no? That list is almost certain to keep growing if our left remains in power. Because our left elites have made clear they will not tolerate debate on such things. They openly side against free speech. Many are even proud to do so.
Though our First Amendment may hold up, it may well not, given the millions of younger Americans trained to repeat that “Free speech is just a cover for BIGOTRY!”
This is what our establishment has wrought. And this is also one of our current presidential tickets. But some of you have principles, and simply can’t bring yourselves to vote for a crass man.
Please drop the quaint dreaming. We are in the midst of a slow-motion coup, one being pulled off via rampant immigration and ever tighter controls on citizens’ speech. Whether in Europe or the US, only the populists stand a chance of thwarting this coup. In the US, the populist leader, love him or hate him, is Donald Trump.
So Trump’s personality irks you. He irks me too. So what? Our elections are not personality contests.
One administration on offer will be a perfect fit for the coup plotters. The other will be a wrench in their works.
Crucial in all this is the question of judges. The next administration will either appoint judges that hew to the constitution on speech and liberty issues, or judges that rubber stamp the expansion of this new censorship regime.
In my view, sober constitutional judges are likely the last bulwark we have. Our universities have fallen, our Congress will sway with corporate pressure, our mass culture is drunk on woke Kool-Aid, herded around by self-appointed lefty hall monitors.
Finally, think of the future. Do you really want your descendants to live under a digitally enforced social credit system where their every statement is weighed for wrongthink? Where they’re awarded or punished in their careers depending on how well they mimic regime talking points? Do you really want your descendants to live under a justice system staffed by our current Democrats?
Which party has proved its willingness to weaponize that system against political opposition?
We’ve now had 46 presidents, all of whom, with a little “creative” legal thinking, could have been accused of crimes after leaving office, but only one president in our history has ever been subjected to banana republic-level trials.
In short, a new low.
This weaponization of justice alone has convinced many to vote against our current Democrats. They are wise. They are thinking long term.
The claim that we mustn’t put a crass man in the White House is incoherent, given the forces we face. Whether one leans left or right in the old 20th century parlance, if one is merely sane one will vote against the emergent governing order.
Normalcy bias, nothingnewism—is a cope. Likely the most dangerous cope available.
Wings of Desire
* A Film by Wim Wenders
* Produced by Anatole Dauman, Screenplay by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke
* Bruno Ganz as Damiel, Solveig Dommartin as Marion, Otto Sandler as Cassiel, Curt Bois as Homer, Peter Falk as Himself
Eternity is in love with the productions of time. --Blake
I’d like to get something straight from the start. I’m no great fan of moving pictures. The cinema, for me, has always been suspect. I think of it as a form of diversion that waits round every corner, an escapism we’ll never escape.
The 20th century’s great art form, a totalizing art that’s taken over so much of our lives--to assess its influence is almost impossible for us. We’ve grown up inside it, we live our lives under its spell. Unlike the great art forms of the past, cinema seems mostly a means of avoiding life, or snuffing life out. Its flickering images are too compelling; we’re too easily taken in by such devastating visual powers. And the powers that cinema lends us are nearly always a sham. What are we left with after the credits run? We’ve been “entertained,” and wait for the next fix.
Although the cinema certainly matters to me (my point here, after all, is that it’s impossible for it not to matter) and although I’m often compelled by a particular movie for the two hours I watch it, it’s rare that a film will answer the demands that I bring, say, to reading. It’s rare a film forces me to widen my thoughts the way certain novels do. There are few movies, in other words, that actually thrill me beyond the experience of watching, that make me see something new in relation to spiritual life or think something new in relation to the problem of being human.
Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire is the only film of these few that’s made me want to write about it. It’s the only film I return to, and muse over.
For me Wings of Desire is not just Wenders’ masterpiece, but one of the peaks of cinema. If the art of cinema has a Divine Comedy, it must be this single film by Wenders.
Never has a film given such compelling answers to such pressing questions. Not clearcut answers, but paradoxical, ambiguous ones. That a filmmaker can raise such existential problems so compellingly is in itself something to wonder over. Wenders makes these questions drive every scene in his film.
