From: Richard Reiner rreiner@nexus.yorku.ca
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 1995 19:09
Subject: billy
Some thoughts after (not) seeing Billy Graham last night:
A remarkable and probably unique thing about modern Western societies is that almost *nobody* who lives in them likes them -- I mean that there are nearly no real conservatives, meaning people who want to preserve things pretty much as they are.
Everybody, whether on the right or on the left, is part of a reform movement: the mainstream left want to reform in the direction of the welfare state and/or social justice, and the mainstream right want to reform in the direction of free markets and/or family values and/or religious values. (In left-speak, "status quo" is a swear word; while rightists often talk about the ongoing erosion of all good things.)
(This might be an outcome of systems of representative government: voting psychology is such that positive propsoals (i.e. reforms) are much more attractive than acceptance of the current way of things. And the media deluge that most people live in expose them to so many messages that whatever active ones are in there will be the ones that get through.)
So the need for "active" messages gives all social movements a lot in common: they all use basically Hollywood techniques, modified for their particular audience (i.e. more or less violence, more or less skin, etc.) in order to drum up activist excitement. They are trying to differentiate themselves from each other, but they all use the same tools, so many of the meta-messages come out the same: these messages say that people have to be cajoled to think (so Hollywood song-and-dance is needed before ideas will be listened to); and the expression of the ideas itself is so showy that content vanishes in a puff of oratory.
Last night's speakers attacked the secular philosophers (who should be flattered to be thought so important) -- but his victims were somebody called Blase' (blah-zay) Pascal (who was attributed some unrecognizable anti-deist ideas), and Nietsche's "devaluation of all values" (which was actually a "trans-valuation" or "re-valuation" last time I looked).
The speaker obviously counted on his listeners neither knowing nor carrying what these philosophers said -- it was enough that there existed an enemy who could be blamed for what ails the society, and rallied against. But this enemy isn't real (and nobody cares that it isn't real). Social movements exist in order to move, not in order to move *somewhere*.