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| Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures |
Traditionally, chastity has meant primarily sexual chastity, though it extends into the realm of any sort of self-abnegating behavior that defeats what has been called our "unbridled restlessness." We have long been taught rules, most of them taboos, as guidelines to ensure chastity. But, more and more, the dictates of radical individual liberty have overthrown the taboos.
The pope would, I am sure, like us to start acting in concert and being publicly and overtly chaste together ... which would change the culture drastically.
But the culture has already changed drastically, in the opposite direction, during my lifetime of close to 60 years and counting.
After fulminating about lost chastity in the previous post, it dawned on me yesterday that we have turned a corner. Where there was once a system of external restraints in place to keep us on the straight and narrow — the Church was a big part of that system — there is now (and has been for a long time) an ongoing revolt against that. It has become the primary business of our culture today to throw over the old external restraints on how we are going to behave.
We're going through a cultural adolescence, in other words. Adolescence is the period of life when, as individuals, we break the shackles of parental control and learn to control ourselves. Like as not, we make mistakes, sometimes big ones. We do things we later regret. We tend to run wild.
But we come out the other side as adults who can take full charge of their own affairs, morally and practically.
That's what's happening in our cultural adolescence. Every time some celebrity acts up or acts out in full public view, filling the tabloids with gossip fodder, the culture pricks up its ears in much the same way as teenagers do when a schoolmate gets caught by the principal breaking the rules. It's how we learn about actions and their consequences, and right and wrong, and justice.
Later, when we are no longer being told what to do and what not to do, we'll need to know those things.
We've been going through our cultural adolescence for some time now — at least since the advent of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s. In fact, it was while I was listening to rock by Paul McCartney on my iPod that it struck me that the complaints I have about how we behave today — crude, rude, and lewd, rather than chaste and demure — are mostly about the extreme, highly publicized excesses of behavior people are prone to these days. Most of us behave pretty well, most of the time. So why haven't we actually gone to hell in a handbasket, I asked myself.
Because, I answered, there is some sort of bottom-up morality forming. That is, once top-down, external strictures on personal behavior are effectively overthrown, people have been finding ways and means of keeping their tendencies toward behavioral excess at bay.
One of the ways we do this is by vicariously experiencing the excesses of others, whether real or fictional or musical. This is why so many rock and rap lyrics are raunchy. Why so many movies and TV shows are over-the-top. Why we have such a low, mean, tabloid-y culture. Why the news on TV emphasizes drive-by shootings and other sensationalist gore.
This is also why there are so many mistakes being made by us average people. I consider such things as abortion and drug dependency to be (whatever else they are) moral mistakes. Just as teens make mistakes en route to maturity, members of an adolescent culture do so as well.
But the culture is maturing. Abortions are down. Drug abuse is down. Teen pregnancy is down. Gradually, we are learning to control ourselves in the absence of top-down, external taboos.
(To be continued in "O for Order" ... )
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