A Disruption in the Normal Swing of Things

What is “Culture;” or, to put it another way, what is “a Culture?” It is another one of those words in the modern American lexicon that everyone uses, but seems to have lost its content and has strayed very far from its source. Everything seems to be a Culture these days: Online Culture, Drug Culture, Gang Culture, Rock ‘n Roll Culture, Sports Culture, Corporate Culture. We’ve even acquired the incoherent phenomenon known as “Sub-Cultures,” as well—which still participate in the “real” Culture, just separately…I guess. But what exactly does it mean to participate in a Culture and how does the Individual fit into this picture?

According to Wikipedia—an example of an “Online Culture” or Community—there are generally three different definitions of what Culture means:

1) The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group

2) An integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning

3) Excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture

As I have said earlier, Culture can generally be defined as “a shared set of assumptions that unites and binds a People.” It gives a group an inner unity of mutual ideals and a shared set of symbols through which they can outwardly express their beliefs. In the past, the foundation—the bedrock upon which it was built—of Culture was the gods that a particular People believed in and the specific “Values” that they prescribed. These beliefs, as Nietzsche puts it, were usually “superstitious custom that originated on the basis of some misinterpreted accident,” preserved by a tradition that it was considered “moral” to follow. And, if one did not strictly adhere to them, it was very dangerous for the Community because one ran the risk of angering the gods and thus calling down the vengeance of the gods upon the Community.

But the Enlightenment changed all that. It was a “conspiracy” that rejected all the Myth and Superstition that had defined all Societies and Cultures up until that point, in order to try and make a more rational and peaceful world to live in. To do this, the Enlightenment thinkers created the hypothetical State of Nature—a pre-historical time, before Man had contracted into specific groups, without any artificial cultural adornments—in order to look at Man as Man, uncolored by any human convention. Through this, they were able to show that all the loyalties that had constrained Man up till that point—strength, wealth, religion, tradition, birth, age—were all simply man-made, and hence not morally binding. They removed the veil that had legitimated the domination of one group by another and freed Man from the tyranny of dead ideas that had enslaved each generation to the “misinterpreted accidents” of their Fathers, and their Fathers’ Fathers, and so on. Or, as Jefferson said, “Every generation needs a new revolution.”

The new governments that were created using these novel ideas—such as the one in the United States—laid their foundations on the concept of Individual Rights, which sought to protect and uphold the Natural Rights that Man possessed which predate government. These Rights are the ones annunciated for us Americans in the Bill of Rights. The goal—in theory, at least—is to treat every person as an end, in and of themselves, and not a means, with a Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. But it is their own, private Right to Happiness, not the Society’s or Culture’s overall well-being that is an Individual’s main concern—which is the general way people tend to choose to exercise this Right.

But how do you go about making a Culture and a Nation out of all these Individual Wills? Is the Social Contract still possible if there is no conception of a Common Good? Can there even be a shared set of beliefs when everyone has become a Cartesian and only trusts their own judgment?

Reason reveals that every Culture in the past was based upon the dictates of god(s). Nietzsche thus concludes that what we need to do is reject Reason on rational grounds because Reason leads to a dead-end, to an abyss. He thinks that you cannot rationally create Values and the new “civilized” War of All Against All unleashed by the Enlightenment arrangement is intolerable and its even worse, even more rational mutation of worldwide Socialistic Self-satisfaction is an even worse evil. What is needed then is a strong willed Individual who can create—a word formerly reserved only for God: The Creator—new gods, in order to create new Values that can take the place of the exhausted ones that are rapidly disintegrating because the old “God is dead.”

Today in America, we have taken the ideas of Nietzsche and his picture of the most idealized Individual, which he referred to as the Übermensch—The Superman or Overman—and now prescribe it for everyone and hold it up as the model of a healthy, well-adjusted citizen. We use these ideas to create children’s cartoons that casually preach to kids to “be themselves” and “that what makes them different can make all the difference in the world”—but that is only half of the equation. How are these radically individualized persons suppose to come together to create some sort of Community or Common Good? We don’t even think about what we are saying, nor the consequences of these ideas, because if we did we may think twice before so casually propagandizing our children.

At the end of Happy Feet, the Community completely reforms itself—in true Nietzschean fashion—around the new Values and Conventions of Mumbles, the free-spirited Creator. He is an authentic Individual, who refuses to compromise himself, who has imbued into the Culture new life and new Values. But, once the Individuals in the Culture become adapted to the new situation, everyone once again all share the same Values and beliefs and go back to living in harmony. But that is not what the true message of the movie is supposed to be. Its goal is to tell every kid that they are special and should only be them-Selves, regardless of the consequences for the Community, and magically everything will work out and there will be a nice, happy ending. Sure, you don’t have to worry about the wrath of the gods being brought down upon the Community for going against tradition—because now God is dead—but there are definitely consequences for only thinking about your own particular welfare above the Community's: that is the reality of Culture and Community. Movies like this only succeed in further complicating the problem that has been festering ever since Rousseau first articulated it 250 years ago.

If everyone is only doing what makes their Self happy, this does not lead to social harmony, it leads to chaos. It grows in the heart a selfishness that places your desires and the satisfaction of them above any concern for Others and will only exacerbate the War of All Against All that the makers of these movies wish to alleviate. This Selfism makes us slack in our duties and weak in our constitutions. It also furthers the Capitalist System, by encouraging people to indulge their Self. And what’s an easier way to do this than with all the beautiful, shiny objects that this system produces for their satisfaction? Whereas, the goal of the people who create these kids’ movies—I can only assume, and feel I am warranted to do so by the evidence—are most likely on the Left and are among Capitalism’s greatest critics, they are actually only succeeding in perpetuating and amplifying the situation.

Kids don’t need to be told to be Self-indulgent, they will naturally be so because the whole world already seems to center around them and bend to their every whim and desire. What they need are instruction and rules that can help shape them into healthy, well-adjusted adults and active members of Society. This of course, also requires that you have a Society that is worth participating in, which, with only some reservation, I would say that we no longer have (but that’s a whole other discussion altogether). This problem did not begin in the Sixties, however; it has been endemic ever since our Nation’s birth, but was below the surface, hidden, so not yet completely corrupted. It has been the object of constant philosophic study and speculation for over 200 years that so far has not produced very attractive real-world solutions that I would recommend our Society emulating. But our current arrangement is not only theoretically incoherent, it is manifestly intolerable—I could point to the high level of psychoactive prescription drug use, legally and illegally, as just one among many symptoms of its malady.

But there is no going back, nor can you just kill history and cross your fingers and hope for the best. We need some sort of creative synthesis that can balance respect for the Individual, as well as respect for the Community; that recognizes the Subjective, without discounting the Objective; that can somehow be Idealistic and Realistic at the same time. I know that this may sound ridiculous—but the extremes have been played out with some very scary results, and it appears that Liberal Democracy has emerged the victor from this battle of Wills—at least for now. What does this mean? Are we condemned to spiral aimlessly, or can we once again grab hold of the reins and steer it confidently into the future?