Is there a spiritual realm behind the material existence we experience every day? If so, what are the relations between spiritual and material? Is human history a parade of disasters finally leading nowhere (or leading, perhaps, to some terminal disaster)? Does anyone hear our voices? Do our voices resonate with some divine Word or words? Our triumphs and perils--are they connected to some ultimate purpose, part of some cosmic conflict, or are they ultimately meaningless? And finally: If a spiritual realm does exist, why would it concern itself with us? Is it in any meaningful way intermingled with us?
Wenders’ film stands apart. It manages to convey the immediacy of such questions to modern life. Wings of Desire is bizarre, in a wry, humorous way, but at the same time utterly serious. Wenders’ genius was to make a film both compellingly realistic, as a documentary of life in modern Berlin, and convincingly metaphysical, as a tale of the angels in charge of watching over the great city.
Wenders collaborated on the film with Austrian novelist Peter Handke, and it’s clear that Handke’s particular genius is behind much of the lyricism. One of Handke’s books I treasure is a collection of his notebook jottings, titled The Weight of the World in English translation. One can hear in his aphorisms the same writerly genius that wrought some of the film’s finest dialogues.
Wings of Desire develops the tension that holds between angels and humans, examining the distance between their separate realms and the yearning that would bridge that distance. The angelic realm is particularly fascinating here because it is one we haven't ever glimpsed in such a tactile way. Wenders’ angelic realm doesn't exactly conform to traditional ideas of angels.
Though his angels hover over Berlin and can move in and around it at will, though they can enter any room or office and observe the people there, they also overhear the thoughts that run through individuals’ heads. The viewer too hears these thoughts as voiceovers.
We learn that the angels have been preparing for this job of overseeing since the beginning of time. The two we meet as characters have in fact been present over this same plot of ground since well before the city arose, even since before human history. At first they merely awaited the arrival of “the one created in our image,” i.e. man. Then, after the earliest humans arrived on the scene, their waiting took on a different character.
Human beings in this film come forth as a result of evolution, but they come forth destined to fulfill a spiritual potential. Wenders’ myth of men and angels thus strays from the orthodox religious accounts, but has, to be sure, its parallel with orthodoxy as well.
Having watched human beings from the beginning, the angels in some ways understand us better than we understand ourselves. In particular they understand how we reach for what is spiritual, how we sense but can’t quite enter into the spiritual realm just beyond us. This understanding, however, doesn’t necessarily imply an intellectual superiority. Although their realm overlaps with ours, and although they can read our thoughts, there remains the barrier, a barrier experienced as such by both sides.
We humans cannot see the angels and cannot normally converse with them. We may even doubt their existence. For their part, they cannot know what life really is for us, what it feels like. Wenders gives us their world in black and white and makes it clear that they can never really touch things in a human way. The coldness or warmth, color, taste, texture of things--these remain beyond them. Being that they transcend time, they cannot really know time either. They cannot know its human meaning. Intellectually, they may know that man lives in the present, that man’s present is ever running out, ever dragging him toward death. They know this, as a matter of fact, but they don't know what it feels like to actually live within it.
The angels’ curiosity about the true lives of men leads to desire. Their lack of real life, of the tragic feel of life, eventually leads some of them to want to shake off their eternity and join man in his time-bound state. The desire of the angels to fall is Wenders' most brilliant twist. Not to fall like Lucifer, by a denial of God, but to fall through a need for human warmth, through a curiosity or empathy for human life. The angels, in their perfection, fall in love with man, with his compelling imperfection. One may say the film is a gloss on Blake’s maxim: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” Wenders makes of this love a beautiful meditation on the worldly and the divine.
It's through the dialogues of the two angels Damiel and Cassiel (played by Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander) that we learn of their long waiting for man’s gestation. We learn also of their current task, their calling: to witness the development in man of “spirit.” Thus Damiel and Cassiel watch over the lives of Berliners and keep note of what they see and hear. Having to testify to man’s spiritual reach, they must gather evidence of it.
One of the most telling dialogues as regards Damiel and Cassiel’s work takes place when they meet to share notes. It’s evident that the two occasionally make reports to each other of their individual observations, things they’ve seen and heard as they each wandered around Berlin. They are seated in a car on display in a car dealer’s showroom, invisible to the mortals around them. Cassiel first takes out a small notebook and begins giving the standard readings:
CASSIEL: Sunrise and 7:22 a.m. Sunset at 4:28 p.m. Moonrise at [. . . .] Twenty years ago today a Soviet jet fighter crashed into the lake at Spandau. Fifty years ago there were the Olympic Games. Two-hundred years ago Blanchard flew over the city in a balloon.
