(Archdruid Report) -- A few years back the American middle class indulged in another of the periodic orgies of self-congratulation in which it proclaims its opinion of its own historical importance. The inspiration for this particular outburst was a 2000 book entitled Cultural Creatives by Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, which announced that the spread of certain fashionable ideas through the middle class meant nothing less than the imminent transformation of American society.
Apparently none of its more enthusiastic reviewers remembered that the same imminent transformation had been announced just as confidently in the pages of Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Charles Reich’s The Greening of America (1970), and a long line of predecessors reaching back well into the nineteenth century. Like so many of today’s new ideas, in other words, this one has been around for a good long time, just as the “new” attitudes Ray and Anderson identified as hallmarks of their “cultural creatives” have been widely accepted among a sizeable sector of the American intelligentsia since the heyday of the Transcendentalists in the 1820s.
Yet there’s more going on here than the simple failure of memory discussed in last week’s Archdruid Report post. What is at issue here touches on the meaning and value of culture itself.
Mind you, it’s difficult to talk meaningfully about that topic in America today, after decades of “culture wars” in which all sides redefined the very concept of culture to fit their own Utopian fantasies and political objectives. It’s doubly difficult because the last half century or so has witnessed the systematic destruction of America’s own national and regional cultures, their replacement with a manufactured pseudoculture based on the values of the American urban intelligentsia, and the consequent revolt of many working class Americans against the concept of culture altogether.
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