In such an example, a “so-called prudish point of view on alcoholism” had become a reality in Hollywood and in education in the evolving American cultural landscape in the decades after Prohibition was ended in the early 1930s.
As Mathewes-Green pointedly adds, “when the WCTU is mentioned today, it's still seen as a bastion of prudes and squares. They were not vindicated, even though they turned out to be right. And it may be the same with us. We may always be seen as prudes and squares. Despite this, sexual common sense is likely to re-emerge. . . .So sometimes cultures shift for the better. When so-called fun hurts enough, people stop doing it.”
In Mathewes-Green is stating that perhaps when enough families have been wrecked, enough abortions taken place, and enough lives destroyed, society will move on to a more appropriate equilibrium in dealing with sex in the public and private spheres of America—an equilibrium which we observe more in European states today than we do in Hollywood these days.
TAKING THE LONG VIEW
Referring to a quote from Mark Twain, Mathewes-Green notes that “everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it. I think much of our frustration is due to trying to steer the weather, rather than trying to reach individuals caught up in the storm.
She adds, “It's possible to influence weather within limits, to seed clouds for rain, for example. And it is right for us to consider what we can do to provide quality fiction, films, and music, and to prepare young Christians to work in those fields. We can do some things to help improve ongoing conditions. But it is futile to think that we will one day take over the culture and steer it. It's too ungainly. It is composed of hundreds of competing sources. No one controls it.”
The good news is that we often don’t have to steer the ship.
Mathewes-Green points out that often a culture “is already changing—constantly, ceaselessly, seamlessly—changing whether we want it to or not, in ways we can't predict, much less control. If you take the cultural temperature at any given moment, you will find that some of the bad things are starting to fade, and improvement is beginning to appear; simultaneously, some good things are starting to fall out of place, and a new bad thing is emerging.”
I think the discussion on rap and hip-hop lyrics in the past few years have been an example, whereby those in the music industry and the listening community have begun to reorient the language, the message and inadvertent messages of the genre. (This has occurred after two decades of trends in the past which promoted fairly no-holds barred exploitation of this medium among the target audiences.)
With time and age, things do shift within and without one’s culture and community.
LOOKING AT THE OLDER CLASSICS
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