Cancelling Culture
Cancelling Culture
They make a desert and call it peace
Robbers of the world, now that the earth is insufficient for their all-devastating hands they probe even the sea; if their enemy is rich, they are greedy; if he is poor, they thirst for dominion; neither east nor west has satisfied them; alone of mankind they are equally covetous of poverty and wealth. Robbery, slaughter and plunder they falsely name empire; they make a desert and call it peace
Tacitus, Agricola 30.4
Well, what empire? At the moment people with houses full of Chinese trash are shrieking about an evil abroad. They have been silent to many evils nearby, as the custom with this kind of fast food-for-thought is to count your care miles. The further away some horrible news - the closer it is to home.
Why do so many people have such strong feelings for the abstract and yet so little response to the concrete? What makes there so much more compelling than here?
The scale of outrage we have seen of late has been immense, with little to nothing said by the same people on the near total abolition of the rights based settlement we used to call the Free World.
How can it be that one enormity – far away – can ignite our nations where domestic ones cannot? The explanation is simple. Our distinct and local cultures based on tradition, custom and the extended family of kinsmanship has been replaced by the mass media.
It is easier to care for a manufactured idea because it has been packaged to pander to you. Secondly, to focus people on fantasy narratives is to remove them from engagement with their real life problems - such as the accelerating collapse of their civilisation. There is a comfort in displaced concern which avoids all the difficult questions, since these mass market catchphrases are presented as final answers. You can choose to clap the Current Thing, or you can choose to be despised.
The resulting craze, engineered to cancel Russia, will make a desert of our lives for the sake of a corrupt client state indifferent to the suffering of its own people.
The mass media promotes a deracinating internationale of individualism, detached from any meaningful social, moral or cultural bonds. The watchwords of this global tribe are misleading. Diversity, multiculturalism, globalisation, world citizen – terms bespeaking of enlightenment and a liberating project of emancipation from the embarrassing ways of the past.
A new identity of nothing. A mask without a human face. The scale of this monoculture is terrifying. Consider the architecture of the monumentalists – deliberately giddying perspectives designed to shrink the viewer. This is you from the point of view of mass scale society – a dot.
Culture is a bulwark against manufactured mania. It anchors you in the past, which is made out of the wisdom and folly of everyone else who lived. The current vogue for cancellation is not a process of editing our story to produce a better tale. It is not to update your beliefs by removing problems. It is a project of total destruction. It does not aim to remove the part, but the whole. Its aim is to cancel culture.
To cancel culture is to cancel our identity, our place in time as well as in space. It is to deracinate us all, to prohibit the dreadful consequences of historical continuity. Why does continuity matter? It matters because it teaches us that things we consider to be new have happened before. The shape of history is not a line driving ever upwards into some imagined moment of total liberation. Whole civilisations go the way of winter, because history shows all things have a summer and then fade.
Culture is the means by which we connect ourselves to those neighbours in time, the dead, from whose we might learn to free ourselves from the contagion of the moment. Culture reminds us of ourselves, of who we are and what we might become. It is an alternative to the moraine of debris which pours into our minds from the monstrous glacial ruin of the Regime, scraping away all that is beautiful and precious into a featureless wasteland. Blankness is the result. Everywhere a nowhereland, with its architecture of sheds, its flat one dimensional cartoon style.
These ugly avatars signify the depersonalising hostility to cultural variance, seeking to make a pastel soup of humanity that they might better match the corporate simulacrum which seeks to spellbind us all. The currency of the supermarketplace of ideas is one designed to debase. A curious medium of exchange is circulated whose function is to impoverish everyone who uses it. These ideas – these client statements - which they sell are like a virus, which sickens as it spreads, extinguishing the very memory of health in its consumer base.
The attempt to erase us all into a omniculture of insignificance is a function of corporate power zelotically endorsed by Progressives. These believers in the Upward Triangle of Time, for whose inexorable progress they can offer no explanation but belief, are devoted to the idea of deleting our culture as if it were some troublesome Twitter account. Culture, not the anti-art or infantile fantasies of popular entertainment, embarrasses their quixotic efforts to gainsay the world with make belief. They are scolds who seek to wipe us all out, and right now they are cheering on the vicious death cult of the Neoconservatives who many very well do so.
I say let those who wish to become nothing but the memes of authority destroy themselves. They cannot be saved by argument, and instead must recover from their thanaterotic infatuation by themselves. Words seem insufficient to break that spell.
For you who wish to know and to love, for you to whom people are not as replaceable as a pair of shoes, for we who value human relation over mere transaction there is the majesty and consolation of culture, whose power to improve us relies on its preservation of that which is worst as well as best. Furnish your mind with the hated monuments of magnificence, and make of it a palace.
To delete whole tranches of reality is to edit oneself in real time, seeking to exclude anything which does not exactly correspond to your temporary preferences. These are also called ‘whims’. It is to make of man a kind of cloud, always seeking first to block out the light and second to rain, before vanishing like a whisp, to form again in some ill-augured dawn. Such clouds congregate in storms, ionising in company to a frenzy. It is a process of catharsis which poisons and does not purge, an addiction to the vices of wrath and to envy. Ultimately, cancelling culture is about this green eyed monster, which must destroy everything it cannot call itself. Because it cannot love itself.
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