DAMIEL: Like the fugitives the other day.
CASSIEL: And today, on the Lilienthaler Chaussee, a man, walking, slowed down, and looked over his shoulder into space. At post office 44, a man who wants to end it all today pasted rare stamps on his farewell letters, a different one on each. He spoke English with an American soldier--the first time since his schooldays--and fluently. A prisoner at Plotzenzee, just before ramming his head against the wall, said: 'Now!' At the Zoo U-Bahn station, instead of the station's name, the conductor suddenly shouted: 'Tierra del Fuego!'
DAMIEL: Nice.
CASSIEL: In the hills, an old man read the Odyssey to a child. And the young listener stopped blinking his eyes. . . . And what do you have to tell? DA MIEL: A woman on the street folded her umbrella while it rained and let herself get drenched. A schoolboy who described to his teacher how a fern grows out of the earth, and the astonished teacher. A blind woman who groped for her watch, feeling my presence. . . . It's great to live only by the spirit, to testify day by day, for eternity, to the spiritual side of people. But sometimes I get fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel there's some weight to me. To end my eternity, and bind me to earth. At each step, at each gust of wind, I'd like to be able to say: 'Now! Now! and Now!' And no longer say: 'Since always' and 'Forever.' To sit in the empty seat at a card table, and be greeted, if only by a nod. . . . Whenever we did participate, it was only a pretense. Wrestling with one of them, we allowed a hip to be dislocated, in pretense only. We pretended to catch a fish. We pretended to be seated at the tables. And to drink and eat. . . . Not that I want to plant a tree or give birth to a child right away. But it would be quite something to come home after a long day, like Philip Marlowe, and feed the cat. To have a fever. To have blackened fingers from the newspaper. . . . To feel your skeleton moving along as you walk. Finally to suspect, instead of forever knowing all. To be able to say 'Ah!' and 'Oh!' and 'Hey!' instead of 'Yes' and 'Amen'.
This dialogue begins as a lyrical testimony to the ways in which man's spirit seeks to break through the pragmatic weight of everyday life. The train conductor who shouts “Tierra del Fuego!” and the man who sends his farewell letters each with a rare stamp from his collection are both kicking against the limits of the mundane. But by the dialogue’s end the focus has shifted in the other direction. Damiel’s yearning for the weight of the world brings him to make almost equally lyrical evocations of what he imagines human life to be like: “To have a fever. . . . Finally to suspect, instead of forever knowing all.”
It is in this dialogue, in its contrast between the two kinds of yearning, human and angelic, that the film affirms its theme. It is a heterodox theology of sorts, or at least angelology, that suggests a necessary and permanent tension between beings of pure spirit, on the one hand, and we humans who commingle spirit and matter, on the other. It regards the lack one suffers without the other.
This is not orthodox Christianity, certainly, but it is close. The film offers a far-reaching heuristic that points to certain of the fundamental Christian mysteries.
Wenders further develops the integration of these two sides through the motif of falling. We humans have long imagined that transcending the limits of our earthbound lives meant rising up: if we could only take flight, all that is banal or merely mortal would be left behind. First, we would fly like the birds, escaping the clutches of family and the law, crossing over walls and borders. Who could pursue us? Then, taking this imagined flight further, we might literally succeed in ascending to Heaven, crossing over from time into eternity, leaving death behind on the surface of a fallen, corrupted earth.
The dream of flight and its concomitant fear of falling is incarnated in the figure of Marion (Solveig Dommartin), a once-aspiring trapeze artist about to give her very last performance. The small-time circus Marion works in is going to close down for lack of money. She knows very well she’ll have to return to waitressing: her dream of rising up through her art was a delusion. But there is more that nags her before her last night. Trapeze is a dangerous art, and what if, her very last time above the crowd, she should lose her composure and fall and break her neck? Along with her coming fall from the ideal life as a circus artist, there is also the grim possibility of a literal fall, one that is frighteningly material.
The angel Damiel, in his growing desire to fall into humanity, grows increasingly fascinated with Marion. We see her through his eyes and hear her thoughts through his ears. Eventually Damiel will truly fall from his angelic state and come together with her.
