Cultural Content or Freedom of Choice?

"All culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief ... no cultured person should remain indifferent to erosion of apprehension of the transcendent." --Russell Kirk, Eliot and His Age, in David Bentley Hart, Religion in America: Ancient and Modern.

The quotation implies what might seem obvious, that "culture has content," but according to Hart, cultural content is in danger of being replaced by "choice" in the existentialist sense, which he sees as a demoralizing slavery to self. It's not so much whether culture arises out of religion or perhaps out of leisure as in Josef Pieper (Leisure, The Basis of Culture, 1952), but that in either case it is the material and symbolic stuff of culture that shapes and supports the human spirit.

Two news stories this week seem to allude to the importance individuals and nations place on the content of culture: "Cultural Riches Turn to Rubble in Haiti Quake," NYT, Jan. 23, 2010, and just yesterday, a report on the proposals in France to strengthen national identity:"French 'Identity' Debate Leaves Public Forum:"By STEVEN ERLANGER, Feb.9.

In the case of Haiti, the story stresses the impact of the loss of a large number of murals in collapsed buildings: the spirit of the people is weakened by the loss of these material markers of national pride and history. In France there is resistence to full facial veils worn by Muslim women, and a call to the reinstitution of displaying the French flag and reading the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in all public schools.

The simple point I want to make here is that all of us are attached, and are dependent for our identity upon, certain "signs," material and symbolic, that point us to our origins and foundational values, and, which while we may internalize and accept these particular cultural signs and symbols as our own, or substitute others instead, determine our sense of identity.

The French protagonists in the story cited would have their citizens reimbrace the values of the Revolution in the Declaration of the Rights of Man (which was intended as an alternative to the Christian Creed); the Haitians interviewed yearn for the psycho-spiritual touchstone the murals provided. If Hart is right, Christians need a familiarity with the tenets of their faith to be "rooted and grounded" in the source of life, and believes our culture depends upon it. Substituting an absolute freedom of the self for the content of Christian --or any other -- culture, paradoxically does not set one free, but enslaves one to oneself -- and in so doing suspends one over the terrifying abyss of emptyness. It's another question which culture we immerse ourselves in --whether we choose the Declaration of the Rights of Man, or for Christians Jesus himself -- trying to discern the implications of one or the other. Either is preferable to slavery to self. ~ GKS