In The Cultural Paradox of the Global Village, Mark Federman tells an interesting little parable. Allow me to paraphrase At some obscure bordertown, for years, a man crosses the border almost daily with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. Each day border security digs through the dirt looking for contraband; and each day it’s the same story – it’s just dirt. He’s filling up a hole. Years later, a retired border patrolman runs into the wheelbarrow man in a social setting. He’s just got to know the real story behind the dirt. “There’s no way you were just bringing dirt across the border; what were you really doing?”
The reply: “I was smuggling wheelbarrows, of course.” ______________________________________
The point of the story is that the obvious isn’t always so obvious. I’ve heard someone say that the Father Brown stories of G.K. Chesterton point out much the same thing. Father Brown is always asking the most basic question that no one else seems to be asking. This is how he solves crimes when others can’t. A Christian critique of our culture, whether it regards social-moral issues or media ecology, is going to have to come to grips with the fact that we are often missing the obvious. We need to train ourselves to look for the obvious things that aren’t so obvious. Often we’re so busy rifling through the dirt that we miss the wheelbarrow. Federman’s solution, based on the work of Marshall McLuhan, is as follows:
The challenge in achieving the awareness to notice the formerly unnoticed – what we call achieving ‘integral awareness’ of our total environment – is to create an appropriate ‘anti-environment.’
The fish in the water doesn’t notice the water. He has to get out of the water. The church should provide the greatest of all anti-environments. Yet, as we engulf ourselves in worldliness, and manage simply to mirror the world, what we are really doing is crippling our ability see the obvious all around us. We cannot critique the music of the world because we are too busy humming along.
The fish may know “know” the water in a detached, analytical sense, but he experiences the water while swimming in it and thus has a sort of tacit knowledge of it. So perhaps we need to stress value in both? And what I mean by THAT, is perhaps an emphasis of being “in the world but not of the world” would help us in understanding how that doesn’t translate into simply “humming along with the world” as you say.
A fish that removes himself entirely “from the water” seems endanger to me of certain monkish mistakes.
By the way, I happen to have just discovered last night that this existed.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Hammer-of-God/dp/B00NM6VVFM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1424883951&sr=8-1&keywords=father+brown
Have you seen it by chance, or know of it?
Point well taken about monkish mistakes…and I wasn’t aware of the Father Brown series.