c. 2008 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) Perhaps it’s the political season that brings on this present melancholy and the realization that the ancient wisdom of Ecclesiastes still stands:
“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.”
Or perhaps it’s our current economic instability that gives rise to the sense of doom and a certain “thin-ness” of human existence.
Four years before the great crash of 1929, T.S. Eliot wrote these sobering lines: “We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men. Leaning together, Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Shape without form, shade without color, Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.”
His poem ends apocalyptically:
“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
In this economic age, advertisements promise everything and demand nothing. Companies spend twice as much on marketing as they do on product improvement and development. A recent ad for factory-direct Christmas trees promises, “real trees pale by comparison.”
Is this what we’ve come to? A civilization of virtual people buying virtual trees?
Or maybe it’s the state of the arts that gives one pause. An exhibition of Picasso’s works at the Grand Palais in Paris mounts Picasso’s work adjacent to works that inspired him _ artists such as Manet, Cranach, Titian, Poussin, Chardin, El Greco and Courbet, Degas and le Douanier Rousseau.
Art critic Michael Kimmelman concludes with this headline in The New York Times: “In a Faceoff, the Masters Trump Picasso.” He leaves the exhibit troubled, writing, “We tend to judge exhibitions as we do one another, according to their regard for individuals. We’re awed by flash and fame. But we’re really looking to make some deeper connection, even just one, beyond the bluster and hype, that feels lasting and true.”
Hollow men are those whose quest for the lasting and true has failed.
Religion has always been a space for seeking the lasting and true, but what to make of recent trends?
Ponder these headlines.
“Online Confession: Tech-savvy churches catch on to secular trend.” The Time magazine article reveals the massive online traffic generated in a voyeuristic culture of anonymity combined with self-revelation. Frank Warren started the fad with his “post secrets” Web site. It draws 5 million visitors monthly and has led to five bestselling books in which anonymous people share their deepest, darkest secrets. Religion has climbed into the game with church Web sites offering similar electronic purgations.
“Finding Jesus on Facebook.” This New York Times story explores church strategies for relevant communication, including pastors using movie clips from “Braveheart” and “Facing the Giants” to make salient points. A hipster pastor explains, “A two-minute movie clip can do so much more than two minutes of sermon.”
A 26-year-old woman told The Times that this is precisely what her plugged-in generation is looking for. “We want all the senses to be tweaking. It’s a full-circle sensory experience.”
What a pity Jesus was born in a pre-multimedia age; how much more effective he might have been.
Does anyone remember sociologist Pitirim Sorokin’s analysis of the fall of great civilizations and how they all end in a downward cycle questing for sensate experiences?
Are sound-bite political ads, modernist artistic distortions, online voyeurism and sensate religion simply contemporary versions of the Roman Empire’s end game, which consisted of outrageous sensations generated by gladiators killing and being killed in Coliseums?
And then I read a sad piece in The Times entitled “Facebook in a Crowd.” A young man is ecstatic because he has registered 700 online friends on Facebook. He decides to host a party and sends out the invites. Fifteen people say they will definitely attend and 60 say maybe. A few hundred send regrets and the rest never answer.
The night of the party, he excitedly heads out for the party and waits. And waits. And waits. Eventually one person shows up. They make small talk until they run out of things to say and she leaves. By midnight, he is contemplating what it means to have 700 friends while drinking alone.
Oh, the sad hollowness of a society that reduces human existence to thin exchanges as substitutes for deeper more personal and substantial communication and relationships.
Hollow people. Drinking alone. Whimpering. Is this the best we can do?
(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)
KRE/JM END STAUB
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