Reflections on today’s culture inspired by C.S.Lewis. By PETER CORNEY

The Lewis quotation that inspired this reflection comes from his essay “The Abolition of man”.

“Such is the tragi – comedy of our situation, we clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible….”

Currently we constantly hear the call for political and commercial leadership with more honesty and integrity, with less pride and avarice, and in the case of our politics, less of the ugly and sterile quest for revenge. The recent Royal Commission has also called for a new corporate culture of honesty and transparency in our Banks and financial enterprises.

And yet, as Lewis contiues; “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

As Lewis points out with his graphic metaphor of castration our present culture renders these qualities and virtues impossible because we have made our culture morally sterile. We have turned away from the belief in moral absolutes and the transcendent origin of the highest values and virtues. We are now lost in a confusion of Post Modern relativism, radical individualism and a false view of personal freedom that is really the desire for individual choice unrestrained by any boundaries of morality, truth and reason.

The sense of moral and spiritual accountability to God has been steadily eroded by the secularists who reject any reality beyond the material and physical world. They want to enclose us all in their well-lit, tightly locked but windowless room of scientific materialism that rejects any ‘meta physic’, nothing bigger or beyond the material and physical. And yet they have no satisfying answers to our most enduring questions about meaning, morality, the highest good and our ultimate purpose.

To change the metaphor we are a “cut flower culture” that has severed our values and virtues from their roots and so it should not surprise us that the flowers of the moral virtues are slowly withering and dying.

Truth and the downward spiral.   By Peter Corney

In the hangover of the Bill Clinton Presidency and its sad and grubby end in the Monica Lewinsky affair Os Guinness wrote a brilliant little book entitled “Time for Truth” (Published 2000). It should be required reading for every candidate for political office and anyone who aspires to a leadership role in business or public life. Its relevance to the present moral circus in Canberra is not hard to see.

He describes the impact of Post Modern relativism not only on Western cultures idea of truth but on the corruption of truth telling and honesty in the contemporary, political, commercial and entertainment worlds. Lies and deceit is a downward spiral into the moral abyss. As Richard Flanagan put it so eloquently in a recent Guardian article, “if we can be persuaded that the truth does not exist, the light goes out and we are condemned to the darkness.” Ideas have consequences!

In the final chapter (six) Guinness outlines the “Seven degrees of descent on the downward path of dishonesty”. Drawing on the work of the philosopher and ethicist J. Budziszewski * he outlines the seven steps on the downward path of dishonesty. As you read and consider this remember we have all lied at some time, or withheld the truth which is much the same thing, and the temptation is always with us. There is no place for self-righteousness here only personal honesty.

(The following is a direct quotation from “Time for Truth” pages 118-119)

1. The first step is “simply sin”. We lie because we have done something wrong. Lying becomes the secondary utility sin in the service of some primary sin.
2. The second step down is “self- protection”. As Budziszzewski writes, “Lies are weaklings they need bodyguards.” Each new protective ring of lies breeds its own protective ring until the liar is smothered in layers of lies and lying.
3. The third step down is “habituation.” Lies repeated become habits and habits repeated become character. Before long a single lie becomes a settled way of lying and we cross the border between lying and become a liar.
4. The fourth step down is “self- deception.” The more we lie, the more we lose hold of truth and the more we succumb to believing our own lies. Sincerity and self- deception then reinforce each other.
5. The fifth step down is “rationalization.” Believing our own lies, we then give explanations other than the real reasons for all we do. Then we blame our weak grasp of truth on the weakness of truth itself, so that (for example) postmodernism itself becomes a gigantic rationalisation for our contemporary lack of truthfulness.
6. The sixth step down is “technique.” The more accomplished we are as liars; the more lying becomes our craft.
7. The seventh and bottommost step is that “morality turns upside down.” As Budziszzewski observes, “the moment lying is accepted instead of condemned, it has to be required. If it is just another way to win, then in refusing to lie for the cause or the company, you aren’t doing your job.” Thus living-the-lie replaces living- in- truth and in the moral murkiness, truth and freedom are lost and evil is born.

Integrity

Living the truth and speaking the truth are connected; the connection is the notion of integrity. Integrity is about the moral integration of our private and public lives, it’s about wholeness. There cannot be a moral incongruence between the two if we are to have integrity.

It is fashionable today to talk about the separation of peoples private and public lives, especially in the matters of sexual ethics, and particularly in the lives of politicians. Certainly the unwarranted and excessive intrusion into their family and private lives is something that should be discouraged. But you cannot espouse certain values publicly and not follow them privately. You have to “walk the talk.” You cannot (for example) condemn bribery and then take kickbacks and ‘financial gifts’ for providing favourable treatment, or special access to power, etc. Nor can you appear to stand for fidelity in family life and deceive and betray your spouse and children without real repentance and restoration. This inconsistency is called hypocrisy and a failure in integrity! Such a person cannot be trusted at any level, let alone public office.

In sailing we talk about the “integrity of the boat” by which we mean the strength and physical fitness of the whole boat – what you can see from outside, the hull, the mast, the stays, and what you can’t see, like the keel and the steering gear, all the gear from the biggest winch to the smallest shackle. In heavy weather under full sail the stresses on the boat and all the gear, small and large, seen and unseen, are very great. A defect in a small stay shackle could lead to its failure and cause catastrophic results for the whole boat and crew. The integrity of the boat is its wholeness. Small lies are like small faulty D shackles!

