“What we thought was really eerie, though, was the way mass culture reflected the high critics’ priorities. While they spoke proudly of their own subversiveness and turned out account after account of the liberating potential of each act of consuming, the culture industry itself grabbed with both hands at the golden promise of rebellion-through-consumption. The …
Adjectives Don’t Exist
“Abstractions like truth, beauty, and green are necessary in order for us to communicate at all. But we must be careful here because our entire problem rests in what we have thought we are allowed to do with abstractions. The lack of ‘existence’ is true of all adjectives, including those adjectives we call numbers. One, …
Modernism and Plato
“But Western culture needed more time in the detox center than was actually spent there, and the temptation to go back to realist assumptions has been constant and unrelenting. This has been particularly the case with mathematics and its cousins — theoretical physics and symbolic logic in particular. Many modern fads and fashions — the …
Honky Tonk Piccolo
“Far more is involved in learning how to do this than just making a list of words that can be used — whether never, occasionally, or all the time. Someone who has a generally pietistic cast of mind cannot just throw a word in here or there — that would be like trying to play …
Hip Off the Rack
“The sixties are more than merely the homeland of hip, they are a commercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the construction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent. Co-option is something much more complex than the struggle back and forth between capital and youth revolution; it’s also something larger …
To Win Christ
[Speaking of Phil. 3:8] The King James is better than most, translating one particular word here as dung. The word is skubalon, and means in the first place some kind of animal excrement. And this verse helps show the problem we are in–Paul does teach elsewhere that we are to avoid filthiness in our speech, …
Urged to a Life of Love
“The truly astonishing thing for many modern readers (were we to notice) is how Paul continues. Right after he says that he wishes his theological opponents would overachieve and cut off more than they were currently advocating, he then goes on, in the next breath, to urge the Galatians to a life of love. The …
The Un-Ad
“Bernbach was the first adman to embrace the mass society critique, to appeal directly to the powerful but unmentionable public fears of conformity, of manipulation, of fraud, and of powerlessness, and to sell products by so doing. He invented what we might call anti-advertising: a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism-perhaps the most powerful …
Metaphorical Foundation Stones
“A man’s words reveal, first, the man. The words are not the man, and yet they reveal him faithfully. Out of the abundance of the heart the man speaks. The foundational nature of all language is therefore metaphorical because every word a man speaks reveals him–just as God reveals Himself though His Word. Every word …
New Bait, New Hook
“No longer would Americans buy to fit in or impress the Joneses, but to demonstrate that they were wise to the game, to express their revulsion with the artifice and conformity of consumerism. The enthusiastic discovery of the counterculture by the branches of American business studied here marked the consolidation of a new species of …