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Post by Dan Dare on Oct 31, 2022 12:26:55 GMT
" Sometime during the last half-century, someone stole our culture. n the 1950s, America was a great place. It was safe. It was decent. Children got good educations in the public schools. Even blue-collar fathers brought home middle-class incomes, so moms could stay home with the kids. Television shows reflected sound, traditional values.
Where did it all go? How did that America become the sleazy, decadent place we live in today – so different that those who grew up prior to the ’60s feel like it’s a foreign country? Did it just “happen”?"
This is the opening paragraph of an article by William Lind published in The Standard in 2020. The answer is, per Lind of course the 'cultural marxists'.
While it should be immediately obvious even from the opening paragraph above that Lind is describing what he sees as being wrong with contemporary American society, and who he fingers as the culprits, is this in any sense relevant to Britain in 2022.
Britain is not America, of course, but I would contend that we are suffering the same cultural decline and can identify many of the same culprits as being the cause.
Any dissenting views?
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Post by jeg er on Oct 31, 2022 12:36:02 GMT
Thatcherism and Reagonomics and the Neoliberalism of the Conservative based parties would be responsible for the disappearance of
"blue-collar fathers brought home middle-class incomes, so moms could stay home with the kids"
They broke the post war consensus
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Post by Deleted on Oct 31, 2022 15:06:44 GMT
I agree, Dan, that what once was has been smashed. It's not just a tragedy it's a catastrophe for many young people. They may not think so, but they have been deprived of normality and things are getting crazier by the day. Coming to a head now, I think. Cutting off children's genitals in Mengelian horror operations and interfering with their hormones is about as evil as it gets.
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Post by Dan Dare on Oct 31, 2022 17:02:19 GMT
Has the left won the Culture War? Has there even been one?
Well the left seem to think so. Writing in the Winter 1996 issue of the Marxist journal Dissent, the ‘prominent American political theorist and public intellectual’ Michael Walzer enumerated some of the cultural victories won by the left since the 1960s:
• "The visible impact of feminism."
• "The effects of affirmative action."
• "The emergence of gay rights politics, and … the attention paid to it in the media."
• "The acceptance of cultural pluralism."
• "The transformation of family life," including "rising divorce rates, changing sexual mores, new household arrangements — and, again, the portrayal of all this in the media."
• "The progress of secularization; the fading of religion in general and Christianity in particular from the public sphere — classrooms, textbooks, legal codes, holidays, and so on."
• "The virtual abolition of capital punishment."
• "The legalization of abortion."
• "The first successes in the effort to regulate and limit the private ownership of guns."
Significantly, Walzer admitted that these victories were imposed upon our society by "liberal elites," rather than being driven "by the pressure of a mass movement or a majoritarian party."
These changes "reflect the leftism or liberalism of lawyers, judges, mandarins and bureaucrats, university academics, school teachers, social workers, journalists, television and screen writers — not the population at large," noted Walzer.
Rather than building "stable or lasting movements or creat[ing] coherent constituencies," the left focused on "winning the Gramscian war of position." Gramsci’s distinctive insight was that the construction of the total state requires the seizure of the "mediating institutions" that insulate the individual from the power of the government — the family, organized religion, and so forth — and a systematic redefinition of the culture in order to sustain the new political order.
Dissent Magazine is still going strong and Walzer is still in the saddle as Editor emeritus. Old Marxists, it seems, just like old soldiers, never die.
So the question then becomes: to what extent has what Walzer lists as the Battle Honours of the Left in the Clinton era been replicated here in western Europe, and in the UK in particular? What other spectacular gains are there to brag about?
Well, we would have to include Vanna's Mengelian experimentations on children for a start.
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Post by Pacifico on Oct 31, 2022 17:23:04 GMT
Britain is not America, of course, but I would contend that we are suffering the same cultural decline and can identify many of the same culprits as being the cause. Any dissenting views?
No dissent here - certainly our cultural decline has mirrored the US. The question is whether it is too late to fight back - and my conclusion is yes unfortunately. |
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Post by jeg er on Oct 31, 2022 17:43:27 GMT
Thank God religion went out of fashion
Now if all those arab and asian countries would learn from us Europeans, the world would mature into a very forward thinking place.
Ideology is immature and weak-minded
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Post by Orac on Nov 6, 2022 11:58:28 GMT
I find what is happening now far more worrying than any of the bring and buy sales and band practices churches traditionally tended to organise in the UK
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Post by Bentley on Nov 6, 2022 12:39:33 GMT
This is our new culture ..
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”
― George Orwell, 1984
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Post by johnofgwent on Nov 7, 2022 19:23:30 GMT
No dissent here.
