Cultural Suicide Chris Selmys Originally published in Issue VII of Vulgata, May 2002.  Art by Ralph Sirianni

Let us remember that a culture is the result of the training of the mental and moral powers as seen in intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual activity and that our Pope calls the one that we live in, The Culture of Death. Really internalizing this information usually means panic. It is a lot like saying to someone, “did you know that that fellow you’re living with is a serial killer?” or “I say, your house seems to be one fire” only on a much vaster scale.

We will  try to come to a deeper understanding of what a culture of death is, but this means first taking a closer look at what is meant by culture. A culture, basically, is the common world-view of a group of people as formed by their beliefs and experiences, and which expresses itself in their arts, their scholarship, and their craftsmanship. In his book, Spirit of the Liturgy, Cardinal Ratzinger notes especially that culture comes from, and expresses, cult. Our world view is shaped by our religion, and the things and ideas that we produce will be effected by and, in turn, will reflect what we worship. We might also note that culture is typically divided into essentially two sub-groupings, usually called high culture and popular culture. The first is the formal culture which is consciously produced by those who have the leisure to pursue cultural activities on a full time basis. The music of Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and co., the sort of writing that drops from the pens of Spinoza, Seneca and suchlike folk, and also poems, paintings and politics of a similar calibre all fall squarely into this category. Popular culture, on the other hand, is the culture produced by the populus – the fiddle music at a country wedding, the style and cut of hand-made clothing, the stories which old men tell to their grandchildren, etc. Usually these two elements of culture will influence and effect each other, while still remaining largely distinct.

In examining the culture of death, then, we must look at how it operates on each of these fronts in order to understand what it is, and how we can undermine it.
 

I  Multiculturalism and Cultural Relativism

One swift burst of deductive reasoning later, you have probably noticed that we as a nation don’t appear to actually have a culture at all, if the above description is in any way accurate. There is no professed unified system of belief and there are claims to embrace and support all cultures equally. In fact, what we seem to have is a patchwork of numerous “sub-cultures,” many of which are radically at odds with one other. Not a cultural tapestry but a quilt, that is to say, a bunch of scrap haphazardly tied together into a more useful shape. It’s supporters really like this idea. Since we can no longer agree on what quality is we go for quantity instead. Instead of putting all of our eggs in one basket we put all of our baskets in a bag and forget about the eggs altogether. The only real selling point of this system of multiculturalism is that it is ‘tolerant’. But can it even live up to the ideals of its supporters?

The idea behind multiculturalism is that everyone has a right to his or her own culture, and that we have no right to “shove our cultural notions down other people’s throats” (the words ‘shove’ and ‘throats’ as used here in a way that has only a passing resemblance to their actual meaning). Thus, multiculturalism is supposed to create an environment wherein all cultures can thrive equally. The question is, does it actually do so? Well, no – the very ideology which attempts to uphold all cultures is fundamentally destructive to every culture. Essentially, it can only achieve its goal of the peaceful integration of all cultures by gutting them of anything that is opposed to such peaceful integration. Put another way, it must excise from these cultures any ideas of moral absolutism, religious supremacy, or cultural superiority. The problem is that no culture can be built upon a foundation in which it does not really and absolutely believe. The Hindu only remains a Hindu because, even if he thinks other religions are valid paths to God, he still believes that his is the best one, and the true one, and he will still oppose anyone who tries to tell him otherwise. As soon as you eliminate this foundation, you are left with only the external shell of a culture – with dancing that is mere movement, music striped of melody, harmony and rhythm, barren architecture, food devoid of flavour and nutrition, ritual divorced from religion. The living dynamism of the culture is killed, because the belief that allowed it to flourish is destroyed and replaced with a belief that all moral systems are equal, all cultures are good, all religions are the same. Cultural practice becomes a sort of worship of culture as such, instead of a worship of the principles that informed that culture in the first place. Thus, the external, inessential characteristics of a culture are preserved, but the essentials are removed, leaving behind something dead and static. It is rather like a taxidermist who manages to achieve the feat of making the lion lay down with the lamb by stuffing both with sawdust.

Naturally, of course, these shell cultures fall apart. Immigrants may retain much of the heart of their original culture, but almost always fail to pass on anything but the outward appearance of it to their children, and even less to their grand-children. The next generations become assimilated into the sort of chaotic, me-centred, sub-cultures that are the natural result of moral relativism in practice, and multiculturalism, far from being a salad bowl, turns out merely to be a melting pot set at a lower temperature.

Why does this happen? Because the culture of death does have a unified (if not entirely coherent) ideology, and it is just as ruthless and dogmatic in proclaiming it as any of the societies which it criticizes for intolerance. Its ideology is adequately expressed in the popular phrase, “what right have you got to force your beliefs down my throat?” It insistently asserts that there are no moral absolutes, that there is no one true religion, and that the only evil is to claim that you know what is true and what is false. And it will bring to bear all of its considerable machinery to defend itself against anyone who dares to suggest that this might not be the case. This makes it impossible for anyone to comfortably retain their culture. If a Muslim comes to Canada, they or their children or their grandchildren will be “educated,” propagandized, admonished and, if necessary, persecuted until they come to believe that Allah is not really the one true God, that his is only one of many names for the Universal Being, that Mohamed is not his definitive prophet, but merely one of the great religious teachers, that contraception and abortion are not wrong, they are merely not preferred by devout Muslims, and so forth. In other words, they will cease to be a Muslim, and will be transformed into a relativist who happens to wear traditional Arab clothing on special occasions.
 

