By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog
Myths
were once rare and exclusive things. The stories told around fires made
up the soul of a culture. From the printing press to the internet,
technology helped change all that. The oral became written and the
written became all too easy to duplicate. Stories ceased to be communal
and became personal. A written scroll was a painstaking effort, too
precious to be hoarded, while a book could be one of a million copies.
Everyone could have their own stories.
When communal stories
became personal stories: some things were gained and others were lost.
Religious stories (there is a reason that the Bible remains the
quintessential bestseller), national myths and cultural lore gave way to
stories of personal empowerment. The story of the group became that of
the individual and ‘individualism’, absent after the fall of Greece and
Rome, was reborn, first in tales and then the power shift from the
collective to the individual.
Western individualism would not
have existed without the underpinning of individual narratives and they
would not have come into being without a printing press and books that
people could read privately, instead of in groups, that increasingly
came to center around the individual, not as a prototype, a set of
principles or a racial hero, but as the fulfillment of individual
drives.
The ‘cultural magic’ of the lore became democratized. It
no longer existed only to amplify the agendas of the group, but to
actualize the individual. Protagonists no longer needed to be moral or
if immoral, a cautionary tale, it was enough that they satisfied
someone’s desires. They could be foolish, selfish and immoral, commit
adultery, lie, cheat and steal, without facing a reckoning.
The
old culture wars had been between different cultures. The ascension of
the Greek world led to a round of cultural wars over how much of the new
Greek culture to absorb and how much of it to resist. But the new
cultural wars were taking place within a culture over cultural morality.
These culture wars continued for half a millennium and while there was a
good deal of back and forth, they were largely marked by the slow
relentless dismantling of cultural morality.
By the 19th century,
culture had become an obsession that affected everything and defined
society. The rate of change was accelerating and culture moved as fast
as technology did. In the 20th century, culture fused with technology so
that the medium became the message. Since the medium was change, the
culture became about change and society had to keep changing.
With
the advent of the counterculture, culture ceased to become fashion and
became revelation. Not since the old Italians had treated their
Renaissance sculptors, painters and tinkerers as saints had any
generation become as convinced that their entertainers were really
prophets, not just of beauty or ideas, but of a coming new age that
would transform all of mankind.
Religion declined and culture
decisively took its place. Culture offered no certainty, but in a world
that seemed to be coming apart, neither did religion. While religion
stifled hedonism, culture praised the liberating powers of individual
impulses to bring joy and change the world. The counterculture soured
into drug abuse, violence and cynicism, but the religious revivals that
followed in its wake failed to shift the fundamental balance of cultural
power away from it.
Cultural magic relentlessly predicted change
and since change came, culture was right. The new world might not be
better, but it was retroactively inevitable and so cultural magic ruled.
The culture was the right side of history and if it seemed awful, that
was because we were awful.
Conservatives grappled with the
culture before surrendering to it. The culture wars are no longer about
the role that culture should play, but what messaging the culture should
be invested with. Having forgotten that the medium is the message, they
believe that the message can be altered by becoming the counterculture
and thus co-opting the culture the way the radicals once did.
But
when the medium is change, the only cultural message that can be
centered is radical change. To become a counterculture is to embody
radical change and then to be changed by it.
Technology
democratized culture but then collectivized it again as individual
printing presses gave way to publishing monopolies and web sites to
social media monopolies. Technological disruptions initially
individualize only to then collectivize. Cultural change broke up old
traditions through individualism and then collectivized to impose new
cultural regimes.
Change created cultural magic. The rapid rate
of technological and social change made culture appear disruptive and
therefore prophetic. To the youth of each generation, culture appeared
to be a harbinger of a new world, only to fall apart leaving behind
nostalgia for its lost optimism. Each future became retrofuturistic and
each utopia turned into a dystopia to be torn down again.
Our
culture has become collectivist and disposable, alienating and
ubiquitous, trying and failing to fill the role of religion and national
mythos all the while setting out to demolish them. And social media’s
mission of enlisting users into making culture has only made teenagers
as depressed and dysfunctional as the ‘creators’ at the top of the
cultural food chain.
Depression rates correlate with cultural
saturation. The more people engage with a narcissistic feedback culture,
the more unhappy they become. Like addicts, they turn to culture for
validation, meaning and purpose, only to come away drained and
depressed.
Cultural magic breaks up the family and replaces it
with dissatisfaction, it replaces actual cultures with intellectual
properties and religion with AI generated fictions on an extended
payment plan. The only future it offers is the dysfunctional one that it
makes out of people.
A healthy culture maintains a balance
between individual drives and social values, between change and
tradition, and does not confuse narratives with truth. It knows that we
need to believe in more than whatever we invent ourselves. While we need
to change, we also need to have touchstones that allow us to control
how we change and what that change is to achieve.
Culture is
magic when it conveys to us not only what we need to change, but also
what to keep. Radical change destroys what exists now with the promise
of making something better down the road, but the only thing that
follows in the wake of its destruction is dependency on the destroyers.
We have learned what it is to destroy, now we need to learn what to hold
on to.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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