The ascendant (or declining?) current state and future of western culture

[lokisnow]

Spinning out of the election thread, some are claiming American (and/or western) culture is in decline. I heartily disagree and would even argue that American / western culture is ascendant or as ascendant as it always has been post World War II, and I think it is kind of bonkers to say our culture is in decline.  

[James Arryn]

Too vaguely defined to argue on merits, but I'd definitely say that the high water marks of 'ascendency' were the Breton woods/Marshall plan era and the fall of the wall, and I don't think the current status is near either of those. Doesn't mean it's declining, necessarily...but I don't think it's rising much if at all. 

[lokisnow]

So which culture is ascendant then? please support your choice with representative examples of music television, movies or non entertainment cultural exports that are outperforming American or western counterparts on the global stage

[Kalbear]

We're getting close to China doing so. 

China isn't winning culturally via movies or music - what we  tend to think of as culture - but they are winning in electronic use. Things like AliBaba and their system for paying for basically everything via phone have taken off and only the US being backwater has made it so it's not really here. It's become a massive defacto model in Africa as well.

Furthermore, China is becoming far more influential as a market. Western movies once looked at local box office as the way to gauge success; now they look at worldwide, and China success is the biggest piece there. We've seen a bunch of movies cater to Chinese marketing, some subtly and some completely horribly unsubtly (the most recent Transformers come to mind). 

It's not quite there - Chinese culture is still remarkably insular and introverted - but we're starting to see a lot more extension. 

[James Arryn]

I think you're adopting several assumptions which are each worth discussing, but a quick response would include notions like the greatest indicator being language (English, partially due to US is largely static, whereas Mandarin-Chinese, Spanish and Arabic are rapidly rising...as is even French, oddly.), the idea that it's not necessarily a zero-sum situation, the idea that dominance =/= ascendancy, the idea that within the cultural rubric you seem to be using there remains a huge chunk of movement still more directly descended from British influence than American, etc.

Basically, I don't think the US has been replaced as the most dominant yet, but it's not presently ascending IMO...if anyone is I think we'd have to say China, but the world does not require a clearly ascending culture. A lot of market adjustments seem to be preparing for a significant Chinese role in culture-shaping.

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

We're getting close to China doing so. 

China isn't winning culturally via movies or music - what we  tend to think of as culture - but they are winning in electronic use. Things like AliBaba and their system for paying for basically everything via phone have taken off and only the US being backwater has made it so it's not really here. It's become a massive defacto model in Africa as well.

Furthermore, China is becoming far more influential as a market. Western movies once looked at local box office as the way to gauge success; now they look at worldwide, and China success is the biggest piece there. We've seen a bunch of movies cater to Chinese marketing, some subtly and some completely horribly unsubtly (the most recent Transformers come to mind). 

It's not quite there - Chinese culture is still remarkably insular and introverted - but we're starting to see a lot more extension. 

To take an historical example of this USA was already one the largest economies in the world during the late 1800's, being comparable to even the greatest colonial empires. Yet the country was still not particularly influential culturally, nor did their word carry much weight in the arena of global politics. Certainly not anywhere near what you'd expect from comparing industrial outputs at least. It was not until the two world wars, during which the USA started vastly expanding its military and pursuing a more expansionistic foreign policy across the globe at the same time as the European empires mostly destroyed each other, that the present world order started taking shape. But at that point USA had already had the potential for being one of the great powers in the world for many decades without really doing much about it.

What this means is that people shouldn't take the present relative invisibility of China outside the economic arena as a guarantee for that the status quo is going to last.

[maarsen]

I tend to take the long view of western civilization.  There had been a long and steady uphill slope of western civilization starting with the Greeks up until now. The centre of culture may change but the culture as a whole does keep going on.  Britain has a stretch as the centre and now it is the US that is the centre. Baghdad  did have a brief spurt as a centre of enlightenment but that fizzled. China may have pretensions to be such a  dominant cultural centre but without a commitment to free scientific enquiry and political freedom, they are going nowhere. Weren't  we all supposed to learn Japanese a generation more so ago?  How did that work out? If you want to track the progress of a civilization,  check the one with the best mathematicians. 

