Essay

America

Church and state

Conspiracy theory

Culture

16 October 2023

6 min read

Disney at 100: The Magic Kingdom's simulation of modern life

Disney is more than a mouse and entertainment. Theologian Jared Stacy dissects how the Liturgy of Disney reflects modern America in all its contradictions.

Jared Stacy

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A statue of Walt Disney holding hands with Mickey Mouse in front of Cinderella's Castle

The Magic Kingdom of Disney.

Walt Disney once said, “remember, it all started with a Mouse.” An incredible fact considering that after a century of Disney, it is impossible to describe and interpret our modern world without mentioning Disney, the Christian church included. Once, Disney came up during an interview I took for a pastoral role at an American megachurch. Those with experience in low church American contexts won’t be surprised at what comes next.

During the interview, the church’s creative director casually mentioned taking his entire creative team to Disney World. It hadn’t been a pleasure trip; church employees toured Disney’s backstage creative department for inspiration they could bring back to the church. For this church, the Disney company – its vision and practices – was an index for its own.

Now, my hunch is this little anecdote will offend the sensibilities of readers who are practicing Christians in high church traditions. I might also guess it will equally offend secular readers who see Disney as the archetype of corporate greed, pushing glib, crass sentimentalism as art. Christian readers might share some of these criticisms as well. Together this is what, back in 2001, sociologist Alan Bryman recognized as the ‘Disneyization’ of society.

Disney... is not a purveyor of morality, but of product that must (like any good neoliberal agent) sail with the prevailing winds of market-based morality.

Disney In the crosshairs

Bryman’s work demonstrates how most criticism of Disney tends to expand into criticism of modern life itself. . Walt Disney himself dedicated Disneyland at its opening in 1955 with the words:

“this park is dedicated to the hard facts that made America.”

To talk about Disney and the modern world is ironically enough to talk Walt at his word. It means reflecting on modern America and globalization, and the economics, aesthetics, ethics, and politics which characterize it.

I have more to say about this. But first, we need to tackle just where Disney sits today in the social and political moment.

Disney today finds itself in a familiar position: fixed in the crosshairs of US conservatives waging the culture war. (Ironically, both culture war and Disney are some of America’s prime exports.) But Disney today is as wise to the market as it’s ever been. It is not a purveyor of morality, but of products that must (like any good neoliberal agent) sail with the prevailing winds of market-based morality.

Disney promotes prevailing values domestically and does the same for values of the Chinese Communist Party internationally. For example, in its Stateside parks, Disney recently decolonized or altered some of its attractions. It re-themed Splash Mountain attraction, a water ride based on Walt Disney’s Song of the South film. The 1949 film is banned on Disney’s streaming platform. It traded in racist tropes and revisionist historical propaganda (often called the 'Lost Cause') which originated in the American South after the Civil War. Disney also altered a scene from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride which depicted women as victims of sex trafficking.

These are surely good changes. But conservatives tend to categorize these changes, together with LGBTQ inclusivity efforts, under the appropriated phrase ‘woke’. Armed with a weaponized slogan, vapid reactionaries continue to influence popular sentiment on Disney. Meanwhile, Disney CEO Bob Iger met with the US Government’s House select committee on China. To discuss Disney’s censorship practices and production in the Chinese market.

To talk about Disney in the present, immediate sense is to (among other things) grapple with the political power of corporations, the moralities that sustain market practices, and the formative power of binge-watching on human beings. But what about Disney in the broader sense? The Disney that is a window into the (failed) promises of modernity? These are promises and possibilities that continue to haunt us as well as shape us.

I can find no better word to describe Disney’s parks. Liturgy, both in the Greek and Christian sense, speaks to how the parks provide a public service and fuel a religious experience.

The “Liturgy” of Walt Disney

At the end of his life, Walt Disney had more in common with Elon Musk than JK Rowling. He was more obsessed with harnessing technology in service of “progress”. His ultimate dream (called EPCOT or Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow) was envisioned as the sum total expression of his theme parks. Disney wanted to take all the lessons of Disneyland and redirect them towards the construction of a permanent, liveable World’s Fair expo in the backwater of Florida’s swamps.

But EPCOT today is something of a simulacrum. It houses a World Showcase where you can stroll the streets of Paris, Piazza San Marco, or a Mayan pyramid that houses a water ride. Disney even hosts student worker programs to ensure that if you order fish and chips in its England, you will be served by someone from York, Surrey, or Manchester. But this is not what EPCOT was supposed to be. Walt envisioned it as a real time, fully functioning “city of tomorrow” where all the best and brightest of American Post-War technological might and efficiency would make the human society something called “better”. In short, EPCOT was Disney’s public works project.

