In a rare treat, the International Herald Tribune caught up recently with Brian Eno, the pioneer of electronic music and avant-garde rock. Mentor and collaborator of such heavyweights as David Bowie, John Cale, Talking Heads and U2, the 48-year-old wizard seems to have turned his back on music-making. These days he is finding meaning in work with a charity called War Child, which sends relief supplies to Bosnia. Its worth quoting him in full: “Music,” he said, “is no longer the center of the cultural conversation. … [Once] everybody's metaphors and reference points were very clear and common and they all went through a relatively small cosmology of musicians and pieces of music. Music mediated culture. Music is still nice and young people like it, but its a kind of ad-on. Not essential. So I wondered— where is the cultural conversation now?” According to Eno, “the counterculture has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the establishment. The counterculture is Calvin Klein. The young, by and large, seem to have been suckered” and are buying into “a surrogate counterculture.”

Whatever the blindspots of the generation of the 60s and 70s and the negative fall-out of the eras social experimentation, Eno is the product of a time of high idealism, of risk-taking and belief in change and progress. Music, indeed, for that generation was the medium that carried the pulse of the day. There was a shared sense of reality. And while many abhorred the excesses of the day, some products of the age had universal appeal—most notably, the Beatles, whose music swept up everyone, old and young.

It is hard to disagree with Eno that commercialism rules the day in the 90s, coopting anybody and anything that can serve its purposes.” No matter what you do today,” he says, “there are all these ponytailed admen at the finish line giving you this huge bear hug. And it occurred to me that a noble aspiration for a young artist today would be to try and make art that is too ugly to be used for advertising.” Or too ugly to appear on “anything goes” music television and cable. Or, maybe too much integrity could be a deterrent.

Again, Eno: “A great deal of peoples behavior is mediated culturally rather than rationally. People make decisions about what they think they ought to do on the basis not of rational argument but on what works for them metaphorically; what has been given dignity in their culture, and how they respond to that.” There is a premium today on the autonomy of the individual (the 60s gone overboard?), self-expression and self-realization, more or less regardless of the effect on the common good. That notion, moreover, has degenerated into something like a communal flight from intimacy and the common right to consume the entertainment of the moment. In this regard, young, old and in-between all have their drugs of choice. The cultural conversation, or what passes for it, is a cacophony of voices, a Tower of Babel. In this supposed global village no one is really listening anyway.

Could any single cultural force again unite all of society, as groundbreaking music was once able to or, on a far grander scale, as Christendom did in once bringing social, political and spiritual cohesion to the peoples of Europe (even as minorities fell victim to prejudices and excessive zeal)? That is precisely what John Paul II has in mind when he speaks of the “New Evangelization.” (And this time, he suggested in his letter previewing the Great Jubilee of the year 2000, the Church will do it right and start with a clean slate after acknowledging and making amends for the mistakes of the past.)

To help renew society, the Judeo-Christian tradition must become a participant in the cultural conversation; it cannot afford to just condemn things from the cultural margins, focus exclusively on the political process, or recruit social elites. To put it in today's lingo, it has got to become hip and cool to be a believer; desirable and dignified to be committed to a spiritual life. This does not mean glossing over the difficult side of faith or compromising any essentials; it does mean gaining entrance into the culture, though, because, as Eno made clear, culture mediates meaning. To be successful, the Church has to be clever— and subtle.

If anything can renew the culture, it is love, authentic love. The remedy for the dearth of life-giving relationships, it is the benchmark, says French Dominican Guy Bedouelle , of authentic art (page 7). As a film critic and theologian, he has high hopes for film-making—its capability of celebrating creation and hinting at eternal life—as a conveyor of meaning in the media age. The work of the best directors, he suggests, is “dictated by love.” May all of us respond to the promptings of that Muse.

—JK