12/16/23 DRAFT
Maybe our problems arise not due to race or gender or other demographic markers, but rather our problems with conflicting demographics are expressive of something deeper and more complex, like “culture.” I am talking about that matrix of more and less shared values in which we live our distinctively human lives, with or without celebration of our commonly shared humanity.
As we come to live more and more outside the envelope of traditional cultures, both particular cultures and culture itself come into question – often energetically and casually dismissed or “cancelled” (as id people knew what they were doing And, of course, there is one culture in particular which is vigorously under question today, one which is known for having exploited and violated everything of the Earth in the name of nothing other than individual “profit,” “the pursuit of property” (later dressed up the scriptures of the American experiment as “the pursuit of happiness”), . in the scriptures of the American experiment), and confidence as to superiority. Ken Burns’ recent film, “The American Buffalo,” serves as an excellent example of this perspective.
It is astonishing, really, the mix of guilt, sorrow, and aggressive defensiveness that erupts as people awake to the realities of how some of our ancestors thought and acted in the several hundred year rampage of modernity. For it turned out that the thoughts and actions expressive of this culture are corrosive not only to the Earth, but to the value infrastructure of society, especially to the root value-transmitting institutions of child-rearing, education, and religion. And now, with corrosion and collapse all around, we are tempted to give over these functions to either the autocrat or AI.
So latter day objections to encouraging “wokeness” in both education and popular culture are understandable: the awareness and cultural attitude that follow from entering into this state (or imaginings thereof) are radically destabilizing. And it does not take conscious awareness in these matters for people to begin a vague advocacy of an ideal past that can be brought back into the present as a cure for the decadence, chaos, and disfunction that are all around – a way to “make America great again.” Humans caught in the post-modern soup of relativism, reduction of all relationships to interest and power, and moral disease become dangerous in many ways (such that the discipline or “repression” of traditional cultures can seem a small price to pay for peace and quiet, or at least law and order).
And this is by no means only a private phenomenon. At the farthest extreme of the toxic individualism with which the modern period ends, we have a whole generation of elected government representatives, many of whom are not so much old (another confusing demographic identifier) as they are only interested in having a nice job. They cow to and “kiss the ring” of the one who simultaneously represents and threatens them, knowing at some level full well that he does not care about them, but, despite this, remaining in the thrall to one who models behavior appropriate to the situation – which, in the crazy-making whirlwind he both reflects and creates. What repression will it take to stop the insurrection?
Dr. Stephen Rowe 