You're spot on. It felt anachronistic at the time - I didn't recognise that world then, and now it's something alien. My parents were religious by baptism only, which may have contributed, and first time around I was still young enough to know relatively little of the religious culture before. Watching it again years later and it's almost unwatchable.
What was most noticeable seeing it later is how respectful and careful the Pythons were trying to be. Yet met with closed minds, dogma, "it's a terrible film" and "Listen to me, because it's been that way hundreds of years". Ironic that John Cleese was trying to develop a conversation on closed and open minds! There's a few facial expressions that reveal their frustration - there may have been a bit of internal swearing!
Listening to my kids and their friends, and other younger people, religion is irrelevant in the UK, outside some ethnic communities, nowadays. Ireland seems to have caught up - twenty or thirty years ago even a conversation around the abortion referendum would have seemed impossible. Yet had the church reacted to the 40 years of post-Thatcher society and they might have had as large a place as ever - albeit in a changed role - had they been inclusive, replaced the lost community resources, sense of hope and so on. That they didn't speaks volumes.
From the perspective of now it does seem to mark the end of an era. Thankfully.
> From the perspective of now it does seem to mark the end of an era. Thankfully.
I'm not sure about "end of an era". People seem to have an intrinsic need for faith. Now that organized religion is playing a less prominent role in their lifes (at least in Western countries), that hole seems to get filled with esoterics and conspiracy theories.
Esoterics and conspiracy theories where pretty strong before british (and elsewhere) decline in church authority.
It isn't the end of an era in the utopian sense, from now on science and reason. But the era of the church as "1st estate of the realm," the unchallengeable political power & moral authority, ended.
I think what people really have a need for is ritual and community. These needs were filled by the church in the past, but we have lots of social rituals now, including those of esoteric religion. We mostly still love our holiday rituals for instance, even if the religions that spawned them are long dead and gone. And people still love to break bread together, even if they aren't thinking of the last supper when they do so.
I don't think being religious immunised people against conspiracy theories or esoteric beliefs as if it were only possible to have faith in one thing at a time!
> People seem to have an intrinsic need for faith.
I don't seem to have any, and I don't think I'm alone.
> Now that organized religion is playing a less prominent role in their lifes (at least in Western countries), that hole seems to get filled with esoterics and conspiracy theories.
You need only look at the history of antisemitism to see that conspiracy theories can and do flourish among very religious people.
The clergyman in the debate, Malcolm Muggeridge, was raised by super communist secularists around the turn of the last century! There's a link below which is a fantastic reference worth repeating [1].
Hyper secularist ideals are not 'new' - the largest war in history, WW2 was partly based on this (i.e. Germany v. Soviets). (And yes, only partly ... the Germans were super concerned about the Communists at the time, I'm not trying to start a big ideological thing here).
I doubt that secularists have any advantage on real progress, my take is that the Church of the past was simply a calcified institution, as all institutions are when they have more or less absolute authority and try to protect it. Moreover, most people 'outside' such communities tend not to understand them at all ... to the point of bigotry.
And yet we have material prosperity and 'freedoms' - we are more depressed and anxious than ever before.
Our 'national strategies' are fundamentally economic: build more homes, more Starbucks, more IKEA.
We live in a weirdly intolerant era - consider how many movies 'couldn't be made today' - and I'm not talking about 'mean racist movies', rather even films that tried to have fun with the issue. See: 'Blazing Saddles' one of the funniest and most sincerely topical films ever made about race relations. Could never be made in our new utopia.
Reform and progress are essential, but I think we're conflating and confusing a lot of institutions and ideas.
This position hardened for me while visiting the rural areas of a very arab/muslim country with super archaic traditions. We are not as advanced as we think we are.
Well both your reply and the above 'replier' have simply attacked my comment ad-hominem, and have not provided any basis for your arguments.
I don't think it adds anything to the argument to indicate "People who say such and such just want to do this or that"
That 'a lot of films could not get made' is not a controversial idea - have a listen to Hollywood podcasts.
Granted, a lot of the 'can't get made' memes are directed at issues such as 'market size' and geopolitics (i.e. China market), there's no shortage of films that have suffered consequences due to nearly arbitrary issues over race, gender etc. - and these were the films that were approved.
"Scarlett Johansson is again at the center of a casting controversy, this time for accepting a role to play a transgender man. " [1]
"Taika Waititi Teases ‘Akira’ Film Adaptation, Says No One Has to Worry About Whitewashing" [2]
"Cloud Atlas under fire for casting white actors in 'yellowface' makeup" [3]
Literally a film made by two hyper-progressive transgender women, 'under fire' for casting people of different ethnicities and genders, in different roles entirely to make a point about such things, faces controversy.
These various movements represent serious restrictions to artistic creativity and freedom of expression in the arts, and it's had a chilling effect on the industry.