[Disturber of Peace]

Western culture will be the cornerstone of The Federation of Planets.

[sologdin]

ZOMG when i see spenglerianism i reach for my pistols.

[Jo498]

A culture/civilization/empire can be in decline, it  can be in tatters without any obvious other candidate to replace it.  The Roman Empire and the Graeco-Roman culture of classical antiquity was in decline for more than 300 years: ca. 150-450 AD if one takes the power of the Roman empire. If one takes as was traditionally done the 5th and 4th centuries *BC* as the summit of Greek art and philosophy there was stasis, epigonalism and/or decline for about 1000 years afterwards...

After the Western Empire fell in the late 5th century AD there was no other Empire to replace it for quite a while. Of course there was Byzantium but this was also in decline, only even longer and more slowly. And from the 7th century there were the Arabian caliphates but they were not as powerful or influential as Rome.

Such developments are going slowly. There are times of empire and there are times of the barbarians and both can last centuries.

[ummester]

Yea, a decline doesn't have to be fast. Rome's wasn't - we only think of Rome as falling in a day (or quickly) because the thought is retrospective.

I think Western Culture is undoubtedly in decline, the indicators are too obvious.

Art is metropolitan and stagnant. When was the last time a genuinely original film or video game came out of the West and actually said anything of meaning about the West? How many remakes are we subjected to?

We live for now and our societies are structured more for today than tomorrow. A ascendant society looks to the future, a culture in decline looks to the past.

We idolise chefs on reality TV - this is part of looking to the past, or trying to remember how good it tasted. Rome idolised chefs and food also, as it was decline. We pay sports people obscene amounts, again Rome did this with Gladiators - it's part of trying to rekindle former glory.

I'm not going to get into moral decline because morals have become a fairly subjective area, suffice to say we (as a broad society) are willing to turn a blind eye towards global suffering if it keeps us going just that little bit longer. We are definitely more decadent than we were 20, 30 or 40 years ago - this can be judged objectively. There is an excellent documentary on Australian decadence from 2006

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decadence_(TV_series)

Seek it out if you are interested, it's well made and is from the perspective of an immigrant who came to Australia on the promise of something better and found something... decadent

We are no longer that productive. We deliver services now (entertainment services, by way of stagnant film making), financial services (by way of extreme greed and corruption) and technological services (by way of inventing new tech that is assembled in the East).

Consolidation of populations into cities and the ever increasing disrepair of those cities is another sign of cultural decline. No civilisation, ever, lasts forever, they all crumble - but they start to come apart at the seams (perhaps surprisingly) when the masses head into the most populace areas and not away.

There are more, heaps more - and there is a lot written about it and some excellent documentaries on it.

[ummester]

2 hours ago, sologdin said:

ZOMG when i see spenglerianism i reach for my pistols.

You read it? I haven't - have only read about it. I guess the modern interpretations and documentaries I have seen must be based (at least in part) on his books.

[Gasp of Many Reeds]

Culture today is globalising and hybridising. With instant communication available between people from very different backgrounds on opposite sides of the world, there is a greater global sharing of information and ideas, which nation states are less and less able to control. Sure, elements of Chinese culture and ideas are finding their way westward, as is the case with India, the Arab world, etc. but the flow is very much two-way, if not multidirectional. The main difference is that western culture is no longer as dominant, there is more return flow, but this does not herald, I think, the replacement of western cultural hegemony by eastern so much as it heralds a developing cosmopolitanism in the Classical sense if the cosmopolitan as a citizen of the world. Political hegemony is connected to cultural hegemony but by a feedback loop rather than directly. I think that whether or not China, India etc rise to fully overtake America and Europe economically, the cultural changes going on in our current era are momentous enough that by the time thus happens the parameters of the political global order will have changed in ways that would be unrecognisable 50 years ago and cannot adequately be discerned in their presently nascent condition today.

[Channel4s-JonSnow]

I don't think Western Culture is in decline, if anything it is more widespread than ever. However 'western culture' is really becoming 'global culture', where everyone is listening to the same music, same movies, looking at the same things on the internet. I can travel round a lot of countries these days and not see huge differences between them, there are various cultural nuances, but life is essentially the same for most people. Globalisation as homogenised everyone.

