Do I need a Culture?
A few additional things... There is an interesting article in the Guardian today about the loss of the German sense of national identity. A few months ago there was something about the loss of the French identity that had been in French newspapers all summer (to be fair though the French have searched for their "identity" since the Revolution, ironic that the nation that produced Sartre may well suffer from the worst existential "bad faith!"). This seems to be a phenomenon playing out around the world.
Another question, could this be the logical end of liberalism? One of the Enlightenment projects was to untie man from his unchosen identities (read here, imposed cultural identity), man would become cosmopolitan and "choose" his identity. Maybe the liberal/enlightenment project has succeeded in limiting the role of social identities and allowing the limited rational being to choose his "self." We have created a right to chose one's culture and the government will stay out of it as far as possible (we do "nation-build" here, our language, our education, etc...are all tools to create some kind of common thing, "American").
Every society has a culture I think, perhaps America has decided to stick with a very thin, "intersectional," baseline culture and left it up to us to decide beyond that. We have chosen not to chose so our "culture" is that thin liberal/market culture that America has used to hegemonize or congeal its society. Maybe, as is hinted at in the above mentioned article on the loss of the German identity, the loss of culture corresponds to the scaling back of the nation-state and its sovereignty. Perhaps it has to do with globalization and the rapid and successive melding of cultures that an international market and technological advances in telecommunications/transportation have fostered. Is a cry for a culture Fascist? This is a question that arises in Germany, if you long for a return to a "German" Germany are you a Fascist?
There are certain uncertainties that follow upon the decline of, or radical change in, culture. It has to be linked with a corresponding decline, or radical shift in "society." Culture has historically been one of the glues that hold societies together (common language, common religion, art, history, etc...these have all been indicators of a "society"). Man is a social animal, there is no human "being" without other human "beings." This is something that has always gotten me about the liberal assumption that man is naturally individualistic and egoistic, (and why I offered that the "self-interested man" is a self-destructive liberal construct),...if man were disposed to destroy the social, then man is naturally inclined to destroy himself. Man must be naturally cooperative or else things like language would never have emerged. Back to the point though, if we destroy culture, and society collapses without this foundation, then are we paving the way to the destruction of humanity?
As a final thought, are culture and society just changing so much and so quickly that we barely recognize them? Maybe as the world gets more interdependent the scope of the "society" that culture must create expands. In order to accommodate this vast social expanse, to gain consent from such a diverse body of peoples, culture must be reduced to the lowest common denominator. This raises two questions. Have we stretched the bounds of culture beyond its capacity (this is the Fascist model, a reversion back to a "National" or "tribal" culture), and ultimately is this project is doomed to collapse on itself? Or are we just in a transitional period, a cultural ebb, where we have had to rely on a razor thin, "bare minimum" in order to start building a massive global society? This implies that as we grow closer as a world a culture will blossom, as we begin to identify as a cosmopolitan society our lowest common denominator culture will begin to grow more robust.
Since I spoke of Gramsci again last time I will leave with a link to an old post I did on hegemony so that people can look to refresh on the theory if they wish, it is very relevant (perhaps a bit reductionist, even though it was meant to combat reductionist Marxists at the time, so for a more complex account that confronts the Foucaultian model of disbursed and fragmented power centers see the work of Laclau and Mouffe). http://the4thcentury.blogspot.com/2004/07/nihilism-hegemony-and-rebellion.html
Another question, could this be the logical end of liberalism? One of the Enlightenment projects was to untie man from his unchosen identities (read here, imposed cultural identity), man would become cosmopolitan and "choose" his identity. Maybe the liberal/enlightenment project has succeeded in limiting the role of social identities and allowing the limited rational being to choose his "self." We have created a right to chose one's culture and the government will stay out of it as far as possible (we do "nation-build" here, our language, our education, etc...are all tools to create some kind of common thing, "American").
Every society has a culture I think, perhaps America has decided to stick with a very thin, "intersectional," baseline culture and left it up to us to decide beyond that. We have chosen not to chose so our "culture" is that thin liberal/market culture that America has used to hegemonize or congeal its society. Maybe, as is hinted at in the above mentioned article on the loss of the German identity, the loss of culture corresponds to the scaling back of the nation-state and its sovereignty. Perhaps it has to do with globalization and the rapid and successive melding of cultures that an international market and technological advances in telecommunications/transportation have fostered. Is a cry for a culture Fascist? This is a question that arises in Germany, if you long for a return to a "German" Germany are you a Fascist?
There are certain uncertainties that follow upon the decline of, or radical change in, culture. It has to be linked with a corresponding decline, or radical shift in "society." Culture has historically been one of the glues that hold societies together (common language, common religion, art, history, etc...these have all been indicators of a "society"). Man is a social animal, there is no human "being" without other human "beings." This is something that has always gotten me about the liberal assumption that man is naturally individualistic and egoistic, (and why I offered that the "self-interested man" is a self-destructive liberal construct),...if man were disposed to destroy the social, then man is naturally inclined to destroy himself. Man must be naturally cooperative or else things like language would never have emerged. Back to the point though, if we destroy culture, and society collapses without this foundation, then are we paving the way to the destruction of humanity?
As a final thought, are culture and society just changing so much and so quickly that we barely recognize them? Maybe as the world gets more interdependent the scope of the "society" that culture must create expands. In order to accommodate this vast social expanse, to gain consent from such a diverse body of peoples, culture must be reduced to the lowest common denominator. This raises two questions. Have we stretched the bounds of culture beyond its capacity (this is the Fascist model, a reversion back to a "National" or "tribal" culture), and ultimately is this project is doomed to collapse on itself? Or are we just in a transitional period, a cultural ebb, where we have had to rely on a razor thin, "bare minimum" in order to start building a massive global society? This implies that as we grow closer as a world a culture will blossom, as we begin to identify as a cosmopolitan society our lowest common denominator culture will begin to grow more robust.
Since I spoke of Gramsci again last time I will leave with a link to an old post I did on hegemony so that people can look to refresh on the theory if they wish, it is very relevant (perhaps a bit reductionist, even though it was meant to combat reductionist Marxists at the time, so for a more complex account that confronts the Foucaultian model of disbursed and fragmented power centers see the work of Laclau and Mouffe). http://the4thcentury.blogspot.com/2004/07/nihilism-hegemony-and-rebellion.html
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