BooknotesBooknotesRowan Williams - Lost Icons - Reflections on Cultural Bereavement, T&T Clarke, Edinburgh, 2000 (but recently reprinted) - £12.99
This is a kaleidoscope of a book on modern (or post-modern) culture - brightly coloured pieces slot together: ranging from Disney to the abortion debate; from perceptions of the royal family to professionalism in sport; from school league tables to Princess Diana; from South Africa to Israel; from the Holocaust to Shakespeare. Whilst this can perhaps be slightly overwhelming at the outset, it gets easier the further you get. The book raises all sorts of questions about what has been lost in the modern world and how we might start to put them back.
The media have picked up on some easy bite-sized quotes, but the overall argument is both more subtle and complex than recovering childhood innocence or Disney bashing. It seems to me, at least, that there is a central argument about the way in which modern culture diminishes our ability to develop as community and what is soul.
In 'Childhood & Choice' the first part of the argument is that choice is not free, but there are moral or other costs to choice (if I have my choice maybe someone else doesn't get theirs). Consumerism promotes the selfish aspect of choice and neglects consideration of the wider aspects. Children need to experiment with the ability to make choices and/or statements of their own in a risk-free environment to be able to have the confidence to do this in later life. Consumerism and the shortening of the "latency" period before adulthood militates against this growth and development in a worrying fashion.
We then move to the early meanings of 'Charity' which are about Christian love and fraternity - the coming together of people who put aside their own choices and affiliations for the good of all; the suspension of competition in favour of mutuality, of conversation - in the same sense as a simple game played for its own sake, that can be replayed endlessly without any sense of loss or victory. The modern world however promotes competition rather than fraternity, successful players gain status, others are disadvantaged - and so back to the cost of choice. Charity defines self in relation to the greater world (God and man), as this is diminished the sense of self is secured only "by the will's freedom to affirm itself" - a triumph of style over content.
Modern power is never having to say sorry: unaccountable behaviour and individual scandal only held up to scrutiny by a sophisticated but not necessarily scrupulous media. What has been lost is a sense of personal 'Remorse' or honour - "of seeing failure or betrayal as inner wounds"
What does this mean in practical terms? Rowan Williams argues that without a deep sense of soul people's perceptions of themselves become based on material things (style), but since choice is costly some people become disadvantaged leading to both self-directed and outward violence. To solve these problems we must start with the root causes in our very culture - our loss of a sense of interconnectedness and true inner life - perhaps in a similar way that, not without difficulty, the South African Commission for Truth & Reconciliation set out to do.
Our culture appears ill-at-ease with the inevitability of the development of the self (soul) through time. We react to the modern world more than we act as part of it. However, where we 'are' is not static, it is both affected by our past (in the widest sense) and affects the shape of the future. Our self-awareness is an examining of our own incompleteness - the portion of self defined in the non-competitive Other - we lose sight of this in a 'me, me, me' world, and both we and our society are damaged by that loss.
Other recent books by Rowan Williams are:
RJB
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