I’ve posted separately on the issues that destroyed the single breadwinner family. I think the cost of housing more than any other contributed to the need for both parents to work, but the sixties and seventies still had a community where by the nineties families were farmed out to private nurseries that made a fortune.
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Post by Paulus de B on Nov 8, 2022 13:07:14 GMT
I feel the same way, but I have to wonder: what would a person 50 years older than ourselves say about the culture that we're nostalgic about? What in modern culture will a person feel nostalgic about in 50 years time? Some part of how we feel is due to the fact that we're reactionary old fogeys. It reminds me of the commentator I heard recently complaining that online shopping was undermining the traditional supermarket. |
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Post by Dan Dare on Nov 9, 2022 19:01:42 GMT
"What in modern culture will a person feel nostalgic about in 50 years time?"
Brings to mind the 'Murray Challenge', laid down by Charles Murray, author of "Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950:"
In 2003 Murray stated:
"I think that the number of novels, songs, and paintings done since 1950 that anyone will still care about 200 years from now is somewhere in the vicinity of zero. Not exactly zero, but close. I find a good way to make this point is to ask anyone who disagrees with me to name a work that will survive -- and then ask, "Seriously?" Very few works indeed can defend themselves against the "Seriously?" question."
Try it. It's harder than it looks.
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Post by colbops on Nov 9, 2022 21:52:01 GMT
"What in modern culture will a person feel nostalgic about in 50 years time?" Brings to mind the 'Murray Challenge', laid down by Charles Murray, author of " Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950:"In 2003 Murray stated: "I think that the number of novels, songs, and paintings done since 1950 that anyone will still care about 200 years from now is somewhere in the vicinity of zero. Not exactly zero, but close. I find a good way to make this point is to ask anyone who disagrees with me to name a work that will survive -- and then ask, "Seriously?" Very few works indeed can defend themselves against the "Seriously?" question."Try it. It's harder than it looks. Of course. that has always been the case albeit that technology inevitably allows more things to be archived than ever before, so technically more things will 'survive' in some form whether or not they ever see the light of day again. Aside from Barbie Girl, Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back, and The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump it is hard to imagine much else that people will care about in 200 years time though a lot of it will likely be accessible somewhere. |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Nov 10, 2022 0:00:35 GMT
" Sometime during the last half-century, someone stole our culture. n the 1950s, America was a great place. It was safe. It was decent. Children got good educations in the public schools. Even blue-collar fathers brought home middle-class incomes, so moms could stay home with the kids. Television shows reflected sound, traditional values.
Where did it all go? How did that America become the sleazy, decadent place we live in today – so different that those who grew up prior to the ’60s feel like it’s a foreign country? Did it just “happen”?"
This is the opening paragraph of an article by William Lind published in The Standard in 2020. The answer is, per Lind of course the 'cultural marxists'.
While it should be immediately obvious even from the opening paragraph above that Lind is describing what he sees as being wrong with contemporary American society, and who he fingers as the culprits, is this in any sense relevant to Britain in 2022.
Britain is not America, of course, but I would contend that we are suffering the same cultural decline and can identify many of the same culprits as being the cause.
Any dissenting views?
You aught to study the US in around the 1930s time. This was when it started. Prior to that I think you will find it was kind of underground late 19c in the UK. There is a bit of a tenuous connection, but late 19c UK saw secretive socialist organisations form and they started to infiltrate the arts. You can go back even further and see some strands of its formation. From the UK perspective there was a backlash against the industrial revolution and a desire to go green, i.e. become regressive and go backwards to feudal times where the upper class held all the power and the middle class did not exist. Meanwhile in the US there were a lot of Jews that emigrated from Eastern Europe. They were very smart and were the classic case of rags to riches. They also popped up in Germany where some of the earliest research was done into sex, as per Kinsey kind of stuff. You had a Freudian influence here too. In the US around the 30s time there was also these communists that were attacking an infiltrating the churches. Another factor was the new invention of radio, which was used as a propaganda device and that is where the soap opera was born. Advances in psychology and radio meant the state could now manipulate the masses far more easily. Of course people often attribute the changes to the 60s, but it was already well in place by then. The 60s was a next step where they created the generation gap to stop knowledge flowing throgh parents. All very sinister but then that is how we are ruled. The dumbing down in schools started 60-70s time as well. I think they started dumbing down maths first then the teaching of English. |
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Post by Dan Dare on Nov 10, 2022 7:51:36 GMT
"You aught to study the US in around the 1930s time. "
I already did. You make it sound like nobody knew about such things until you discovered them.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Nov 10, 2022 10:10:45 GMT
"You aught to study the US in around the 1930s time. " I already did. You make it sound like nobody knew about such things until you discovered them. The books that contain the information are long out of print. I used to know a researcher who pulled out the relevant info which was largely suppressed and now a Disneyland version of history is available in all the shops. |
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