To any of you who did notice my absence, I am profoundly sorry if you were disappointed by, or perhaps pleased by, my lack of writing. Circumstances beyond my control (such as family and work) have kept me from writing until now. To those of you who did not notice my absence, I am not sorry for not having written. I do not feel bad about this absence of remorse to you, though, because in the end my absence from this blog did not affect you in the least. Thus, I owe you no apologies.
During the intervening time between my last blog post and now, a number of things have happened. Of course, there were the 12 days of Christmas, which involved Christ, presents, food, family and fellowship amongst other things. There have been spiritual graces given by God, and spiritual graces refused by my own sinfulness. But during all this time, I have indeed been thinking about what I would like to write about on the first blog of the year. As I thought about this blog post for the past few weeks there were a number of topics that came to mind, topics I thought could really shape the focus of the blog in 2012. For instance, I thought about writing another blog post about the need to make God the first priority, and to place everything else in relation to that. Or, I thought about beginning the year with a serious discussion of the Republican primaries, and thus perhaps move the blog into more political spheres. Or, I thought about writing an entire post about the merits of rugby, though this was quickly dismissed from my mind by the desire to retain some of the loyal readers this blog has.
However, no matter how many ideas I came up with for this first post, my mind kept coming back to one thing. I kept seeing a recurring theme in the media that I felt needed to be addressed by a serious minded young Catholic. Many commentators have offered their opinion on this phenomenon, but I have rarely heard a peep out of the Catholic blogosphere regarding one of the key mysteries of our time. Of course, I am referring to the Kardashians:
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| Pictured here: What I thought merited the first blog post of 2012 |
Now, I recognize that I may have just lost a number of readers, and that I may have been better writing about rugby than rambling about the writing of this blog and then hitting you with the Kardashians, but let me explain before you click away back to Facebook. The Kardashians have not been on my mind because I am particularly interested in the Kardashians; I'm not more or less interested in them then I am in any other complete stranger. I pray for them, I hope they make it to heaven and have a deep relationship with God, but I don't particularly follow the "fascinating" aspects of their personal lives. What does interest me about them, though, is that there are people who follow all the different aspects of their personal lives.
The Kardashians are the perfect example of a phenomenon all too common in the digital era: the phenomenon of shadow knowledge. What I mean is that the Kardashians remind me of the shadows in Plato's famous cave. They are images available for everybody to see, and there is a certain segment of the population that prides themselves on knowing everything about them. However, the Kardashians that everybody knows are not the true Kardashians; they are often simply images meant for the consumption of general people. Thus, the people who know a lot about the Kardashians don't actually know a lot about the real Kardashians, but rather they are experts at images. To have knowledge of the real Kardashians would require the same circumstances that are required to have knowledge of any person: namely, we would need to live in community with them. To truly know someone requires that you work, pray, rest, and relax with them. You need to see them up close in various situations to truly know them, but all we know of the Kardashians are the images they chose to show. We don't know them in various situations, we only know them as they wish to be known.
The danger of the Kardashians is that the knowledge they purport to give distracts us from gaining the true knowledge of living in a community. The Kardashians, and other celebrities, make a living off of convincing people that they (regular people) do know them (the Kardashians). Hollywood wants people to have a connection with celebrities, because then they will purchase goods relating to those celebrities. It's a lucrative business, this game of shadows and images. If we're absorbed in our own community, if we're more concerned with our neighbor's marriage more than with Kim's marriage, the media won't be able to make any money off of us. They want to keep selling us tickets to the shadows instead of letting us get to the light for free.
Of course, the Kardashians are only one of a thousand examples of this in modern culture. Whenever we become more concerned with video games, sports, movies, Facebook, twitter, national politics etc.., than we are with our neighbors, we have fallen into the trap of virtual reality and lost sight of the importance of true reality. Indeed, many in our culture only know the shadow realities of Hollywood, TV and video games without every knowing the reality of their own street. To enjoy any of these cultural entertainments is not bad in and of itself, but it becomes bad when the enjoyment of images becomes a hindrance to living in the concrete reality in which God has placed us. This is why I thought the Kardashians worthy of the first post of 2012: they remind me that this year I want to get to know the true reality around me better.
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