By Hans Fiene
Monday, June 20, 2016
“The brown-headed cowbird is an obligate brood parasite.”
That’s the one thing I remember from “The Biology of Birds,” a class I selected
to meet my undergraduate science requirement because it sounded easy and didn’t
have a lab or require group work.
For those of you who may have been too busy taking actual
science courses to learn what that phrase means, obligate brood parasites are
the kind of birds that, because they can’t build nests of their own, lay their
eggs in nests other birds have built, birds whose offspring are generally
smaller and take longer to incubate. The parasitic bird hatches first, causing
the host mother to cease incubating her actual offspring to tend to the
imposter. Other times, the parasitic mother will destroy the host eggs after
she lays her own, ending any competition from the get-go. Either way, the
result is the same: an organism that can’t create something itself coopts
another organism’s creation to further its own survival.
Culturally speaking, I worry that my generation of
westerners has become a collection of obligate brood parasites. Like every
generation before us, we want to see our values survive. Like our ancestors, we
want to influence the world and leave our imprint on society. But unlike those
earlier generations, we seem to have lost the ability to accomplish those goals
by creating, building, inventing, and imagining. Rather, to better the world as
we see fit, we employ the far more parasitic approach of seizing the nest
someone else built and refashioning it to our liking.
Listen to the Internet cowbirds crowing for the nest
builders to give them what they desire instead of just producing it themselves.
Feminists in the James Bond nest are insisting that they be given a female 007
while those who have infested the Ghostbusters nest scream “Misogynists!” and
push the host hatchlings out of the tree the second they complain that the
all-lady reboot with lazy jokes and “Scooby Doo: Monsters Unleashed”-looking
ghosts sullies the beloved film of their youth.
Likewise, among LGBT advocates who want to see media for
adolescents and children manifest acceptance of gay characters, we see
something similar. Recently, some Twitter users plopped into Disney’s nest and
demanded that the creators of “Frozen’s” first non-romantically entangled
princess be given a girlfriend, while others parachuted into the Marvel nest
and demanded that Captain America be liberated from his shackles of
heteronormativity and be given a boyfriend.
Leftism Doesn’t
Build Things
On the surface, all of this is rather confusing. After
all, until recently, if an Indian musician thought the works of Mozart didn’t
reflect his culture, he didn’t start a “Give the Symphony a Sitar” hashtag
campaign. Rather, he created his own compositions so that those who shared his
culture, experiences, tastes, and values wouldn’t be left out. So if feminists
want a super spy or a fighter of phantasmal forces to call their own, why don’t
they, via novels or film or television or comics, create them instead of
coopting Bond and the Ghostbusters? Likewise, if LGBT advocates believe the
world will be better off with more lesbian princesses and out-and-proud
superheroes, why don’t they produce this material themselves?
The answer, I think, is fairly simple. During the
feminist and civil rights movements, leftism (however vaguely that may be
defined) didn’t build things. It changed things built by someone else. America,
it perceived, had great potential, but was hamstrung by the bigotry and moral
failings of its founders, bigotry and moral failings passed down to those
currently controlling the governmental, societal, and cultural strings.
Leftists took control of those strings and, at least in
their minds, succeeded at bettering everyone, and those who came of age in
subsequent decades essentially came to believe that the most virtuous way to
stamp out bigotry and discrimination was not to build something new but to
overtake pre-existing institutions and fix what the builders did wrong. Quite
simply, my generation doesn’t know how to create because we never bothered
learning how, being taught from the grave that honing our parasitic skills was
a better use of our time.
This is why the average young adult who needs GPS to find
anything beyond three blocks around his apartment can’t make it through
Columbus Day without proclaiming his moral superiority over the Italian
explorer—because, in his mind, embracing diversity and checking his white
privilege on American soil is a greater accomplishment than discovering
American soil. It’s also why your average high school student who can’t write a
thesis statement feels not an ounce of inferiority when comparing herself to
Thomas Jefferson. After all, writing the Declaration of Independence is a fine
accomplishment, but it’s nothing compared to picking the racist twigs out of
the Founding Fathers’ nest by shouting “slave rapist” every time his name is
invoked.
It’s also why my generation feels such overwhelming
compulsion to “fix” the misogynistic or heteronormative stories someone else
has already told and pat ourselves on the back for our bravery. Why bother
learning that forgotten skillset of creating when it’s inherently less virtuous
than overtaking someone else’s imperfect nest? Exorcising young girls of the
Aykroydian and Flemingian implications that women have no business busting
ghosts or super-spying is a greater accomplishment than actually inventing the
Ghostbusters or Bond, so quit whining about the girl versions not being funny
or interesting when building a humorous or entertaining nest is of less value
than cleansing those nests of their misogynistic impurities.
