We are separated from the neoorthodox and neo-Thomist theological revival of the 1940s and '50s by the 1960s in a number of senses. By the early sixties the effects of a great cultural mutation, in whose midst we still live, were first becoming evident--the television era. As the most apparent feature of a whole set of recent technological changes in the communications media, the television has helped to accelerate what Jacques Ellul has called "the humiliation of the Word," in favor of the image, or, rather, of a constant stream of images. As Jonathan Solomon recently put it, there now exists 'a global subculture of music, dress, hairstyle, sport, drink, films, and magazine which cuts across . . . boundaries," a subculture that could "be categorized most aptly as a form of American populist Epicureanism." Affected by and even conditioned to this worldview, this rhythm, many of us have "highly developed audio-visual sensitivities" and feel "no bond with the archetypal events of the past." Even religion often succumbs to and is deformed by this egalitarian entertainment culture--Swaggart and Bakker become more imposing than the apostles, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, John Wesley, or the pope.
In this world of commercial advertising and libertarian nihilism, everything that is solid or traditional often seems to melt into the air in a "Coney Island of the mind." As Daniel Bell has somewhere said, the essence of modern life is that nothing is sacred. Rock singers or groups carry names such as the Dead Kennedys, Jesus and Mary Chain, and Madonna. "Entertainment value" has become the dominant criterion in much of our culture, even a kind of addiction, and thus, in Ellul's phrase, the word is humiliated. No archetypal tradition, pattern, or narrative is taken as obligatory; nothing is conceived to be authoritative that is "anterior, exterior, or superior" to the self. Everything is permitted. In the high culture, what one cultural historian has called "the narrative of the decline of narrative" gives us the bleak De Chirico landscapes of absurdist poetry, drama, novels, sculpture, painting, and even architecture. In popular art the brassy, brazen, odd, violent, and immediate are at a premium.
In light of this development, the great neoorthodox and neo-Thomist writers (including neoorthodox Jewish writers such as Martin Buber, Abraham Herschel, and Will Herberg) seem closer to the great ethical Victorians of the nineteenth century (in England and Europe) and to the great English Augustans of the eighteenth century than they do to us. Theologians and philosophers such as Whitehead, Barth, the Niebuhrs, Maritain, Gilson, and Simoe Weil, and historians such as Butterfield, Dawson, and Toynbee seem somehow closer to the
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