And I am hard pressed to find in my mind a time when such a sustained attack was waged, not on specific cultures, which of course is more or less the continual story of history and presumably prehistory, but on culture itself, on the notion that shared thoughts and behaviors can and should be passed down and accepted by all of us in such a way that we find non-ironic, non-contingent connections with one another.
It is an odd fact of our time that the people talking about modernity are in the main the ones creating it. Those who indulge in “cultural criticism”, in the Western spirit of self-improvement, are doing so in such a way that the destroy the very basis of their activity. As I have said, it is the snake eating itself, all in the name of a progress which disappeared with the tail.
When the past is too strong, the present becomes a ghost. But without the past, everything stretches into ocean. We live in a world–perhaps have always lived in a world, I don’t know–with ghouls everywhere. And most of them are promising to save us.
Please forgive me this seriousness, though. I had a bad night last night. I may or may not talk about it.