Cultural Gray Goo: Sermon One
Harry Potter, Wicca, and Postmodernism
Larry Kirkpatrick ++ 5 July 2003
First published online on 11 July 2003
(Read the companion sermon, Cultural Gray Goo: Sermon Two, Harry Potter in Particular.)
In his 1986 book Engines of Destruction, MIT Physicist Eric Drexler coined a new phrase: gray goo. Drexler is an authority on nanotechnology, the extreme miniaturization of technology. He wrote of his concerns and used the phrase “gray goo” to describe the potential inundation and destruction of every living thing on planet earth as the result of the powerful combination of technologies of extreme miniaturization and biotechnology gone out of control. He warned that
‘Plants’ with ‘leaves’ no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous “bacteria’ could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop—at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.
Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the ‘gray goo problem.’ Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term ‘gray goo’ emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable.
The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.
Gray goo would surely be a depressing ending to our human adventure on Earth, far worse than mere fire or ice, and one that could stem from a simple laboratory accident. (Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation, ch. 11).
Drexler's “gray goo” warning deals with the physical world and the perceived potentials of raw technology. We diverge from his specific concern but borrow his metaphor of “gray goo.”
Our own concern is a danger less theoretical, much more obvious. The earth today is bathed in an electromagnetic cloud of broadcasting. Via television, radio, satellite, cable, internet, and wireless, a blurry yet essentially unified Western culture is broadcast planetwide. At the core of this culture rests the postmodern, amoral worldview largely driven by Hollywood. This cultural ‘gray goo’ is no mere theory. In the moment it takes you to read this sentence, vast quantities of values-laden material are being broadcast through every variety of media, received into the minds of hundreds of millions of this planet's inhabitants. Few are the sections in this planet's society not impacted by the currently popular values of the West.
The problem we see is the propagation and elevation of a destructive new morality rising from the West and through its technological hegemony largely imposed upon the masses of planet earth. The result? A homogenization of culture in the post-modern framework. The massive influence of Western media has potential to cause moral implosion on the global scale. Forces beyond merely human political conservatives or liberals and with a much deeper ethical purpose are involved in today's so-called culture-wars. We must take note.
The testimony of God's Word is clear: “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil” (Exodus 23:2). The majority is not the measure for moral standards or for one's personal value system. The revealed will of God, however, is. Christians need to be in the world but not of the world. They must stand ready to critique and thoughtfully decline the varied offers presented them which contradict God. It is still true today that the popularity of multitudes, whether of common folk or cultural elites, cannot serve as a justification for the practice of morally compromised belief systems.
Be that as it may, one of the central interests in the world today is the story of a young wizard named Harry Potter.
What is the Harry Potter Phenomenon?
British school teacher J.K. Rowling, a person with a lifelong interest in all things magickal (the spelling “magick” as opposed to “magic” is explained in sermon two) and occult, wrote a fictional book about the adventures of a young man named Harry Potter. Harry is destined for greatness in the field of wizardry, but he doesn't know it at first. His parents were killed by the dark wizard Voldemort, and he is raised from infancy by a couple of really unpleasant muggles (in Rowling's world, “muggles” are persons who do not believe in magick). Fortunately for Harry, eventually he is able to leave them for Hogwart's School of Wizardry, where he embarks on a discovery of his power potential, entering into numerous adventures fighting the evil Voldemort. The books make “magick” their central motif, and children and adults across the world have so enjoyed the books that they have become enormously popular, to the extent that when a new Harry Potter movie comes out, children have actually been bussed from schools to the movie theater to view the film. Teachers are holding discussions in their classrooms and a great interest has arisen in magick. Meanwhile, contemporary culture's interest in neopaganism (new or renewed paganism) and Wicca (the practice of magick), have been blossoming. Because young children have taken an interest in Rowling's writings, they are being hailed as a great educational aid. At the same time some have opposed them because of the elements of witchcraft and wizardry they contain. Renewed anger has been directed against Christians who have opposed the Potter materials, and they are viewed as moralistic sticks-in-the-mud.
