The Power of Popular Culture
Forward
The Preface and first three chapters of The Power of Popular Culture
are now ready. This has taken more time than anticipated but the result
may impress you. I hope it does. Some chapters are my best work
even though a few others have some rough edges.
In any case, everything is controversial.
The book is written as a series of essays, not as a scholarly treatise
which depends on footnotes and references to specialty journals.
The objective is to appeal to the widest audience possible.
At the same time, critical readers, including academics, should
find the book useful as much for its discussion of serious ideas
as for its discussion of facts -information- generally overlooked
by political writers and journalists.
As a series of essays, there is a mixture of personal reflections,
especially chapter 1, which launched the book in the first days of 2017,
along with somewhat lengthy discussion of topics like the movie
industry, that clearly rest on a foundation of research. But only some
selected book titles appear in the text. Experts may recognize my unnamed
sources by virtue of unique content but readers will need to trust the
author's
conscientiousness. As Dave Berry might say, "nothing is made up."
Various references can be mentioned here just to provide an idea
of my unidentified sources, for instance:
* Timothy Beal, The Rise and Fall of the Bible; 2011.
* Chris Berdik, Mind Over Mind, the surprising power of expectations;
2012.
* James Fallows, Breaking the News, how the media undermine
American democracy; 1996.
* Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own, how the Jews
invented Hollywood; 1989.
* Linda Killian, The Swing Vote, the untapped power of Independents; 2011.
* Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism; 2004.
* Michael Medved, Hollywood vs. America; 1992.
* Humphrey B. Neill, The Art of Contrary Thinking; 1954.
* Andrew Newberg, Why We Believe What We Believe; 2006.
* David Rothenberg, Survival of the Beautiful, art, science, and
evolution; 2011.
* Michael Sandel, What Money Can't Buy, the moral limits of markets; 2012.
* Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals ; 2005.
* E. O. Wilson, Consilience; 1998.
There are many references to newspaper and magazine stories for 2016
and 2017 and some other dates.
A week ago I had thought that all that was necessary to complete what was
then
a 6 chapter book would be some close proof reading. However, it became
apparent that some major re-writing would be necessary, especially for the
early chapters. Additional material was also necessary. Not certain yet
how many chapters this will turn out to be, but a minimum of 8 is definite
and there could be others.
Billy Rojas
February 12, 2017
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Preface
The book before you is written from the perspective of a Radical
Centrist,
a political Independent who is approximately just as disillusioned
with the Democratic Party as with the GOP. But to say this is also
to point out that much in the text is based on ideas that derive, on
balance,
from both the Right and the political Left. It is the nature of Radical
Centrism
to criticize approximately equally but also to adopt ideas from both
liberals and conservatives also equally, or more-or-less equally.
Emphasis in The Power of Popular Culture is on criticism, however,
because of how the Obama administration ended and how the Trump
regime has begun. Obama, it can be argued, was a disaster almost from
start to finish, but during his last two years especially he broke nearly
every promise he ever made, he made choices right out of the playbook
of Cultural Marxism, abandoning every trace of actual liberal principle.
Of special interest here is how Obama facilitated nearly every objective
that activist homosexuals had ever sought, effectively becoming their
patsy.
About Donald Trump, maybe the best way to put it is to quote from a
conversation between myself and my good friend Ernie not long ago.
Mike, who was part of the conversation, can vouch for everything.
I made the observation that Trump is like a juggler, juggling 10 balls at
once,
but three or four are always falling down. "Wrong," said Ernie. "Actually
they are hand grenades." That about sums it up.
It manifestly is not the case that everything that Trump does is
incompetent.
Far from it, much is utterly professional and incredibly smart. However, in
far
too many cases nothing is thought through, it is amateur hour, and
no-one seems to know what they are doing. This book is largely
a reaction to these developments.
However, it should be understood that it would be possible to write a
companion essay about what is right about Trump and his policies.
He is on target repeatedly and speaks to the real life concerns
of most of the American electorate. But he is so shallow in his
understanding of issues that he repeatedly botches his decisions.
This is a very serious problem that is at the core of this book.
The Power of Popular Culture is supposed to shake things up, to provide us
with an opportunity to start over, following an election that gave
Americans
the worst two choices in candidates for president in US history. One of
those worse choices won, but we do not need to passively accept the
result and do nothing.