When the light of telling the truth is snuffed out we are condemned to the darkness and evil triumphs.

Of all people, the followers of Jesus must be an example of truth telling, “You are the light of the world” he said. The New Testament tells us that “God is light; in Him is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with Him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus purifies us from all sin.”(1 John1:5-7)

We live in the truth in two ways (1) By always telling the truth, and (2) By pointing to the source of the light of goodness and truth – Jesus, who said “I am the way the truth and the life.”(John 14:6)   

 (* J.Budziszweski is Professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas. He specialise in ethics, political philosophy and the interactions of these two fields with theology. Among his many books are: “Written on the heart” and “A line through the heart” on Natural law.)

BRINGING PERSPECTIVE TO OUR TURBULENT TIMES  –  by Peter Corney

“Blessed are those who find wisdom, those who gain understanding.” (Proverbs 3:13)

“Love the truth and understand the times”   (1)

Populism

‘Populism’ is the appeal to current opinions, prejudices and the interests of popular contemporary culture; the fashionable ideas and sentiments of the times. It frequently rests on a shallow plausibility of narrow and limited arguments and is often promoted by glib slogans. For obvious reasons it has always had political currency but in our time of constant superficial mass communications, thirty second news grabs, social media and emotional reasoning, it is particularly virulent.

To counter populisms corrosive effects on the best, and often most hard won, of our cultures core values requires the application of a certain perspective and wisdom.

I offer the following ideas and quotations, mostly from the wisdom of others, that will I hope provide some of that necessary perspective and wisdom.

(For the sources of quotations and a further explanation of some of the ideas see the extensive footnotes)

Progressivism verses conservatism – a false dichotomy?

We live in a time when changes in our culture, which have been building now for many years, have begun to reveal themselves in radical, dramatic and unsettling ways. What were once foundational assumptions are either forgotten, being questioned or rejected. Historically this is not unusual.

Every generation needs to test the established ‘wisdom’ of their elders and to question its foundations and validity and its contemporary relevance. They need to press the depth and scope of their elder’s knowledge, the adequacy of their solutions to human problems, the extent of their quest for social justice, the usefulness and practicality of their inventions and technology and so on. This is part of the way we move forward and progress.

But wise cultures also value their fundamental foundations, particularly their moral and spiritual ones and those through which their hard won political progress has been made towards the common good, greater human equality, freedom and justice. The present generation typically assumes them but often does not know their origins or foundations, ‘their story’, and so can be in danger of neglecting, distorting or losing them. Progressivism and conservatism need each other.

The role of history and truth

 “Not to know what happened before you were born is to be forever a child.” (Cicero 65 BC)

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  (G Santayana19th C) 

“History is the continuous conversation between the present and the past” (E H Carr 20^th C) (2)

The corrosion of truth and the loss and distortion of our Western cultures history are disturbing features of our times. They are the result of a number of forces: the political propaganda and spin constantly churned out by our politicians, the relentless commercial marketing that at best just exaggerates and at worst is deceptive, (3)and corrupt commercial practices, for example the negligent, dishonest and exploitive behaviour of what were once our most trusted financial institutions. (4)  But there are other less obvious and more culturally influential forces that have had a profound effect on the way truth and history are now perceived.  For example Post Modern relativism (5) has reconstructed for a whole generation how the idea of truth is perceived.

The current funding model for Australian universities that in effect now emphasises education for employment rather than a genuine liberal education for life has also been unhelpful. It has accelerated the decline in many humanities and liberal arts departments and so has badly affected resources in history departments, particularly those newer universities not in the elite group. But in terms of ideas it is the unbalanced perspective from which much of the tertiary teaching of history has suffered over the last thirty years that has had a very pervasive and distorting influence.

This is the idea that history and culture is to be interpreted and taught primarily through the lens of the oppression of the majority by the powerful minority, and their control over not only material wealth but also social norms, customs, values, ethics and language. This has been accompanied by a particular theory of ‘social constructivism,’(6) of how a culture’s  values and social norms are formed, the idea that values are just a social construct and have no objective truth. At its extreme edge it is claimed that ‘reality’ is just a social construct! This has captured the teaching of sociology, literature, gender studies and influenced the understanding of ethics, as well as the interpretation of history. The constructivist theory of social values can partly explain how values are passed on but its implied philosophical basis and theory of knowledge is highly contested.

The ‘oppression theory’ of history, where the oppressed resist and eventually overthrow the oppressors, has some validity but narrowly understood and reductively applied is really an old Marxist idea and a discredited and simplistic view of history and the development of culture. (7)

One of the ways this influence now presents itself is in the politics of identity, particularly gender politics. Where any external definition of gender placed upon the individual is seen to be oppressive.  Ros Ward a self-professed Marxist involved in the ‘Safe Schools’ gender re-education program says “Marxism offers both the hope and the strategy needed to create a world where human sexuality, gender and how we relate to our bodies can blossom in extraordinary new and amazing ways.” (8)

The recent public debates over same sex marriage and the Safe Schools program have raised some serious questions, not just about the particular issues, but about the way many people, and some pressure groups, conducted themselves and the ability of people to respectfully disagree and the extent to which they understand the vital importance of free speech in a liberal democracy.

