At any rate, the final assignment was the summary of two aritlces from our Classical Readings text book (500 words per article. A joke! My biggest struggle in blogging is keeping my posts under 2000 words!)
One of the articles I summarized was called "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" By Horace Miner.
This selection is a somewhat humorous “outsiders view”
description of American life. It describes the health and hygiene rituals of
the typical American citizen (male and female), but in a way that an outsider
might describe them if her were totally unaware of their purpose and rationale.
For instance, shaving is described as “a distinctive part of the daily body
ritual which is performed only by men. This part of the rite involves scraping
and lacerating the surface of the face with a sharp instrument.” Not far off
from the point of view of someone who has five-o-clock shadow by noon, grows
facial hair with the consistency of wire bristles, and is required by his job
to maintain a clean shaven appearance every day.
In addition to daily hygiene rituals the author also
describes the health practices, including doctors (medicine men), pharmacists
(herbalists), dentists (holy-mouth-men), hospitals (latipso) and nurses (vestal
maidens… in distinctive costume and headdress.) He describes the (very real)
oddities and horrors of modern medicine, including needles, high cost, bed pans
and even the fact that the patients do not always recover.
At one point the author briefly discusses body image issues, especially the fascination with breast augmentation and reduction surgeries. He says, "General
dissatisfaction with breast shape is symbolized in the fact that the ideal form
is virtually outside the range of human variation."
I thought this was an excellent point, if somewhat scary. One need only take a look at magazines on the supermarket
rack to realize that the body image presented to us by our culture as our ideal
and goal, for both women and men, is quite obviously false. Compare them to the people
that you see in the street. Even the healthiest and most active of us very
rarely look like the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine. The models are starved and
exercised, pinched and photo-shopped into a shape that is virtually impossible
for most people to achieve.
This fascination with unreality, this inability to accept the real, is pandemic in our culture. Indeed, I would say it is the lynchpin of our culture. It isn't that much of our society is built upon a lie, but that most of our society is thoroughly invested in telling and selling and buying and sharing the lie.
Our preference for unreality takes many forms. I will probably talk about a few of them in follow up posts, but here are a few examples for starters. The whole fashion industry is based upon unrealistic ideas of what men and women actually look like. Video game addiction is the preference of a fantasy world to the real world. Pouring out your heart and soul on facebook instead of phoning a friend is another example of this phobia of reality. Our entire custom of dating is based upon the lie that you can build deep emotional and physical intimacy, and then end that connection and move on as if nothing had happened, and that it will not affect your ability to do it again.
My Grandpa once said, "You know, I think you can make a lot of mistakes with your kids, but as long as you give them one thing, they will be all right. As long as they can acknowledge the truth when they see it, they will never go too far wrong." I was about ten when he said that, or maybe younger, but I remembered it. I think he was right. A life that is not based upon a respect for the truth is going to end up disillusioned and destroyed eventually, and rightly so. It is not a punishment from God for our stupidity. Suppose you painted over all the windows in your car and drove down the road at 50MPH. Would you wrapping your car around a tree be a punishment from God? Or would it simply be a natural consequence of not being aware of the truth, i.e. that there is a tree in front of you. God letting us crash and burn is mercy, not punishment. He gives us chances, many and varied, to come to the knowledge of the truth before we close our eyes forever and it is too late. Every failure of mine that crushes me and makes me question Him, is really just me not paying attention and bumping into the curb, or scraping along the guardrail that He has put there for my protection.
Holy Spirit, open our eyes.