However, Democrats will find that as much as they may want to use
this book as a means to the end of derailing the Trump administration,
what it says is, if anything, even more of an indictment of Democratic
Party
objectives and values, which, to be candid, I mostly abhor. Which is said
by someone who once was a Democrat but who now believes that
the party, years ago, abandoned most of its principles and took us all
down the road to an American version of Marxism. The Democratic Party
is, indeed, the Evil Party.
The Republican Party is the Stupid Party, and nothing makes this truth
more obvious than the maladroit way that Mr. Trump does things.
And nothing makes this more obvious than how poorly informed he is
in almost all areas as soon as he leaves the realm of business and deal
making.
Every day since his inauguration has brought with it cringeworthy decisions
and awkward choice of words spoken by someone who sounds
as if he was lucky to get past the 9th grade despite his degree from
the University of Pennsylvania.
The source of these problems, Left and Right, is not only found in the
personality defects of our political leaders, however. The people who
direct America's fortunes in Washington, DC, are creatures of
Popular Culture and that culture is a hopeless mess and has been
since at least the 1990s. This book seeks to analyze our broken
Popular Culture and show us a way out. But it must be clearly
understood that everything that is wrong with that culture
must be jettisoned, thrown out, so that we can begin again.
----------
The issue is also intrinsic to philosophy. And we could look to
Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil for some kind of grounding.
However, as brilliant as Nietzsche could be, about some matters
he took his clinical logic further than it was justified to go. He assumed
that morality was essentially relativistic, that there was no solid
foundation for ethics. Ultimately we need to be the masters
of our own fate, to make the hard decisions, to do so objectively.
No sentimentality, please.
But to say the least there was a great deal that he overlooked.
And he operated on an Age of Enlightenment assumption that has
not withstood the test of time, the view that we are infinitely elastic,
that there is no moral human nature. We can argue that, au contraire,
he actually said there is, that we can be driven by a strong desire towards
transcendence, that there is a kind of poetic essence to nature that we
can make our own, that is always there. Yet is this how Nietzsche is
usually interpreted? Rather, he is often made into an excuse to
make nihilism our own, to observe no conventional moral rules.
Or, more accurately, very few conventional moral rules.
However, one thing we can avail ourselves of that he could not, is
sociobiology.
Many Christians have no use for sociobiology because it rests on a
foundation
of evolution, but that is precisely why it has appeal to any number of
people.
They do not want to forfeit either science or basic morality,
After all, if you study EO Wilson or the others, and Wilson began life as
a believing Baptist, you will find a science-based morality within
sociobiology.
"Right" and "wrong" are our words for survival / health vs. disease /
death.
The good is what is healthy, evil is what is unhealthy, self-destructive,
or damaging to others. We are not adrift in a sea of meaninglessness.
Looked at this way, suddenly the abstract legal-sounding arguments
that are persuasive for sophisticates become almost irrelevant. We are
not talking about Judgment as a problem in logic, but as part of the world
of nature, as necessary for health and survival and, ultimately,
reproduction.
The test is not careful legal parsing but human well-being.
Then there is history, specifically social history -which can also be
thought of
as cultural history. Here the question concerns the past, the last 5000
years
of which we have records, and that means a vast source of information
about what works and what does not, Re: health vs disease and death.
This gets us to "big picture" observations.
If you conclude -from mountains of evidence- that by and large the moral
teachings of the "great religions" reflect hard won truths learned by
countless
generations of people since about 3000 BC, then we need to ask:
What makes anyone so sure that contemporary nihilism that denies the worth
of all religions and seeks the destruction of all religions, is true?
Nihilism shares with Enlightenment philosophy the view that we start life
tabula rasa, with a clean slate. Says who? Sociobiology tells us
that the slate is not clean at all. We are born with dispositions, with
gender specific inclinations and tendencies, with intrinsic aversions
like fear of certain types of insects or of certain types of snakes,
and with inborn feelings of disgust at particular phenomena
like defecation.
About a whole list of things we are inelastic, and for good reason.
The task, sometimes not all that easy, is to identify natural aversions
and make damned sure that they are integrated into our systems
of morality and other codes of conduct. Otherwise we set ourselves up
for very serious problems, and maybe literally for death.
"Anything goes" may be great song lyrics but as the nucleus for
a philosophy of life it is pure poison.
Where do we see "anything goes" in contemporary culture? All over the
place.
To speak personally, I see it and it makes me nauseated -and fearful
about
where we are headed. Especially since there are massive political
expressions of
"anything goes." On the Right it is known as libertarianism and on the Left
it goes by the moniker, Anarchism.
