I've been trying to read as many books as I can since I started my "break" from school, and I've been trying to read as many different books as I can. It must be interesting for my co-workers to see what I've been reading on my breaks, since I went from reading The Walking Dead to The Fountainhead, (with a quick detour with Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which was a great book) and I'm currently reading Culture Making by Andy Crouch, which gets to why I am posting this blog in the first place.
I think it was a wise choice to go from The Fountainhead into Culture Making.
When I started reading The Fountainhead, I had heard the main points of the novel from a lot of places. I heard it was a good book for thinking people, and that most Conservative's see this book as a basis for their political ideas. Since I enjoy philosophy and politics, I decided to jump in.
There's a lot going on in The Fountainhead, but one of the parts I took from it was that an artist (in the case of the book, an Architect) shouldn't compromise on anything they make. When they create (buildings, music, writing), they should be going by what they want, and not creating for other people.
The deeper meaning behind this is to be your own person, and not live off someone else. There's a long speech at the end of the book about how people create something for themselves, and how some will just take what someone else worked on and either add to it and say it's their own, or critique it and say how it's not good enough.
Basically it comes down the idea of the Artist verses the Critic, and The Fountainhead places the Artist way above the Critic.
My thoughts on this topic would take a whole other post, but the idea of being a Creator instead of living life Second-hand is something that stuck with me.
So then I picked up Culture Making, a book I got at Urbana two years ago, and saw some very interesting similarities between the two books.
The main point of Culture Making is how Christians shouldn't try to change culture by critiquing or copying culture, but by actively creating culture. Andy Crouch goes into details about what Culture is, what it isn't, and how it's created, While reading the first half, I came across this passage. I think this is quite an observation about society, and not just the Church.
Just so you know what's happening, he's talking about why creating a worldview isn't enough to change culture.
The language of worldview tends to imply, to paraphrase the Catholic writer Richard Rohr, that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. The risk in thinking “worldviewishly” is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. And they will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. They can create a cultural niche in which “worldview thinkers” are privileged while other kinds of culture makers are shunted aside.
But culture is not changed simply by thinking.
(Sam's note: Now if only people in Washington could understand this idea...)
That's pretty much it for now. I just really liked this quote.