Welcome to the Ambiguazone
The response of Christendom toward Harry Potter has not been as expected. As parents are looking for insight and guidance, what, more often than not, are the formal publications of many churches offering? Articles that weigh the supposed virtues of Potter against the cons, making the decision concerning what to do with the Potter materials a matter of seemingly arbitrary choice—a veritable zone of ambiguity. Clear-cut viewpoints do not prevail quite as you would expect. An ever-strengthening chorus proposes that the ‘good side’ of the Potter books at least equals the ill. Major voices inside Christendom have come out in favor of the Harry Potter books and movies, such as the foremost among Christian magazines, Christianity today.
In such a setting then, we propose to investigate and draw some conclusions of our own. We hope we can offer some guidance about how Christians and Christian children and parents in particular, should relate to the teachings and interest in Harry Potter.
Elements of the Christian Worldview
First, we note that as Christians, our understanding of the closing events on planet earth is clearly marked by our belief in the veracity of the Scriptures and in the imminence of Jesus' second coming. We are premillenialists, holding along with Scripture that as we approach the end, “evil men and seducers will wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Timothy 3:13). The Holy Spirit is being withdrawn from the earth (2 Thessalonians 2:3-9). We might be charged with adhering to a negative wortldview, but remember, along with our realistic recognition the continuing decline in the moral fiber of society, we see also the development of a people who are walking ever more closely with God, we hold to the return of Christ and an end to sin and suffering and death.
Those who highlight the negative side of our perspective should also be fair and grant the positive. But we do admit that without God's entrance, insofar as mankind himself is alone involved, ours is indeed a negative view. Without a divine intervention from beyond the reach of humankind, we see only continuing moral decline and eventual self-destruction.
The reason for our negative view as relating to humankind is our belief in The Fall, a literal event in the garden of Eden (a literal place). Man disobeyed God and in doing so greatly damaged himself and thus all his descendants. The human race was changed and although designed to love what is right and to function as a worshipping being, humankind now was attracted to the evil, to unmitigated self-interest far more than to self-denial. The race shifted to a fundamental selfishness. It now trended toward evil indisputable sense. True, we retained our natural impulse to worship, and countless devices have been sought-out by people, so that they have a variety of clever explanations for why they select the ethical/unethical course of action that they do.
Of course, in every point in time certain ideas become prominent interests in society. They attract participants. They offer solutions. But all these are found empty in the end. People still need God more than all the substitutes. But everyone is free to choose and embrace value-systems they favor.
Values-Laden Entertainment
Today the dominance of the Western media tends to elevate broken moral fads to status of global influence. To speak of Harry Potter as an isolated phenomenon might be interesting, but it has not attained to the pinnacle of Western pop culture apart from other factors. We need to look also at another phenomenon: Wicca. It is in the context of the contemporary interest in the occult that the interest in Harry Potter takes on a darker light. We will look more at the ideology of Wicca in our second talk, but for now, we will pause to consider something concerning it and its origin.
Wicca: Ancient or Not?
We shall here quote at length from an article by author Charlotte Allen, titled “The Scholars and the Goddess,” which appeared in The Atlantic magazine in 2001:
Many come to Wicca after reading The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979), a best-selling introduction to Wiccan teachings and rituals written by Starhawk (née Miriam Simos), a Witch (the term she prefers) from California. Starhawk offers a vivid summary of the history of the faith, explaining that witchcraft is ‘perhaps the oldest religion extant in the West’ and that it began ‘more than thirty-five thousand years ago,’ during the last Ice Age. The religion's earliest adherents worshipped two deities, one of each sex: ‘the Mother Goddess, the birthgiver, who brings into existence all life,’ and the ‘Horned God,’ a male hunter who died and was resurrected each year. Male shamans ‘dressed in skins and horns in identification with the God and the herds,’ but priestesses ‘presided naked, embodying the fertility of the Goddess.’ All over prehistoric Europe people made images of the Goddess, sometimes showing her giving birth to the ‘Divine Child— her consort, son, and seed.’ They knew her as a ‘triple Goddess'— practitioners today usually refer to her as maiden, mother, crone—but fundamentally they saw her as one deity. Each year these prehistoric worshippers celebrated the seasonal cycles, which led to the ‘eight feasts of the Wheel’: the solstices, the equinoxes, and four festivals—Imbolc (February 2, now coinciding with the Christian feast of Candlemas), Beltane (May Day), Lammas or Lughnasad (in early August), and Samhain (our Halloween).
