In a twist on the expression "It's the culture, stupid!", this piece passes on the latest reflections of a Nobel laureate in literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, about the disappearance of genuine culture - as something that contributes meaningfully to the human patrimony - to be replaced by a mindless, unguided but global non-culture of the transient and the spectacular, a stupid culture, in fact. More significantly, Vargas Llosa underscores the indispensable role of religion - the transcendent - in the formation and promotion of genuine culture. Though he was born and raised Catholic, Vargas Llosa has been a free thinker most of his adult life, but his Catholic roots showed when he wrote that famous essay in praise of the WYD in Madrid in 2011, in which he declared that as long as religion does not intervene in politics, it is indispensable for the survival of a democratic society.
It’s the stupid culture
By Robert Royal
21 January 2013
Everyone today complains about the culture. From liberals who think it promotes gun violence and “hate crimes”, to conservatives who believe it’s taking us on a high-speed luxury liner to Hell. Perhaps the only thing that rivals this agreement across ideological lines is the utter bewilderment at what to do about the whole sad mess.
I have been reading a fascinating little book,
La Civilizacion del Espectaculo (The Civilization of the Spectacle), by Mario Vargas Llosa, the novelist who once ran for president in Peru. I’ve always liked him because his books combine rare literary gifts with a firm rejection of the kinds of nonsense that radicals in Latin America and elsewhere have been peddling for decades (try
The War at the End of the World).
[Oh yes, please do, if you can! After Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, it's been the 2oth-century novel that I have loved and admired the most! In the welter of great Latin American novels in the second half of the past century, that unique book - far less heralded than Gabriel Garcia Marquez's classics of 'magic realism' - stunned me, who was already very sold on MVL after his earlier classics like El Jefe y Los Perros, La Casa Verde and Conversacion en la Catedral, and the hilarious comic masterpieces Pantaleon y Las Visitadoras and La Tia Julia y el Ecribidor (MVL is arguably the only contemporary literatteur who has succeeded in fashioning genuine LOL=ROFL farces that do not read like farce but the best of comic story-telling), after which I swore I would buy every book of his as soon as it came out. And I have. Besides writing novels, MVL also writes plays, literary criticism,and regularly publishes collections of his essays on culture and politics that have appeared in various newspapers. The book referred to in this piece is available as an e-book online.]
He’s so good that he won the 2010 Nobel Prize for literature
[IMHO, more than two decades too late! Gabriel Garcia Marquez got the Nobel in 1982, and every year after that, I kept hoping it would be Vargas Llosa's turn! I had just about given up hope that the Nobel people might even consider him when they decided to give him the Prize in 2010], even though the selection committee admires – and sometimes honors – those very radicals, and usually passes over their critics, however talented.
His latest effort (unfortunately, still only available in Spanish), opens with a bold thesis:
Probably never in history have so many treatises, essays, theories, and analyses been written on culture as in our time. This fact is even more surprising inasmuch as culture, in the traditional sense of this word, stands in our day on the point of disappearing. And maybe it’s already disappeared, discretely emptied of content and replaced with another that has denatured the one it once had.
He adds: It’s more than the fact, universally admitted, that the culture is decadent.
The very nature of “culture” has changed to the point that maybe today we have no culture worthy of the name.
Sixty years, ago, T.S. Eliot wrote a well-known essay “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.” Eliot argued that a healthy culture is articulated into three parts: a few at the high end, a significant middle, and a large number of common folk. And back then, it was clear that culture did not coincide with social class (as Chesterton observed, many of the rich are “born tired”).
There was exchange among the three – which some of us can still remember – in everything from music to religion.
Family and church were and must be key carriers of culture – not universities (to say nothing of the current art scene, theater, etc.), says Vargas Llosa,
because knowledge is not culture.
Knowledge is useful, but what it’s useful for depends on religion and culture. Besides, universities have stopped teaching about religion:
...which for good and ill, in history, philosophy, architecture, art, literature is indispensable to keep culture from degenerating at its current pace and to see that the world of the future will not be divided between functional illiterates and ignorant or heartless specialists.
Without religious knowledge, new generations will be, “bound hand and foot to the civilization of the spectacle, which is to say, to frivolousness, superficiality, ignorance, gossip, and bad taste.” {And, one must add, narcissism! All this are precisely what the so-called social networks promote, which is why I have never seen the point of this now global obsession, which has spread like a persistent and pernicious invasion of crabgrass, only it's not your lawn that is overwhelmed. The only reason I have not expressed more reservations about the Pontifex Twitter initiative is that, a) by its very nature, it cannot be narcissistic - the Pope's messages are never about himself - and, of course, that it may help him reach more people, though 2.5 million followers is not exactly phenomenal; and b) I do not have to follow reactions to the messages, many of which will necessarily be illustrations of the 'frivolousness, superficiality, ignorance, gossip, and bad taste' of contemporary 'culture' that not just Vargas Llosa, but Benedict XVI himself, has often decried. I think the Russians have a good term for this - 'nekulturniy' - to describe anything that has no class and no culture.]
Recent theorists have used Marxism, sociology, political theory in efforts to understand culture. But all of that has been eclipsed by what is now a global standard culture that requires no personal cultivation, makes no special demands on anyone, anywhere. Its primary vehicles are pop music and movies – reinforced and spread by the Internet and social media.
Vargas Llosa notes that this situation does not equally empower all, as is often claimed. Quite the opposite. Without independent cultural bases, it’s very difficult for anyone – whether your “culture” is Hollywood or Bollywood – to maintain real freedom.
The worldwide civilization of the spectacle promises endless diversions. The very definition of what counts culturally is what is commercially successful because it “diverts” enough people around the world.
Another characteristic is that culture objects are consumed in the enjoyment. So one film follows another, one rock concert or album replaces the last, and maybe soon one digitized text by another. Very little is intended – or expected – to survive passing enjoyment.
When he was living in London in the 1960s, Vargas Llosa noticed that
the counterculture partly turned even religion into a superficial self-indulgence to go along with promiscuity, drugs, and dropping-out.
But real religion has survived: In bad forms in al Qaeda, fundamentalisms of various kinds, but also in ways eminently human. Despite the intellectual attacks of the Dawkinses and Hitchenses, he says,
all human cultures have valued transcendence, in their different ways, and not solely out of ignorance. The New Atheists are merely repeating the old theory that secularization inevitably following education, which has not proven to be the case.
Every civilization has embraced something beyond itself, partly as a bulwark against present suffering and hope of future justice. But Vargas Llosa notes that it’s an obscure – and sound – human intuition that without something that transcends us – that envelops and gives us reliable guiding stars – the worst human evils will inevitably follow. That something, for most people, is religion. We’re already bad enough, even with the transcendent.
Let’s hope that this little book will soon appear in English, because it’s time to figure out why several distinguished non-believers – Jürgen Habermas in Germany, Marcello Pera in Italy (both of whom have done books with the current Pope), and now Vargas Llosa – are arguing that
you can’t have high democratic culture and, maybe even a moral economy and stable democracy, without religion.
En route, he also gets important things wrong about the compatibility of faith and freedom. But to understand culture in such lucid and deep terms is a great step forward. Others have suggested it will take “creative minorities” (Benedict XVI) and communities of meaning (Alasdair MacIntyre) to escape our current morass.
It’s no small matter for a Nobel Prize winning novelist to come to the realization that culture has passed – and must pass – through family and Church rather than what we assume are the usual “cultural” institutions. (The decay of family and Church is a subject for another day.) It may mean that, even in secular precincts, all is not lost for us yet.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/01/2013 00:36]