Contours of Culture
Recognition of Disconnection
by Ken Myers
Second only to C. S. Lewis, the writer from whom I have learned the most about the spirit of our age is Wendell Berry. One central lesson I have learned from Lewis concerns the typical modern denial of the meaningful order embedded in reality. Lewis used the term "subjectivism" to describe the assumption that we are the makers of values, not the discoverers of them. Subjectivism (thoroughly dismantled in The Abolition of Man) was, for Lewis, a fundamental and seminal disorder of modern culture, "the disease that will certainly end our species (and, in my view, damn our souls) if it is not crushed."
Subjectivism is an intellectual error the effects of which are evident in countless cultural institutions. It is a failure to account properly for the relationship between the transcendent and the immanent, between permanent things and the concrete stuff of human experience.
Wendell Berry's writings also hover around the recognition of a fatal disconnection: the separation of the soul from the body, a rift that Berry insists characterizes the modern mind. And, as Berry repeatedly reminds us, this mental mistake has profound consequences for our embodied life on the earth. As he notes in his essay "The Body and the Earth," "it is a flaw in the mind that runs inevitably into the earth. Thought affects or afflicts substance neither by intention nor by accident, but because, occurring in the Creation that is unified and whole, it must."
While it may not be the most precise term to use, "Gnosticism" is a helpful label for this disorder, and Wendell Berry is a most prescient and prophetic guide to recognizing the various forms it can take in modern culture. In an essay called "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine," Berry suggests a continuity between ancient and modern forms of Gnosticism:
For many centuries there have been people who looked upon the body, as upon the natural world, as an encumbrance of the soul, and so have hated the body, as they have hated the natural world, and longed to be free of it. They have seen the body as intolerably imperfect by spiritual standards. More recently, since the beginning of the technological revolution, more and more people have looked upon the body, along with the rest of the natural creation, as intolerably imperfect by mechanical standards. They see the body as an encumbrance of the mind—the mind, that is, as reduced to a set of mechanical ideas that can be implemented in machines—and so they hate it and long to be free of it. The body has limits that the machine does not have; therefore, remove the body from the machine so that the machine can continue as an unlimited idea.
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Conditions of Embodiment
The Gnostic spirit discerned and described by Berry is often evident in our foolish attempts to live as if good ideas and good intentions could guarantee good living without the bother of attending to the actual conditions of our embodiment. This was a lesson I began to learn from the first book of Berry's that I read, What Are People For. In the essay, "The Work of Local Culture," Berry explains how true communities are always rooted in trust and memory, which require time (which, along with space and food, is one of the basic limiting conditions of embodiment). The restless mobility of modern culture—which has a large economic component—means that fewer families live in the same place for more than a generation. Berry describes how much we take for granted the loss of the succession of generations in one place, while for all of human history,
the normal thing was for the generations to succeed one another in place. The memorable stories occurred when this succession failed or became difficult or was somehow threatened. The norm is given in Psalm 128, in which this succession is seen as one of the rewards of righteousness: 'Thou shalt see thy children's children, and peace upon Israel.'"
While many lament the loss of community, few of us are willing to recognize and submit to the embodied conditions that are necessary to sustain community, which means that our defense of community is essentially Gnostic. In learning to repudiate a Gnostic approach to culture, one soon realizes that the abstractions typically associated with "worldview" aren't sufficient tools to address cultural disorder. A culture is a way of being in the world, not just a set of ideas.
And so, if we take the conditions of embodiment seriously, we cannot avoid questions about how our engagement with space and time are rearranged (often unwittingly) by a wide range of cultural institutions and practices, including technologies, economic and political systems, and forms of art and entertainment. It is not enough to evaluate whether the ideas that animate or explain such cultural institutions are consistent with Christian theology. One must also examine their effects on the actual shape of lived life and the consequent effect on our moral imaginations.
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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