Swallowing Culture Whole
Swallowing Culture Whole
By Chase Replogle
For a literary giant like Tolstoy, there are endless possibilities for bringing about the death of his protagonist, Ivan Ilyich, and given the expectation of Ivan’s death from the story’s title, every word is an anticipation of that coming event.
Maybe you’ve seen the clickbait lists of strange, but surprisingly common ways people can die: falling coconuts, selfie accidents, exploding champagne corks, and rare aquatic parasites. For a writer, the imaginative ways to bring about a character’s demise is half the fun of writing. But if you aren’t paying close attention to Tolstoy’s story, you’ll miss it.
In the middle of the story, in the middle of section three, in the middle of a paragraph, in the past tense, you read simply, “Once when mounting a step-ladder to show the upholsterer, who did not understand, how he wanted the hangings draped, Ivan made a false step and slipped, but being a strong and agile man he clung on and only knocked his side against the knob of the window frame.”
In that inconsequential misstep, the death of Ivan Ilych had begun.
Tolstoy cast Ivan as an unremarkable bureaucrat, gradually climbing his way through the social structures of Russian society. At the time of his injury, Ivan had been overseeing the remodel of his drawing room—the most public room of the family’s house. The project had been funded by a recent promotion and Ivan’s interest in the style and presentation of his home captured his impulse to fulfil the expectations of his cultural place. Ivan did precisely what was expected of him. Career, marriage, social hobbies, and interior upholstery, his life exemplified the expectations of a 19th Century Russian absorbed in the theatrics of social image and ostentatious displays of wealth and influence. Ivan was the everyman of his culture.
And so, in the mundane and unnoticed moments of that ordinary life, moving steadily along the trajectory of attainment, Tolstoy interjects the unpalatable reality of death. Deep within Ivan’s body, there was a damaged organ, and though all appeared well, he was quickening toward his end.
Ivan did everything he could to ignore the problem. He threw himself into his work and hobbies. As Tolstoy put it, “The pain did not grow less, but Ivan Ilych made efforts to force himself to think that he was better. And he could do this so long as nothing agitated him. But as soon as he had any unpleasantness with his wife, any lack of success in his official work, or held bad cards at bridge, he was at once acutely sensible of his disease.”
Thomas De Bruyne
Eventually, Ivan could no longer convince himself all was right. He was sick. He was dying. What now agitated him was the unwillingness of everyone else to recognize it. “What tormented Ivan Ilych most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill.”
How could they fail to see something as plain as death? If that final reality, the ultimate human reality, could be so irrationally ignored, what else? But Ivan knew the answer to that question, everything. All of life can be tucked behind neatly painted facades. As Ivan came to realize, “It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up.”
Tolstoy intended a critique of Russian society. Mindlessly in pursuit of cultural expectations, Tolstoy saw his friends and neighbours blinded to the real questions and meaning of life. Unable to recognize their own sickness, they had little hope of recognizing the sickness around them. Like the proverbial fish unable to conceptualize water, our culture swallows us and blinds us to anything beyond itself.
It was not lost on Tolstoy that religion too often participated in the propping up of these social illusions. In our own day, Christ is often presented as the fulfilment of the dreams our culture has previously fashioned for us. Faith becomes our personalized pathway to health, prosperity, happiness, and individuality.
I’m often struck by the crude and naive ways Christians swallow culture whole, the ways we indiscriminately binge on Netflix and supermarket tabloids, mindlessly recite cultural clichés to one another, and deflect ourselves away from any uncomfortable idea. If we do happen to stumble upon an unavoidable challenge, it is quickly relocated into the world of politics and so generalized and generally dismissed. Our pastors tirelessly pursue relevance while most Christian’s lives and possessions are indiscernible from their non-Christian neighbours. How rare it is to recognize our own wounded organ. We go on doing what we are expected to do. We go on, imagining we are “going up,” just as we are “ebbing away.”
I think of Neil Postman’s, 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, as a kind of prophetic warning about our easy consumption of the culture’s values. Postman contrasted two dystopian novels, George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World. Orwell depicted a world held hostage by tyrannical political power, “the big brother.” In A Brave New World, Huxley alternatively depicted society not dominated but pacified, lulled into complacency and indifference through pleasure. Postman pointed out, “As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists, who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny, ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’”
Distraction is far more oppressive than dictation. We live in an age of distraction. If Ivan could distract himself with work and cards, how easily we can distract ourselves with the mirage of social networks, fantasy games, and streaming video. We scroll, quite naturally, from images of drowned immigrants to fifteen-minute dinner recipe ideas and on to retargeted ads for our worsening male baldness. The truth becomes harder to recognize.
C. S. Lewis saw this risk. The tempter Screwtape used just this trick of distraction to avoid his patient thinking too long about deeper things. As Screwtape remembered, “I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of ‘real life’ (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all ‘that sort of thing’ just couldn’t be true.”
And so God has always commissioned prophetic voices to wound and interrupt our perceptions of ordinariness, often startling us with their strange and peculiar voicings: John with his camel hair clothes and locust diet, Isaiah walking naked and barefoot for three years, Jeremiah smashing jars, and Ezekiel cooking bread over a fire fueled by human waste. God called his people to be a peculiar people. There was little prophetic concern for the relevance of fitting in. The prophets sought anyway to break the spell of normalcy. They subverted normal with dramatic presentations of the truth.
These days, fulfilling God’s call to peculiarity doesn’t require nudity or strange diets—oddly enough, these are now the norm. What true peculiarity requires is the willingness to chew instead of swallowing whole. We are called to take our time. Not to be conformed but to be transformed by the renewing of our mind—considering, thinking, discussing, and deliberating. Peculiarity requires a willingness to ask more questions, or as Postman put it, “To ask is to break the spell.”
You might be surprised to discover just how much culture you consume without asking a single question of it. The next time you see a movie, ask, why did it make me feel that way? When you watch a commercial, what kind of story is this marketer pitching me? When someone offers you advice which sounds obvious, ask, is it really true? Like every skill, questions require practice. The answers may not always be obvious, but the questions themselves—if subversive enough— will begin the process.
And remember, at the centre of our Christian identity stands the cross, a symbol peculiar and foolish to many. And it is this cross which the church’s greatest minds have never stopped formulating questions about. It is this gospel which even the angels long to look into.
To consider seriously the cross is maybe the greatest act of cultural subversion. The cross is the great work of art. As the novelist James Baldwin explained, “the visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and all our achievement rests on things unseen… The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.”
I wonder what kind of peculiarness God has called you to? I wonder if you could begin with that question?
Chase Replogle
Pastor, Writer & Podcaster
Chase Repogle is the founder of Pastor Writer Podcast.
Photography by Carli Grommet