Culture vulture

Flipping aimlessley through last Saturday's papers, couldn't but help think to myself: there's an awful lot of things to see, books to read, music to listen to. You keep on adding to your lists, which is silly, really; it only adds to your (mid-life?) anxieties: things-to-do-before-you-die sort of thing. Of course there's no time for any of it. You end up (no, you've ended up) living a life without assimilating anything, and have no sense of any inner coherence; instead, fragments of lines of poetry, quotes here and there, a few jumbled thoughts which it would take you a lifetime to untangle. The number of half-read books, half-watched films, and music listened to distractedly is staggering. Everyhting is there to be consumed, nothing to be savoured...

'The range of culture is so diffuse, the "topics" of interest so proliferated, that it is almost impossible to find a centre of gravity that can truly define the "cultivated" man.'

--D. Bell.

'World-culture', fusion music, international best-sellers. You have to wonder: how convenient all that is for capitalism and the marketeers. The idea of boundaries, limits, of something being withdrawn from one's gaze or understanding, is simply not on. The past and "exotic" cultures must be plundered, made "available" (is it a coincidence that that word is related to sex?)

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The case of someone who went missing 21 years ago has been re-opened. There's something utterly mysterious about that (assuming it's not sinister, which is more likely). Someone, back in 1991, just walking out and never returning, the bowl of cornflakes on the table a sharp reminder of his presence, the room exactly as it was when he left, his loved ones greyer, wiser, sadder; or maybe they've moved on and he returns to find strangers living in his home...

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As we become more competitive over luxuries we 'lose the ability to share and sacrifice. There then follows, says Ibn Khaldun the loss of "asabiyah", that sense of solidarity..that group feeling which means mutual affection...'
--D. Bell. 

But what's the evidence for that? It seems, on the contrary, that market-based societies are fairer and have higher levels of trust etc. Also, the 'group feeling' was often based on tribal instincts, ethnicity- and depended, at least in part, on excluding those not in the group. Of course, to a conservative, this falling away from unity is to be deplored. It seems unquestionable (to him) that the modern world is full of alienated, estranged, disenchanted individuals. Markets, or so the argument goes, lead to a decline in "social capital" and to "atomization".