II  Sub-Cultures and Cultural Disintegration

Aside from multiculturalism, which represents the culture of death’s approach to other cultures, we find its more natural expression in a variety of disunified cultural movements. Because relativistic tolerance is it’s only posited absolute value, this culture necessarily breaks down into sub-cultures, each representing a different form of (usually idolatrous) worship. Thus you have an anarchist sub-culture which arises from an expression of the worship of freedom as such, as opposed to freedom in order to accomplish some greater good. Alongside this you find a business culture that worships money and prestige, a gay culture that worships homosexual sex, a rave culture that worships drugs, an Elvis culture that worships a dead musician as their lord and god and look for his resurrection from the dead, and countless other absurdities. Both homosexuals that congregate yearly on the streets of Toronto to proclaim their pride and any of the Fluffy Cloud Meditation for Inner and Outer Harmony, Peace and Metaphysical Fulfillment groups co-exist within the same larger cultural context and neither is a break-away sect or a real rebellion against the cultural status quo. What unites them is the glorification of the self, the quest to find the transcendent through immersion in the sensual, and the belief that what you choose to do with your life is your business.

The culture of death is fundamentally opposed to the teaching of objective values, but is not really adverse to missionary activity per se – provided that activity pretends not to seek converts and doesn’t impose any sort of rules. Thus the culture itself is able to promulgate its values on a broad audience without perceiving any sort of hypocrisy or moral imperialism. Provided you are peddling a sexual morality which destroys moral teachings instead of establishing them, you are perfectly free to proselytize, and even to do so aggressively to people who have no desire to hear or accept your ideas. So long as your religion states that there is no one true religion and no one true God, you may preach it from the newspapers, from the television and in the classroom, and no one will notice or care that your views are offensive to the practitioners of the most of the religions of the world. And of course, the commercial world has a free reign to inculcate any sort of beliefs, attitudes or addictions that it desires, provided it does so in an attempt to sell products and not an attempt to save souls. Thus we, and especially our children, are subjected to a barrage of messages and teachings designed to produce our co-operation and compliance with the culture surrounding us, a barrage that is made stealthy by the absence of the half-dozen accusing fingers which necessarily accompany any other form of proselytizing.
 

III From Relativism to Suicide

The curious observer may well ask, how is it that we come to call a culture whose basis is supposedly tolerance, freedom and compassion a culture of death? There are at least two good reasons for using this term. The first originates in it’s attempts to find tolerance, freedom and compassion in the context of relativistic agnosticism. Without knowledge of God, absolute morality does not stand long. There may be a few atheists who still worship truth as their god, but in popular practice, lack of belief in God leads to idolatry, usually of the sensual variety. Cut off from a promise of ultimate justice, people arrive at a belief that you do good because it feels good – and if it doesn’t feel good, then you don’t do it. They don’t want to be harmed themselves, so they say that you shouldn’t harm others (unless, of course, those others desire to be harmed), but morality comes to an end there. The rest becomes a free for all, and moral relativism reveals her practical doctrine: if you can justify it to yourself, it’s all right.

This is a recipe for spiritual and moral disaster. Because relativism denies moral absolutes, it inherently denies any sort of absolute reference point from which we can recognize the inherent value of human life. Thus human life becomes valuable insofar as it resembles our own. This is expressed in the idea of a “meaningful” existence as a prerequisite for valuing human life. The meaning of life, within this context, rests on the ability of a person to endow that life with meaning. Thus, a life that cannot be self-governed, self-determined and self-realized ceases to be a life, and we arrive at abortion, euthanasia of the handicapped and the dying, and assisted suicide for anyone who no longer find his own existence meaningful. If this is allowed to run its course, we will also arrive at infanticide, and at the idea that people have a right to sell their own lives if they so desire.

What is tolerance and compassion in theory, turns out in practice to be merely a means of securing one’s own desires and freedoms, at the expense of other’s lives if necessary. Cut off from God, the moral injunction against harming others loses its sting because it is based merely on a mutual contract between those who are privileged enough to be able to make such a contract, and not on any objective value. Thus, we arrive at a culture of death whose only moral injunction is that you may not tell someone that their unborn child is a person, or that they have no right to take the life that God gave them.
 

