ARE YOU AN ICONOCLAST?

BREAKING OF IMAGES

We all know what a religious icon is. It's a painting, usually by an artist of the Eastern Orthodox Church persuasion. The painting of icons is an antique practice that survives till today. But the idea of an icon includes MUCH more than religious images. It includes ideas and values of all kinds, religious and secular. An icon, generally speaking, is a symbolic image that represents ideas, beliefs and values. The term icon has even come to include the tiny images on a computer monitor, or a telephone screen.

A person who uses icons is called an iconophile -- image lover, and one who does not like icons and tries to destroy them is called an iconoclast -- or image breaker. When iconoclasts in the past have gotten together and gone around breaking images, these events, and sometimes whole movements, are called iconoclasms.

An iconoclasm happens when one group of people break (destroy) the images of another group of people. This is not just true in the world of religion and art, it is also true in the area of culture. We have all heard the term Postmodernism, and there are many facets of Postmodernism, some good, and some not so good, but one of the central features of Postmodernism is its iconoclastic tendencies.

Postmodernists (at times), tend to through the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. In a wholesale approach to defacing, rearranging, or outright destroying previous notions of culture, Postmodernists occasionally employ iconoclastic techniques to rearrange everyone's world. It can be very coercive, authoritarian, and elitist, while claiming that no one has the right to dictate to others how they should live. It is often self contradictory.

This tendency to "break" the images of others is not just true of Postmodernists today, but it was true also of many groups throughout history, from the Protestant reformers to the revolutionaries of the French, from American patriots to people who burned the records of the Beatles in the 1960s. Some of the English Protestants of the Seventeenth century even took to smashing stained-glass windows, hacking off the faces from religious statues, and whitewashing over artwork in the churches that they found offensive.

There have been lots of iconoclasts through history. iconoclasm is as old as civilization itself. Every time there is an revolution, the old icons are gathered up and destroyed, and new icons take their place; images that are imbued with their own "new" ideas, meanings, and values.

The irony is, every succeeding generation of iconoclasts believes with complete confidence that the old must be removed to make way for the new, only to find that within a very short time (usually within about two generations), the new is not doing as well as it thought it would.

It then becomes the stuff against which the next revolution will rebel. It is a vicious cycle, and one would think we'd learn something from this screwy process. Some optimistic souls believe that each revolution bring us up one more rung on the never ending ladder of human / social / political / religious evolution. You gotta love that kind of optimism.

Iconoclasms may be unavoidable, but there is no guarantee that they are a means to progress. Progress is basically a myth of western culture. To what are we progressing? What does progress mean? Progress is basically an antiquated idea left over from the French Enlightenment that was made possible by the Christian Humanism which preceded it. The idea of progress makes us feel good about ourselves. It gives us a sense that there is meaning in the universe, even if we could not say exactly what that meaning might be.

There is, in fact, no way we can know if we are "Progressing," or "Regressing," or going nowhere at all. The notion of progress is one of those non-scientific left-overs from an age when faith itself was valued because of the influence of the Church on society. The idea of human progress is a construct of faith, not fact, yet it continues to be a deeply held idea in many Western societies - even within our scientific communities. It is an idea that will eventually give way to scrutiny, then ambivalence and ultimately decay. Then a new civilization will replace us with new ideas and will smash our precious icons to pieces, instituting images of their own. History has proven that this is the way of all flesh, in every case, without exception. We Americans will not escape the process. Today we are still safe because progress is a value we continue to hold dear.

It is important, I think, to make a case for the continuity of certain things; for history, for antiquity and for all that came before. The Russian Marxist/Leninist thought to bring about a utopia by sweeping away the icons of Czarist Russia, and what did it do? It left a permanent scar on the face of the earth, and an eternal lament in the hearts of many of the Russian people. Stalin killed millions of his own countrymen and women, in search of the progress that would liberate humankind from the tyranny of Capitalism, so he thought, yet Stalin is dead and Capitalism is still alive and VERY well in this world. So much for that agenda, yet Capitalism is not the savior of human kind, and it is its own kind of tyranny. The story is not fully told.

Sure, things do change, and even more needs to change than has. Change feels like the only constant in the universe, but not all change is beneficial, just as not all iconoclasms are helpful. Much irreversible and unfortunate damage has been done in this world due to such behaviors and attitudes.

Today, however, we are in an iconoclastic age. The images of Modernity are being destroyed "left and right." Maybe some of this is good, but I'm willing to bet we will look back and regret some of the changes we are making these days. For those of you who have time, find Leonard Cohen's song, "The Future," and listen to it for awhile. See if you don't hear the echo of some of the same things I'm trying to get at in this blog.

It is probably important to accept the fact that not all conventions need to be swept away. Only an immature or twisted mind would think such a thing. Not everyone over thirty is untrustworthy, not every young person is irresponsible, not every old person is to be tossed aside for the sake of "hipper" generations. Some categories, like family, authority, virtue, and human kindness, need to remain stable, long-lived, protected, and honored from generation to generation. The gospel is another one of those things. Art, not a particular style, but art in and of itself, is another one, and should remain part of one's spiritual life, both individually and corporately. Many things should, regardless of innovation, remain constant in our civilization.

The next time you feel tempted to trample on an older person because they are in-the-way of your progress, push aside someone from a different ethnicity because you feel threatened by their color or their practices, ignore the values of your parents' generation because you think yourself more enlightened, mock your grandparents for being irrelevant in modern society, reject a pastor's wisdom as outdated or out of touch, or curse your leaders because they represent ideas you do not embrace, think again. Things are not always what they seem.

The next time you feel like smashing an image that represents ideas from before your time, or from before America's time, reconsider your feelings. It is not always necessary to crush an idea the preceded your own. It is not necessary to hate/fear people with whom you disagree.

The next time you feel the urge to join the pack and deface the meaningful images others give to the things they value, ask yourself if you are just being a knee-jerk iconoclast, or a thoughtful contributor to human society.

I am very aware that church folks are just as guilty as any one else in these things, and often more so. It only takes a moment of rashness, unthoughtfulness, religious zeal or personal passion to become an Iconoclast. It take a bit more gray matter, godly virtue and wisdom to know what images need white-washing (if any), and which images simply need a fresh coat of paint.