on culture

“Personality and the Making of Twentieth Century Culture” by Warren Susman
(Source: http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst203/readings/susman2.html)

I just finished reading this essay. The wealth of insights located here is more than enough to recommend itself to anyone serious about understanding where we are culturally and why, by understanding where we have come from. In this essay, Susman describes the two modes of selfconsciousness that defined the 19th and 20th centuries, and the shift in thinking that led from one to the other. To preface, both modes of understanding one’s self, in both centuries are unbiblical and man-centered. Neither reflected the Trinity, and the Trinitarian way of interaction, that is, pure gift, and selflessness. Self-awareness and self-consciousness is not the ultimate goal in the Trinitarian Christian’s life. Our only thought of self is who are we in Christ, and who are we in relation to neighbor. Christ and others form the web of our self-consciousness. Focus on self alone leads to idolatrous individualism and, ironically, self-destruction. But encouragement in that direction is not the purpose of Susman’s essay. His, rather, is to expose the modern (and in doing so, the post-modern) view of self, and how it has developed over the past two hundred years, having sustained a fairly drastic transformation at the turn of the century.

(Read the rest of my response here.)

Sense

I just had to post this. One of my employees found this and tacked it to our bulliten board. It makes me smile.