The ancient Greeks had a word for projects like this: “liturgy”. The English word comes to us from combining the Greek noun for “people” leitos or laos with the Greek verb for “working” ergos. Nowadays, we tend to associate liturgy with Christian tradition, particularly the external rites and forms of worship for the church. But the idea of Christian liturgy emerged from this Ancient Greek practice of private financing of public projects. George Tridimas shows how these “works for the people” were originally a Greek form of politics. To the Athenians, liturgies were a symbiotic practice: the wealthy elite competing for the honor and power associated with a project, while each project served everyday citizens of Athens.

I can find no better word to describe Disney’s parks. Liturgy, both in the Greek and Christian sense, speaks to how the parks provide a public service and fuel a religious experience. They are a public works project that continue to shape the American consciousness, directing its worship, which is inevitably exported too, through the medium of culture. If you doubt the religious factor of the parks, ask again why a church might find itself believing a tour of Disney serves its task of Christian proclamation and formation. This isn’t just crass entertainment, but a profound (yet often uninterrogated) influence.

The parks exist as an inhabitable space that suspends the contradictions of modern life and actually resolves them in a simulated fashion.

This is why I think Disney biography Neal Gabler puts his finger on the essence of Disney’s parks. He argued that the parks aren’t successful because they provide an 'escape' from reality, but because they provide a ‘better' reality than the one outside. In this sense, the Disney imagineers don’t just tell good stories, they master physical space. The parks continue to attract guests the world over not because of popular franchises, but because,as a public works project, the entire parks experience is a high-control, surveiled effort to provide public efficiency, thematic immersion, crowd control, transportation—all of it.

The parks exist as an inhabitable space that suspends the contradictions of modern life and actually resolves them in a simulated fashion. To treat the parks as a tasteless venture into plastic sentimentalism obscures how the parks attempt to satisfy, at nearly every turn, the modern contradictions that shape our human experience. To say this experience is a religious one would not be far from the truth, the Athenian liturgy and Christian liturgy converging into one.

This is one reason why, however tragic it may be, churches in America continue to emulate Imagineers. The architecure of churches constructed within and without Christendom have communicated transcendence. And in spite of America’s embrace of Protestantism, we should not be surprised that American Christian traditions continue to emulate Disney’s mastery of physical space in the key of modernity. I understand criticisms of all things Disney, from parks and art to economics and adult Disney fans. But the parks are a liturgical experience, both in a religious sense and in a public sense. To understanding the staying power and influence of Disney means grappling, at a human level, with the park experience as a simulated resolution of modern life, rather than an escape.

Review

Awe and wonder

Books

Culture

Poetry

10 October 2024

6 min read

Charles Taylor on how poetry seeks cosmic connections

The philosopher yields an array of luminous insights.

Paul Weston

Paul Weston is a Fellow at Ridley Hall, Cambridge.

At dusk, three people sit on a field edge and look at the stars emerging.

Rad Pozniakov on Unsplash.

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

At just shy of 600 pages, philosopher Charles Taylor’s latest book is not for the faint-hearted. At the heart of the book are fascinating questions. What kind of language should we use when we encounter ‘beauty’, or experience ‘wonder’ which seems to take us into a new kind of space, or make time stand still? It could be the sight of a breathtaking landscape. It could be a piece of music. It’s that sense of ‘connection’ with something bigger than ourselves. What might it mean? More particularly, how do we express what we intuitively feel to be real and deeply significant about such things when our usual language fails to capture it?

Taylor says that his latest book ‘is about (what I see as) the human need for cosmic connection . . . one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration’. And his hypothesis is that ‘the desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history’, even if ‘the forms this desire takes have been very different in the succeeding phases and stages of this history’. The book explores these questions by focusing on late-Romantic European poetry and traces its development through the work of later poets including Goethe, Rilke, Wordsworth, Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot.

The background to Taylor’s explorations is the ongoing impact of the Enlightenment on our language and understanding about ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’. Those familiar with his 2007 book A Secular Age will find echoes of it here, particularly the way in which post-Enlightenment language tended to develop the language of control. This, he argues, became increasingly dominant in Western modernity ‘because it is linked to a practical stance which is basically instrumentalist; we seek out the efficient causal relations in our world with the aim of discovering handles which will enable us to realise our purposes’. In reaction to this narrowing of possibilities, the Romantic poets focused on ‘the experience of connection, and the empowerment this brings: not a power over things, but one of self-realization’. And a key element of the Romantic movement was the recognition that a poem (alongside the wider arts) uncovers deeper meanings: it ‘reveals to us, brings us into contact with, a deep reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken’.

‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’

Charles Taylor

The book focuses on the variety of forms that this reaction took amongst Romantic poets. A unifying desire for ‘connection’ led to differing ideas about how poetic language makes this possible and what kinds of meaning are revealed. But the central belief remained constant: that poetic language was the key to addressing a prevailing cultural atmosphere of ‘disenchantment’, in which the desire for cosmic connection had been sidelined.

On the English side of the channel, Taylor finds in Keats’ poetry, a new form of expression summed up in his statement ‘Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty’. In Taylor’s words, ‘Art raises the object to a new unity and intensity, which constitutes Beauty. But this is not something which just exists in the mind of the artist (or reader); it has reality, and hence Truth, even though this reality is partly brought to fruition by artistic (re)creation’.

Similarly, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, the form of poetic language itself can become a means of ‘connection’. As Taylor puts it, in Hopkins’ work, ‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’. His poetry embodies this in that it ‘renders the rhythms of the being itself through the “sprung rhythm” of the verse’.

The second half of the book looks to poets of the last 200 years who have navigated parallel pathways towards this ideal of experienced fullness – in the face of increasing industrialisation and disenchantment. Baudelaire longs for the experience of fullness, but finds it barred by a state of melancholy that he described as ‘Spleen’. It is a melancholy brought about by the endless repetitions of mundane and urbanised life. Baudelaire’s attempt to find release from our imprisonment in trapped time is to face Spleen head on and to transform it through poetic contemplation.

T. S. Eliot’s poetry similarly aims to evoke the sources of a fuller life in a culture of decay by means of the ‘continual surrender’ of the poet to something more significant and valuable. In Eliot’s case this resolves in a more-or-less traditional sense of Christian order, but Taylor notes that his poetry doesn’t necessarily require this. Miłosz on the other hand, amidst the social and political upheavals in Poland, sought a higher form of poetry: a poetry that could rise above the discord of social turmoil in order to define a moment and clarify the path that needed to be taken.

‘The work of art opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’.

Charles Taylor

At times, the weight and detail of Taylor’s exposition threatens to overwhelm the reader, but he offers an array of luminous insights along the way, and he is largely successful in keeping an eye on the broader questions and themes. Perhaps the most important here is his belief that the human desire for ‘cosmic connection’, with its yearning for joy, significance and inspiration is perennial. The book is in this sense an elaborate historical worked example of this desire, understood – perhaps imperceptibly – as a sense of ‘loss’ or ‘longing’. It is this ‘central aspiration of the Romantic period’, he concludes, that ‘remains powerful today’.

My own experiences of talking with people today seems to amply confirm Taylor’s view. And the search for language to describe the desire for this sense of connection (or the longing for it) continues to thrive even within a so-called secularised culture (most likely because of it). It too seeks language for expression and sometimes struggles for some of the same reasons that the Romantics identified. Taylor’s phrase ‘the immanent frame’ (from his A Secular Age) powerfully evokes a sense of being held on a restricted rein, unable to name or explore the realms of ‘beauty’ or the ‘transcendent’ beyond perceived cultural boundaries. Connected to this is the still commonly held belief that any supposed knowledge derived through the arts doesn’t put us in touch with anything other than ourselves.

Taylor convincingly transcends the supposed dichotomy between these so-called ‘subjective’ or on the other hand, ‘ontological’ possibilities. ‘The work of art’, he says, ‘opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’. Moreover, it can ‘realize a powerful experience of fulfillment . . . of connection which empowers’. And Taylor backs his theory with autobiography. In Goethe’s ‘Wanderer Nachtlied’, he says, ‘There is a kind of rest/peace which I long for. I don’t fully understand it, but now I have some sense of it’. Or broadening the artistic field, he finds that listening to Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor ‘opens me up to an unnameable longing’, or that when he listens to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, he feels ‘a striving upwards, an expression of praise and thanks, straining to reach some higher addressee (for me, this would be God), but I can imagine that someone else, feeling the ascending movement, would imagine another destination’).

Here then is a book that shines a light on the possibilities of ‘cosmic connection’. Taylor affirms our desires, reassuring us that we should not feel strange to share the same longings for ‘fullness’, for ‘transcendence’, for ‘joy’ and for ‘connection’ as did the Romantic poets. Our recognition of these desires may well have been evoked by the kind of poetry or music that Taylor talks about here. But for all of us, it is good to be reminded that in a western world still heavily influenced by the climate of secularisation many today are still searching for the sense of cosmic connection that Taylor describes.

Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment is published by Harvard University Press.