Quotes About Culture

Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends. And it is these economic achievements—not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars—that are the movement's greatest monuments.

This arrangement should be the envy of every ruling class in the world. Not only can it be pushed much, much further, but it is fairly certain that it will be so pushed. All the incentives point that way, as do the never-examined cultural requirements of modern capitalism. Why shouldn't our culture just get worse and worse, if making it worse will only cause the people who worsen it to grow wealthier and wealthier?

Mark Lilla evokes the feeling well in a sympathetic 1998 summary of conservative thinking. It is not that anyone thinks that incivility, promiscuity, drug use, and irresponsibility are good things. But we have become embarrassed to criticize them unless we can couch our objections in the legalistic terms of rights, the therapeutic language of self-realization, or the economic jargon of efficiency.

backlash leaders systematically downplay the politics of economics. The movement's basic premise is that culture outweighs economics

drain economics out of the world, and you're left with few tools for explaining anything. Why is our culture the way it is? Why does TV get coarser with each passing year? What makes certain styles or words or ideas suddenly so visible while others disappear?

The truth is that the culture that surrounds us—and that persistently triggers new explosions of backlash outrage—is largely the product of business rationality. It is made by writers and actors, who answer to editors and directors and producers, who answer to senior vice presidents and chief executive officers, who answer to Wall Street bankers, who demand profits above all else.

Our culture and our schools and our government, backlashers insist, are controlled by an overeducated ruling class that is contemptuous of the beliefs and practices of the masses of ordinary people. Those who run America, the theory holds, are despicable, self-important show-offs. They are effete, to use a favorite backlash term. They are arrogant.2They are snobs. They are liberals.

conservatism's populist myth.

Encouraging demographic self-recognition and self-expression through products is, similarly, the bread and butter not of leftist ideology but of consumerism. These things are part of the culture industry's very DNA.

Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.

Why biblical texts? Because biblical texts have the power to release what Brueggemann calls a "counter-imagination," a way of seeing the world that is an alternative to the consumerist, militaristic, death-obsessed imagination of the culture.

That's my point: if you own thirty or more books, or you are reading any book at this moment, you may protest all you want, but you were born on the wrong continent.

A traveler enters the world into which he travels, but a tourist brings his own world with him and never sees the one he's in.

science at its best was a flower of Western culture, unbiased, apolitical, transnational, open, and progressive. It destroyed superstition and cant. It threw at least a little light into the darkness. And it worked.

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

The test of an author is not to be found merely in the number of his phrases that pass current in the corner of newspapers...but in the number of passages that have really taken root in younger minds.

All that was worth handing on died with them; the rest, they put into their books.8

A final point is the fact that discrimination based on presumed inborn and immutable characteristics (race) tends to be stronger and more inflexible than ethnic discrimination which is not based on 'racial' differences. Members of a presumed race cannot change their assumed inherited traits, while ethnic groups can change their culture and, ultimately,

today's heavy emphasis on competition and humiliation of your "opponent" (whether in sports, business, or family), our culture sets men up for anger and unhappiness.

Tanizaki's subject requires the shadowy style in which he treats it

The place to start assessing a culture is to listen, really listen, to how employees describe a place. We believe that within most generalizations there lies an inner core of truth.

Social theorists may be considered as belonging to the Zuni-like culture of scholars. Such cultures select persons who have repressed their emotions in the service of intellectual goals and develop norms and procedures which maintain the dominance of intellect over feeling. Scholarly theories of the human experience which exclude emotions are both product and causes of repression.

The superiority of chocolate (hot chocolate), both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain. . .

There is no reason to believe that we are now on a higher intellectual or spiritual level than during ancient times.