The result of the same sex marriage plebiscite shows that the majority of people acknowledge that it had a worthy object of creating greater equality in a pluralist society. The Safe Schools program, because it overreaches, is much more problematic. Nevertheless the more limited and sensible goal of protecting vulnerable children from bullying is also seen by the vast majority of people as a worthy goal.

And yet the way in which truth, objective facts, reliable surveys, research, the advice of senior professional medical experts and rational discussion was distorted or ignored in the debate was very disturbing. (9) Emotional argument frequently dominated discussion and some groups used the tactics of abuse and name calling and even denied others the right to assemble or speak. The verbal violence and level of hate and vitriol expressed in some of the abuse was staggering. This continued, even after the result of the vote was public. As Goya wrote “The sleep of reason brings forth monsters” (10)

Progress, freedom and Truth

“Truth prevails for those who live in truth” (The motto of the ‘Charter 77 Movement’ and the Czech rallies in Prague in 1989 seeking to overthrow Soviet control.)

“Live in truth” (The catch cry of leaders trying to rehabilitate their people in post-Soviet East European countries) (11)

“If you hold to my teaching you really are my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” – Jesus.

For those of us brought up on the writing of George Orwell, particularly his brilliant satirical critique in ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’ of Soviet Communism and its real life expression of Marxist/Leninist theory, the current manipulation of truth has an eerie ring to it. The slogan of the ‘Ministry of Truth’ in Orwell’s novel is ‘War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength…’ and truth is whatever the ministry said it was! ‘Newspeak’ was also created by the state to control and limit the individual’s freedom of thought. ‘Correct thinking’ had to be maintained and ‘thought crime’ punished!

Our current enforcement of ‘political correctness’, about what can and can’t be said, particularly at the level of campus politics, begins to feel like a similar fascism of the mind! Roger Scruton the English philosopher describes its contemporary version in this way: ‘Newspeak occurs whenever the primary purpose of language – which is used to describe reality – is replaced by the rival purpose of asserting power over it. It conjures the triumph of words over things, the futility of rational argument, and also the danger of resistance’ (12)

Recently Richard Flanagan the Tasmanian author who in 2014 won The Man Booker Prize for literature recently wrote a very insightful piece in the Australian Guardian (31/10/17) on the theme of Progress Freedom and Truth.

‘Progress and freedom are not necessarily joined……truth is the precious hinge that holds freedom and progress together. Chinas advances are, after all, the proof that if all that matters to you is progress, you can have progress without freedom. But there will be a void, and in that void a great darkness will arise. Truth is the only force we have, the one light strong enough to combat such darkness. And if we can be persuaded that the truth does not exist, the light goes out and we are condemned to the darkness.’ (13)

Truth, meaning and morality

‘Cultures abhor a metaphysical vacuum’ (Ross Douthat)

‘When cultures lose the decisive influence of God and God dies for a culture they become weightless’ (Nietzsche)

“A culture not dedicated to the sacred has only itself to take as object, the self becomes sovereign.” (Robert Coles) (14)

In the old days of deep seam coal mining the miners carried a canary in a cage down to the coal face to keep a check on the quality of the air. If the canary stopped singing that was a warning, if it died it was time to get out and back to the surface! We live now in a culture where the warnings are becoming clear that the atmosphere of our culture is becoming toxic to humans. One in four Australian adolescents now suffers from some form of mental ill health such as depression, anxiety and self-harm. In spite of our prosperity we now have more dependent children in state care than ever before.

Carver Yu the Chinese philosopher and theologian commenting on the cultural atmosphere in the West describes it as marked by “Technological optimism and literary despair.” (15)  Richard Flanagan says “There is a pandemic of sadness and emptiness.” (16)  Johnathan Sacks says our society is “one of a maximum of choice and a minimum of meaning.” (17)  A steady diet of dystopian novels and films, of varying quality, arrives regularly in the market place of cultural comment and artistic distractions to further increase our gloom.

A vacuum of meaning

Western culture seems gripped by a malaise, an ‘anomie’ (18)  produced by a vacuum of meaning. Cultures not only abhor a metaphysical vacuum, as Ross Douthat says, but also a moral and spiritual one. Has our culture become weightless for the reason Nietzsche predicted?

The deepest wisdom and most profound knowledge is that which provides answers to our most enduring and important questions – questions about the meaning and purpose of our lives, about the nature of good and evil, what is just and unjust, about love, duty, honour, beauty, delight, shame, guilt, forgiveness, suffering and tragedy.  The answers to these questions have traditionally been found in religious and spiritual sources, and in the West, in the Christian faith and world view. But currently Western culture has turned away from this heritage and has put nothing in its place that has its depth of meaning and wisdom. No wonder there is an atmosphere of nihilism and radical individualism that feels like our culture has developed a kind of collective mental illness of depression and narcissism. At the same time our prosperity enables many of us to pursue distractions rather than face despair, but the void is never far away.

