Culture making and community (2)
Posted by Paul | Filed under culture
In my last post I pulled together a few thoughts on making art and community. Widening this out a little, we can bring in similar ideas from the recent books on culture by James Davison Hunter and Andy Crouch.
Borrowing Justin Taylor’s summary of Hunter:
Thomas Carlyle’s “great man of history” view — “the history of the world is but the biography of great men”—is mostly wrong.
Rather, “the key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network [=community] and the new institutions that are created out of those networks” (p. 38). The more “dense” (active, interactive) the network, the more influential it could be.
Yes, there have been charismatic, heroic geniuses in history (Luther, Calvin, Wilberforce, etc.). But “charisma and genius and their cultural consequences do not exist outside of networks of similarly oriented people and similarly aligned institutions” (p. 38).
…
In history, “at every point of challenge and change, we find a rich source of patronage that provided resources for intellectuals and educators who, in the context of dense networks, imagine, theorize, and propagate an alternative universe.” Along with the elites there are often “artists, poets, musicians, and the like who symbolize, narrate, and popularize this vision.” New institutions give tangible expression by forming and enacting that culture. The result is a “vibrant cultural economy that gives articulation in multiple forms, and critical mass to the ideals and practices and goods of the alternative culture in ways that both defy yet still resonate with the existing social environment”.
In Culture Making, Crouch talks about the 3, the 12 and the 120 of any cultural project: the small group who ‘innovate and create a new cultural good’; and ‘concentric circles’ of people who add the weight that allow it to reach it’s full potential.
Absolutely no one makes culture alone. There may be periods of solitude where we work to shape our contribution to our own cultural sphere and scale. But for our work alone to bear any fruit at all, we will need to join a three. So one of the most important questions for our calling is, Who are your 3? Who are the few people you trust enough to risk creativing something together?
It is such communities, not just their famous representatives, that actually transform culture. Communities are the way God intervenes to offer, within every culture, a different and better horizon. To be Christian is to stake our lives on this belief: the only cultural goods that ultimately matter are the ones that love creates.
One Response to “Culture making and community (2)”
-
Tweets that mention Instamatic Theology » Blog Archive » Culture making and community (2) -- Topsy.com Says:
April 7th, 2010 at 3:16 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Paul Norridge. Paul Norridge said: New Instamatic Theology post: Culture making and community (2) http://bit.ly/dkZaTY [...]
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...