I’m going to take some ideas out for a test drive and see how much weight they can carry. Bear with me.
Modern “mass media” only works when it has a “mass man” to act on. Mass man is a disconnected consumer, a credulous and compliant cog in the economic machine of production and consumption. An important part of the formation of mass man has been his transplantation out of households, catalyzed in part by his migration into the modern industrial city. This modern city – unlike the heavenly city of Jerusalem, the end of our pilgrimage – is a plausibility scaffold around disconnected individualism, in which mass man is disconnected from his historic faith (by his illiteracy, chronological snobbery, and over-specialization which isolate him from centuries of critical thought), his face-to-face faith community (by his individualistic spirituality and anonymized consumption through inorganic media channels), his extended family (by job-chasing distances and trend-chasing generation gaps), and his immediate family (by invasive non-stop entertainment, furious over-scheduling, and emotional self-absorption reinforced by a cultural exalting sexual selfishness). A man so isolated is easy prey for advertisers and propagandists, swaying him by every whim of sophistry and tempting him by every appeal to his untamed covetousness.
This world seems bent on concocting as many “-isms” as possible, full of immobilizing deception and moral foolishness, and throwing so many at us that eventually enough will stick, neutering our witness, blunting our testimony, and torpedoing our mission. However, in looking at the households I am called as a Christian to belong to — local Churches, the Church historic, and my family, immediate and extended — I see these innumerable fads constantly rebuked and shown up for the false passing-away wisdom of the age that they are.
Through the church I have come to know and love people whom my squeaky-clean career path and separated single-family home life would ordinarily keep me from ever encountering: brothers and sisters with Tourette’s, Parkinson’s, MS, MD, Down, and other neurological disorders. When the libertarian right tries to make me an Ayn Rand-style Objectivist, I remember these dear friends, and remember that their conditions show up “self-ownership”, a man’s axiomatic ownership of his own body, as a fragile illusion, a laughable fiction.
Then the neoconservative right tries to sell me on the glories of American exceptionalism and her proactive military expression through preemptive war. But I knew my great-uncle, Ken, who stormed a French beach on D-Day and for the rest of his life never really recovered from the experience. While the almost unmeasurably vast cost of war sometimes must be paid, it is only at the utmost, and the bar for “utmost” is too-easily deflated when veterans are people on television and not dearly beloved and connected family.
Later an imperious adherent of materialism plies me with appeals to “reason untainted by superstition” and “scientific consensus”; when he does, my dear grandmother comes immediately to mind, and her long descent into Alzheimers disease. And my pity for her low estate toward the end also struck down any rational pretense of a high self-estimation of my own awareness and rationality. The mind’s grasp upon itself and the world around it is anything but a forgone conclusion; it is full of self-aggrandized self-assessments and corrupting delusions. Such a mind, of itself, ungrounded, unbounded, and fully subjective, cannot rationally assert its own rationality on its own authority, because it lacks any objectivity with which to make sure an assessment. And then I recall the dearly departed wife of another great uncle; she fled the Soviet invasion of Hungary, knowing full well the brutality brought by a regime drunk on the arrogance of its own unflinching rationality.
I could go on, but the big idea is this: real connection with real people makes a real difference, by helping us see for what it is the almost limitless fount of foolishness this age spews at us.
