duke_aldhein (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} duke_aldhein) wrote,@ 2006-08-20 09:36:00 |
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an accidental essay on sexuality, economic culture and timeliness
poserorprophet posted some very interesting thoughts on the Liberal/Conservative divide within the church:
My experience in the UK is that (at least among the louder voices) Liberals and Conservatives tend to be equally obsessed with the issue of sexual orientation. The former speak and act as if the liberation of gay and lesbian Christians is the most important issue facing the Church today. While I sympathise with the impulse behind their argument, I am less sympathetic to their priorities - focusing on "lifestyle" issues lets them off the hook of posing a more radical challenge to our economic and political culture. This is convenient, because their version of religion is essentially therapeutic: offering ways of living more happily in the world as we find it, rather than engaging in a substantial critique of the world's assumptions. (The attraction of the Conservative Evangelical churches, for all their crudity, is that they at least offer some significant distance from the world's values.)
Liberals are (in my experience) reluctant to recognise any legitimate concern about sexuality underlying the Conservative attitude to sexual orientation: preferring to brand their opponents as bigots and stop there, rather than exploring the underlying discomfort with today's sexual culture which finds an unfortunate outlet in the condemnation of the sexual other. (As I've written before, part of the problem here is a zero sum attitude to understanding - as if any attempt to understand the oppressor is a participation in oppression. Something similar happens in the public debate over terrorism.)
What troubles me most is the certainty of the loudest voices on both sides that the Church would be better off without their opponents. They recognise no legitimate position that is not "us" or "them". (My former vicar called me an "intellectual defender of fundamentalism" for trying to articulate the things I'm writing here...) Some of the vitriol directed at the Archbishop of Canterbury by Liberals is no less unpleasant (though expressed in more refined language) than the abuse he gets from their opponents.
A particularly striking feature of this sorry debate is the consensus between Conservatives and Liberals on their historical roles - the former as custodians of tradition, the latter as dragging the church into an Enlightened future. This is largely nonsense. There are several grounds on which this can be argued, but most relevant here are the distinctly contemporary assumptions shared by both sides in the sexuality debate - Conservatives and Liberals alike have internalised unreflectively the idea that sexual desire is the foundation of authentic selfhood. Although it has roots in Romanticism and Freudian psychoanalysis (both reactions against the repressive distortion of sexuality in an economic culture of deferred gratification), it is the advent of consumer culture that places this idea centre stage.
The second half of the twentieth century saw a reconfiguration of the relationship between time and desire in the norms of western society. In earlier versions of capitalism, where the good economic citizen was a well-behaved worker, deferred gratification was the moral order of the day. The constant putting off of the fulfilment of desire implied a certain attitude to sex as much as to money, attitudes often labelled "Victorian". But as the economies of affluent societies (first post-war America, then the UK and other western European countries) came to rely increasingly on mass market consumer spending, the balance shifted and the good economic citizen became the well-behaved consumer. Instead of working hard today for a reward tomorrow, we were encouraged to spend on our credit cards today and worry about it tomorrow. (Compare, for instance, the iconic World War II propaganda poster, "Dig for Victory", with Bush and Giuliani's post-9/11 call for Americans to go out and spend.) The coincidence of this tipping point in economic culture with the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s is hard to ignore.
My point is that the "liberated" norms of instant gratification which dominate the representations of sexuality which surround us are just as distorting of time and desire as the repressive norms which immediately preceded them - and have different but equally painful effects. What is missing from both is a sense of timeliness - that what is appropriate at one moment may be inappropriate at another. It is not that this is entirely absent from our ways of living together, but that it is very largely absent from our ways of talking about how we live together.
This absence is not a historical fluke, but is directly related to our economic culture. The reconfiguration of time in the emergence of capitalism is one of the most important things that sets our ways of living apart from those which have dominated at most times and places in human history. EP Thompson charted the forced alteration of people's relationship to time in his brilliant essay 'Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism'. Ben Franklin's equation, 'Time is money', puts succinctly the capitalist understanding of time. If time is money, the qualitative distinctions between one hour and another, one season and the next, have been dissolved. Bound up with the focus on quantity rather than quality is a loss of the language in which to talk about what might constitute "enough". (The whole discourse of "Development" suffers from the absence of this language...) Unable to distinguish times for feasting and times for fasting, we easily end up in a landscape of extremes - of destructive repression or destructive promiscuity.
But all of this takes place at the level of shared language. Eugenio Montale's poem may bring us back to the ground:
poserorprophet posted some very interesting thoughts on the Liberal/Conservative divide within the church:I would like to suggest that not only are both the Liberal and Conservative compartmentalized hierarchies flawed because of what they leave out, they are also flawed precisely because they are compartmentalized hierarchies. The problem with the Liberals' hierarchy is that they think they can talk about economics without talking about sex. The problem with the Conservatives' hierarchy is that they think they can talk about sex without talking about economics. What I want to propose is that every discussion of economics carries sexual implications and every discussion of sex is intimately shaped by the economic context within which that discussion takes place.I think he's hit on some powerful connections here.
