Go and read the article called The Big Bang in the online version of the Aurstalian [tag]The Age[/tag] Magazine. I found it via Ben Hourigan’s blog and I thing it is a very thought provoking and philosophical review.
You got to love it when the reviewers use some obscure movie as an excuse to publish some very deep, and eloquent commentary of their own:
Forty years ago we had a revolution in desire whose surface effects in clothes and music fooled some people into thinking that it wasn’t a fundamental cultural shift in the West, from a culture living along Judeo-Christian lines, to one dominated not by secular atheism, but by a pagan sensibility. By pagan, I don’t mean the marginal nonsense of druids and healing crystals, which few people believe in deeply. What makes our culture pagan is that there has been a decisive shift in ethics in everyday life, from the centrality of the “good” to that of the will. What has become most sinful, as evidenced across the cultural field, from the art avant-garde to reality TV, is to not do as thou wilt, to abnegate, to pull back from the pursuit of satisfaction. To us, meekness – put at the centre of Christian belief by the sermon on the mount, as a riposte to the Roman Empire’s will-to-power – is genuinely repulsive, a strangling of one’s selfhood by a renunciation of what one wants. Of course, in some way we are more “ethical” than we have ever been, with the spread of the notion of human rights, and a concern for distant others unimaginable in the age of faith. But very few of us feel that domain of life as real, in the immediate and challenging way that power, ambition and above all desire figure in existence. Nietzsche was the first to propose, in the latter 19th century, that humanity could only be saved by going beyond Christian morality, which was choking off the free expression of the human spirit. Geoff Waite in his masterpiece Nietzsche’s Corps(e), argues that the world we now have is one created by those ideas, bubbled through D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Janis Joplin in equal measure. It is a world in which the central figure of Christian mythology, culminating in a figure like, say, Dickens’ Oliver Twist, cannot be looked on without some contempt for their failure to act. Why does Oliver just take it, we think? Why doesn’t he stab his tormenters in the throat – god knows they deserve it.
This is a very interesting observation. The Judeo-Christian ideals put values such as meekness, self-sacrifice, asceticism and passivity on the pedestal. Nietzhe considered that a culture of repression and resentment. A culture which builds complex mythological and religious excuses for their own passivity, and failure to pursue their needs desires. Have we really transcended from the man of resentment to the Nitzhean übermensch? I find it very interesting how it becomes harder and harder for each generation to understand the literary heroes who remain passive in face of adversity… Regardless of what you think about Nietzhe, you must admit that it is interesting to see how our liberal, secular, sex driven society parallels his ideas.
The conclusion of the article is even more interesting:
We will recover desire only when we can turn away from the screen and back to full human presence. When we do, narrow life-denying Christian and Islamic fundamentalism will be as discarded and useless as an old combine-harvester, their reasonable and identical response to the sexual meat-market – “keep it all off” – rendered irrelevant. But it will only happen when we realise that Pell and porn, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali and hardcore are two sides of the same de-denominated coin. We are face-to-face with the unmediated natural world of sex and death for the first time in history and without easy stories, both conservative and liberated, we will have to make sense of it.
Is the [tag]sex[/tag]ualization of popular [tag]culture[/tag] just a phase in the evolving culture of [tag]western civilization[/tag]? Is it just another signpost on the road to new cultural models?
It is a very interesting read.
[tags]sexuality, philosophy, religion, interesting[/tags]