What does it mean that the film’s last scene shows Marion again practicing trapeze while Damiel, erstwhile angel, holds the rope that anchors her to earth? She didn’t need to renounce her art after all. A new balance between heaven and earth is established, a balance this time effected through the love between man and woman.
Wenders charges theological speculation with romance, with Eros, and vice versa. He gives us a love story with a subtle cosmic significance. There’s no love story like it, in film or modern literature, that I know of.
Falling. Scenes of falling are everywhere in this movie, but it is only Damiel’s falling for Marion that is simultaneously a kind of transcendence. The other cases of falling include auto accident, film stunt (a fake sort of falling), suicide (a young man leaps from a building) and the angel Cassiel’s pathetic attempt to experience what that suicide must have felt like. Having been unable to prevent it, he’s led to a confused empathy: he will repeat the young man’s suicide by himself falling from Golden Else’s shoulder atop the Victory Column. But since Cassiel is both immortal and weightless, his fall can be nothing like true suicide.
Cassiel, in fact, offers the all-around professional angel: the angel as mid-level management. In each instance he lacks Damiel’s grace and sympathy. He’s closer to abstract intelligence and further from creative, living being. In the same meeting with Damiel quoted above, we learn that what most attracts Cassiel to the idea of falling is the possibility of experiencing evil. Cassiel, as angels go, is in a more Luciferian mode, more in the mode of the angel classically understood. Is Damiel, then, in a mode closer to Christ?
Wenders doesn’t stress the notion that Damiel might be somehow Christlike, unless it is in his interactions with children. One way we may think of him as Christlike is in the sense rendered by a rewritten, pared down John 3:16: “For Damiel so loved the world that he gave his eternity in order to be with man.” Which is quite pared down indeed, though the parallel is strong enough that one cannot neglect it. Damiel, in any case, is more Christlike than Cassiel, if only because he is more human; he is animated more by love than by whatever it is that animates Cassiel.
Love, transcendence, human history, mortality: these themes taken up by Wenders give his film a potentially epic character. Not epic in the Hollywood sense, but epic in the traditional sense of a story of foundations: the story of the heroic struggles that defined us.
The theme of epic story is made explicit through the character of the despairing old storyteller (Curt Bois), the old Berliner who is at the same time a kind of would-be Homer. His criticism of the world around him is familiar. According to him, the possibilities of wonder, of storytelling, are finished: men have become both too sophisticated and too impoverished through their scientific knowledge; they’ve lost the world through their destructive know-how. Many of us will sympathize with this Homer.
Where are my heroes? Where are you, my children? Where are my own, the dull-witted, the first, the original ones? . . . Name me, Muse, the immortal singer. Who, abandoned by his mortal listeners, lost his voice. How, from being an angel of storytelling, he became an organ-grinder, ignored or mocked. Outside, on the threshold of no-man's land.
The no-man’s land he wanders are the dead zones and nearly dead zones bordering the (still standing) Berlin Wall. He is looking for the location of Potsdammer Platz, which has been effaced by the changes brought about by the war and then the division of the city between East and West.
Wenders’ lamenting Homer is a figure for those among us who see our advancements as only alienating us further from the authentically human. Our lament is implicitly criticized by Wenders. For in the very same city where the old storyteller wanders distraught there is occurring “a story of new ancestors”--namely the story of the fall of Damiel and his love for Marion. And if I love this film so much it’s because Wenders, in his magnificent artistry, is nearly convincing. One is nearly brought round to believing that, yes, it is possible to tell stories about our world that might matter to us as much as the ancient stories mattered: those, say, of Adam and Eve, or Odysseus.