My experience in the UK is that (at least among the louder voices) Liberals and Conservatives tend to be equally obsessed with the issue of sexual orientation. The former speak and act as if the liberation of gay and lesbian Christians is the most important issue facing the Church today. While I sympathise with the impulse behind their argument, I am less sympathetic to their priorities - focusing on "lifestyle" issues lets them off the hook of posing a more radical challenge to our economic and political culture. This is convenient, because their version of religion is essentially therapeutic: offering ways of living more happily in the world as we find it, rather than engaging in a substantial critique of the world's assumptions. (The attraction of the Conservative Evangelical churches, for all their crudity, is that they at least offer some significant distance from the world's values.)
Liberals are (in my experience) reluctant to recognise any legitimate concern about sexuality underlying the Conservative attitude to sexual orientation: preferring to brand their opponents as bigots and stop there, rather than exploring the underlying discomfort with today's sexual culture which finds an unfortunate outlet in the condemnation of the sexual other. (As I've written before, part of the problem here is a zero sum attitude to understanding - as if any attempt to understand the oppressor is a participation in oppression. Something similar happens in the public debate over terrorism.)
What troubles me most is the certainty of the loudest voices on both sides that the Church would be better off without their opponents. They recognise no legitimate position that is not "us" or "them". (My former vicar called me an "intellectual defender of fundamentalism" for trying to articulate the things I'm writing here...) Some of the vitriol directed at the Archbishop of Canterbury by Liberals is no less unpleasant (though expressed in more refined language) than the abuse he gets from their opponents.
A particularly striking feature of this sorry debate is the consensus between Conservatives and Liberals on their historical roles - the former as custodians of tradition, the latter as dragging the church into an Enlightened future. This is largely nonsense. There are several grounds on which this can be argued, but most relevant here are the distinctly contemporary assumptions shared by both sides in the sexuality debate - Conservatives and Liberals alike have internalised unreflectively the idea that sexual desire is the foundation of authentic selfhood. Although it has roots in Romanticism and Freudian psychoanalysis (both reactions against the repressive distortion of sexuality in an economic culture of deferred gratification), it is the advent of consumer culture that places this idea centre stage.
The second half of the twentieth century saw a reconfiguration of the relationship between time and desire in the norms of western society. In earlier versions of capitalism, where the good economic citizen was a well-behaved worker, deferred gratification was the moral order of the day. The constant putting off of the fulfilment of desire implied a certain attitude to sex as much as to money, attitudes often labelled "Victorian". But as the economies of affluent societies (first post-war America, then the UK and other western European countries) came to rely increasingly on mass market consumer spending, the balance shifted and the good economic citizen became the well-behaved consumer. Instead of working hard today for a reward tomorrow, we were encouraged to spend on our credit cards today and worry about it tomorrow. (Compare, for instance, the iconic World War II propaganda poster, "Dig for Victory", with Bush and Giuliani's post-9/11 call for Americans to go out and spend.) The coincidence of this tipping point in economic culture with the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s is hard to ignore.
My point is that the "liberated" norms of instant gratification which dominate the representations of sexuality which surround us are just as distorting of time and desire as the repressive norms which immediately preceded them - and have different but equally painful effects. What is missing from both is a sense of timeliness - that what is appropriate at one moment may be inappropriate at another. It is not that this is entirely absent from our ways of living together, but that it is very largely absent from our ways of talking about how we live together.
This absence is not a historical fluke, but is directly related to our economic culture. The reconfiguration of time in the emergence of capitalism is one of the most important things that sets our ways of living apart from those which have dominated at most times and places in human history. EP Thompson charted the forced alteration of people's relationship to time in his brilliant essay 'Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism'. Ben Franklin's equation, 'Time is money', puts succinctly the capitalist understanding of time. If time is money, the qualitative distinctions between one hour and another, one season and the next, have been dissolved. Bound up with the focus on quantity rather than quality is a loss of the language in which to talk about what might constitute "enough". (The whole discourse of "Development" suffers from the absence of this language...) Unable to distinguish times for feasting and times for fasting, we easily end up in a landscape of extremes - of destructive repression or destructive promiscuity.
But all of this takes place at the level of shared language. Eugenio Montale's poem may bring us back to the ground:
History isn'tBelow the level at which norms can be said to exist and at which broad historical periods and shifts may be characterized, people get on with their lives. Things don't necessarily stop existing because we forget the words for them. The calendar of old feasts may have been displaced by the austere mechanism of Sabbath observance (conveniently predictable for factory owners...), but humans are resilient: festivals persist or are created anew in any space that can be found. Timeliness is still felt, though we live in structures formed by other attitudes.
the devastating bulldozer they say it is
It leaves underpasses, crypts, holes
and hiding places. There are survivors...