Likewise, when my generation has become convinced that a
host’s privilege points only serve to weaken its defenses, why break a sweat
learning to create your own worlds when it should be a piece of cake to take
the franchises built by straight, white males? Why spend all that time making
an original queer princess story, only for it to be relegated to Netflix’s
mostly ignored “Gay and Lesbian” section, when you can get Disney to hand you
the reins to the “Frozen” empire by threatening them with accusations of
bigotry? Why do the hard work of creating an audience-enticing, super
out-and-proud superhero, when you can just seize the one audiences have already
embraced from the over-privileged nest builders who surely don’t have the
strength to fend you off?
Christians Aren’t
Off the Hook
Granted, the liberal social justice warriors were not the
only ones to inherit the “take, don’t make” mentality. For the past several
decades, conservative Christians adopted the parasitic approach, convincing
themselves that overtaking secular nests and repurposing them in a “Christian”
style was somehow more virtuous than actually making something new.
Having embraced the same mindset as many secular
counterparts, Christian parents convinced themselves that creating their own
unique faith-driven stories or storytelling genres, like Dante and Milton and
Bunyan and Wallace and Lewis and Tolkien had done, would have been too much
work and required capital and capabilities they didn’t have, so they
churchified the Saturday morning cartoon nest by showing their kids videos of a
talking cucumber lecturing them about honesty and fairness with a Bible verse
or two thrown in at the end. They swapped out Batman episodes with the
adventures of Bibleman and praised themselves for their faithfulness. They put
the “Facing the Giants” DVD in the “Remember the Titans” case. They justified
all of this thinking rebuilding secular nests with Christian garbage was best
for their children.
Likewise, with regard to music, furthering the tradition
of legendary Christian hymnists and composers like Paul Gerhardt and Johann
Sebastian Bach would have required a skillset these modern Christians were
neither taught nor willing to learn, and finding their own voice would have
proven just as difficult.
But three chords and pop song structure were pretty easy
to imitate, so when they saw their children listening to music that glorified
premarital sex and drug use, they parasitically strapped on guitars, infested
the pre-existing nest of secular music, and produced awful Christian rockers,
embarrassing Christian rappers, and an endless array of Top-40-sounding
Christian artists ranging from bad Belinda Carlisle knockoffs to
somehow-worse-than-actual-Richard-Marx Richard Marx knockoffs.
The results, however, were disastrous—not just because,
in seeking to make Christianity better, they only made rock and roll worse, but
also because they rendered us, their children, incapable of knowing any better.
Because they settled for secular copycats, they never exposed us to
Christendom’s great music, literature, artwork, and architecture. Because of
this, we’ve become a bunch of musically illiterate, artistically impoverished
believers with no appreciation for beauty who are perfectly content to spend
Sunday mornings singing terrible music in repurposed movie theaters or
gymnasiums, aspiring to nothing more because it’s never even occurred to us
that the Christian faith gives us the power to form culture instead of
parodying it.
By trying to safely place us into those pre-built but
repurposed nests, our parents only succeeded in obligating us to the parasitic
tradition. We’re already passing down that tradition to our offspring, and
until we learn to stop believing the lie that taking is greater than making, I
fear we’ll never recover the ability to create.
Making Is Stronger
than Taking
So as one who has, in his own terrain, seen the
culturally destructive effects of the brown-headed cowbird approach, I beg
those to my Left to reconsider their methods for affecting change. If you’re a
feminist, infesting the Ghostbusters or James Bond nest won’t teach your
daughters to be bold and assertive. It will just teach them to be lazy,
thinking they’ve accomplished something greater than the Cub Scouts by sloppily
painting “girl power” on a treehouse built by the boys.
Likewise, if you’re of the opinion that gay characters aren’t
already overrepresented in media, you’re not going to better the state gay
people by shoving the straightness out of Queen Elsa or Captain America’s
nests. All you’ll accomplish is stripping the next generation of the ability to
create its own characters, tell its own stories, and leave its own mark.
Granted, much of the cultural change that modern
feminists and LGBT activists are trying to bring about is not change that I
want to see happen, just as I’d imagine that many of the things I’d like to
accomplish are unappealing to them. But in a world where people tend to imitate
the tactics of those on the other side of the cultural wars, perhaps it’s time
to see that everyone benefits when nobody stoops to swiping each other’s nests.
Perhaps it’s time for Christians to let moralizing
cartoon characters stay secular and for feminists to let Ghostbusters remain
men of the 1980s, while all of us work on rediscovering the lost art of
creating our own stories, making our own art, building our own beautiful things,
and trusting that the world will notice and history will remember the makers
far better than the takers.
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