Carl Trueman’s thesis in The Desecration of Man is that the purpose deficit and cultural coarsening that people across the spectrum now recognize in liberal democratic societies, cannot itself be explained by the theory of disenchantment – the fading of faith, mystery, and meaning from the world.
Desecration, or the deliberate transgression of what was once held sacred, pursued as a normative cultural stance, is what is much more active and causally salient. Modern people demonstrate their autonomy through this stance on the world which means rejecting inherited limits, natural ends, and obligations. It has a kind of intoxicating and exhilarating effect, in that it makes us feel godlike because nothing is given, or commands reverence, and everything, including the human body, can be remade according to our desires. These ideas have a long tail, but took off in the 60s rebellion and are now everywhere.
Madonna’s appearance at the World Cup final halftime show is hardly a novel example of this, but underlines and cements the fact of just how mainstream this transgressive approach is. Her chosen name invokes Mary, who many understand as the mother of God, and all the ideals of purity, humility, receptivity, and motherhood traditionally associated with her and the feminine ideal. Madonna’s public persona was built through the deliberate inversion of those ideals, as she promotes and is the manifestation of provocation, sexual transgression and promiscuity. Her music and performances are suffused with radical self-assertion and rebellion against all inherited norms and taboos, which are her ethos. She is a sad story, a deeply damaged person who has been through countless failed relationships, needs to inject herself with all sorts of things to try to maintain a youthful physical beauty as though that would make her truly lovable, and has never been able to stop her life of constant performance. All for an acceptance and self-love she will never find in these things.
Unfortunately, she is simply an extreme, but fairly common instance of the mainstream entertainment figure, who at the end of their lives, having lived a life of sex, drugs and rock and roll (now rap and hip hop), are often profoundly depressed and damaged, marked by broken relationships, addiction and psychological distress, and unable to leave the stage. Their lives are characterized by continual reinvention, breaking boundaries by exposing more, shocking, and converting private pains into consumable content that are a paean to the cultural ideal of the narcissistic self-actualizing, authentic individual. How very different they are from artists in cultures that aim to refine and transmit cultural ideals. Artists in such societies present and past do not adopt such personae, and instead strive and strove to transmit refined values and truths found outside of themselves rather than their navels, and according to ideals of beauty. The entertainment industry – and our culture, through its profound influence – presents these not as warnings about the burdens of radical self-creation, but as models of success.
Once scandalous, this cultural vision is now presented on the world’s largest stage, during an event otherwise to be devoted to sporting excellence, sportsmanship, and international fellowship. And which countless children watch and take their cues from. It is, I think, a perfect example of just how much transgression and desecration is now the establishment.
The consequences of this worldview are profound and all around us. When nothing is sacred, reverence becomes impossible, and so, apathy sets in, as nothing really matters that much more than others, since the values we have and the feelings we have for them, are not much more than a mishmash of subjective and cultural influences. Wonder and awe – among the deepest and refined human experiences – give way to cynicism that we see in the slouching, sloppy, ‘meh whatever’ general bearing and attitudes of people today. Our warped conception of freedom as autonomy means complete detachment from place, tradition, family, and obligation. We are left with a low-level anomie in our society as a result. It manifests itself in high levels of loneliness, depression, restlessness, and a weakened capacity to form deep and enduring bonds that we see in our shrinking social networks and family trees.
Not only does it appear in some of the clear trends in declining well-being and human flourishing, but in our stance to numerous policies. Euthanasia and assisted suicide reject dependence and frailty as an indignity and elevate intentional killing of one’s self as a great dignity. No-fault divorce elevates unfettered choice over enduring obligations created by marriage. Pornography, which is viewed at staggering rates, makes people into commodities to be consumed and damages the capacity for intimacy, which requires a deep, unitive bond with the whole of a person. The dominant business model employed in many digital environments is one where attention is the commodity, dependent upon the psychological manipulation of the user to maximize their engagement. Gender ideology and transhumanism treat the mind and body as wholly separate, and the latter as purposeless stuff to be used and modified at will. Commercial surrogacy, donor conception and many reproductive technologies make parenthood into an object of manufacturing and children the objects of adult desire with no necessary connection to natural parents.
All of these things share the governing intuition that nothing has an inherent or stable nature that governs how it ought to be used or treated. Everything is a kind of meaningless stuff, only given meaning by subjective desire over it, including human beings. And so, the relationships we enter into are merely significant insofar as we subjectively ‘consent’ to it. Nothing has any intrinsic value. We are material to be used and exchanged and disposed of according to the autonomous will.
This rapacious, and unfettered autonomy that desires ever more control creates a default stance of continuous transgression and desecration. It requires, in turn, a response of reconsecration, Trueman argues—a recovery of genuine belief, worship, beauty, moral formation, and the understanding that human life is received as a gift.
Encouragingly, many small cultural movements are already reaching toward this higher vision, which we find in renewed interest in classical education and schooling outside of the public systems; localism and craftsmanship, attachments to particular places and cultivation of longer term friendships and bonds; marriage and family life; technological restraint in the form of moderate use, and tech-limited spaces; the recognition of the need for beautiful architecture and sacred art. Many of these things are found in intentional communities built around worship, and the reception and refinement of inherited wisdom.
These movements differ, but they share a growing intuition in that a good life cannot be built upon limitless autonomy. In fact, it requires its opposite – clear limits defined by and oriented to an objective conception of the good.
I discuss all this with Carl Trueman on the latest Inside Policy Talks from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
Peter Copeland 