‘No-one there to tell us what to do’ not delivering freedom
Christendom is pretty much dead and we now live in a thoroughly secularised society. In other words that long period during which the Christian church enjoyed a privileged place of influence in public life is over and we now live in a society in which talk of God, like cigarette smoking, has been banished from public places.
In Christendom faith in God was the easy path of least resistance that most people naturally followed – and so to be an atheist required great moral and intellectual courage. But in secular society this has now been pretty much reversed.
And this reversal has been going on for quite some time. Back in the 1960s it was confidently believed that as a society became more modern, scientific, and materialistic it would also become more secular – the need for God would simply wither away as growing rationality and prosperity provided all the fulfilment we ‘‘naked apes’’ required.
But what is now being realised is that people are much more stubbornly spiritual than this secularisation thesis first supposed.
What is now being realised is the truth that Jesus taught us long ago: ‘‘Human beings do not live by bread alone.’’
It was back in the 1960s that being openly secular suddenly became mainstream – the new easy path of least resistance.
And this new freedom to reject God and institutionalised religion (and the wagging moralistic finger that so often went with it) was totally intoxicating to a new generation.
For me there are two songs that encapsulate and comment upon this whole movement. The first is the jolly and now quaintly old fashioned-sounding Beatles song Octopus’s Garden. This was written at the end of the 1960s – a decade that had radically broken with the past, in which the new baby-boomer generation repudiated the Christendom tradition as being authoritarian and intolerant of the yearning for social freedom that energised the youth of the Western world at that time.
Octopus’s Garden reflects the joyful optimism that humanity could create a new way of living provided it could be sealed off from the old so as to keep the old from contaminating the new – under the sea (metaphorically) might be a good place to do this!
There was a genuine hope which animated this generation, that this possibility lay within reach and much of the rejection of authority and experimentation with drugs during this time was a search for non-violent alternatives to traditional forms of social organisation.
The second was written a generation later – Drive by R.E.M. This is a much darker song. Rather than happiness, safety, and joy as in Octopus’s Garden there is a menacing sense of sinister foreboding that hangs over this song and the overall impression is one of pessimism, violence, and lostness.
And the thing that intrigues me about these two songs is that they are both so very different – yet so very similar. Both include almost identical lyrics – but with such different meanings. Octopus’s Garden has the happy jingle, ‘‘No-one there to tell us what to do’’ and Drive the ominous, ‘‘Hey kids where are you? Nobody tells you what to do.’’
And so both songs use almost identical words to speak of the absence of a knowledgeable and authoritative voice by which our lives may be governed, directed, and sustained. The first song celebrates this loss, seeing it as a voice of oppression that robs us of our freedom – a voice we are well to be rid of.
But the second – which I take as a commentary on the first – recognises the absence of this voice is something to be mourned and its loss experienced as a kind of lonely directionlessness that means those (kids) who have grown up without it feel abandoned and bereft in a vast and silent cosmos – homesick for a place of belonging they no longer recognise.
Jesus taught us long ago: ‘‘Human beings do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from God’s mouth.’’
And in the secular-speak of today this really means that prosperity and consumerism alone cannot save us – and our wanting to have no-one there to tell us what to do does not deliver the kind of freedom we once hoped it might.
Andrew Callander – St James Church, New Plymouth