Richard Holloway once put the matter most starkly and with brutal honesty in this way:

“The person who gives up belief in God because it brings with it certain unresolvable dilemmas ends up believing in a dying universe in which there is no meaning anywhere, a universe that came from nothing and goes to nothing, a universe that is cruelly indifferent to all our needs. And there is no point in feeling resentment against such a universe, because in a Godless universe there is no reason why anything should not happen, and there is no one to resent or to blame. We are alone in an empty universe. No one is listening to our curses or our tears. We stand, tiny and solitary, in a corner of a vast and empty landscape, and if we listen, all we hear is the bitter echo of our own loneliness.” (19)

The existential problem for the contemporary Western person

 As Nietzsche prophesied, cultures not only become ‘weightless’ when they lose the decisive influence of God, but also as Robert Coles puts it, when they are not dedicated to the sacred they have only themselves to take as object  and so ‘the self becomes sovereign.’ That is exactly what we now see in contemporary Western culture where modern selfhood finds its identity in self-enthronement. But to achieve that God must first be dethroned. The result, as the Jungian psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover puts it, is “the frozen isolation of the heart.” (20)

Charles Taylor in “A Secular Age” describes it as “expressive individualism”; it is the idea “that each one of us has his or her own way of realizing our humanity….as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside”. This “has profoundly altered the conditions of belief in our societies.”   Important implications are: that personal authenticity and individual choice are now key values and tolerance is the primary virtue. (21)

While this self-obsession is not unfamiliar as a stage of development in adolescence it is now a common one among adults. It’s as if a whole culture is suffering from a collective form of arrested development!  Because this mindset tends to reject any external wisdom, authority or tradition as oppressive the individual finds themselves in a ‘hall of mirrors’ where the only perspective they ever see is a reflection of themselves. This is the ultimate subjective trap, a kind of ethical, philosophical and spiritual narcissism, a tragic disorder of human vanity and hubris. Not the least reason that we all need a perspective from outside ourselves is that for most of us our inner world of feelings, emotions and impressions is frequently unreliable, dysfunctional and distorted by our past wounds and present difficulties.

Longing for ‘home’.

Another image that helps us to not only diagnose our spiritual condition but also glimpse the solution is the idea of ‘longing for home’, it is a powerful metaphor. Not only does our culture feel weightless, empty of deep meaning and trapped in subjectivity, it also feels homeless. Again Nietzsche is prescient in his predictions about the death of God for Western culture for it raises he says “The most painful, the most heart breaking question… that of the heart which asks itself, where can I feel at home?” (22) 

Many forces in the culture of late modernity reinforce this. The way we have constructed our cities   has  turned us all into strangers in our own towns and streets, in spite of our best efforts at community events and festivals most of our ‘progress’ and prosperity has destroyed community. We have turned our suburbs into commuter dormitories dominated by our cars, our obsession with privacy and our fears for our children’s safety. Large numbers of people live alone; our elderly are shuffled off into separate ‘aged care facilities’ and the research tells us that a high percentage are rarely visited by family or friends.

Nevertheless when young adults today are asked about what is important to them they frequently say ‘family.’ I know my own grandchildren, while being independent young people, put a high priority on family gatherings. While over a third of all marriages now break down and fracture families young people still instinctively feel the need and importance of family and ‘home’. So in spite of these negative cultural pressures, or perhaps even because of them, the deep human desire for ‘home’ persists. Home provides not only security, belonging and love but also a sense of place and identity. When these vital things are lost or fractured by family breakdown they leave a great void in young people’s lives.  These factors combined with our culture’s loss of a sense of ultimate meaning leads to a wide spread feeling of spiritual homelessness.

Ironically even positive ideas that are meant to draw us together such as: one world, the global community, multiculturalism, a United Europe, in fact often have an opposite effect. The Brexit factor and the rise of nationalism again in Europe is partly a response to the sense of a loss of identity and place among many groups. Being a citizen of one world is a nice idea but it’s too big to be ‘home’. This unease coupled with the massive international movement of people from widely different cultures and values makes our politics vulnerable to extreme views from the right and the left.

Critical questions for us now are: How do we maintain a sense of  ‘home’ and identity without drifting to the dark side of nationalism and race? How do we retain the best of our individual cultural identities and uniqueness and at the same time embrace our human oneness and interdependence as the one world family? We have always found unity in diversity a challenge! The Christian Gospel speaks very clearly into these questions. (Gal. 3:26-28)

In the Judeo / Christian tradition our ‘foundation story’ describes the drama of two brothers, Cain and Able. Cain’s jealousy and envy of his brother leads to a violent conflict in which he kills his brother. (Gen 4:1-17)  His punishment from God is that he is to become “a restless wanderer on the earth”, and God’s presence will be hidden from him and he is now vulnerable to other men’s violence. So he builds the first city as a refuge from his fear and homelessness, but that never solves his essential existential longing for home, and as we know cities produce their own violence and fear and loneliness. (23) This is a way of describing our human condition when we depart from God and his design for our lives. As Nietzsche expresses it “where can I feel at home?”(Nietzsche had in mind his own late 19^th C. European culture in which he believed the idea of God was dying but his predictions have become an accurate description of our times.)  Once a culture closes the roof of its mind and imagination to the heavens – to the transcendent, then the mark of Cain descends upon us, the restless wandering looking for home.