This nature-attuned, woman-respecting, peaceful, and egalitarian culture prevailed in what is now Western Europe for thousands of years, Starhawk wrote, until Indo-European invaders swept across the region, introducing warrior gods, weapons designed for killing human beings, and patriarchal civilization. Then came Christianity, which eventually insinuated itself among Europe's ruling elite. Still, the ‘Old Religion’ lived, often in the guise of Christian practices.
Starting in the fourteenth century, Starhawk argued, religious and secular authorities began a 400-year campaign to eradicate the Old Religion by exterminating suspected adherents, whom they accused of being in league with the devil. Most of the persecuted were women, generally those outside the social norm—not only the elderly and mentally ill but also midwives, herbal healers, and natural leaders, those women whose independent ways were seen as a threat. During ‘the Burning Times,’ Starhawk wrote, some nine million were executed. The Old Religion went more deeply underground, its traditions passed down secretly in families and among trusted friends, until it resurfaced in the twentieth century. Like their ancient forebears, Wiccans revere the Goddess, practice shamanistic magic of a harmless variety, and celebrate the eight feasts, or sabbats, sometimes in the nude.
Subject to slight variations, this story is the basis of many hugely popular Goddess handbooks. . . . In all probability, not a single element of the Wiccan story is true. The evidence is overwhelming that Wicca is a distinctly new religion, a 1950s concoction influenced by such things as Masonic ritual and a late-nineteenth-century fascination with the esoteric and the occult, and that various assumptions informing the Wiccan view of history are deeply flawed. (Charlotte Allen, http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/01/allen.htm. The Scholars and the Goddess.
Allen goes on to provide the evidence for her assertion about Wicca. Among these, that there is no evidence in the archeological or written record that any ancient people ever worshipped a single, archetypical goddess. Further, Allen turns to the work of other interested scholars who have tracked down the beginnings of contemporary Wiccan belief to a few names from the 18th and 19th centuries: Gerald B. Gardner (1884-1964), Aliester Crowley (1875-1947), Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1923), and Margaret Alice Murray (1863-1963). Beyond these sources it seems impossible to stretch further backwards. The writings of these persons are understood to be the originating sourcepoint for contemporary Wicca. It was fascinating for me to note that with the exception of Crowley, the other three key figures all lived contemporaneous to myself (I was born in 1962). Ancient, huh!
Wiccans have suggested that downthrough history they were the subject of a persecution far exceeding that of the Jews, numbering they say nine million killed. But those who have studied the records of the period (a brief time from about AD 1550-1630) find that—at most—the killings of “witches” numbered around 40,000 worldwide. In spite of such findings, “Wiccans cling tenaciously to the idea of themselves as institutional victims on a large scale.”
Which brings us to possible reasons for the great contemporary interest in supposedly ancient Wicca. There is something in it for people. They are able to identify with a supposedly persecuted group, and on the basis of that supposed affront, justify their existence and peculiar views. As Allen explains, while the researchers have been rather successful in debunking Wicca's origins, reason remains for its continued success.
It [Wicca] gives its practitioners a sense of connection to the natural world and of access to the sacred and beautiful within their own bodies. I am hardly the first to notice that Wicca bears a striking resemblance to another religion—one that also tells of a dying and rising god, that venerates a figure who is both virgin and mother, that keeps, in its own way, the seasonal ‘feasts of the wheel,’ that uses chalices and candles and sacred poetry in its rituals. Practicing Wicca is a way to have Christianity without, well, the burdens of Christianity. ‘It has all the advantages of Catholicism and Unitarianism,’ observes Allen Stairs, a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in Witchcraft and magic. ‘Wicca allows one to wear one's beliefs lightly but also to have a rich and imaginative religious life.’
In other words, Wicca is a means of rationalizing and justifying doing religion your own way instead of God's way. It is postmodernism at its essence.
Author Steve Wilkens wryly reminds us, “The desire to be truly ethical is not always as strong as the desire to be thought of as ethical.” (Steve Wilkens, Beyond Bumper Sticker Ethics, p. 24). Remember, deep within ourselves we all perpetuate an innate urge to worship. But it is skewed by the effect of the Fall. Wiccan beliefs allow the repackaging of reality to suit oneself. It may be growing very rapidly, but it is as empty as any other counterfeit. Beyond the package justifying its existence, it is just another snake-oil operation, if especially well suited for those preferring to take everything to pieces and remake it in their own image. The amazing thing is, it has gone mainstream; it has become just another commercial operation to separate cash from the wallets of consumers.