Marion had dreamed of a man in her sleep, a man who came to her. In fact it was Damiel who, in his angelic form, was lying in her bed by her side. When Damiel finally falls, a day or two later, he comes to the pub where Marion goes to dance. He comes to find her, only her. But it is she who approaches the bar where he's waiting. The two turn to each other and Marion, recognizing the face from the dream, begins her monologue about how, finally, things are getting “serious.” Following the drama of Damiel and Cassiel, Marion’s monologue is the lyrical high point of the film. She speaks it just inches from Damiel, a man she’d never before seen in the flesh; she speaks it with halting confidence, a frankness and softness that mean he is only to listen, to hear from her mouth the meaning of their new love. I’ll finish by quoting her monologue in full:
It's time to get serious. . . . I was often alone, but I never lived alone. When I was with someone I was often happy. But I also felt it's all a matter of chance. These people are my parents, but it could have been others. Why was that brown-eyed boy my brother, and not the green-eyed boy on the opposite platform? The taxi driver's daughter was my friend, but I could just as well have embraced a horse's head. I was with a man. I was in love. But I could just as well have left him there, and continued on with the stranger who came toward us. . . . Look at me, or don't. Give me your hand, or don't. No, don't give me your hand, and look the other way. . . . I think there's a new moon tonight. No night is more peaceful. No blood will be shed in the whole city. . . . I never toyed with anyone. And yet, I never opened my eyes and thought: 'This is it.' . . . It's finally getting serious. So I've grown older. Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Is it our times that are not serious? I was never lonely. Neither when I was alone, nor with others. I would have liked to be alone at last. Loneliness means at last I am whole. Now I can say it because today I am finally lonely. No more coincidence. . . . The new moon of decision. I don't know if destiny exists, but decision does exist. Decide. Now we are the times. Not only the whole city, but the whole world is taking part in our decision. We two are more than just two. We personify something. We are sitting in the People's Plaza, and the whole plaza is filled with people, who all wish for what we wish for. We are deciding everyone's game. I am ready. Now it's your turn. You're holding the game in your hand. Now or never. You need me. You will need me. There's no greater story than ours. That of man and woman. It will be a story of giants. Invisible, transposable. A story of new ancestors. Look. My eyes. They are the picture of necessity, of the future of everyone on the plaza. Last night I dreamt of a stranger. Of my man. Only with him could I be lonely. Open up to him. Completely open, completely for him. Welcome him completely into myself. Surround him with the labyrinth of shared happiness. I know it is you.
Response to a letter speculating on America’s drift from Christian faith
Dear … :
I agree with a lot of your analysis of why the culture has drifted from Christianity. At least in immediate terms. You mostly evoke a shift that’s occurred over the past couple generations--reaching, say, back to our generation. And it works. But my own framework is different. I don’t only look at this shift through the lens of the choices of younger Americans against older, recently dominant generations.
Yes, it sure looks like what we have in America is the mass of the population making a conscious, informed choice for freedom and self-determination against the religious strictures and judgmentalism of the 1950s. But I don’t think masses in general make really “conscious, informed choices.” I think rather they are molded by the Zeitgeist, which gives them justifications for the thinking they adopt. This is true in every culture, and it’s true for ours. It’s true for both educated and uneducated. Among the “educated” only a very small minority will ever challenge currently fashionable thinking.
So, we in America assume we are following our desires and that those desires are self-chosen, but the truth is we’ve absorbed most of those desires from others. In this respect consumer behavior (as in the burning desire for some new fashion or product) is a microcosm of human behavior in general. Even including our choice of “beliefs” or ideological positions. We are monkeys.
When the writers cited in that Substack post underline that the West has replaced Christianity with a Void, what they mean is that our culture has made the Desiring Self the origin of all values. “Woe to you if you offend my Desiring Self!” You point out correctly that everyone worships something, but the problem with the Desiring Self is that it can’t in itself be a sane object of worship--or rather, the circularity of such worship means that the culture is bowing down to a Void. Worshipping oneself is an illness, not a civilizational model.
We Americans believe we champion freedom, and we do, but what has happened beginning in the last century is that our concept of freedom has shifted radically. The Founders of the 18th century, and really all of the historical West, would look at our way of talking about freedom and immediately see a glaring problem.
Notice that we don’t use the word “liberty” so much anymore. We use “freedom” to mean the same thing. But what we actually mean is something different. The shift in terminology is a tell.
Most ancient philosophers and most thinkers up through yesterday would look at our contemporary, “supremely free” Americans and insist: “No, you are not free.”
Why not? Because almost all thinkers from the western past recognized that one can be enslaved in multiple ways. One particularly destructive kind of enslavement was to be slave to one’s own desires. Thus liberty, in the true formulation, includes freedom from being led around by the nose by one’s own urges and whims. An adult who self-defines by what he desires or what gives him kicks (whether money, or sexual behavior, or fame) is not free.