The Waiting Father

But the Bibles story does not leave us in Cain’s dilemma; in fact its whole journey is taking us on God’s rescue plan that finds its climax in the person of Jesus. Perhaps the most well-known of the stories about coming home is told by Jesus, it’s the parable that is known as ‘The return of the Prodigal Son’, but a better title is ‘The Waiting Father.’ (24)  In Jesus’ story the emphasis is on the extraordinary patience and love of the father for his way ward son. In spite of the son’s foolishness and selfishness and the pain he has given his family the father has been waiting for years for his son to come home. If we contextualise it a little we can think of him standing every day on the veranda of his homestead looking down the dusty country road for his son to return. When he at last he sees him he runs to meet him and embraces him and welcomes him home and restores him to his place in the family. This, Jesus is saying, is God’s stance towards us.  But lest we think this is just a nice sentimental ending to the story, our failures and sins, our selfishness and betrayals, our violence and cruelty and pursuit of power over others are not just overlooked, they must be accounted for. But in the climax of the Biblical story God in Christ takes them and our accountability for them into and upon himself in the terrible but extraordinary event of Christ’s crucifixion.  As St. Paul puts it in the New Testament “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting our sins against us.” (25)  The way ward restless wandering child can be welcomed home because the waiting father has borne the cost of forgiveness himself, which is always the way with true forgiveness. This is what Christians understand to be the heart of God’s grace and love. It is this story that is the foundation of our understanding of the meaning of life.

Finding meaning

Lord Johnathan Sacks the retired chief Rabbi of the UK was asked recently in an interview discussing the loss of meaning in the West “How do you find meaning?” He replied “You have to go to those people who have preserved the stories of meaning.” (26)

Peter Corney  (New year’s day  2018)

(All FOOTNOTES AND REFERENCES can be supplied on request)

The hall of mirrors by Peter Corney
In the past some of the great houses of Europe were built with the special feature of a hall or room where all the walls are lined with mirrors so that as you enter all you see are reflections of your own image. No doubt an interior design feature that their wealthy owners found pleasing! They have also been reproduced in some modern buildings with the ceiling lined with mirrors as well.
Also in the past a feature of the travelling circus or carnival was often a tent of mirrors but these were designed to distort your image for fun. Some made you look short and fat, some thin and tall, others gave you a rippled effect or showed your image out of focus. The effect was comic and amusing. I remember as a boy spending some of my precious pocket money on a side show tent of “fun mirrors” at the Perth Royal Show!
One of the features our Post Modern world has embraced is an attitude of mind like the hall of mirrors where the self is constantly reflecting on itself. We all have a tendency to be preoccupied by our – selves, how we feel, how we look, what others think of us. Self – interest is a perpetual preoccupation! In our teenage years it becomes an obsession, one that has now been facilitated by social media to levels dangerous to youth mental health.
But our Post Modern world has embraced an attitude of mind that has taken our natural tendency to a new level in the realm of ideas, values, truth and meaning. The individual’s subjective view and perspective has become the primary authority, particularly in matters of meaning, purpose, ethical values, right and wrong. Now the individual’s subjective view is unmodified by, nor subject to, any external authority or notion of objective truth, let alone by any concept of transcendent values. This is further reinforced by an idea of personal freedom where the individuals will and choice is primary and sacrosanct, an idea reinforced daily by living in the consumer/ marketing society of unlimited personal choice. The sense of obligation to some common good or community responsibility is being overwhelmed by this trend.
Hyper individualism has also been reinforced by a fashion in parenting and education that has overcorrected some negative elements of the past and substituted them uncritically with the language and emphasis of the Self Esteem and Human Potential Movements – “You can do anything, be anything”, “anything is possible if you believe in yourself.” Self-control and concern for the feelings of others is also pushed aside by the closely related Self Expression Movement – with the encouragement to “be yourself”, “don’t repress your feelings”, “ be authentic, say what you feel”, “be true to yourself”, “you have a right to say what you think”, your opinion is as good as anyone else’s.”  *  All this has fed an overinflated sense of entitlement and an ugly narcissism. Also weak and overindulgent parenting has lowered the bar for children on facing the tough side of life, its limits on self interest, its requirement for accountability for our bad decisions and selfishness.
This kind of radical individualism that is self- authorising is like the hall of mirrors, in the end you are trapped in a room of reflections of yourself. In fact it may be more accurate to see it as the side show tent of distorted mirrors as our individual inner worlds are so often distorted by our own desperate needs, desires, dysfunctions, past hurts, ignorance and self-interest. The hall or tent of mirrors cuts you off from the wisdom, experience and knowledge that is greater than your own.
The fact is we can’t be anything we want to be; only people with a certain kind of physical make up can be an Olympic sprinter! The fact is an individual’s knowledge is limited! The fact is our individual capacities vary! The fact is that at 17 or 18 years your life experience, wisdom and skills are limited!
This cultural fashion has set up a whole generation for a great disappointment and the evidence is now coming in. All the recent surveys on the mental health of young people in Australia are telling us that they have poor resilience in the face of failure and the inevitable difficulties that life throws at us all; they have high levels of depression and anxiety. The alarming fact is that one in four suffers from some serious mental health issue.
Radical individualism is a problem for the individual’s health; it is a problem for building healthy marriages and families; it is a problem for our communal and social health; it is a problem for the political health of our democracies. The solutions are not very palatable for a Post- Modern and materially prosperous society like Australia as they take us back into many of the very ideas and values that so called progressives have rejected and ridiculed.
Christian communities have to now redouble their efforts to faithfully and alternatively live out the values that have been rejected by a section of our society, or in many cases just been worn down by our prosperity, the contemporary media and an over reactive education system captured by fashionable ideas. This places a high priority on Christian parental teaching and example and Church youth ministry that must work harder and more creatively at Christian education and discipleship training. At tertiary level education Christian young people will find themselves in a context where the world view framework is allegedly neutral but in fact is frequently aggressively ‘progressive’, secular and often anti-Christian. They need to be equipped to understand the ideas behind what they are facing and how to respond. Those entering higher education or any level of political activity need to understand the intellectual, ideological and cultural contest to which they will be exposed and prepared for significant ‘soft persecution’. To some it may sound extreem to say that Christians are now in a new cultural war but that is the reality! (2Tim 3:1-5)

