Most socialists, to make a blindingly obvious point, which nonetheless remains completely invisible to them, conflate the economic and meaning realms, such that they assume with no justification that changing the economic system will inherently change the meaning system for the better. This is stupid. It has always been stupid, and will always be stupid, because the systems are logically separate, and require individual attention.
When impossible, socialism has often come to be seen as an attractive alternative to everything anyone doesn’t like about the world. It is a solution, they feel–no thinking is involved here–to the problems of human cruelty, poverty, and disillusionment.
As a word, culture has come under attack by the Gramscians as an “instrument of power”. That their own claim to power rests on nothing but a markedly inferior version of the institutions they want to attack is, again, invisible to them. The whole thing is lunacy, top to bottom. Because it does not withstand even rudimentary critical scrutiny, their solution is to simply call the process of coherent thinking racist. As I have said often, this is a snake eating its own tail. It cannot end well, and certainly not in any lasting amelioration of any true human suffering.
But here is the point I wanted to make, the rest being prelude: culture as an emergent property of human interactions represents the possibility of reliable human connection. When western intellectuals are discussing ideas, those ideas are their connection. The process of discussion is their connection. When Africans are dancing in the streets, the joys they feel in old rhythms, and old songs, is their connection. Things we all know, processes we all know–and know that everyone around us knows–are culture. If you can predict how someone will behave based on cultural conditioning, you have a culture. When you cannot, you do not.
The creed of Individualism has led to nearly everything generally good about the world. It depends on the notion–the empirically obvious notion–that there can be no locus of ideas or understanding but the individual, and that any one individual can be smarter than any swarm of human insects who want to scream the contrary.
At root, this is perhaps the most obvious point that Ayn Rand wanted to make, and frankly needed to make. All our progress–at least materially, with the spiritual still being up in the air, and this post itself intended as a contribution–has depended on bold people being empowered to discover new things, using a method which in principle allows dissent and negation.
One of the few lasting impressions David Hume made on me was his suggestion that for all we know, the universe was designed by a committee. It is both humorous, and provocative in an interesting way. No committee can ever be smarter than the smartest person in it, which might be stated as a general rule, and most committees bring the smartest person in the room down to their level, rather than the contrary. This might be stipulated as a corollary. Thus, a committee is equal to the average intelligence in the room, and in most cases will not rise higher.
The globalist want a world of committees. They are anti-Individualists. They rightly view all independent thinkers as enemies of a system which will abhor and punish them.
In the past, I have proposed as an alternative to a global technocratic uni-culture the development with time of countless subcultures, rooted in local circumstances, with many places needing nothing more or less than a new appreciation of where they come from, and the value of what they have been given.
The nihilists tell us nothing matters. If this is true, then one culture is as good as any other, including American suburban culture from the 1950’s. They have no principled basis for opposing this idea. It is merely a CULTURAL fixation among them, one rooted on habitual opposition to everything coherent, reasonable, good, and capable of evolving into something even better.
We are not who we were in the 1950’s. This says something about us. Many Muslims very much ARE who they were 1,000 years ago, and want the world to join them. That says something too.