The studios have 'taken note' - and now there are an entire series of stories and characters removed from pop culture reference, due to the antagonizing of a fairly small number of individuals.
Twitter has become a tool of mass suppression, whereby a few angry people can often dictate 'what cannot be done'.
The effect is pronounced and significant, affecting casting decisions in most films made in Hollywood.
Consider that in 2019 there was no host for the Oscars - largely because nobody wants to step up to the plate and undergo the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for presidential candidates. Any public statement ever made, in any context, that runs afoul of one group or another, can have one permanently removed - I'm not defending terrible people like Bryan Singer (X-Men), rather, guys like James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy), who made some really tasteless jokes on Twitter and lost his job (though thankfully regained).
Finally, on a side note, I'll refer to John Cleese himself during a Marc Maron interview (you can search iTunes for it, highly recommended): "You can't make a joke about the French Revolution anymore". I understand this isn't quite a concern over sensitivities, but Cleese himself pokes in this direction in his interviews.
Frankly, I find your evidence that this era is "weirdly intolerant" to be completely lacking. That some random advocacy group managed to get a couple of lines into the Guardian about a movie means nothing; the fact is that it got nominated for a bunch of awards, and the sisters got an even bigger budget for their next one. Talk about a chilling effect!
As for public statements, we just didn't use to be able to publish whatever crap came to our brains at 3am on the toilet to millions of people. Broadcasting was a Big Deal, only made after careful preparation. The difference is Twitter, not the reactions.
Yes, there are still taboos and stuff you can't say freely. But worse than before? I'm not seeing it. And Cleese provides no more evidence than you.
There where also the massive nerd-rage directed towards the Ghostbusters remake with all-female main characters. I don't think this means we won't see gender-flipped remakes ever again. It just shows that with the internet every complainer has a voice.
This is one of those words - like "glorious," "pro-abortionist," or "non-Madhayamaka-Tibetan-Buddhist" that lets you know exactly the ideology of the speaker.
No, 'secularist' just means 'secularist' because it's the right word.
It says nothing about 'the commenter' at all.
As for the word ... the 'old stodgy conservative clergyman' was apparently raised by the furthest thing from that: old-school communists, and since most people don't fully equate communism to secularism (which is effectively the case) - the description is apt, given the whole point of the thread is the nature of this guys religion, and the recent history of secularism.
Muggeridge was a very complex one - a serial groper with almost as infamous a reputation as Saville - until he found religion late in life. Another one who it turns out was well-known for it at the BBC. He wasn't ever a clergyman, though he had faith his whole life: pro communism, anti communism, christianity, and was always anti-something. Pot, free love, contraception, swearing, monarchy, Life of Brian, and firmly in the Mary Whitehouse anti-progressive anything camp. Seems it was only his excellent writing that gave him the place as national asset.
So it wasn't a surprise to read that link and find he disliked most things - that seems to fit very well. SSC's commentary says far more about American attitudes than the actual history in places.
Anachronistic as even in 1979 nobody seemed that bothered abotu what the church thought of Life of Brian, whether christian or not. The furore was among the great and the good (lol) in the media, with a few town councils banning it, and a fuss on the TV. So the debate was already distinct and disconnected from the regular people and out of time. In those days the media and establishment moved slowly. It was the follow up Not The Nine O'clock News sketch as a reversal of the absurd debate that was the talking point.
The countless revelations of abuse over the decades since have reinforced the feeling that any place the church still held in society was ill deserved.
> And yet we have material prosperity and 'freedoms' - we are more depressed and anxious than ever before.
I see this as likely a symptom of the loss of community for individualism.
Historically religion and community went together, today they both seem rather lacking, but are separate and distinct. It seems to be the loss of community that is hurting rather than the general decline of faith across Western Europe. As I hinted above, it's that role the churches could have tried to fill, successfully, but chose not to.
Why couldn't Blazing Saddles be made today? Some of the jokes would be different -- mores have moved in 40 years. There's been racial progress, even in America!
What was most noticeable seeing it later is how respectful and careful the Pythons were trying to be. Yet met with closed minds, dogma, "it's a terrible film" and "Listen to me, because it's been that way hundreds of years". Ironic that John Cleese was trying to develop a conversation on closed and open minds! There's a few facial expressions that reveal their frustration - there may have been a bit of internal swearing!
Listening to my kids and their friends, and other younger people, religion is irrelevant in the UK, outside some ethnic communities, nowadays. Ireland seems to have caught up - twenty or thirty years ago even a conversation around the abortion referendum would have seemed impossible. Yet had the church reacted to the 40 years of post-Thatcher society and they might have had as large a place as ever - albeit in a changed role - had they been inclusive, replaced the lost community resources, sense of hope and so on. That they didn't speaks volumes.
From the perspective of now it does seem to mark the end of an era. Thankfully.