“Oh, but Sweetness Follows”
Know this about High Fructose Corn Syrup:
“My Brain’s Turning into Memory Foam Again”
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.
“I Was Starving in that Shithouse, the World”
Can one work of art be objectively better than another work of art? Let me rephrase the question: Is the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família an objectively better building than a Honeywell outhouse? While I suppose it all depends on what you plan to do inside the structure, the answer here has to be “yes.” If your answer is “no,” then you, my friend, have lapsed into the dullest sort of nihilism, an existential channel-surfing in which the mundane takes precedence simply because it can always out-vote the exceptional.
By staring at a picture of the Sagrada Família, we can discover something about the grandeur, indomitable will, and invisible intricacies of a successful human life. Now, what would happen if we were equally open to studying the inky blue depths of that outhouse – not as a matter of curiosity, but as part of our basic worldview? As the seconds passed, we would certainly find our resentment and disgust towards humanity mounting, and we would feel a strong urge to get the hell out of there. How do you feel when you look at the day’s headlines?
Murder, bankruptcy, child abandonment, the specter of hyperinflation… only horrors seem to make the cut.
When you find something of genuine beauty, correct yourself to it. Some of our society’s most prominent institutions are rotting from the top down. Don’t let them dominate your horizon. There are signs of a cultural revival in nooks of every city, suburb and town… sometimes stashed in iPods, sometimes lost in the banter of two lightheaded friends. These glimmers of a better way are isolated for now, but they are the cornerstones on which we will build, over the decades, something as monumental as the Sagrada Família, something really worth keeping around. I simply refer to a healthy culture.
There is no youth culture. Culture spans generations. It is found where young people talk with the old. Culture is a group of private citizens choosing to invest their money in the construction of an audacious church that had its groundbreaking in 1882 and isn’t yet finished in 2009.
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