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Post by Paulus de B on Nov 22, 2022 13:39:42 GMT
No one stole a culture. Culture is not just in the past. It is being added to every day. Music is being written. Art is being produced. Social patterns are being developed. The way we dress changes. Politics is changing the environment which we live in. Sports is changing , for example with the growth of women's sports. Social movements rise and fall. We keep our national culture alive Today's events are all part of the long long continuum of what is defined as "our culture". We can at any moment enjoy what has added to it, from theatre to simply playing a track from music from any period and genre. You can't kill or change culture. It is what it is. We and our choices are what it is. Unless youvstop making choices or developing thought, it is an expression of being a people. On the other hand, I think that we should beware of assuming that because some cultural change is inevitable, all cultural change is desirable. The following four things are equally "natural": change, welcoming change, indifference to change, and resistance to change. |
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Post by Dan Dare on Nov 22, 2022 13:55:39 GMT
It's also necessary to distinguish between cultural change that occurs organically and which is embraced (eventually) by the public as a whole as welcome and beneficial, and change that is imposed from above or by outside agency.
I'd suggest spaghetti bolognese and Mandel's Messiah as examples of the former, but will leave it to others to come up with examples of the latter.
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Post by johnofgwent on Mar 19, 2023 22:24:13 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. I’d say the science fiction works of Isaac Asimov but when i looked them up some of the short stories date from the 1940’s but you did say there would be some books etc. |
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Post by jonksy on Mar 20, 2023 7:20:41 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. I’d say the science fiction works of Isaac Asimov but when i looked them up some of the short stories date from the 1940’s but you did say there would be some books etc. Going back even further 'Henry Mayo Bateman' is now only remembered by a few despite several groups trying to keep his memory alive. |
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Post by Orac on Mar 20, 2023 9:52:35 GMT
and the group is meaningless if not made up of individuals Indeed . If the concept of individualism can only exist in a group then individualism is merely an illusion. Despite the fact that a group is formed out of more than one individuals. I'd say individualism has two sides - a good side and self indulgent side The good side prioritises individual responsibility over licence and the bad side prioritises individual licence over responsibility. The good version says you can only take the licence you are prepared to be fully responsible for The bad version ends up placing a responsibility on others to accept and commend whatever you do. Many of our central social organising concepts have been hijacked and distorted into dysfunction |
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Post by Einhorn on Mar 20, 2023 11:48:22 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?
What was the name of that black woman who refused to sit at the back of the bus? She stole 'traditional American culture', Danny. And if Lincoln's emancipation of slaves was 'cultural Marxism', that's fine with us 'Lefties'. |
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Post by Vinny on Mar 20, 2023 15:09:34 GMT
We're British, everyone stole our culture.
We gave the world football.
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Post by jonksy on Mar 20, 2023 15:45:14 GMT
We're British, everyone stole our culture. We gave the world football. We gave the world missionaries but they decided to eat them. |
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Post by Ripley on Mar 20, 2023 20:53:56 GMT
We're British, everyone stole our culture. We gave the world football. Cultures influence one another, and Britain has influenced other cultures to a remarkable degree. Just think of the extent to which the English language has been exported and adopted and has become the third most spoken language on earth and the lingua franca of our time. Do you think that all the countries which widely use English feel that their culture has been stolen? |
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Post by johnofgwent on Mar 21, 2023 7:10:38 GMT
We're British, everyone stole our culture. We gave the world football. Cultures influence one another, and Britain has influenced other cultures to a remarkable degree. Just think of the extent to which the English language has been exported and adopted and has become the third most spoken language on earth and the lingua franca of our time. Do you think that all the countries which widely use English feel that their culture has been stolen? No, i think they want to exploit their new gift by coming here and destroying ours. |
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Post by Dan Dare on Mar 22, 2023 9:55:04 GMT
I've often thought that one of the first decrees I shall issue as ruler of a newly independent England will be to adopt (say) West Frisian or Danish as the national language. That'll stop 'em in their tracks. At least they won't be able to eavesdrop or stick an oar in on our national conversation.
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Post by Orac on Mar 23, 2023 7:45:43 GMT
I think Welsh would be a good choice.
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Post by Paulus de B on Mar 23, 2023 12:35:15 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. When I'm 120, I'll tell you what modern culture people are still nostalgic about  , but it's still 50 years too soon to be sure. Google, as ever, has its perspective on this, and I'd agree with the few of them that I've read. thegreatestbooks.org/the-greatest-fiction-since/1950If you'd asked someone 100 years ago which of their contemporary works would last, would they necessarily get it right? In any case, they had a smaller field to choose from, whereas new books, music and art are rolling off the production line at a tremendous speed nowadays, to satisfy a mass market. Greater literacy, more leisure time perhaps lead to a debasement of the culture, but we can't get too nostalgic about semi-literate wage-slavery. |
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Post by johnofgwent on Mar 23, 2023 13:20:55 GMT
When I'm 120, I'll tell you what modern culture people are still nostalgic about , but it's still 50 years too soon to be sure. Google, as ever, has its perspective on this, and I'd agree with the few of them that I've read. thegreatestbooks.org/the-greatest-fiction-since/1950If you'd asked someone 100 years ago which of their contemporary works would last, would they necessarily get it right? In any case, they had a smaller field to choose from, whereas new books, music and art are rolling off the production line at a tremendous speed nowadays, to satisfy a mass market. Greater literacy, more leisure time perhaps lead to a debasement of the culture, but we can't get too nostalgic about semi-literate wage-slavery. The point about asking someone what would last triggered a memory…. About six years ago i was driving home from the office commute listening to radio 4. It was the friday afternoon PM programme and they had a slot in which they mentioned a chap called James Burke Burke was in my youth a man in a white suit working for the BBC on ‘tomorrow’s world’. He tended to get the computer based stuff. I’m pretty sure he was rounded up to front some of the apollo moon landings and the apollo soyuz space docking mission that was the forerunner of the space station missiobs. ANYWAY one of tbe last things he did for tomorrows world was write a prediction of what tech would flourish in the future. In his own words he got a lot wrong, but as the PM guy interviewing him said, there was a Lot he got right, particularly huge government databases snd surveillance tracking your every move He was asked for this thoughts in future tech and he went for advances in 3D printing with resources being consumed at tbe molecular level. Not as fanciful as it sounds as a chap in Sterling Uni was working on fixing molecules in an artificial substrate to increase catalysis years ago… |
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Post by Ripley on Mar 23, 2023 19:28:17 GMT
Cultures influence one another, and Britain has influenced other cultures to a remarkable degree. Just think of the extent to which the English language has been exported and adopted and has become the third most spoken language on earth and the lingua franca of our time. Do you think that all the countries which widely use English feel that their culture has been stolen? No, i think they want to exploit their new gift by coming here and destroying ours. A gift that wasn't sought. A gift that was a by product of imperialism and colonisation, which now appears to be coming back to bite. |
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, but it's still 50 years too soon to be sure. Google, as ever, has its perspective on this, and I'd agree with the few of them that I've read.