As I might have put it in the sixties, back when I hung out with other
stoners,
"that's bad shit, man."
There's a lot of bad stuff going around these days.
The Religious Right gets a lot wrong, however, and hence one of
my reasons for dedication to Radical Centrism. I do not need
and do not want a forced choice between Puritanism vs Nihilism.
You can be very pro-religion, but is the Puritan version of faith
the only answer? Must we choose between all or nothing at all?
Is it essential for religion to consist of an orthodoxy that was
etched in marble 500 years ago? Or 1500 years ago?
This is not about the Southern Baptist Convention vs. militant Atheism
even if it includes that dynamic. We need other frames of reference
because our world is not polarized this way but in a hundred different
ways.
Look at today's orthodoxies and the actual practices of people of history.
After all, Abraham had two wives, as did Jacob, and Solomon had
about 1000 if you count concubines. Other Hebrew monarchs had to make do
with 4 or 5. I seriously doubt if polygyny is in anyone's future besides
a small minority, but if some people choose it under no compulsion,
clearly it is one form of human sexual nature that history tells us
has been part of the story of our species as far back as written
texts exist.
Much the same for prostitution, of which there are many examples in
the Hebrew Bible, not least of them being Rahab.
More relevant, while I am the next best thing to a tea-totaler, alcohol
just does
not mean that much to me, a few beers in the Summer, some wine during
the Winter holidays, but if others want to drink, at least if they are
not drunks or alcoholics, basically I could care less.
And so on, through a list of "common vices."
Try telling this to a staunch Southern Baptist, however......
But when we get to basic morality otherwise, that's a very different
matter.
The question is: Where do all (or nearly all) religions agree? Find that
and the chances are you have simultaneously identified a sociobiological
truth.
Hence the scholarly view that different theologies are less important,
sometimes far less important, than moral behavior.
Which is why, it seems altogether certain, that some groups oppose religion
with contemptuous vehemence, as do most homosexuals, as do most
libertarians, because they understand this truth at some level even if
they don't know the scholarship at all. They understand that without
an "anything goes" culture they have no credibility.
"Do as ye please as long as it harms none." This is the neo-Pagan
response.
But while you may be fascinated by revivals of ancient religions this
hardly means
that all of them should be judged equally. Some, it seems obvious, are
crazy -or irresponsible. "Harm," after all, needs to be explained.
Harry Hay used the principle of "no harm done" as justification for
NAMBLA,
for blatant pederasty. After all, as he saw it, who was being harmed? If we
have
gotten to the place where we cannot even see the harm in child abuse,
where, exactly have we gotten? The gates of Hell.
This hardly says that all cases of child abuse are the same, nor does it
say that
all offenders are cut from the same cloth. And you can take the view that
extreme prison sentences are unjustified in particular cases, it depends
on circumstances and motivations and unlikelihood of recidivism. But
discussion of the North American Man Boy Love Association is not in this
kind of category. It regards pedophilia as a "good" and as a homosexual
"right." Moreover, to the best of my knowledge, no homosexual groups
of stature are on record as opposed to the agenda of NAMBLA.
Thus NAMBLA members routinely march in homosexual parades
and participate in homosexual counsels.
We can say much the same thing with regard for sado-masochism
and related phenomenon, viz., whips and chains and torture as a
sexual tonic. The fact that this sort of thing is regarded as a "personal
preference" on Law & Order, only says that too much, way too much ,
of our historic religion-based culture has been compromised away.
Here we get to empirical psychology and other standards of health vs
sickness
and malfunction. Which, once again, most Christians "do not get," are
repulsed by, because they see psychology as a threat to faith. And again,
speaking personally,
another strong reason for me to be a committed Radical Centrist. I have
spent
-literally- years studying psychology and its literature. Not all of it
is convincing,
and some approaches of the past no longer have currency -there are
no Freudians any more, only neo-Freudians- but far more than otherwise,
and I can't see making judgments without it.
As Socrates once said: The unexamined life is not worth living.
Hence the imperative to study Popular Culture and what it is doing to us,
for good and for evil. Otherwise we are flying without radar.
---------------------------------------------------
The Power of Popular Culture is intended to raise questions that
can, soon enough, show us the way to a future all Americans deserve,
that is denied to us as long as we must live amidst intellectual squalor.
We can do better, much better. But for now the best that may be
possible is to begin to tell the truth about what is wrong.
--
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Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
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