240. Flattening culture
Does culture still have depth? In item 238 of this blog I discussed the
range, the different kinds of things in culture. That is the horizontal
dimension, the width of culture. Here I consider the vertical dimension, the
surface and depth, the high and the low of culture. Do we still have that?
Culture seems to have flattened, in art, religion, public debate,
politics, and science. Religion without theology, art without high and low,
public debate without argument, politics without knowledge, ideology without
ethics, science on a side-track.
Do talent, skill, knowledge and experience still count, or is any claim
as good as any other?
Culture has been democratized, and democracy has become consumption. In
markets customers are king. The customer is always right. Now, with markets encroaching
on public services, citizens have become customers, and there they now exercise
what they have been told: they are always right. It is not the producer or
elite that judges value, but the citizen customer, resentful of any claim of
superiority from above.
In art, there has been growing criticism and antipathy towards
professional elites that judge awards and allocate funds. They have been
accused of being esoteric, inward looking, disregarding popular taste. That
criticism may be valid, but what now? Does anything now go? Some compromise is
found, for awards in art, literature and entertainment, in combining the choice
of a public with that of an expert jury.
In philosophy, popular ‘philosophy of life’ appears to crowd out the
more abstract, academic forms. I have mixed feelings about this. I grant that
much academic philosophy appears to have drifted away from recognizable issues
of humanity, life and society. And in principle there is nothing wrong with
popular philosophy. However, I do hope there is still some room for deeper,
more abstract reflection as a basis for it.
Ideology should be based on some underlying ethics. Without that it
becomes footloose, unaware, arbitrary, a flight of fancy. Market ideology is
based on a utility ethics without being aware of it, and as a result claims to
be value free (see item 180), while exercising all the power of an ideology.
In education, standards have been subject to pressures to shorten study
and let students pass more easily. To compensate, some universities have
instituted special ‘university colleges’ to add some depth.
Science still holds fast to criteria of technique, skill, knowledge and
argument. But it seems to be increasingly bypassed in much discussion, at least
in the humanities. Policymaking does not adequately use what is known. Perhaps
there are good reasons for this. Disciplines look at aspects while policy needs
the whole picture (see item 218). Natural science can study phenomena more or
less in isolation, it is subject to reasonably stringent falsification in
experiments, and natural law as the object of study is stable and autonomous.
The humanities, by contrast, are less falsifiable and study phenomena that hang
together more, and are subject to shifts. They affect the behaviour they study.
Nevertheless, on all the urgent issues, of populism, refugees,
terrorism, culture, identity, European integration, democracy and autocracy,
Islam, fundamentalism, discrimination, markets, and so on, there is ample
useful insight that is diligently ignored.
There is an increasing disregard of facts and arguments, in much public
debate, which is more management of and by emotion, with a disregard,
devaluation of deeper knowledge needed to understand what underlies the
phenomena. In present democracy, policy needs to be dumbed down to pacify
demands for simplicity, and to be heated up to satisfy a clamour for emotional
appeal. Intellect is denigrated.
The refugee problem evokes emotional eruptions without the nuance that
relevant knowledge would bring. It is a nonsensical hassle between
all-or-nothing. Violence against women is all due to the Islam or has nothing
to do with it. Of course both are untrue. The violence arises across cultures
and religions, but is some cultures it is more virulent due to things like
patriarchy, economic underdevelopment, lack of education, no history of
emancipation, and, yes, religion. It has something to do with religion but not
everything.
In the media, debate needs to be dressed up as entertainment, with time
for hardly more than one-liners, and an urge towards provocation, stereotyping,
and invective, all needed to boost viewer statistics.
In the press, pressures from falling readership and competition from
other media have caused a dumbing down,
and replacement of older, expensive, more knowledgeable journalists by cheaper,
younger, less experienced ones.
In the barking of twitter (see item 219 in this blog), fact-free
opinions are picked up and broadcast on an equal basis with news that is checked.
In this blog I have argued for truth as ‘warranted assertibility’. It
seems to erode into mere assertibility, waiving the warrant.
The Enlightenment aimed to abolish despotism and obscurantism. We have
managed the first, but the second has been institutionalized instead of
abolished.[i] And now this obscurantism
is paving the way for renewed despotism. If we don’t think, the despots will do
it for us.
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