Culture, Power, and Oliver O'Donovan

I have been listening to a series of lectures on culture by Andy Crouch. They are quite good. Let me give a synopsis.

Culture is what we make of the world, in both senses. This means that what we make is culture and how we understand the world is culture because we make to make sense.

There are different postures one can take to culture: Condemnation (all is wrong), Critique (some is right), Consumption (all is right). Crouch says that a Christian response is to treat these not as postures, but as gestures. You cannot live condemnation; you cannot live critique; you cannot live consumption. But you can do all these things at various times. Rather, Crouch says we should take the posture of cultivating and creating. We cultivate what is already good in culture and see that it flourishes and we create cultural goods to add to culture.

How one creates cultural goods is from cultural power. This is not coercive power ("hard power") that brings its will by threat of violence, but that seeks to influence. Cultural power is that ability for one's creation of a cultural good to last and influence. This power can be exhibited in any places where there is culture--a university, a workplace, a family, a church, a small group, etc.

This is not to say that coercive power is always wrong, but that it cannot create. Whenever there is a war, there is less than when it began. Guns don't create. Bombs don't create. They destroy. I believe this alerts us, again, to the genius of Oliver O'Donovan and his thought on judgment. War is the most extreme form of judgment. Judgment establishes a new public context. War cannot create, but it can establish, in limited ways, contexts where creation is possible and in which cultures can flourish in which cultivation is possible.

My own thought regarding this is that the one in favour of war must also recognize that there are no cultures in which there is nothing worth cultivating. There is nothing devoid of good because once something is, though always damaged and sometimes very damaged, it is good. As such, the more extreme form of judgments (like war) must take very seriously the destruction they will cause. (I believe the Just War Theory fleshes these out practically as proportionality and reasonable chance of success.)