Sunday, January 17, 2016


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.            



[i] I owe this comment to Alain Finkielkraut, La defaite de la pensée, Gallimard, 1987, p. 165.

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