Harry Potter and the Cultural Gray Goo
Harry Potter merely reflects our age. The values it promotes are what we would call cultural relativism. That is, there are no moral absolutes; all values are relative to all other values. At most, any given set of “values” merely are those currently favored by society.
If you've ever thought this through, you may have realized that cultural relativism places one's culture in the role of God. Whereas in our worldview God knows and defines moral values and reveals them to us through revelation, in cultural relativism, it is whatever society says that determines what is held as “truth.” there can be no absolutes. But this also means that cultural relativism is internally self-contradictory. By claiming as an absolute that there is no absolute truth, cultural relativism denies its own principle. It asserts an absolute!
In fact, cultural relativism is rather flawed because, while it is given as the working viewpoint in order to legitimize change, in fact, no reasons can be offered why societal change should occur if you believe in cultural relativism. Since no single practice is superior to any other, you cannot call the abolition of slavery moral progress. You cannot make moral progress when there is no such thing as an absolute objective measure of morality. All you can do, at best, is conform to the societal consensus. So whatever passes as politically-correct at a given snapshot-point in time becomes the goal. Humankind constructs its own “moral” standard which is nothing more than an exercise not in solidity but plasticity. Cultural consensus is continually being reshaped by the gray goo. Moral consensus in such a situation is subjective, liquid, gelatinous. Values promoted under such a situation are a construction like a house of cards. They are never definitive. Right and wrong become fun versus boredom. Morality ceases to bear any objective meaning.
Postmodernism may be centerless, but is not rudderless. This worldview has a rudder, it has a direction. It promotes a muted and befogged conception of morality. Right and wrong are held as mere socially constructed ideas on a plane as ephemeral as, What is the currently favored toothpaste? Generations coming onto the scene feel free to mute and ditch what the previous generation held to be truth, no matter whether its arguments are rational or irrational. It is simply a question of what is popularly preferred. Long-standing Judeo-Christian values whose endurance is measured in millennia may readily be cast aside. Religion is, in blanket form, counted as mere culturally-relative phenomenon.
Our world has never been so wired, so unified, so connected to the global communications system that centers in generic Westernized values. The trouble is, the West is not culturally superior to other segments of human culture. It may be dominant, but no human culture in itself is values-superior to another, or morally superior to another. Differing cultures have their shining places and their warts. But if one thing is true, it is that the West is leading the world, not in moral excellence, but in jettisoning moral absolutes in favor of its fantasy of socially constructed reality, societal consensus as the new norm. It is cultural gray goo. And the current shape of the toothpaste tube comes out looking an awful lot like Harry Potter!
Conclusion
One should not run along with the crowd to join it in its evil. There are moral absolutes. Our age wraps itself in the wizard's cloak of postmodernism. Supposedly ancient magickal arts and sciences have been packaged and sold into the popular culture as both entertainment and insight. Like a cultural gray goo engulfing the earth, contemporary entertainment bathes our world in the supposedly refined maturity of Western culture. The world has sprung a moral leak.
Harry Potter glamorizes the occult and rides the crest of the Wiccan wave. But Wicca is no ancient magick or lore; its origin point rests with authors contemporary to ourselves. Cultural relativism is as bankrupt as it ever has been, but it still imposes it baleful influence upon us all. And the world is looking for something better. This talk has provided background of interest. Our second one will zero in quite specifically on Harry Potter and present clear reasons for concern.
Additional Links of Interest:
- Cultural Gray Goo, Harry Potter Particulars, Sermon Two.
- Twelve Reasons not to see Harry Potter movies, by Berit Kjos at http:// www.crossroad.to/articles2/HP-Movie.htm.
- The Scholars and the Goddess: Historically speaking, the “ancient” rituals of the Goddess movement are almost certainly bunk, by Charlotte Allen at http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/01/allen.htm
- Hundreds of Potter links: http://www.sirlinksalot.net/potter.html (Just in case you thought we were exaggerating the degree of interest out there in Harry Potter!)
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