Culture in Crisis

Philip Rieff is a sociologist who wrote a complex book entitled, “The Triumph of the Therapeutic.” In his foreword he explains his attempt to move toward a “theory of culture.” Interestingly, he moves between many of the cultural trends of his own day and points to an impoverishment of western culture, a trend toward the personal that undermines all reflections or considerations of absolutes, whether religious or social, and a cultural description of a “therapeutic mindset” in which our collective interests become only those self absorbed solutions to our own predicaments. He suggests that mechanization and urbanization have allowed us to adopt patterns that will fail to find the agrarian cultures self-correction in mandated community effort to survive and thrive. In the movement away from the agriculturally based culture of the past we have found an insistent movement to satisfy our secondary needs at the expense of our primary.
Failing to share, to communicate personally, to interact with intentionality toward community leaves the future looking less and less capable of exercising and demonstrating genuine love. In the midst of our times, we are casting aside internalized moral demands and ignoring the needs of others for the sake of self-interests or worse, self-destructive ends. In his words, we are asking for “more goods, more housing, more leisure, and…more life” in the “reformations” of our cultured requirements. And while more does not translate into “better” by our vocalized agreements, we still pursue more.
Failing to even internalize obedience as a principle for relationship, we now have created a system in which sin is foreign because the recognition of obedience is lost as a value.
For a book written in 1966, this book has a hauntingly prophetic ring for our times.
While Rieff may serve as an able social prophet, we are reminded to recognize that the Word of God to us is truth. In that word, we find the correction for this and every generation that points us toward a redemptive and positive life in Jesus Christ. It is a principled existence, but it is not only an existence, it is a love-generated relationship with our Creator -- initiated by God to redeem humankind and to save us. God will have the last word. The question is, “Will we be listening?”