The Bratty Kid Next Door Finally Gets it

There’s something slightly cute, but oh so pitiable about the manner in which the modern Western culture is suddenly “discovering” all kinds of wisdom about how life ought to be run, when it’s been what the Christian tradition has thought all along.

It’s a bit like your child when they discover how to do a magic trick for the first time.  They fumble with the Ace of Spades card, you can clearly see the slow-mo switch as they grimace and grapple with the change-over, before you applaud them when they go “Taa-dah” and produce the Queen of Diamonds.  They take a bow, you give applause and you all go off for ice-cream.

Except this child is the brat next door, he’s been poking his tongue out at you for months, and his parents keep parking their oil-dripping clanger on your verge.

So take this pearler for instance, overheard on radio by a FB friend:

“Manhood is no longer mainly signified in our culture by sexual conquest or macho behaviour. In our culture, your role as a father is now a much more potent signifier of your masculinity.”

Like, “duh!” – ya think?  So, modern western culture, after all those years selling us magazines, internet sites and Tough Mudder events, you’ve finally come around to our way of thinking?

And then there are the increasing number of articles in liberal newspapers and opinion sites that excoriate porn, showing how it leads to all sorts of increasingly unsettling behaviour, messes with the dopamine in your brain, rewires your neurological pathways, and sets people on a pathway where, what once satisfied the viewer, no longer does, and the fix needs to be greater, deeper, darker and more twisted each time. Never mind the fact that many men can’t get it up with their wives unless they’re looking over her shoulder at an image of another woman (seedy, but true).

You mean, bratty kid next door, that all those years of scorning the Christian framework about sex, all that scoffing at the prudes who either wouldn’t go on line, or when they did, felt wracked with guilt, you mean to say, they might be on to something?

But of course it took you to come up with it first and go “Taa-dah”, looking around the room for approval and applause before it was valid, right? One does wonder what the next trick will be that you come up with. You know, the one at which we will all have to smile politely, and pretend that you’ve got a depth and wisdom about you, a depth and wisdom that God has been giving to his people for centuries, and which would have been available to you ages ago if only you had been humble enough to ask for it.