Shoestring Century

Can a culture be killed, like a human being?  It seems that whenever a people’s way of life comes under open attack, i.e. by an invading army or a rival political clique, the normal response is to circle the wagons, for the group to instinctively honor and defend their culture.   So, no, a culture doesn’t disappear when someone tries to “kill” it.  It disappears when it’s forgotten.

We live in a media-soaked shitstorm of distraction.  There is always a new scandal or gadget that we are told we should know about.  I’d like to invert the way we think about these isolated distractions (David Letterman’s affairs, Jay Leno’s Kanye interview, Conan O’Brien’s concussion, etc).  The problem is not what they are, but what they cumulatively replace. Economists speak of opportunity cost – the cost to an individual when he pursues one action instead of another.  If you feel intruded upon every time that an inane news blurb wastes thirty seconds of your time, if you know that you could have better used that time, say, devising a beet-based recipe or staring at a picture of the Sagrada Família (see previous post), then consider yourself on the front lines of the defense of real culture –  you know, the passing of knowledge and values from person to person over generations.  If you see that article and find yourself getting sucked in, and actually caring about some celebrity’s fashion faux pas, I urge you to pause and assess how much you’ve already lost.  Think of the richer things you could be doing, and remember that life is short.  This fraudulent, memory hole “culture” needs us to believe we’ll live forever, so that we can never calculate the opportunity cost of all the time it’s wasted.