Exporting The Anti-Culture
I grew up in an American expat family living in a Persian Gulf monarchy. This is a place that underwent very rapid modernization in a short time, where the majority of the population literally went from dwelling in mud brick huts and scratching out a subsistence (usually as farmers or fishermen) to living in air-conditioned apartments and villas and working in climate-controlled office buildings, commuting between the two in cars on superhighways. All in the space of a single generation.
.. What struck me most in reading your coverage of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is how much the cultural decay he describes in Appalachia tracks with what I saw in the rural areas of the country where I lived.
.. Modernity, as conceived by Western society, is in the process of erasing Christianity, and it’s already made major inroads in wealthy, conservative Muslim countries.
.. I don’t buy the materialist explanation that ISIS is just a product of the discontents of modernity. Nor do I think that it’s necessarily the logical conclusion of Islam as a religion. ISIS and Al Qaeda are what happens when Muslims who are assimilated to modernity react against it, but retain its key principles.
.. Rieff considered our culture to be an “anti-culture” because it denies the things that any culture needs to sustain itself.
.. One of the themes of Rieff’s work on which I focused was his concept of anti-culture—the idea that in the twentieth-century West there had risen to social dominance not any particular culture but a suspicion of all cultures, which consisted in authoritative institutions and internalized psychological demands—you know, guilt. Nothing any longer regulated individual conduct except for the idea that nothing should regulate individual conduct.
.. it is rooted in an ideology that claims to be content-free, neutral, procedural—liberalism
.. Kalb sums up the ideology of liberalism as the enforcement of “equal freedom.”
.. The celebrating pastor spent a good five minutes excoriating the concept of same-sex marriage. It seemed strange, and viewed in isolation it was clearly out of place. But in cultural terms, it was understandable. The resurgent populism that we see so much of lately, and that is proving to create pliant material for power-seeking right-wing demagogues, represents the desperate cry of a culture under siege. This populism is the inchoate yelp of people whose cultural terms are failing them and are no longer validated by their social and political institutions. Like cornered Indians pushed into mountain retreats, many of our Middle Americans are retrenching
.. Does this mean that the Benedict Option will be the Christian equivalent of self-defined reservations?
.. Europeans who had been kidnapped by Natives and who grew accustomed to living tribally only very rarely could be persuaded to return to civilization. Many of them, when dragged back, longed to return to live in the more primitive way — and if given the chance, they returned to the tribe. Conversely, Natives brought to live among Europeans usually failed to thrive.