Unreal world cultures locations1/13/2023 ![]() But the commercial exploitation of sexuality is tragic, and is a great festering sore on our culture - but again, it is the symptom, not the cause. Indeed the problem I have with the sexualization of entertainment - from tweaking to Playboy Magazine to the wasteland of pornography - is not that it is sexual, but that it is the commercialization of eros. Trying to "clean up" Hollywood while ignoring the insanity of Wall Street and Madison Avenue is like doctors who treat symptoms without addressing the causes of the illness. On the contrary, what I am saying is that the way the entertainment industry exploits sexuality and violence to shock consumers is intricately tied up with our entire financial and advertising culture, as the Archbishop pointed out. I am not saying that all we need to do is banish overt sexuality from our entertainment culture and then all our problems will be solved. Has our society become so insane that a young woman feels she needs to be outrageously sexually provocative to declare to the world that she is no longer a child? It appears so. As a culture, we conveniently forget that her raunchy behavior is largely celebrated in our society (for example, in Thicke's "Blurred Lines" video), just as long as the women whom we objectify do not remind us of children or those we cherish. Many people were appalled - but scholars like Dr Lauren Rosewarne of the University of Melbourne point out that much of our cultural dismay has to do with the fact that Cyrus is associated with a "wholesome" image from her child star days. Consider the recent uproar over Miley Cyrus's provocative performance. ![]() How does this track with the Archbishop's comments? The world of money, marketing, and show business is a kind of funhouse, where we get lost in a room of mirrors, eventually losing perspective on what is sensible or foolish, what is outrageous or not, and even to what is right or wrong. What all these shades of meaning have in common? Simply this: that insanitypoints to a reality so far removed from what is sensible, practical, ethical, or just, as to be unacceptable to most reasonable people. In addition to its connotation of severe mental derangement, "insane" also implies foolishness ("are you going to quit your job to become a full-time poet? You must be insane") or outrageousness ("did you see Miley Cyrus twerking on Robin Thicke at the VMA Awards? It was insane"). Of course, they did not just walk free - both were committed to psychiatric hospitals where they remain institutionalized. John Hinckley Jr., who tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan, and Andrea Yates, who killed all of her children while suffering from postpartum psychosis, both were found not guilty by reason of insanity. Let's look at those one at a time. First, "insane." The word, in a legal sense, implies a state of being incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong. ![]() And Archbishop Williams minces no words: the systems of finance, advertisement, and chaotic (read: manipulated) emotions is "unreal" and "insane." The point is not how these three lynchpins of our consumer culture may directly affect us, but rather how they contribute to "the system" - the system of money, materialism, and amusement that keeps us hypnotized into being obsessive consumers rather than truly free. New York and Los Angeles may be the two largest cities in America, but even so, only a relatively small percentage of us live in either location, and even most of those folks don't deal with Wall Street, Madison Avenue or Hollywood directly. In addition to freeing us from the grasp that the consumer lifestyle has on each of us individually, today we ponder how contemplation can free us from social structures that keep the consumer lifestyle locked in place: our financial system (Wall Street), our marketing culture (Madison Avenue), and - the stimulator of our "chaotic and unexamined emotions" - our entertainment culture (Hollywood). Today's point is really an elaboration on that. Yesterday we considered how contemplation can liberate us from the addictions that arise from consumerism. Today's point, quoting the archbishop directly: contemplation is "the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit." Today we're looking at the third of ten points drawn from what Archbishop Rowan Williams and Father Kenneth Leech have said about contemplation. If you're just joining the conversation, begin with The Archbishop and the Community Theologian and then proceed to Why Contemplation is Revolutionary (Part One) and (Part Two).
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