can “culture” even be “controlled”?
After celebrating being able to share the culture of the Simpsons (a cartoon universe) with his eldest son, writer Rod Dreher goes on in subsequent posts to claim that Liberals control “culture” – which, whatever he may understand it to be, he expressly understands with respect to the New York Times reportage as different from politics – while we are also left with the vague impression, never established with any rigor, that the good Dreher and those who agree with him (and perhaps those who don’t as well) find themselves somehow the unfortunate victims of this amorphous, undefined existential historical-social ether-goo they gather up under the rubric “culture”.
In Alexandria, “culture” is specifically used as a categorical catch-all available to Authors when they do not know how else to categorize a post; our Culture Category is in fact our Uncategorized Category renamed as Culture.
But what is “culture” to you?
Is “culture” something you produce, something you consume, something via which you victimize or enable others, something you are a victim of or via which you are enabled, some of all of these – what?
Is “culture” an historical-social medium you inhabit like a fish? If so, are you a fish at home in the waters in which you were born or do you swim about desolately or flop on the banks desperately wishing you swam in a different historical-social milieu?
To what extent do you think “culture” can be changed, by what agencies?
If “culture” is malleable to exertions, who should be responsible for doing the exerting – you, or someone or something on your behalf?
If you speak confidently about “culture”, what do you mean when you do so?
If you don’t speak confidently about “culture”, what, nevertheless, are you attempting to articulate or get at when you do so?
If you, as I do, find the term “culture” opportunistically nebulous, how do you, nonetheless, think of, speak of, and attempt to deal with that stuff you don’t already refer to by some other term such as politics, sex, economics, morality, religion, ethics, psychology, biology, &c, &c ?
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
“Is “culture” an historical-social medium you inhabit like a fish? If so, are you a fish at home in the waters in which you were born or do you swim about desolately or flop on the banks desperately wishing you swam in a different historical-social milieu?”
Yes, pretty much. No single entity controls it, but a lot of them are desperately trying to. The most effective such entity is, of course, commercial advertising. But it gets undeserved traction from the presumption that it has, and is entitled to, First Amendment rights to say anything it damn well pleases, without having to respond to anything other than a sharp drop in sales revenues for the advertised product. And if that drop can possibly be traced to some single source, the advertisers will immediately claim to be the victim of an unconstitutional boycott, and may even sue somebody. Which is also part of our culture.