This Is the Day
Our Golden Opportunity to Remember, Celebrate & Create
I am an artist; I make liturgical art. I studied fine art in college. Now, for more than a century, the world of art, of culture, has been taken over by a vision that is deconstructive. The notion of culture today—how we influence and recognize what is valuable—is disruption rather than continuity and renewal. For example, the Impressionists saw themselves as opposing and replacing the academic painters; then the Cubists proposed novelty on the Impressionists. Novelty is most important and possesses a type of energy. It is a true energy when you see something new and the thing that it opposes. There is an excitement that comes from seeing novelty.
Accelerated cycles of novelty and disruption have led to the postmodern deconstructed world, the fragmented reality we are in now. As those cycles become increasingly radical and weird, you end up with the idea that identity itself is revolutionary, which is the transhumanist position.
And what makes identity valuable is the manner in which you “self-identify.” The madness of the trans, LGBT, and “furries” world is the notion that identity is difference. To be an individual, you have to show how you are unique and different from others. Think of the punk rock aesthetic, for instance, or of Disney children’s movies in which the characters rebel against their parents, against society, or against some type of moral order. This is what culture is today.
Obviously, it is not sustainable. It’s a lie, a self-devouring monster, a monster that eats its origin. It’s Kronos castrating his father, a very old story. It is also Adam and Eve in the garden, reaching up and taking the fruit for themselves, elevating themselves in opposition to God.
But that is not how the world works. You can stretch the world and its order with sin, but at some point, the rubber-band snaps back. You can lie for a certain amount of time, but at some point, reality comes calling. And this is also true of culture. You cannot twist the world. The world has an actual order, an actual shape, to which it will return.
Clown Tradition
How does it return? My brother, who wrote a book about biblical symbolism, calls it the double inversion. The best example of it is a clown. The clown mocks; the clown opposes; he is irony and subversion. But a good clown will ultimately slip on his own banana peel and fall—that is what makes a clown a clown. The king’s clown, his jester, will make fun of the king, but ultimately he will also make fun of himself in that role. Around 2019 or 2020, I started to notice that comedians and other subversive figures, out of their desire for subversion, were starting to embrace traditional ideas—it’s the last rebellion.
What do you do when you have a tradition of rebellion, as we’ve had for a hundred years? The art that you see in a gallery or the contemporary section of an art museum is basically what was being done in 1920. Nothing has changed.
Although we think that rebellion is sophisticated, it is not so, nor is it complicated. Rebellion says, “Here’s a rule, here’s a pattern, and I’m going to do something that doesn’t fit.” That’s all. That’s what the hippies did. You see what the rule is, and then you just color outside the lines.
There are places in society for that type of behavior, but it cannot become the whole system. You can’t have a tradition of rebellion or base your cultural enterprise on rebellion. That leads to the kind of chaos and fragmentation that we’re experiencing now.
But you will also notice places in this upside-down world where normality is reasserting itself. And it’s always going to be deeply ironic at the beginning. For instance, in 2021, someone on social media who was tired of being told that he was transphobic for not being attracted to “trans females” coined the term “super straight.” He said, “I’m literally part of your LGBT culture. I just happen to be super straight, which means my sexual identity and expression is that I am a cisgender person who’s only attracted to cisgender people of the opposite sex.” Or take the “trad wife,” a woman on social media who makes videos of herself wearing modest clothes and holding babies. You think, oh, it’s silly, ridiculous.
Hunger & Resurrection
Jonathan Pageau is a liturgical artist, writer, and public speaker. The mission of his publishing venture, Symbolic World Press, and his YouTube channel, The Symbolic World, is to re-awaken our culture to its deepest roots through stories and symbolic analysis.
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more on culture from the online archives
22.3—April 2009
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by J. Daryl Charles
33.1—January/February 2020
Do You Know Your Child’s Doctor?
The Politicization of Pediatrics in America by Alexander F. C. Webster
more from the online archives
28.1—January/February 2015
on State Impositions & Church Acquiescence by Stephen Baskerville
32.1—January/February 2019
Sex, Women's Ordination & the Rejection of Hierarchy & Equality by James A. Altena
28.6—Nov/Dec 2015
on the Deepest Longings of the Restless & the Lonely by William Graddy
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