Cultural Fever

[HKHaugan]

Cultural Fever

 No matter the age we live in there are trends, movements, currents that ignite emotions and drive social and public expression.  They sweep across a multitude of people and become attitudes that dominate thought and behavior.  They can be moral, political, economic, inspirational, evil, bombastic, idealistic, personality driven and so on.  Whatever they are they become feverish in their behavioral forms.  They are like a fever that sweeps across a culture, cultural fever.  When individuals become carriers of that fever to the point where large groups are consumed by it, it is time to step back and recognize its source. 

 There is something in us all that need social fulfillment, expressing what we think about the larger world around us.  It’s about the things we can’t control, issues that trigger our emotions, people that cause an inner reaction and the heart within yearning for recognition and self-worth.  Now with visual and written media bringing all that into our homes, the mix of those outer issues with our relational lives and their frustrations, they can’t just remain bottled up.  They need to be vented.  Something has to be done.  Lack of action only increases our inner unsettledness.  We need to feel good about ourselves and our need to look good to those around us.  If we just had an outlet.

 There are those amongst us who know that common inner drive and how to manipulate it.  The combination of the manipulator and our personal emotional involvement are the germs, the bacteria, the infectors that unleash the different cultural fevers that throw a culture into stress.  The fevers rise with very subtle enablers like rationalizing a personal sense of what is right and wrong then ‘climb on the bandwagon’ of any cause that fits my conclusions about what is happening in the larger world.  Getting involved and joining a crusading demonstration in any public display gives us self-justification.  The ‘I’ in us is good and emotionally satisfying.  “I’ve done my part.”  History records this pandemic in every society, culture and civilization since Adam and Eve.  What the fever really is, is the spiritual disease call sin.

 You can see it in the media’s determination to find fault.   Their spirit of cynicism feeds the fever.  Their lust for power and recognition as well as their executives’ profit motives hide behind the flowery language of inclusion, equality and self-righteous indignation.  Cultural fever becomes a pandemic and hostile division and multi-ethnic paranoia arise where groups find themselves suspicious of one another.  This is when people begin all their relational activity based on physical appearance rather than the commonality they share as human beings.  Their judgments are set by outer values rather than inner strengths and abilities.  Relational dishonesty replaces honest interchange.  People treat each other based on what they see rather than what they are.  Condescension, fake smiles and superficial conversation become the norm.  Cultural fever is sin in full swing with no cure in sight. We are magnetized to people who think like us and avoid those that don’t.

 One of the symptoms of this fever is the need to blame.  Someone has to pay for the unrest and division among people.  They, those people, them, the one’s you see.  Yep.  Nothing to do with me.  It’s them.  Therefore, define them, hate them, destroy anyone who gets in the way of whatever fever controls the moment.  Tear down, destroy history if necessary.  Find cultural symbols, books, cauterize the existing order.  It’s always ‘they’ ‘them’ that need removal from society.  ‘They’ cause all the problems.  Physical action emotionally empowered is the answer.  The obscenities on their signs say it all about those possessed by the sin’s fever.

 There is only one possible antidote, one vaccine, one intravenous hope for our personal cultural fever and that is the person of Jesus who shows us what real humanity looks like, what each person can be like and when spiritual reality becomes the cure.  It has to be taken in individual doses of belief, trust and faith in Him.  This is true for the heart of every person born into the world.  It is a continual experience of having a relationship with God as He is revealed in Jesus.  He is the source, the Creator of each person.  He knows how we should operate.  He designed and provided the vaccine to treat our maladies.  He speaks through His Word, the Holy Bible with all its understanding and analysis of human nature.  It is administered in the heart and comes through the reading and hearing of His Word.  It’s His grace, His truth and His love.

 Cultural fever can be thwarted because it is a spiritual disease rooted in this frustrated self-centeredness called sin.  That can’t be repeated enough.  The main problem in this cultural fever is that those who are its victims don’t recognize they have the condition.  They are so self-consumed with their self-righteousness that they are self-directed.  Until the individual heart recognizes this inner restlessness and unfulfillment as sin needing God’s forgiveness, it will be vulnerable to any and all movements that encourage its presence.  “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls (Matthew 1:28-29).”