The upside of all this is that there is an increasingly dissatisfied and growing group of people in our community who are unhappy at the results of what our contemporary society has produced. They are concerned with: our mental health crisis, particularly among the young; with marriage and family health; with the alarming number of children now in State care; with the loss of values and ethics in business and finance; with the state of our political processes and the level of public discourse. These concerns may develop into a groundswell of desire for a recovery of those values and ideas that we have turned away from.
Peter Corney.

( * Note: Some time ago the US Christian Psychologist and academic Dr Paul Vitz wrote an outstanding book that traced the roots of the so called Human Potential Movement entitled ”Psychology as Religion – The cult of self worship.” [ Pub. Eerdmans 2nd Ed. 1994 ] It traces its origins in a form of secular humanism based on worship of the self and its most influential and well known theorists. For anyone wishing to understand the academic and theoretical origins of the psychological theories behind the popular versions of the Self Esteem, Self Expression, Self Actualisation, etc., movements it is an excellent guide. The range of popular books and training seminars has multiplied over the years and widely influenced parenting, education, staff training and therapeutic practice.)

Kagaw

The forgotten Christian who reshaped 20thC Japanese society
Toyohiko Kagawa was an outstanding Japanese Christian who had a great influence on twentieth century Japan but is now largely forgotten both in his native land and in the West.
He was a social activist on behalf of the poor and the oppressed working class of 1920’s Japan as it began to industrialise. An author and poet, by 1933 he was the most popular author in Japan and his book “A grain of wheat” went through 150 editions. He was very involved in the development of the first trade unions in Japan and also in advocating for a national health scheme, one of the earliest in the world.
He is no longer remembered in Japan partly because he strongly opposed Japans military aggression in the Second World War and attempted to convince the emperor and government to turn away from the aggressive stance of the senior military leaders. After their defeat he campaigned for Japan to formally apologise. This was not received well in Japan.
His story and conversion to Christianity and how his faith shaped his life and service to the poor and Japanese society is a fascinating one.
Christianity first came to Japan with the Portuguese traders in the 16th C., the first missionaries were Jesuits. In the late 16th and early 17th C. converts and missionaries were fiercely persecuted, many were actually put to death by crucifixion and the infant church pushed underground. In 1859 the Protestant missionaries arrived but it was not until 1871 that Japan officially recognised the Christians right to legal recognition. But even then a Japanese person who converted was often ejected from their family. Today the population of Japan is 126 million but only 1% is Christian, in spite of this several Japanese Prime ministers have been Christians.
At the beginning of the 20th C. in Japan God raised up this extraordinary man – Toyohiko Kagawa. His father was a senior official in the Japanese government and a member of the Japanese aristocracy. But he was a philanderer and Kagawa was the result of a relationship with a prostitute. Both his parents died when he was young and he was taken into the care of a wealthy uncle who owned an historic rural estate where he was brought up. The beauty of the countryside made a lasting impression on him; it gave him a love of nature and motivated his later environmental concerns. His uncle’s family history went back to the ancient Samurai nobility. But his time in his uncle’s home was difficult as his paternal grandmother rejected him because of his birth mother.
Eventually he was sent off to a Presbyterian missionary secondary school. High placed Japanese families at this time were eager for their children to learn English. There he was in effect adopted by two missionaries who took him into their home and loved and cared for him. This had a profound effect on the development of his faith in Christ. He had been given a New Testament earlier by an American missionary to whom he had been sent to learn English and was deeply impressed with Jesus. But his faith now flowered and he felt called to Christian ministry. He was a bright student but instead of going to university as his uncle expected he decided to attend the Presbyterian theological College at Kobe. His uncle could not accept this decision; he rejected him and cut off all ties.
