Superflat Faith pt 2
Bart’s bare Butt
I am looking at a young man’s car parked close to mine. On the dashboard of the car is a plastic figurine, it is Bart Simpson, he is pulling down his pants, and ‘mooning’ the world. Normally I would not stop and think about this, but this time I am shocked. I am not shocked out of a sense of oversensitive Christian piety, I have grown up with the Simpsons, and when it comes to butts I am the owner of one myself which has provided me with great support during my life. I am shocked however because I think of all the passionate, stubborn, activist, wildly revolutionary young people of history, who have fought to change the world, to bring down corrupt governments, overturn oppressive laws and regimes, who have given their lives on battlefields to improve the world. Sometimes they were right, sometimes they were misguided, but they believed in something. Of all the slogans, of all the messages that this young man could have sent the world, he chose this one. Bart’s nihilistic, plastic moon, exposes more than just are bare butt, it exposes our total lack of cultural depth, and reveals to us just how superflat our culture has become. When it comes to discussing the big issues of life, we have lost our voice.
Superflat Shock Jocks and the death of serious discussion about the big questions
The reason many western people who have grown up outside the church have no ability to discuss spiritual issues with any coherence, is because they have grown up in a culture which has seemingly written off serious spiritual and existential discussion from any public discussion. Take for example the phenomenon of shock jocks. I have noticed as I have travelled around speaking , that most Western cities have FM radio shock jocks. Sometimes they are just a single host, sometimes two guys, sometimes a guy and a girl. However whatever the combination, the shows are all the same. They always have the same jokes that veer towards the crass, they are always irreverent, and seriousness is always discouraged. The rules of cultural discourse are created, a public space is crafted where nothing can be taken too seriously, everything must be laughed at. Satire is a powerful and needed tool, but increasingly in our culture it is becoming the only form of communication. Take for example the fact that research[1] has shown that increasingly young Americans are looking to late night comedy shows as their primary source of news about the world. Even the most serious news is delivered light heartedly. I remember just after the attacks of September 11 when David Letterman broke down on the Late Show, it seemed almost wrong, out of place, even strange. Of course I could understand why Letterman was crying, however the strangeness came from the fact that he was being serious, in a context where no one is ever serious.
Satire has become the dominant form of discourse. In fact it is difficult to find anywhere in youth and young adult culture where anything is taken too seriously. So many simply move through life never encountering forums or contexts in which the big issues of life that humans have always struggled can be heard let alone, discussed, debated and wrestled with.
Well we may say that public debate and discussion of the big issues is not in the public sphere simply because it is not entertaining. This is simply not true. We only have to look back through history to a few generations to find Christians like G.K Chesterton debating atheists such as Bertrand Russell in front of packed houses. Or look to C.S Lewis’ public debates and national radio broadcasts. The great missionary E. Stanley Jones would tour around India, creating round table discussions with participants of all kinds of religious, philosophical and political viewpoints; often these discussions would see thousands of spectators attend.
Today we do not see such debates, sure people tune into various spokes people, or radio commentators. But almost always they represent a narrow view, be it conservative, liberal, rural, urban, new age, etc. Such commentators act more as world view editors, they are not broad casters they are narrow casters. Their audience already is convinced before they tune in. Sure sometimes these narrow casters will attempt to debate people of a different viewpoint. But instead of debating we receive petty, personal arguing packaged as entertainment that only confirms our prejudices. We hear only sanitized soundbites, written by public relations experts. The internet has only made this phenomenon worse, you can now spend all of your time in chat rooms and on websites populated by people from all over the world who share your worldview, biases, and interest.
The Apostle Paul and the Paparazzi
When the apostle Paul moved out of his comfort zone of preaching the good news of Jesus Christ amongst his home culture of Judaism, he knew that he would find things hard. When he preached to his fellow Jews he could rely on their expectations of the coming Messiah and their knowledge of the Torah. Yet he had one thing in his favour when he went to preach amongst the Greeks of Athens. They loved to debate the big issues of life. The book of Acts tells us “All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.”[2] When Paul bumped into some Greek philosophers in the Marketplace, they actually wanted to hear what he had to say, because Athenian culture had a value in which the big questions of life were of great importance and thus dominated public life. Sure these people were not Bible believing Jews but at least they wanted to wrestle with the ‘big ones’.
