The other night I watched the Brett Morgan’s “Chicago 10″ on PBS (Independent Lens). Since I turned 9 years old in July 1968, and we didn’t have a TV, I have no memory of this part of American history. We had just moved to rural Arkansas, so I didn’t even see the edges of the violence that rocked the nation at that time.
However, I was struck by Abbie Hoffman’s conviction that the government had little, if any, legitimate authority. My reaction was that it sprang from a Marxist worldview, a partially postmodern understanding of language and power structures, a condescendingly playful messiah complex (not uncommon in the 60’s), and, however distorted, a sense that the created order was being transgressed by the deaths of innocent people in the Vietnam War.
Which set me to thinking…how did we get here?
We all are captives of our cultural backgrounds to a certain degree. Since our knowledge will always be partial and flawed, we struggle with whether our knowledge is “complete enough” or “accurate enough.” I’ll address this in more detail in a later post.
At this point, I’ll simply assert that most young adults, and many older adults, are so saturated with a culture that has so radically abandoned the created order that they often find it difficult to separate a created structure from a distortion of that structure. A classic example is the radicalized egalitarianism that denies that any authority is legitimate.
One aspect of “de-saturating” or deconstructing the existing cultural distortions is tracing how we got here.
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