A niece, an uncle designed by Roald Dahl, and wisdom from Walter Benjamin

While I was at home with my parents last week, my niece (not the Welsh-speaking turncoat) stopped over for Saturday night. While she loves me as (she says) `my uncle from a Roald Dahl book, who’s never grown up and is naughtier than I am,’ I’m afraid certain aspects of my style leave her perplexed.

For example, my mobile phone. The fact that it is black and white, doesn’t do the web, doesn’t take photos, doesn’t hold iTunes or podcasts, is kept almost permanently switched off – in fact, is good for nothing other than, errm, making the odd phone call, is a complete enigma to her.
Further, when I asked if she like classic rock, she was at first merely confused by the term; and it didn’t help when I cited a few examples – Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones, the Who – nothing seemed to register. Finally, a light bulb went off, her face lit up and she declared that she did like one song `from the olden days.’ What, I wondered? Something by Elvis? The Beatles? Cream? Zeppelin? No, none of these. `Angels’ she declared `by Robbie Williams.’
For those unfamiliar with Robbie W, this means that my niece regards the late nineties as `the olden days.’ Reminded of a student who told me there was a cinema in town which showed the old classics. When I asked what it was showing at the moment, he answered `Spiderman I.’ That movie had been released for all of six months.
At first, my niece’s response made me wonder how the church can engage such a society of contemporaneity where cultural amnesia dooms us to live in a perpetually rootless present. Then I wondered what the causes of this might be. The looney Left? A bunch of secular liberals subverting the education system? Unlikely. Intellectuals, despite what they like to think, have very, very little impact on the way wider society thinks. That’s why, strange to tell, the reactionary antiquarianism which undergirds so many of the arguments for classical education, Christian and otherwise, is doomed to have little cultural impact. It is nostalgic, even romantic, in its sensibility; but it is ultimately not critical in any really prophetic way. Indeed, to the extent that it has arguably become simply one more money-making commodity in the marketplace of education, to that extent it is incapable of offering substantial criticism of the consumerist system upon which its life depends. Rather, I suspect the primary culprit is the dramatic and overwhelming power of consumerism; and it is this which really corrodes the power of history and tradition. When everything that happened this morning is already ancient history, and the world of computers, iPods and email creates a world of instantly consumable and utterly fleeting experiences, history and tradition have no place.
Walter Benjamin, the fascinating left-wing Jewish philosopher, saw this coming over sixty years ago. For him, the stories passed from the old to the young were the key to human experience, human identity, and the richness of human life; the destruction of these in the automated, fleeting, commodified nature of modern existence was something he regarded as one of the more deadly forms of human oppression because it amounted in principle to the suppression of humanity itself.
If Benjamin, as a secular philosopher, saw this as a problem, how much more should Christians see how lethal is the culture of consumerism and instant gratification to a faith once delivered to the church, a faith which is tradition at its very core? And it demands that, in contextualising the church, we must be very careful to avoid the seductive temptation of commodifying the church.