Two Important Reads
I’m still processing. Two writer blogs that you should be frequenting are The Dacian and A Hellene Author. Yesterday they published blog posts that touch on the same topic – the death of our culture.
From the former:
We are twenty-one years into the 21st Century but culturally we are trapped in a nostalgic pastiche of the 20th. Our current seems incapable of articulating the present. Everything is referential to the ghosts of the past. Our social and political commentary is trapped in the mystified history of World War II seen understood through the lens of superhero movies and Tarantino infantilism. Endless performative stupidity.
From the latter:
But the fact remains that we are trapped in a bizarre Frankenstein’s monster of World War II nostalgia and 1980s geopolitical thinking and artistic aesthetics, a paradigm stuck in those two decades, with no end in sight. A culture of pastiche. Take bits of the past to make something that’s kind of like the past. It’s like a road trip without a map or an idea of where you want to go: you decide to just pull off in some pretty residential development and just do circles around the cul-de-sac for hours, driving a lot but going nowhere.
There’s a glitch in humanity’s code. The present is a broken record we cannot unskip. In the end, I shouldn’t be so surprised that robots can imitate us so convincingly.
Ouch.
These are the guys articulating some deep currents flowing beneath the culture. That shifting of the earth’s mantle that most of us perceive without full understanding of what happened. We’re in one of those golden hot summer sunset hours when the days begin to shorten and the breeze carries a cool bite with it that portends the coming winter, and they have given voice to warnings.
They aren’t alone, and there are bigger names warning us of the coming dangers. But those bigger names seldom offer any solution than to turn inward and embrace the decline with hedonism and self-improvement for its own sake. The best I can do is “pray harder bro” and “have kids and raise them right”. Platitudes that, while true, don’t add much to the conversation.
Watch these two authors. If anyone can offer a solution for the culture, and not just for the individual, it’s these two. They don’t have it yet, I don’t think, but at least they are hacking through the bracken on the hunt for a solution. If anyone can find it, it’s them.