Of course China has grown in status and power and money, and becoming more influential, but its still an insular country and its culture doesn't tend to spread in the same way. 

I think what we are seeing at the moment is the realisation that after the Cold War ended, the US took over as the only superpower and turned itself into 'Team America World Police' in some ways, and tried to change the world in its image, but now that power is being challenged and other countries are less willing to just go along with the US' point of view on all matters. The US has also realised that its policies have become unpopular and has lost the stomach for being the protector of world peace, and so is backing off, becoming more insular. 


 

[Channel4s-JonSnow]

36 minutes ago, ummester said:

Yea, a decline doesn't have to be fast. Rome's wasn't - we only think of Rome as falling in a day (or quickly) because the thought is retrospective.

I think Western Culture is undoubtedly in decline, the indicators are too obvious.

Art is metropolitan and stagnant. When was the last time a genuinely original film or video game came out of the West and actually said anything of meaning about the West? How many remakes are we subjected to?

We live for now and our societies are structured more for today than tomorrow. A ascendant society looks to the future, a culture in decline looks to the past.

We idolise chefs on reality TV - this is part of looking to the past, or trying to remember how good it tasted. Rome idolised chefs and food also, as it was decline. We pay sports people obscene amounts, again Rome did this with Gladiators - it's part of trying to rekindle former glory.

I'm not going to get into moral decline because morals have become a fairly subjective area, suffice to say we (as a broad society) are willing to turn a blind eye towards global suffering if it keeps us going just that little bit longer. We are definitely more decadent than we were 20, 30 or 40 years ago - this can be judged objectively. There is an excellent documentary on Australian decadence from 2006

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decadence_(TV_series)

Seek it out if you are interested, it's well made and is from the perspective of an immigrant who came to Australia on the promise of something better and found something... decadent

We are no longer that productive. We deliver services now (entertainment services, by way of stagnant film making), financial services (by way of extreme greed and corruption) and technological services (by way of inventing new tech that is assembled in the East).

Consolidation of populations into cities and the ever increasing disrepair of those cities is another sign of cultural decline. No civilisation, ever, lasts forever, they all crumble - but they start to come apart at the seams (perhaps surprisingly) when the masses head into the most populace areas and not away.

There are more, heaps more - and there is a lot written about it and some excellent documentaries on it.

I've heard this theory about the Roman empire falling apart because of its decadence, or its decadence being one of the contributors to its decline, but I don't buy it. There were far too many reasons for the empire crumbling and you can't boil it down to one thing. Lack of money, reliance on income through violence,  over extension, huge population changes, wars etc all contributed to it. 

As for decadence in Western society, well its all a point of view isn't it. Whats decadent to one person isn't to another. Whos to say what is decadent.

I also don't believe we are backwards looking as you claim, the internet has made everyone incredibly tech focussed and people are constantly striving to invent and create. We live in an actually incredibly vibrant time, where technology is in fact advancing at an enormous rate, and probably will only get faster. 

There is a problem with western GDP growth, or even world growth, but again I think technology will change that, growth tends to come in cycles and is technology led. It is a bit of a fallacy to claim that we don't 'produce anything'. Just because something isn't made in a factory doesn't mean it isn't a product. Intellection property and services are just as valuable as something that comes off a factory line. We live in the information age now, not the industrial era. I think the way we produce and the way our economies work will change over time, we are just adjusting to it now.

 

[Gasp of Many Reeds]

A lot to be frank will depend on whether and how the energy transition from fossil fuels to nuclear and renewables takes place and what the effects of climate change are on population sustainability and movement, and what the subsequent impacts on economic and technological growth. Enough ecological disruption and globalisation could well go into reverse, with a move back towards local centres of power fighting to defend their own interests and diminishing resources. In such a situation, of course, everyone probably will be in decline and American worries about Chinese cultural hegemony will be replaced by worries about keeping those damn Shelbyvillians away from our precious unirradiated water supplies. 