IV The Vacuous Culture-Shaped Hole

The second respect in which this culture is a culture of death is in the sense that it kills genuine culture. I spoke earlier about popular culture being the culture created by, and traditionally also the culture enjoyed by the people. With the advent of mass media, however, popular culture has been almost entirely replaced by pop culture – a consumer product designed by a small elite to entice and entertain, rather than a genuine expression of the experience and beliefs of the people as a whole. Popular culture has always contained a certain amount of smut, but this was always viewed in the context of a larger moral framework. Thus the standing room audience at the Globe could laugh at the crude references to thrusting swords or the tupping of ewes, but they did so in the knowledge that any sort of sexual immorality implied within the play was going to be met with appropriate consequences before the curtain closed. Pop culture, however, feels no need to restrict itself to that which is morally appropriate, and would rather entice the senses instead. Thus it sets up artificial cults of sex and violence which use our mind’s natural responses to powerful erotic or violent images in order to turn us into drooling addicts willing to buy soft drinks because we associated them with a teen-ager’s gyrating, half-naked body. The public buys into it, not because it reflects their natural beliefs or culture, but because it feeds their curiosity, and eventually their addiction to evocative images. Thus, the normal flow of culture is reduced – no longer does cult create culture, but culture creates cult. The elite making the films and music don’t believe in the messages they’re peddling, so it isn’t even really a genuine form of high culture, they just think that it will sell. And sell it does, and in the process it creates and transforms ideology.

It is not only popular culture which is dying, though. High culture is dying, not for the same reason, but because it has actively embraced its own destruction. The new ideology, whether it calls itself deconstructionism or post-modernism essentially amounts to nihilism driven towards its final destination of complete nothingness. New music does not represent an innovation in old musical forms, but a stripping away of everything that the centuries have added to music. New art does not call for the introduction of new dimensions of meaning and perception, but rather for the slow elimination not only of meaning, but of line, colour, subject, and so forth. Philosophy has arrived at the conclusion that not only is there no God and no morality, there is also no logic, no personality, no language, no reality – in other words there is nothing but an illusion that hasn’t even the dignity of being the dream of Brahma.

The culture of death not only leads to the devaluation of human life, it also results in the death of culture itself. And in the place of the beautiful expressions of man’s belief which the past ages has given it, it offers a parade of incomprehensible, content-deprived, stylistically stripped substitutes which reflect its essential philosophy that non-being is greater and more fundamental than being.
 

V Marching Orders

Our culture is fragmented, disintegrated, deadly and dying, but we must not despair. There is much we can do and we must do it all, with great faith and great hope.

There are essentially two fronts on which the battle can be fought, and we must each take our position in the lines, each depending on his ability and talents. The first is the inculturation of modern cultures into Christianity. Those of us with traditionalist leanings may be put off or mystified by many of the ways that the Holy Spirit if breaking through into the culture of death and transforming it into a culture of life, but we must not so easily forget that it is one of God’s most striking attributes that He brings a greater good out of every given evil.

Unfortunately, the purpose of inculturation is often missed, especially by liberal theologians who think it offers an excuse for widespread liturgical innovation. These people seem to believe that inculturation means taking the existing culture and injecting its forms and traditions into Christianity, usually without much consideration for the fact that Christianity itself is a distinct cultural movement. Quite the opposite, however, is true. When the Pope speaks of inculturation, he does not intend a revision of Christianity to take on a more local and less global character. Instead he means the transformation of local cultures in the light of the gospel. Thus we are not to bring television screens into our churches, but to bring the gospel to the television screen – a television network can be bought for the price of a couple new churches and could reach considerably more people who are thirsting for truth but don’t know where to find it. We are not to play rock music at Mass, but to play Christian music at rock concerts -- although most Christian rock is not really proper art in the sense of a fusion of form and content, it is not impossible for such a thing to exist and to be a powerful tool of evangelization. Most of the modern forms of music are not inherently bankrupt and almost any of them can be used to legitimately express truly Christian ideas, as Fr. Stan Fortuna, the Franciscan rap artist, has already shown. We are to go out and meet the people where they are, just as Paul went into the Areopagus (Acts 17: 16-32), the centre of Greek justice, in order that the people might hear and judge his message to be true. The Pope has referred to this culture as the new Areopagus and made clear that new and innovative forms of evangelization are called for if we are to deliver the Gospel message on their home turf and in a language that they can understand and relate to. We, the laity, must go out and bring Christianity into whatever sphere of life we inhabit. We must re-evangelize the strongholds of the culture of death in order to baptize and transform it into a powerful conduit of gospel teaching by following St Paul’s example and becoming all things to all men, that we might by all means save some.

The second front on which we are called to fight is the small scale, the building of authentic cultures for our families and communities. This includes the teaching of the faith to the next generation, it includes home-schooling where possible in order to prevent inculcation of confusion secular values in our children, it means fighting to keep our schools Catholic, supplying local libraries with Christian books and stories, creating music, art, literature, and teaching our children to do likewise. It means, primarily, turning off the television, the culture created by the elite, and doing things to create our own real and living culture in our living rooms and schools.

The culture of death is powerful, just as Goliath, and the Canaanites, and the Greeks, and the Romans, and the powers and principalities and Satan himself were and are powerful. But while we may appear to be defenseless against its power, we must remember that it is necessary that we recognize our helplessness and dependence on God. But we must do this with great hope, knowing that God uses our weakness for His greater glory, and that we will be victorious, for God “scatters the proud-hearted…casts the mighty from their thrones and raises the lowly.”