For the past month or so on BBC Radio 4, there has been a three minute slot with snippets of recordings from "the Summer of 1968". It's tempting to believe that Radio 4 are keen to celebrate my fortieth birthday. Instead, they're marking the anniversary of the Summer of Love, student riots, the full flowering of liberalism and a whole load of cool music from that year. What I've actually heard is incredibly dull: news pieces that were far from earth-shattering (rock star arrested in drugs seizure, music hall comedian dies, industrial action, midde-of-the-road film premieres, protests against the government etc etc). Apart from the shocking assassinations of Martin Luther-King and Robert Kennedy, the whole Summer of Love thing seems like a bit of indulgent nostalgia from a few middle-aged BBC executives. Accidentally tuning in to a Radio 2 programme listing the pop charts of June 1968 over the weekend, it seems even the idea that the music was any good is misplaced (have you tried listening to Englebert Humperdink?).
So what has changed? The new Church of England commissioned report, "Moral, But No Compass" suggests that society has lost its moral bearings due to a privatised vision of the person and increasing distance from the church. Increasingly, I am having a great deal of sympathy for this view, and wonder, as a friend said to me recently, that we have "Not got we wanted, but got what we asked for". The 60's revolution, and I date our current malaise of individualism back to then and not to New Labour, nor even Margaret Thatcher (though each hammered nails into the coffin of communal values), tipped us into the self-seeking that we see now. To paraphrase this same friend:
- we wanted sexual freedom, we got Nuts magazine, lapdancing clubs and untold family break-ups
- we wanted to break away from deference to authority, we got happy-slapping, knife crime and anarchic classrooms
- we wanted self-determination and the sanctity of the individual, we got a myriad of new neuroses and the objectification of the human body
- we wanted choice, and we got SUV's and a planet in meltdown
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want to sound like some Daily Mail columnist, and I don't hark back to the days of patrician England, unquestioning deference and a different type of class system (we have a new one now based on celebrity and income!). But we do need to do some serious cultural critique, stand back and work out where we may have gone astray from the ideals that God calls us to.
It's not trendy, and I'm conscious that this sort of sentiment is not terribly "emerging church" either. But as a church, we need to work at questioning the cultural values we may have imbibed. I wonder, just to prod some discussion, whether the emerging church, in an effort to build "responsibility to other" has failed in "responsibility to action" because it has been overly dictated by society? .....Moral, but no compass?
Do you acknowledge that it is correct time to receive the loan, which will make your dreams come true.
Posted by: VICTORIAPEREZ18 | October 08, 2011 at 04:12 PM