While studying theology he became involved in ministry to the poor in the Kobe slums. He eventually went and lived there in a tiny hut identifying completely with the poor. There he started “The Jesus Band of Kobe” for young Christians to work in the slums. At this time there were approximately 10,000 people living in the Kobe slums. This is in the 1920’s at a time when Japan had no social welfare of any kind and farm and factory workers lived and worked in the most appalling conditions. The industrial revolution did not hit Japan till the end of the 19th C and its worst effects were just beginning to impact Japanese society in the early 20th C. There was no organised labour movement and no trade unions and so no one to stand up for the rights of workers and the poor.
Kagawa felt a burning call from God to work for and among these people. He lived in the slums for 15 years. His work was amazingly holistic; he worked as a passionate evangelist, social reformer, labour activist and union organiser. He developed churches, schools, hospitals and co-operatives among factory workers and farmers. The Kobe/Nada Co- operative which he helped start is still in existence and is the largest single Co-op in the world with four million members.
In the 1920’s he was frequently arrested for his involvement with labour activism which was actively discouraged by Japanese political leaders at the time. He became a key figure in the development of the first Japanese Unions and in 1928 organised the “Japanese Federation of Labour.” As a result of his tireless work he became known as the champion of the poor.
But he was not only an organiser he also researched and wrote on the causes of poverty. He became a prolific author and his writing both educated and touched the conscience of the Japanese public. He was also a celebrated poet and his book “A grain of Wheat’ which was published in 1933 was at one stage the most widely read book in Japan. His books sold in their thousands and he became Japans most popular author. He was also an early environmentalist and initiated a very effective tree planting program in Japans rural areas.
In 1923 Tokyo experienced what they still call ‘the great earthquake’ which devastated parts of the city particularly areas where the poor lived. Kagawa was now so respected he was asked by the city officials to take charge of its relief work and later was put in charge of the city’s social services.
His other extraordinary achievement was that he became the first person to advocate for a national health care system for the whole country which was eventually achieved, one of the first in the world.
But as mentioned earlier he was not only a social reformer he was also a passionate evangelist. For eight years from 1926- 1934 he conducted a nationwide evangelistic campaign called the “kingdom of God Movement” speaking to large crowds.
He had studied at Princeton in the US from 1914-1916 and was well known there. Before the outbreak of the Second World War he returned briefly to the US in an attempt to prevent the outbreak of war. As a pacifist he was deeply opposed to Japans militarisation and Imperial plans. He was arrested in Japan in 1940 for making a public apology to China for Japans brutal occupation of that country, an occupation whose memory lingers on with bitterness in China today.
After Japan’s defeat and occupation by the US he became an adviser to the Post War Transition Government. He was a strong advocate for Article 9 in the post war Japanese Constitution that renounces war as a means to settle international disputes. Japan is the only country with such a clause, although it is now a matter of some dispute as Japan re-arms today. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947 and 1948 the Nobel Peace Prize in 1954 and 1955. At his death in 1960 he was awarded Japans second highest award the Order of the Sacred Treasure but his call for a national act of repentance after the war was not received well by the Japanese and was a significant factor in his loss of popularity and marginalisation. But his social reforms live on and still bear fruit in Japan.
There is an interesting connection with Australia and Victoria. The late Fletcher Jones a Christian business man who built the very successful “Fletcher Jones” clothing company was very influenced by Kagawa’s ideas and brought him to Victoria to speak in 1935 at Warnambool where Fletcher had his business. Fletcher also went to Japan in 1936 to study the co-operatives started by Kagawa and this shaped his approach to staff involvement and financial sharing in the company which was very successful and an outstanding model of Christian principles applied to business and labour co-operation.
Kagawa, an outstanding example of Christian servanthood was motivated to achieve these things because he believed that, as he expressed it in one of his poems,
God who dwells in my hand
Knows this secret plan
Of the things he will do for the world
Using my hand!
(From the poem “Discovery”)