Yes, the mid-20th century largely invented “the teenage years,” or rather made a big thing of them. It then immediately proceeded to extended them. I’d say, more or less, that this invention of the teenager ended by extending adolescence first to age 22, then to age 26, and now indefinitely. Why not be a 30-something teenager? It’s called Sex and the City. Why not be a 60-something teenager? Who can criticize you for it? “I have my right to fulfill my desires. If you say otherwise, you are OPPRESSIVE. You are HARMING me.”
Our culture is therapeutic, much of it arising in the wake of Freud. We equate health with being liberated from the harmful “repression” that civilization imposed on us. Civilization is the problem we must be cured of. What nobody seems to notice is that this ultimately means that barbarism is identical to health. Although most people reject Freud on on most things, and don't anymore read him, we still live in the house he built. And since we can't avoid enculturation, i.e. civilization, the double bind is making our whole culture ill.
Of course our invention and then extension of the teenage years is a luxury, possible only because of our stellar economic and military success following WW II. But if you look back at my point about freedom vs. liberty, you will see the cost. There is everywhere a kind of enslavement. To what? Not to the Christian God, not to the Nation, not to the Family Clan, but to one’s own circular round of frantic desiring.
This is the Void they are writing about. And it is dangerous for us as individuals, but also dangerous for us as a civilization. Our cultural industries are happy to keep dangling ersatz fulfilments in front of this Void, whether in the form of lifestyle upgrades, sexual identities, political posturing, etc. From The New Yorker to pop music trends to vibes-based campaigns for the presidency, all of it has the same tedious character.
Some of it is sophisticated. Certainly many of the cultural producers in question have high levels of “education.” But to the extent they continue to believe in ever-expanding self-definition and freedom, they’re shallow. They’re not asking the meaning of human being, the meaning of our being here, but rather planning the Next Thing. Because they assume we are heading somewhere, toward greater self-autonomy and justice and “liberation.” It’s a hollow utopianism that is too frantically busy to question itself. A narcissist in a hall of mirrors will never be liberated.
These points might clarify what I meant at the beginning by my different framework. I’m not looking at a shift of generations so much as a wider historical decline. What I see is the unfolding of a certain perversion in western ideas of what our liberty is, or what it’s for.
Some argue that this perversion was already baked into the cake of our 18th century Enlightenment project, i.e. it’s already there in our Founding. I’m not so sure of that. I think most of the problem stems from a warping of what used to be the western left, and the rise of this new warped to the status of dominant faith. But these are all complicated questions.
You ask what Christianity has to offer young people facing these major shifts. I’d say what it offers is what it has always offered. I notice that you mostly seem to define Christianity in terms of those things in the sexual revolution to which it said No. This makes sense, but then again, you will understand that this only makes sense in the present, a present that lives under a different religious dispensation, the religion of the Desiring Self. Of course the thing we will first notice about Christianity is that it says No to some key part of this new religion.
“Christianity is obsessed with sex!” we say.
Imagine a tribe that lives by pig farming coming to a Jewish village. “These people—their religion is all about pork! They’re obsessed with it!”
That’s what the accusation looks like to me. A culture that worships the Desiring Self and generates constant new niche sexual identities, making these identities the center of individual meaning--this culture accuses Christians of being obsessed with sex?
I must admit, however, that my longer historical lens tells me that if Christianity is viewed this way by current generations, it isn’t only because of the new religion cultivated by younger generations. The particular kind of Protestantism that dominated mid-20th century America shares some of the blame. That Protestantism had jettisoned much in Christianity and ended up with an easy-peasy bourgeois version of the faith that managed to make sexual sins the only sins one should condemn. This was not all American Protestants, of course, but was a defining tendency of the national faith.
Perhaps there’s little surprise in this development. Though pride is the primal Christian sin, pride and greed were endemic to America during those years of expansion. In our capitalist culture, they were even touted as “virtues.”
That American Protestantism was only one iteration of Christianity. It was recognizably Christian, yes, but rather hypocritical, no? The tragedy is that because of the flaws and manias of that version, the whole has been rejected. Baby thrown out with bathwater.
I have much more I could write about, sure. But I hope this gets at some of how I see this new American religion vs. what came before. I don’t at all think we’re getting closer to the truth, nor do I think we’re flourishing as a culture. Quite the contrary. We are sick. We are lost and groping in a Void. Because the Desiring Self is not the meaning of the universe.
