Divine Canon--Who Is The Custodian?

Last week, we spoke about who owns stories and decides what is canon. I shared some thoughts from Paolo Munoz, aka GameDiviner, about the nature of stories and how one determines what is canon in a given story background.

But this was not the only fascinating thought Mr. Munoz had to share. In a discussion about GamerGate with a friend of his, the topic came up of how long the Culture War had been raging. This was what he had to say:

“I told him that I estimated it has been about 500 years since the Protestant Reformation. That's when it suddenly connected to me that the whole debate about IP, stories, ownership, the "muse", are actually all part of the same issue.”

He went on to suggest that the "foundational story of Western Civilization" was the Bible and that the Reformation and the Enlightenment were, in part, disagreements over who was the custodian over which parts of that story were canon.

I found this concept fascinating. Because isn’t that exactly what we see going on around us—a portion of society attempting to do the exact same thing to the “foundational story of Western Culture” that it is doing to Star Wars, Star Trek, and so many other properties?

Fundamentally, the last five hundred years have been about: Who is the custodian of the story of Western Society, and how do we get people to stop speaking out when we introduce themes that go against the previously established societal canon.

Why does it matter who is the custodian of the canon of the Story of the West?

In earlier periods, the Bible was the basis for schooling. Reading and writing were taught using the Bible, so even those who did not take the content seriously had the advantage of the shared context for references and analogies—that and Classical references. These two things—the Bible and the Classical works—made up the foundation of Western Society.

One thing both of these sources had in common was a huge emphasis on morals. The non-history parts of the Bible talk about morals. The history parts demonstrate the value of these morals and how lives, and countries, go astray without them. Classical stories from the Greek and Roman ages also emphasized morals, if not always the same ones lauded in the Bible.

When society celebrates morals, not everyone lives up to them. There are those who prefer vice, and those who signal virtue without practicing what they preach.

Many people, however, are just decent people who do strive to live up to the values presented by their culture. If these values are exalting virtue, then the average good person strives for greater virtue.

This year, I decided to begin reading the Bible through. I’ve read parts of it over and over my whole life, but I had never read it from cover to cover. So I have been reading or listening to the whole books of the Bible. Putting aside, for the purpose of this post, the many fascinating things I have realized or discovered, one of the things that I kept coming back to was what it must have been like when the majority of people in educated society, across Europe and in some other parts of the world, were all familiar with these works.

The books of Kings and Chronicles, for instance, are not only fascinating and full of action and drama but also filled with many specific incidents useful for examples for all manners of different types of things—moral, historical, etc.—the kind of thing that a group of people with a shared culture would use as references.

The more I listened, the more I regretted not having lived in a time when the Bible made up the lion’s share of shared cultural context. (I tried writing that without using share twice, but…there it is.)

The story to which a culture subscribes dictates the ideals presented. If the cultural ideals celebrate vice, people stop even striving for virtue. So what cultural story is presented to the young becomes a matter of extreme importance to the virtue of both the culture and the individual.

The less understanding our society has of the foundational works upon which it is based—the Bible and the Classical Works—the less ability we have to spot the deviations from the canon that is the fundamental story of Western Civilization.

Thus our story has gone from one that is good for mankind and encourages healthy normal human beings—whether or not all members live up to this—to one that is upsidedown, encouraging the belief that left is right, up is down and boys are girls. 

But what is the solution? All human institutions, even those that represent heavenly things, seem flawed.

What are your thoughts on how to protect such a precious and valuable story?