The refrain we read in most of the conservative papers is that the ‘culture war’ is over and that the left won. The truth is that the left won the culture war in the late 18th century and has just been solidifying its control and issuing new edicts with every succeeding century. There’s not all that much more culture left to destroy, unless the left goes through our remaining museums, burns them down, and digitally purges records of past literature.
This wouldn’t be all that necessary, because the alternative to complete destruction is quite serviceable. When you pump out junk cultural products in industrial quantities while conditioning the millions to prefer junk to our cultural heritage, soaking the Met in gasoline isn’t entirely necessary.
The problem is not that we have lost a culture war. The problem is that there is a war on culture. Any culture composes itself from a long tradition of accumulated stories, visual art, music, and dance. What the left does is continually attack the foundations of any cultural organization that you attempt to build on the theory that it is both out-dated and immoral according to the rapidly changing standards. Rather than gradual accumulation and careful experimentation, the left instead encourages culture to mutate rapidly, attacking anything that’s not a mutant growth from the latest developments in the philosophical laboratories.
The notion that technical artistic skill is important receives continual denigration. Art becomes not about ability, but about ‘expression,’ coded message, and political relevance. The artist as a creator becomes less important than the identity group that the artist belongs to. Because cultural coherence itself stands between the left and its goals, the multicultural program prevents any of the component cultures from fully expressing itself in a way that creates the appropriate sense of life for its members.
What we have replaced that pervading sense of life with is a facile sense of being ‘cultured’ because one knows how to recognize an African drum-beat without knowing which animist spirit that drum-beat is supposed to celebrate. It allows us to recognize the theme from a popular ballet without recognizing its literary heritage and the context of the dance. We know that Chinese people dress up as dragons on their New Year and eat moon cakes, but most people will have no idea what the ritual actually means unless they are themselves Chinese, and even then many second generation immigrants are ignorant of their past. We all know what chicken tikka masala is, but most of us Europeans have lost our connection to our deep culinary heritage.
No one can gain an adequate cultural education when everyone is obligated to skim surfaces and read inconsequential reports to maintain the pretense of being a ‘responsible democratic citizen.’ In this, the news is especially a source of cultural pollution, by expending enormous efforts to maintain a pretense of an informed and educated mass-citizenry.
Jesus is a nice guy from a alternative country music song who really understands you, Hell’s just a word we say to spice up our cursing, and a Shakespeare production’s just an opportunity to raise funds for your political party.
It’s not just a war on the past culture of our dead-pale-male ancestors, but an ongoing war on any attempt to build any sort of culture by anyone under the political control of leftist governments. It’s a constant effort to plan, destroy, and recreate over and over again, severing people from their past and one another.
The way to resist the war on culture as a concept is to create good works, to accumulate, to link together, and to fight all attacks on it to the death. A culture that’s not circled by spears is one that’s waiting to be annihilated. The American right has typically failed to understand what the left is how it functions.
Going forward, let’s not make that same mistake.
Very astute. A coherent culture is precisely the kind of social capital leftists want to exhaust.
I think you make a very important point here. Firstly, that culture is lived. Secondly, that what progressivism does is not so much destroy, but continually suppress lived culture. The museums are part of that. Heritage sites are part of that. Commercialisation is part of that. “Free speech” has always been a call for desecration. What is degenerate necessarily has a cultural context, so it’s always about desecrating the existing culture and tradition. There’s always a target.
I agree. The culture war has been lost since the late 18th century. Any revival of traditional cultural values has been kept down through implementing a steady stream of “critical theory” into our educational systems and pop culture in the Western World.
Culture took a dramatic change with German idealism in the late 18th century, yes, and the students in the universities – especially in Northern European countries were engaged with Kant’s philosophy. It was a demonstration against the established, but the alternative was worse, and students of the university later carried with them these destructive German ideals, as the black plague, on ships that sailed to America during the 19th century.
Since Kant, all thinkers have based their aesthetics more or less on Plato, who can be nicknamed The first Modernist.
To solve today’s situation, we need a different education, based on the philosophy proposed by a man, who defended poetry and craft in a time when these longings were attacked as enemies of society. To build a new renaissance, we need the ideas of Aristotle instead of that of Kant and Plato, and young students must be provided with the Aristotelian alternative way of thinking – because it all begins with the universities.
Agree on everything, Bork, but I think we should be more cautious.
Calling Plato The first of the modernists, really doesn’t give the right credit to his Dialogues and, ultimately, to Socrates. We should not forget that Kant’ s interpretation of Plato is mediated and adultered by the Scholastic philosophy.
In the end, shrinking Plato to Kant it’s like putting Leonardo and Picasso on the same level.
Let’s carefull not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
If the ideas that are expressed through the dialogues of Plato belong to his own philosophy or solely to the philosophy of Socrates – does not really matter. The Republic is still one of the most influential books written and the book included many ideas that have been further developed by enlightenment philosophers, the period of German idealism… even Karl Marx.
To take an example – Plato never talks about abstract painting, but his philosophy leads to it. It is hard to see how Plato can be interpreted in a different way. He said that imitation deceives people and blocks them from “the truth”, and that to receive this “truth” – imitation must be forbidden – and the only things that are to be accepted is philosophical and religious behavior towards things – pleasure being rather evil and deceiving.
Plato also confirmed of Hymns to the gods and writings that worshiped the political regime. But a free playwright or painter – displaying mythological themes and producing entertainment? Plato literally states that this sort of human being should live in exile.