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Myths were once rare and exclusive things. The stories told around fires made up the soul of a culture. From the printing press to the internet, technology helped change all that. The oral became written and the written became all too easy to duplicate. Stories ceased to be communal and became personal. A written scroll was a painstaking effort, too precious to be hoarded, while a book could be one of a million copies. Everyone could have their own stories.
When communal stories became personal stories: some things were gained and others were lost. Religious stories (there is a reason that the Bible remains the quintessential bestseller), national myths and cultural lore gave way to stories of personal empowerment. The story of the group became that of the individual and ‘individualism’, absent after the fall of Greece and Rome, was reborn, first in tales and then the power shift from the collective to the individual.
Western individualism would not have existed without the underpinning of individual narratives and they would not have come into being without a printing press and books that people could read privately, instead of in groups, that increasingly came to center around the individual, not as a prototype, a set of principles or a racial hero, but as the fulfillment of individual drives.
The ‘cultural magic’ of the lore became democratized. It no longer existed only to amplify the agendas of the group, but to actualize the individual. Protagonists no longer needed to be moral or if immoral, a cautionary tale, it was enough that they satisfied someone’s desires. They could be foolish, selfish and immoral, commit adultery, lie, cheat and steal, without facing a reckoning.
The old culture wars had been between different cultures. The ascension of the Greek world led to a round of cultural wars over how much of the new Greek culture to absorb and how much of it to resist. But the new cultural wars were taking place within a culture over cultural morality. These culture wars continued for half a millennium and while there was a good deal of back and forth, they were largely marked by the slow relentless dismantling of cultural morality.
By the 19th century, culture had become an obsession that affected everything and defined society. The rate of change was accelerating and culture moved as fast as technology did. In the 20th century, culture fused with technology so that the medium became the message. Since the medium was change, the culture became about change and society had to keep changing.
With the advent of the counterculture, culture ceased to become fashion and became revelation. Not since the old Italians had treated their Renaissance sculptors, painters and tinkerers as saints had any generation become as convinced that their entertainers were really prophets, not just of beauty or ideas, but of a coming new age that would transform all of mankind.
Religion declined and culture decisively took its place. Culture offered no certainty, but in a world that seemed to be coming apart, neither did religion. While religion stifled hedonism, culture praised the liberating powers of individual impulses to bring joy and change the world. The counterculture soured into drug abuse, violence and cynicism, but the religious revivals that followed in its wake failed to shift the fundamental balance of cultural power away from it.
Cultural magic relentlessly predicted change and since change came, culture was right. The new world might not be better, but it was retroactively inevitable and so cultural magic ruled. The culture was the right side of history and if it seemed awful, that was because we were awful.
Conservatives grappled with the culture before surrendering to it. The culture wars are no longer about the role that culture should play, but what messaging the culture should be invested with. Having forgotten that the medium is the message, they believe that the message can be altered by becoming the counterculture and thus co-opting the culture the way the radicals once did.
But when the medium is change, the only cultural message that can be centered is radical change. To become a counterculture is to embody radical change and then to be changed by it.
Technology democratized culture but then collectivized it again as individual printing presses gave way to publishing monopolies and web sites to social media monopolies. Technological disruptions initially individualize only to then collectivize. Cultural change broke up old traditions through individualism and then collectivized to impose new cultural regimes.
Change created cultural magic. The rapid rate of technological and social change made culture appear disruptive and therefore prophetic. To the youth of each generation, culture appeared to be a harbinger of a new world, only to fall apart leaving behind nostalgia for its lost optimism. Each future became retrofuturistic and each utopia turned into a dystopia to be torn down again.
Our culture has become collectivist and disposable, alienating and ubiquitous, trying and failing to fill the role of religion and national mythos all the while setting out to demolish them. And social media’s mission of enlisting users into making culture has only made teenagers as depressed and dysfunctional as the ‘creators’ at the top of the cultural food chain.
Depression rates correlate with cultural saturation. The more people engage with a narcissistic feedback culture, the more unhappy they become. Like addicts, they turn to culture for validation, meaning and purpose, only to come away drained and depressed.
