93. A new culture?

This is the last item of a long series on art, and here I permit myself a somewhat longer text than usual.

I am inclined to deplore how present culture develops. Superficiality swamps depth. Hype shouts down reflection. Emotions brush away argument. Communication is fast and furious. Books get published only when connected with celebrities or idols or when plugged in TV shows. Social media celebrate the trivial. The serious is pushed over the edge into anonymity. Is something going badly wrong or am I prejudiced by an old, defunct cultural style?

In his book The barbarians (2006) Alessandro Baricco argues that what seems, and indeed in many respects is, barbarian, destroying to the core old cultural values, in a spreading collapse of established civilization, may not be only unstoppable but also valuable and legitimate.

The old intellectual ethic of in depth delving for ultimate truths, requiring lifelong dedication and scholarship, has buried itself in the deep. Such ultimate, lasting truths are an illusion. The effort involved is out of proportion to the limited yield of valuable insight and intellectual enjoyment. The discourse is only accessible to a narrowing circle of specialists, bickering among each other, vying for supremacy, while the world passes by. And it hasn’t exactly produced a humane and peaceful world. And digging too deep one may get lost in a void.

What is happening now is a democratization and socialization of mental activity. No longer just for an intellectual elite, and no longer a solitary affair. Surfing along the surface, racing along in hyperspace, people collect their own array of bits and pieces, thank you very much, which they enjoy and share with others, exchanging miscellaneous scraps, that veer off, echoing in endless networks, breeding and re-combining, and sometimes becoming viral. Contemplation is replaced by ravishing, taking a stand is replaced by rushing along, search for immovable truth by a run that no longer seems to have any specific aim to pursue. Movement has become an aim in itself.

What strikes me now is that this seems to connect, on several points, with what I have been saying in this blog. The rejection of absolute ideas, about truth, morality and beauty, is part of my Imperfection on the move. The shifts of ideas and meanings are part of the pragmatism that I preach and practice. The rejection of ideas and of personal identity as autonomous and isolated is closely related to the socialization of the self that I argued for in my otherhumanism, relinquishing the Enlightenment ideal of a rational, autonomous self, accepting that the self needs the other to become and develop itself. The combination and re-combination of diverse views, extraction from old contexts and immersion into novel contexts is what I discussed and recommended in my cycle of invention.  

So, how can I reconcile my revulsion concerning present culture with the fact that my own ideas seem to accord, at least in part, with Baricco’s claim? Perhaps I should re-examine my self-righteous tenacity in holding on to traditional cultural values of intellectualism, depth, erudition, and serious, systematic examination. That hurts.

Yet, still I cannot shrug off the intuition that something is deeply wrong. But then, instead of foolishly trying to stop the swell of present culture, could I not go along with it while feeding it with fruits that are still delved from the deep, but distilled, perhaps, into something just a little more intoxicating, and bringing that up to the surface, to be nipped by people racing along. Is that perhaps how this blog may work out, even if I did not intend it that way: offering bits from philosophy to be pieced together by readers as they see fit, as they rush by?