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| Taking the Cultural Temperature | Breaking Liberal Taboos on Education |
What the Bleep? It's a Movie!
by Christopher Chantrill
July 03, 2004 at 8:00 pm
EVER SINCE relativity and quantum mechanics were
invented in the early twentieth century, people have wondered: What on earth does it all mean? Wonder no more. Now there’s a movie to explain it all to you: What the Bleep
Do We Know?
That’s right. Now they’ve made a movie about the wonders of modern physics, recent discoveries in neuroscience, and the nagging questions they raise about reality, spirituality, and “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.” A film by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark Vicente, What the Bleep is doing a good business in about 15 art houses on the left coast and Colorado. Maybe it will expand soon to a theater near you.
But how do you make a two-hour movie about quantum mechanics, neuroscience, reality, and the meaning of life without putting everyone to sleep? You mix together a blend of talking heads, computer special effects, and throw a narrative about a talented, angry photographer, and hope that people will come.
This being the twenty-first century, the talented, angry photographer is the hearing-impaired Marlee Matlin, the star of Children of a Lesser God. And the problem we are trying to solve is to help her become the outstanding person and creative artist she was always meant to be. But first she’ll have to deal with her anger so she can throw away the anxiety pills.
If you think that this sounds like some dreadful liberal morality tale, where good and evil are tossed out as narrow-minded bigotry and then smuggled in the back door in the service of creativity and compassion, you’d be right. But it still manages to be a good movie. Its crew of colorful talking heads is first-rate; its computer animation of sub-atomic particles, cartoon human emotions, and neuro-peptides is passable. And it has a Polish wedding that features a big argument about polkas.
As you may know, if you have ever watched a liberal morality tale, you cannot become the free, creative person you were meant to be unless you get rid of your demons, here represented as addictive emotions being pumped out of your hypothalamus as neuro-peptides. How do you do that? You realize that you not divided against yourself but really are already the One you were always meant to be.
The one thing you must also transcend is the limiting notion of good and evil. The God of good and evil is a blasphemy, says the talking head professor of theology, Dr. Miceal Ledwith. The true god is creativity, all the talking heads agree.
This is a great movie for the creative classes, the elite readers of The New York Times, listeners to NPR, and secular liberals in general. It fits into their belief systems like a peptide into a cell receptor. No doubt that for a talented and skilled deaf photographer it’s true that all she needs to do to solve her problems is to lose the anger and learn to love her body. But what about the rest of us?
For instance, what about the 400 million believing Pentecostals worldwide? We are talking here about a religious movement that has gone from zero to 400 million in a hundred years. What about the 70 million house church Christians in China? We are talking here about a religious movement that has gone from zero to 70 million in about thirty years.
We are talking about 500 million people here in two spontaneous religious movements that have flourished in spite of, and sometimes in the teeth of persecution from the world’s elite creative classes. In an age when the cultural elite has insisted that the only evils are racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia, they believe profoundly in good and evil, that Jesus Christ as a personal Savior, who died for our sins.
Are these people all blasphemers, as Dr. Miceal Ledwith would have us believe? Or is it possible that enthusiastic Christianity is a practical belief system that promises salvation for ordinary people just as the religion of creativity promises salvation to angry creative artists?
It’s something to think about, isn’t it? Why is it that in spite of a century of public education and the withering testimony of German philology hundreds of millions of people still believe in a personal God and in Jesus Christ as their personal Savior? For some reason they believe that the way out of addiction and anger is through the love of Jesus Christ and the forgiveness of sins.
What the Bleep is another social indicator that despite the efforts of the ACLU, the educated elite is edging back, if not to religion, at least to some form of “spirituality.” It would be nice if the elite weren’t so dogmatically determined to differentiate itself from the enthusiastic Christian “Other.”
Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.
To email the author, click here.
Civil Society
“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Class War
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
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