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November 19, 2006
I've been concerned of late that junk for code has begun to look flabby. It has lost the harder edge it once had when it explored the pornographic in our cultural unconscious. It has become too nice with the more personal posts on art and music and cartoons that appeal. In becoming nice it has lost its edgy cultural criticism that scraps our skin like sandpaper.
Steve Bell
So we have a return to the violence in the unconscious of our now very conservative, patriarchal Anglo-American culture, which talks about family values, law and order, constraints on sexual freedom and antagonism towards Islam in a religious Christian mode.
After all it is the conservatives who go on and on about the cultural wars and a flabby postmodern liberalism that is the road to nowhere. What is needed to stop the liberal rot, they say, is a reassuring truth of a single narrative. It is the security blanket that provides us comfort in a world of chaos and flux. The comfort is supposedly given by a Judaic-Christianity, which functions as the foundation of the values of our culture.
Hasn't that foundation decayed and withered, as Nietzsche famously argued?
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I am reading Arthur Herman's "To Rule The Waves". He is a grand narrative historian and author. The trouble with grand narrative oratory is that everything becomes pivotal. Something is always the first and , like the butterfly in Bolivia that leads to a cyclone in Darwin, has long lasting effects through the rest of history. Yet technological advance in science and social organisation render many of those advances on the dump after a while. I am sure there is a place for the grand narrative, but history is so messy and incremental. I don't think a unitary narrative, or even grand narratives do human achievement any justice.