In Steve Taylor’s recent post, ”Hey Jude Echoes Across the Universe,” he makes an important contribution to highlighting some core issues in cultural research. It struck a chord for me, and I suspect the difference he touches on between pop culture and philosophical culture goes far, far deeper than we’ve yet realized. Hopefully, his post will open the way to more dialogue. Here’s the essential quote that I’d like to pick up on for my commentary on culturology versus philosophy:

A few months ago, Al Roxburgh watched Atonement movie and asked what it means to form leaders in a culture losing memory.  He quoted Goethe, “He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.”

Across the Universe raises another possibility; that “She who cannot draw on three decades of popular culture is living hand to mouth.”  I left the cinema humming “Hey, Jude.”

Hey, Jude, don’t be afraid
You were made to go out and get her
The minute you let her under your skin
Then you begin to make it better

Practically, we need to, in response to the incarnation, let our pop cultural world get under our skin. To sit with the everyday narratives, whether micro-, meso- or macro-. To refuse to pay it cool, as a starting point for our missiology.

Personal questions on this dichotomy between culturology and philosophy have been churning for me lately. I’d been planning to post on the subject eventually, but since Steve brought it up, it seems the timing is ripe. Here’s a sampling of my internal wretching and kvetching:

  • Cultural studies and missional approaches should make my heart sing because they’re about (in part) my passion for culture and contextualization! So, why do I consistently feel like I don’t connect well with what I perceive as more “academic oriented” cultural research approaches? The people involved are critical thinkers, exploring important research issues, and publishing resources – so what’s the disconnect or blockage? Am I just too far removed from their paradigm or methodologies to feel comfortable in partnering with them?
  • Why can’t I seem to interest very many leaders, pastors, professors, (and even missionaries and church planters) in looking at futurist and culturologist perspectives and tools, or at least seemingly little beyond enjoying the stimulation of new ideas or different viewpoints?
  • Is it not the right timing for a culturology approach? Or methods that give more weight to global-media-pop-tribal influences than to the traditions of Western philosophy? Or just me? A combination? Something else?
  • What are plausible responses in Western societies while it is forgetting its cultural memory and/or fusing in new cultural sources from non-Western societies? What are preferable responses? Is there one or more biblically prescriptive responses?

I think I’m finally getting some clues … but it’s still feels up in the air.

For months, I’ve been mulling over the gut-level disconnect I feel between myself as a culturologist and those I perceive as philosophists. I see a culture-centric view as using more of a field-researcher/practitioner/activist paradigm, committed primarily to a focus of study on concrete media, pop culture, and emerging values of the present and near past. (And I do come from an interesting activist background. My first political meeting was at age 9, and I asked my parents to take me – shades of Alex P. Keaton on TV’s “Family Ties”! Environmental education summer intern at age 15. Reporting on local politics for public TV and volunteering with several non-profits by age 17. Monitoring aspects of Title IX/Affirmative Action at age 20. You get the drift …)

I see a philoso-centric view as using more of an academic/theoretical/theological paradigm, with a primary focus on the more classical and abstract discipline of Western philosophy, embodied in high culture and worldview structures of our long-term past. Have I totally misjudged their perspectives? Or merely labeled them and boxed them in? Or is it that I just don’t like their perspective? Is a philosophic-leaning perspective too utopian in a dystopian world? But is culturology always realistic?

This internal battle is nothing new. I first became aware of this same disconnect a decade ago when I undertook an intensive course on futurist skills. There may be academic discipline differences that contribute to the anti-magnetism. Here’s my current take on what I learned then.

More inherent to a futurist or culturologist perspective is that cultural change drives philosophy. Society/culture changes first, in response to people’s ACTUAL visceral desires for values that are not present in current cultures. Whatever needs or desires or longings drive them, they seek and find those with common desires. Philosophy then attempts to describe the changes that have already occurred, once those changes are noticeable enough to be emerging or have emerged. Usually these philosophical attempts do articulate an ever-closer approximation to the ideal embodied in the real changes, so their perspectives do somewhat influence additional social change … but they do not drive it.

That is oversimplified, but I think a more detailed model of culturology fits with diverse cultural phenomena: creation of new subcultures and countercultural movements, the eventual influence of subcultures and countercultures into mainstream cultural values, the subversion or overthrow of the dominant culture in a parallel-culture society, global distribution of cultures and subcultures, violent and non-violent approaches to change and why they appeal to different types of people, etc.

This is contrary to the usual approach I seem to find among theologians and specialists of many other disciplines. They generally assume that philosophy drives cultural change, where the ideal or utopian or abstract philosophical expression of what SHOULD be sparks people to new values, new thoughts, and/or new changes. I know there are good, sincere people who advocate this; all I’m saying is that it just doesn’t sit right with me – even when it is clear enough that we are pursuing similar missional objectives: be culturally relevant and yet transformationally countercultural, without syncretizing to other cultures or superimposing conformity to our culture upon the others.

Personally, I rather like the idea of having one descriptive, flexible, and highly-explanatory meta-culturology approach that covers the vast variations in contemporary cultural systems. I feel like the more conventional approach of studying streams of Western philosophies is too confining for me … always feels like trying to find the prescriptive One Right Theory. But culturology is far more interdisciplinary – I can be an integrative philosopher without having to feel like it’s all about philosophies.

I don’t think this queasiness is about density or vocabulary – heaven knows, what I write is so dense and wordy that sometimes I can’t even understand it the day after I write it!  And yet, I just do not seem to process well what I perceive as the esoteric language of philosophically driven attempts to interpret cultures.

Actually, I think it’s more about the reaction my highly-concrete learning styles have to what seems to me a highly-abstract learning style. Is it a battle between the Myers-Briggs Temperament Indicator “S” (more concrete) versus “N” (more abstract)?  Maybe. But, ooooh, got a problem there, as I am clearly “iNtuitive” on MBTI, while very concrete on other learning style assessments, which would make one think I should be a dominant “Sensory” on MBTI.

Is it maybe a clash between the MBTI “J” (relatively linear/segmentational) and “P” (relatively random/gestalt)? Maybe. If philosophy is more a function of “Judging” (breaking it down and analyzing) versus “Perceiving” (looking at the whole system), I still have a problem – I’m barely in the “P” zone, and on the Cognitive Style assessment, I rate Very Analytic.

From MBTI and some other learning style assessments, it really seems I could be engaged in abstract philosophizing – but instead am enjoying concrete culturology and systems development theory.

I just don’t know. But if I’m to get any farther into possible collaborations on culture and contextualization, I guess I’ve got to figure it out enough to be at peace in partnerships. Input, anyone? I’m floundering here …

Hmmm … is it possible that these polarities just cannot easily be partners? I appreciate the value of paradox and dynamic tension between polarities. So maybe I’m struggling about whether these are actually irreconcilable paradigms instead of complementary perspectives, and thus must remain culturology VERSUS philosophy, and one or the other may need to become pre-eminent in this era? Or can they be converted to some kind of both/and dynamic tension and we could serve side-by-side in a paradoxical partnership team of academician-activist-field-reseracher-theoretician-practitioner-theologians? I’m sure I’ll have more internal Gollumlogues emerge on this dilemma as time goes by …

Anyway, perhaps Steve’s providential pairing of the Atonement and Across the Universe pieces has opened a door for dialogue.