[Channel4s-JonSnow]

11 minutes ago, Gasp of Many Reeds said:

A lot to be frank will depend on whether and how the energy transition from fossil fuels to nuclear and renewables takes place and what the effects of climate change are on population sustainability and movement, and what the subsequent impacts on economic and technological growth. Enough ecological disruption and globalisation could well go into reverse, with a move back towards local centres of power fighting to defend their own interests and diminishing resources. In such a situation, of course, everyone probably will be in decline and American worries about Chinese cultural hegemony will be replaced by worries about keeping those damn Shelbyvillians away from our precious unirradiated water supplies. 

I think actually the major problem facing the planet in the next century will be an ageing population, and slowing population growth. Everyone is anti immigration at the moment, and under the impression their countries are over crowded, but what happens when everyone is older, not having enough children to resupply the workforce, and suddenly immigrants are in demand. That is going to change the dynamics, and its already been happening.

[Jo498]

48 minutes ago, Channel4s-JonSnow said:

Lack of money, reliance on income through violence,  over extension, huge population changes, wars etc all contributed to it. 

As for decadence in Western society, well its all a point of view isn't it. Whats decadent to one person isn't to another. Whos to say what is decadent.

I also don't believe we are backwards looking as you claim, the internet has made everyone incredibly tech focussed and people are constantly striving to invent and create. We live in an actually incredibly vibrant time, where technology is in fact advancing at an enormous rate, and probably will only get faster.

Wouldn't you agree that some of the harder factors like overextension, wars do apply to the US?

As for decadence, I agree that it is overrated and probably not a decisive factor. But it is actually not as culturally relative as one might think. What Roman authors from the 1st century on deplored were similar things we hear about today: destruction of traditional social bonds, favoritism, wasteful luxuries, sexual libertinage etc.

As for invention and creation: I think in the last 25 years or so we seem to be mostly inventing and creating (decadent) toys. If the current Pokémon Go mania is not (admittedly mostly harmless and childish) decadence, I do not know what would be...

[Channel4s-JonSnow]

9 minutes ago, Jo498 said:

Wouldn't you agree that some of the harder factors like overextension, wars do apply to the US?

As for decadence, I agree that it is overrated and probably not a decisive factor. But it is actually not as culturally relative as one might think. What Roman authors from the 1st century on deplored were similar things we hear about today: destruction of traditional social bonds, favoritism, wasteful luxuries, sexual libertinage etc.

As for invention and creation: I think in the last 25 years or so we seem to be mostly inventing and creating (decadent) toys. If the current Pokémon Go mania is not (admittedly mostly harmless and childish) decadence, I do not know what would be...

Yes I'd agree that the US has over extended in some ways, but mainly because it has put itself / been forced into taking on a parental role for the world. In terms of territory and governance it hasn't extended so much, and can reasonably easily pull back. It is different to the Roman Empire. Its still the richest country in the world and actually its economy is in good shape, despite doomongers opinions, certainly better than Europes. China and Russia won't be able to compete with them while they live under such rigid structures. Europe is in a bit of a mess at the moment as well. 

As for decadence, no I still think it is relative. Our moral values are generally based on what is good for us to function as a society (not given down to us by some god!). So for instance we don't allow murder because if everyone could murder each other then society would fall apart. Our values about sex have changed because whats necessary for society is different. We no longer need to have women stay at home and look after the kids. Men and women no longer have split roles of provider and housewife, whereas in the past a woman having children by mulitple father would have caused chaos and problems, now its not a problem. Plus we have female contraception, all of which leads less of a problem with everyone having sex. There is no real logical reason why sex is bad, or should be considered decadent. 

There is also less need for people to work so hard these days in order to get the very basics they need to survive. So yes there is more free time and more ways to spend your money on things which will be fun. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. 

I think invention and creation these days is commercially led, but you might focus on fun items, but in the world of medicine and almost all fields of technology huge advancements are being made which benefit humanity, we might not be in the space age yet but we're still racing ahead. 

[Castel]

2 hours ago, ummester said:

We idolise chefs on reality TV - this is part of looking to the past, or trying to remember how good it tasted. Rome idolised chefs and food also, as it was decline. We pay sports people obscene amounts, again Rome did this with Gladiators - it's part of trying to rekindle former glory.

I don't think you can draw much from gladiators, given the wide period they were used in (including periods of prosperity). 

Or sportsmen for making money tbh.They make money cause they bring money.