Cultural magic breaks up the family and replaces it with dissatisfaction, it replaces actual cultures with intellectual properties and religion with AI generated fictions on an extended payment plan. The only future it offers is the dysfunctional one that it makes out of people.
A healthy culture maintains a balance between individual drives and social values, between change and tradition, and does not confuse narratives with truth. It knows that we need to believe in more than whatever we invent ourselves. While we need to change, we also need to have touchstones that allow us to control how we change and what that change is to achieve.
Culture is magic when it conveys to us not only what we need to change, but also what to keep. Radical change destroys what exists now with the promise of making something better down the road, but the only thing that follows in the wake of its destruction is dependency on the destroyers. We have learned what it is to destroy, now we need to learn what to hold on to.
Thumbs up, Daniel. 👍
thank you
We say the reaction from the DNC/Bolsheviks back n 2016 and the Jubulant M.S.
Media Bottom Feeders in 2020 but Biden blew it big time and so Trump is back as the M.S. Media pound their heads on the wall
Brilliant. Hard to comment on.
Exactly my thought, also.
Mr. Greenfield’s pattern of brilliance, his deep thinking and coalescing of broad, disparate points to expose a strong, unifying principle bringing everything together is so consistent that it is easy to take for granted. But when he writes as he does in this article, it is like a splash of cold water in the face – and I am once again reminded of his rare value.
Thank you to you both. An intelligent comment is the most appreciated possible response to an obscure article.
Pop culture is the opium of the masses, woke culture is the fentanyl.
Pretty much.
As ignorance and miseducation spreads, it can only create a dysfunctional irrational population. I’m finding it everywhere–incompetent people unable to function in a normal way. There’s only one workable solution as far as I can see. Frank Zappa said it best in 1966: “Go to the library and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts.”
incompetent people unable to function in a normal way… who look around for something or someone to blame
My mind wants to tell me this spate of school shootings by gender confused individuals is linked to what you have written here. I can’t fully tease it out but I can’t ignore the connection, either.
Great article, Mr. Greenfield.
Cultural Magic is alive and well in the miraculous way Trump was protected from assassination
This is Magical Realism. This is the type of Hero myth that tribal communities retold around campfires. People from all around the world respond viscerally to such events and recognize the hand of God. Add to that Trump’s raised fist was heroic defiance of evil. The photo of Trump with his fist raised and the American flag was. iconic
– only mass media could have circulated it around the globe so quickly. It was iconic and biblical like the image of the collapse of the Twin Towers.
Cultural Magic can promote good or evil.
“Religion declined and culture decisively took its place. Culture offered no certainty, but in a world that seemed to be coming apart, neither did religion.”
Because culture has become an ever-changing chimera religion untethered to universal transcendentals, shaped by men to suit individual preferences. J. Vernon McGee once said religion is the most powerful force for evil in the world. He was right. He distinguished Christianity from religion by saying it was a not so much religion as relationship, initiated by God – from Whom we get our unchanging transcendentals and our only source of joy.
Psalm 16:11 “You will show me the path of life; In Your presence is fullness of joy; At Your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”
Isaiah 35:10 “So the redeemed of the LORD will return and enter Zion with singing, crowned with everlasting joy. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee.”
John 15:11 “These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”
Kynarion Hellenis -I’m not trying to be a wiseacre here, but are you saying that Jesus is spiritual, but not religious?
Because I’ve been thinking of going with that one myself, for real. And ignore everything or anyone else.
No.
The difference between Christianity and all other religions is Jesus, All other religions require works of merit for salvation and approval. For love of His creation, God initiated an otherwise impossible *relationship* with us in Christ, Whom we worship as God incarnate. Jesus became a man, lived a perfect life of obedience to the law in sinless perfection, and offered Himself as the Passover sacrifice for our sins and the sins of the world. We claim (by faith) Jesus’ foreign righteousness as our own as God commands us. God has accomplished all the work of salvation by Himself on our behalf in His Son, the LORD Jesus Christ.
This is the difference. We were dead in our sins, and Our God initiated our redemption and *relationship* with Him. He gave Himself for us, that we might be with Him and enjoy Him forever.
There is no other god who does this or can do this.
We bring nothing to our salvation except the sin which makes it necessary.
Jesus is Lord
Marshall McLuhan