Let’s begin with the fact that Culture in itself is not the enemy. We necessarily live in a culture — actually the overlapping of various cultures — as an outward expression and embodiment of values, principles, aspirations, desires, and world views.
Culture is the battle ground of well-being, the filter through which the meaning of happiness is glimpsed. Culture creates what Catholics call “solidarity,” the society and community of persons to which all belong. Where that solidarity disposes is another question. That question is what lies before us, as a challenge. How to both read a culture critically and how to deliver into that culture an intervention that will make a difference.
A culture is constituted by all that a person does, makes, thinks, feels, utters, sings, or even dreams. As a result, a culture becomes the repository and embodiment of values. I use the term value specifically because a value may not conform to any moral norm or dispose anyone to virtue. They require, as I said, a critical eye.
But these values — which themselves may be true, false, or incomplete — do become part of the air we breathe. They are taken into our minds and hearts, usually unnoticed, because culture by definition is always pervasive, transmitting its embedded values and world views through the means of human communication and experience.
Even those actions that may seem the most humdrum and trivial have deep cultural significance, what the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor called — “the mystery of manners.”
Culture and proclamation are the only means we have to reach people to tell them the truth about life. If the Gospel is not given a voice in the culture then the Church hasn’t even begun the task of evangelization — the latest forms of secularity have the field to themselves.
Those who view culture only as an influence to avoid are often blind to their own acculturation. There is no spiritual plane of existence, any form of piety, that transcends the bounds of culture. Those who deny the necessity of culture will also not recognize the opportunities it presents for evangelization and spiritual nourishment.
Just as culture itself is not the enemy, just as it provides the vehicle of evangelization, a culture will inevitably contain much that is of value and importance to persons of faith. This openness towards culture is what “engaging” the culture means. Looking with the eyes of faith we will discern many friends, friends from unexpected places.
Let’s agree that the uses of the word culture are analogous. We can talk about the culture of a man, of a home, a parish, a community, an association, a country, an epoch. What all these have in common is a worldview containing commensurate moral values and particular attitude toward human existence, nature, and the world. A culture defines what is right and wrong, good and evil, but also the gray, those infractions of morality that are allowed to slip by.
Culture acts as a kind of iron lung — it disposes us, directs our attention, cushions disappointments, and boosts our energies from within. This accounts for the difficulty of modifying or changing cultures. It also explains why a cultural shifts can often by elicited by the dynamic explosion of beauty applied to the soul.
Culture is the school we go to everyday.
What a culture says about human happiness is the key to grasping its implied values — the key to reading the culture, as it were. Students care about happiness and can be prompted to reflection by comparing contemporary understandings of happiness to past conceptions.
For example, happiness to the Ancients and Medievals was a moral term, applied only to men and women of virtue. Whatever feelings or emotions were stirred by it were considered ancillary or after-effects, not the thing itself.
Starting with the Renaissance the concept of happiness started to become identified with various forms of earthly fulfillment, such as pleasure, emotional satisfaction, peace of mind, power, and success. The happiness of the journey replaced happiness of the destination which we find explicitly in Thomas Hobbes, for example. Once happiness devolved to purely hedonistic terms during the Enlightenment, Sigmund Freud intervened with his Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Freud accepted the premise, that the highest experience of happiness itself was the most intense state of pleasure. He concluded that the search for happiness was detrimental to civilization and society. We should settle, he said, for common unhappiness.
For the most part, we haven’t. Human nature won’t let us. It’s fueled by the natural desire for God, for the perfection of our being. We will always be chasing what is ultimate and absolute. We can’t help, the desire for happiness is like an internal firehose you can’t turn off. Our hearts are restless.
Meanwhile, the contemporary identification of individual happiness as the achievement of unassailable self-congratulation has destroyed many lives, and will continue to, unless it is successfully challenged in the public square. Catholic culture can make its greatest contribution, I believe, by challenging culture on this very point, happiness.
We must learn and teach now to recognize and reject fabricated beatitudes. Miss Flannery O’Connor caught the gist of these false humanisms in the confession of Haze Moats in Wise Blood: “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.” This is something to remember the next time some hot-rodder roars his engine in the next lane.
Many earnestly religious believe the culture can be shut out altogether, whether by home-schooling, smashing TV sets, turning off the internet, or joining cults. Like the air we breathe, culture cannot be avoided, though through reasonable efforts it can be cleansed for the sake of a family or a small community. Critical filters are important in providing critical awareness in order to resist acculturation.
No one can avoid some process of acculturation — the task is to manage that process by acquiring spiritual self-knowledge and an understanding of genuine happiness, the Final Good. Culture is that aggregate of representations that influences our attitudes, our aspirations, our values, and our worldview. To evangelize the culture you must learn to mix it up with the accepted bromides of a Godless society.