We however, live in a culture where these questions are off the list. Of course our culture of religious freedom allows us to think of them in the privacy of our own home, but we cannot dare bring them up in the public sphere. So without any serious discussion or debate, there is a vacuum in our culture, and into that void flows the superflat. Except for us it is not plastic Manga characters, saccharine Japanese pop music, and cute packaging, it is paparazzi video of celebrities buying Starbucks, Internet Porn from Estonia, and lifestyle magazines offering us a million consumer choices.
Superflat culture has Attention Deficit Disorder
One of the reasons that we do not allow people the space to seek out the big questions is because as a culture it is difficult to think past the racket, to contemplate what it is all about when you find yourself immersed in white noise. I remember when I first visited Tokyo for my first hit of superflat culture, I was shocked by the sensory overload of the city. Everywhere I seemed to go there was a sea of people to traverse. Every shop I went into seemed to be playing multiple songs over the load speaker at once, gangs of greeters would welcome me into every store and restaurant. Walking around at night everywhere was lit up with competing neon signs and giant video screens trying to sell me something. It was like Blade Runner turned up to ten. I found for the first few days it was exhilarating but then it began to become exhausting I could find no space to think, let alone contemplate. We may not live in the hyper busy world of Tokyo but increasingly due to technology we are creating mini-Tokyos around ourselves. Mobile Cell phones, are left on at all times, interrupting us with texts and calls throughout the day and night. Emails flood our inbox’s with everything from important messages from your boss, to news of your second cousins swollen ankle, to messages from Katarina from Moscow a pretty blonde who wants to “find kind rich western man for sexy fun time .” (Katarina is probably a male unemployed computer graduate named David Yakubu sitting in a café in Lagos, Nigeria just waiting to get your credit card number). Blackberry’s and PDA’s now mean that our work life has lead a blitzkrieg attack into our personal and family time. I-pods and portable gaming systems mean that we no longer have to wait twiddling our thumbs on the bus stop, portable DVD players in cars mean that kids will never again play ‘I spy with my little eye’ on cross country trips or know what it is to sit quietly in silence. Your Facebook/myspace/beebo account needs constant attention so you can receive a link from a guy that you hardly knew at high school, who wants to show you an ‘awesome’ video on Youtube where a drunk Thai teenager at a party runs through a fence.
Our attention is constantly in demand, we have created a technological world which has filled our every waking moment with distractions. Attention Deficit Disorder expert Dr Edward Hallowell now labels our society as having a kind cultural ADD. Hallowell notes that there are two kinds of states that our mind can be in one is the “f-state”: “You’re frenetic, frenzied, furious … about to utter another F-word,”[3] the other state is the “c-state”: “calm, cool, collected, concentrated.” The C-state is where you brain gets a chance to contemplate, to recharge, to let itself wander. C-State is the space of prayer, of meditation, of spirituality. However our superflat, superbusy, superstimulated culture has eaten into our C-state time. So many of us simply do not have the time to address or even contemplate, the question of God, or the meaning of life. C-state time is simply not part of our lives. Our sensory overload contributes to our spiritual poverty.
So if we follow our culture’s line of logic, all we can do is ignore the big questions. However they come to our mind at three o’clock in the morning, we feel a panic, a rush as we get a taste of our cosmic loneliness and our mortality, so we turn over and hope our i-pod lulls us to sleep.
[1] Sept. 17, 2004 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5520569/
[2] TNIV Acts 17:21
[3] Quoted in New York Post Online Edition May 14, 2007 http://www.nypost.com/seven/05142007/atwork/wired__weary_atwork_sara_stewart.htm