THE DEATH OF THE CONTEST OF IDEAS IN WESTERN CULTURE.
By Peter Corney
Western culture is inexorably moving towards a crisis. We are a culture of suspicion and cynicism, empty of any sense of ultimate meaning, a culture that leads to either despair or distraction. We are the philosophical children of Nietzsche and his post structuralist, Post Modern followers.
As Nietzsche prophesied, God is now dead for modern people. Therefore there can be no transcendent values of right and wrong, justice or goodness, no objective truth; the only absolute is the will to power. If this is true then the contest of ideas is over, it’s ultimately futile because there is no final standard to determine what is true or false at the end of the contest and so all that’s left is the contest of power!
Nietzsche said “If you kill God you must also leave the shelter of the Temple.” He meant that to be consistent you must leave Christianity’s values and meaning and make your way alone in the brutal world of the contest of power. The contest of ideas requires a notion of objective truth, with that gone the contest of ideas is a futile delusion. Samuel Becket depicts the futility powerfully in his play ‘Waiting for Godot’ as just the chatter of clowns waiting for someone to arrive and explain it all. But the ‘someone’ never comes because in Beckett’s world view there is no one to come and there is no meaning to explain. Behind our chatter about ideas – the thin veil of illusion – lies the real battle the will to power which eventually leads to the contest of power.
I am not suggesting that everyone out there knows or even cares about the history and influence of ideas in Western culture or would understand or express it in this way, but this is the spiritual place at which our culture has arrived. Of course very few who even do know are prepared to go all the logical way with Nietzsche to the edge of the abyss and stare into the empty darkness of the logic of his ideas that is too bleak for most of us! It’s only in our moments of suffering; physical, psychological or spiritual, that we come to the place of despair. When we have lost our job or failed to find one after months of searching or lost a friend in a car crash or yet another relationship has collapsed by betrayal, stupidity or selfishness, it’s only then that we stair into the abyss of meaninglessness and despair. Most of the time we are into distraction, and all the ingenuity and creativity of popular Western consumerist culture is pumping away to assist us!
Alain de Botton’s “Religion for Atheists” and “Art as Therapy” (and as a substitute for religion), are well-meaning attempts at a popular philosophy of life without God for modern people but in the end they just paper over the crack of despair. They have no radical answer to the real pain of existence without ultimate meaning in the presence of the unrelenting struggle for power. In the end, even though it’s quite sophisticated and elegant writing, it’s just more of Beckett’s ‘chatter’, another addition to the veil of illusion masking the real game – the will to power.
But every now and then the truth breaks out to confront us in disconcerting ways, in contemporary art, film or literature. Richard Flannigan’s recent novel “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” is such a moment. It deservedly won the 2015 Miles Franklin award for Australian literature.
In this powerful novel Flannigan tells the story of allied POW’s building the Burma railway under the brutal cruelty of the Japanese army in WW2. The central character is Dorrigo Evans a POW medical officer and surgeon.
For Evans the brutality of the experience has left him with a sense of total nihilism – the only truth in life is the relentless existence of violence. Flannigan expresses his characters thoughts in these words: “For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which no one could escape the horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it created, greater than any God man worshiped, for it was the only true God. It was as if man existed only to transmit violence to ensure its domain is eternal. For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boots and fists and the horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was the history of violence.”
Violence is so often the accomplice of the will to power whether it is a controlling husband’s abuse of his wife and children or an authoritarian manager bullying his employees or the power of the state oppressing its own people or violating the sovereignty of another state for territorial or material gain. The contest of power is usually settled by violence of one kind or another.
The freedom from the “oppression of absolutes”, that Western Post modernity craves, including any transcendent values, will of course in the end lead to the most terrible oppression of all, the unfettered expression of humanities will to power. The current redefining of personal freedom and the quest for unrestricted choice will tragically in the end see the loss of freedom and the unleashing of the crushing violence of unrestrained power. We see it in the growing dysfunction and fragmentation of the family in Australia and the accompanying escalation of family violence. Ironically the reaction of the state is more regulation. Having undermined transcendent values by the relentless encouragement of secularism all it has left is the blunt instrument of legislation. Laws don’t make good people they merely restrain bad ones, and not all that effectively as many Australian families know. A woman is murdered every week in Australia in an act of family violence.
Within, as well as beyond the West, we are seeing the rise of violent movements seeking to impose by force a totalitarian view of government and religion that marginalises or eliminates all dissenting views. This is a new form of fascism but an old story of the abuse of power.
The first actions of oppressive and totalising regimes, whether secular or religious are always to strip away the people’s rights to openly contest the truth of ideas, to remove the ability to challenge the basis of the regimes claim to power. The regime does this not by engaging in the contest of ideas but by the naked exercise of power.
Western democracy and its liberal values are built on ideas from its Christian heritage but it is now weak and vulnerable because it has lost its memory of these ideas and values and its connection to this foundation. Through prosperity, comfort and overindulgence it is now soft and flabby and without discipline. The jury is still out as to whether it will survive the coming storm that internally is of its own making and externally is bearing down upon it from distant deserts and the people who understand only too well the contest and the use of violent power in the quest for victory and control.
The award winning documentary “The Fog of War” is about the nature of modern war. It is built around Robert Mc Namara’s recollections and reflections. He was the US Secretary for Defence during the Vietnam conflict. At the end of hours of interviews with Mc Namara Errol Morris the film’s director concluded “We are in an endless loop, the characters change but the idiocy remains.” The idiocy is our unwillingness to face our fallen weakness of the will to power and our default position of achieving it by violence. Ironically one of Mc Namara’s conclusions when asked what he had learnt from his experience was “You can’t change human nature!”
The Christians understanding of power comes from the teaching and example of Jesus. It is the radical alternative to fallen humanities understanding of power. It is in fact the complete inversion of worldly power. Jesus said “Love your enemies….do good to those who hate you”, “Blessed are the peace makers”. It is the power of servant hood! He said “The Son of man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many”. He submits to the cross and the brutality and violence of fallen worldly power and absorbs it into himself and bears upon himself the guilt of all who have and will exercise such power and in doing so he defeats it. Christians understand that in that act of submission and self-sacrifice he makes possible our forgiveness with God and a new way to live free of the will to power, to live in love as the servants of others. The Christian also understands that the power of God, which is the power of love, will ultimately rule the world in the transformed and renewed creation that God will one day bring to fruition. So the Christian engages in the contests of power that infect our world from a radically different World View and a radically different approach to conflict and power. Their guiding principles will include: (a) recognition of the presence of the ‘will to power’ in all conflicts, (b) the goal of mutual understanding and benefit for all parties, (c) equality for all participants, (d) truth telling, (e) the aim of forgiveness and reconciliation, (g) the refusal to use violence and illegitimate force as the first option, (h)and the goal of the democratisation of legitimate authority, (i) the belief that people can change through God’s grace and so (j) an attitude of hope.
Sometimes this approach will prevail and bring peace and reconciliation, sometimes not. Then it may mean suffering and the sacrifice of our lives. Jesus said “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”. Paul says “…that we are heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings…” Nonviolent intervention and rejecting the will to power can be a costly journey, for the will to power and violence combined is a monster without love or pity. But because all people are made in the image of God and in their hearts some of the reflection of God’s nature remains, sometimes when given the chance to see the true alternative to the monster some will choose the alternative, the way of Jesus.