What Is Culture?
On the post-WWII replacement of Old America with the New
Contemporary Americans have a deficient and ahistorical understanding of culture. They usually employ this word in reference to the various means of entertainment and leisure and amusement that are available for purchase and consumption. They refer to popular music, TV shows, and various lifestyle choices as examples of American culture.
In fact, however, these products of the American consumer economy are elements of a general spirit of anti-culture that was born in postwar America and has by now permeated the entire Western world.
What is considered to be culture in popular parlance is actually a sociological revolution against Western culture and represents civilizational subversion.
To understand the true meaning of culture, we can look to the first chapter of Russell Kirk’s America’s British Culture in which he argues that America’s original culture—sustained from the age of the Pilgrims to the Second World War— was British in origin to such a fundamental degree that “if somehow the British elements could be eliminated from all the cultural patterns of the United States… why, Americans would be left with no coherent culture in public or in private life.”
Kirk takes a sociological view of culture and quotes the great Catholic historian Christopher Dawson to say:
A social culture is an organized way of life which is based on a common tradition and conditioned by a common environment. . . . It is clear that a common way of life involves a common view of life, common standards of behavior and common standards of value, and consequently a culture is a spiritual community which owes its unity to common beliefs and common ways of thought far more than to any unanimity of physical type. . . . Therefore from the beginning the social way of life which is culture has been deliberately ordered and directed in accordance with the higher laws of life which are religion.
From this, we get two senses of the meaning of culture (Kirk borrows the two senses from TS Eliot): first, we get culture in the sense of organic folkways (my phrasing, not Kirk’s). These are the habits, norms, instincts, and artistic derivatives from these habits and norms among people groups that have a common way of life “conditioned by a common environment,” to quote Dawson. For instance, authentic Country Music (not the weaponized culturally subversive Country Music funded and promoted by Capital), is the way that it is because the spirit of that music is tied to the way of life of the people from which it came.
This means that authentic country music is the product of a culture in a way that prevents just any human being from meaningfully producing the same genre in a sustained and organic way. That is, the arts and other cultural accidents are not the culture, but they come out of, and are produced by, the culture. The cultural accidents are not merely a product of individual interest, but of community context. The social order is the maker of men.
That is to say, contrary to the liberal-enlightenment-individualist way of thinking, human beings are not interchangeable but are rather shaped and constituted by the milieu and setting into which they were born. This is what de Maistre was observing when he wrote:
Now, there is no such thing as ‘man’ in this world. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I’ve never encountered him.
The entire cruz of the postwar American project is to counter this traditionalist approach to culture and to echo the Jacobins in their vision of the universal man.
These cultural folkways, Kirk argues, are the product of the people at large within a given group absorbing and passively receiving the culture-making of its leaders over time. He calls these folkways the “democratic culture” and argues that they “ordinarily had [their] origins, perhaps long ago, in the concepts and customs of a cultural aristocracy….” Folkways are organic and develop cultures over time, but they are founded upon, and carried along, by the aristocratic culture-drivers.
It is the responsibility of the aristocratic members of a culture to be connected with the folkways of their people, and yet to push the culture to correspond with Higher Things. This is the second sense of culture Kirk draws from TS Eliot. If we called the first sense of culture organic folkways, we can call the other sense of culture a society’s High Culture. The objective of the High Culture should be to inspire the populace to correspond their folkways with some culturally-relevant social ideal; or, in TS Eliot’s phrasing, “the improvement of the human mind and spirit.”
High Culture is what produced the great achievements of Western Civilization: Mozart, Chaucer, Michelangelo, etc. Kirk writes that “the preferences, mores, and customs that make up the democratic culture used to find their sanction in the judgement of individuals of remarkable talents, or on the manners and attitudes of a class or group of arbiters of culture.” The two senses of culture are related to each other as one reflects the organic instants of the people at large, but they are always learning from, and should be inspired by, the Heroes of High Culture.
A healthy society has both, working together for mutual reinforcement. Organic culture without High Culture degrades into debasement and barbarity as there is no guiding light to set the boundaries of culture and nothing to inform its improvement. But a High Culture without a derivative culture for the people at large eliminates the social relationship between a people and its cultural leaders and turns the responsible aristocracy into society-damaging aloof plutocrats with no interest in the well-being of its people. It must never be forgotten that the majority of human beings within a socio-political order do not have the capacity to spiritually sustain themselves at the level of the High Culture. They must follow and absorb the lives and role-modeling of leaders.
Kirk notes that for TS Eliot, “any healthy culture is represented at its higher levels by a class or body of persons of remarkable intelligence and taste, leaders in mind and conscience. Often such persons inherit their positions as guardians of culture; to borrow a phrase from Edmund Burke, these are the men and women who have been reared in the ‘unbought grace of life.’”
The integration of High Culture and organic folkways to create a civilizational culture implies ethnic relevance. As I recently stated on Twitter, culture is not ethnically absolutist, but neither is it ethnically agnostic. It is not ethnically absolutist because it is possible for individuals of foreign ethnicity, from time to time, to assimilate into a given culture. Such as Benjamin Disraeli in England. But we must be honest enough to maintain that it is not ethnically agnostic. After all, if we are to follow Dawson, a culture is formed by a “common tradition and conditioned by a common environment.” The importation of foreign ethnicities en masse will destroy a culture, even if done “legally” because there are no common traditions nor commonality of environment.
The pursuit of a multicultural society is actually an assault on the host culture, and will be the cause of its undoing.
Does America still have its old culture?
Writing this book in the early 1990s, Kirk warned that “what American culture urgently requires just now is solidarity: that is, a common front against the operation of Chaos and Old Night.” (By the way, it is the tragedy of the collapse of American culture that most people have no idea where that phrase comes from).
Kirk adamantly opposes the forces seeking to tear down what has been derided as “Euroculture.” Without Euroculture, we are nothing. More specifically, without the British particularities of Euroculture, we had been undergoing a Long Transformation, from Old America to New America and at the time of Kirk’s writing it was a state of emergency. I suspect, knowing Kirk’s more somber and honest writings, he may have considered it too late in some ways. He may have agreed with CS Lewis that Old Western Man is now a thing of memory (though perhaps by 2023 there is no longer even a memory).
While Kirk did comment on the flooding of America by the third world in the 70s-90s (a common culture cannot survive a flood of imported uncommon cultures), he rested most of his blame for the undoing of American culture on three groups: “militant blacks; white radicals, mostly ‘civil rights’ zealots of yesteryear; and a mob of bored, indolent students to whom any culture but pop culture is anathema.” I would like to comment on this later, but for now, we can merely recognize the extent to which they have succeeded in severing American society from its cultural roots.
Immigration was vital to the replacement of Old American culture because it viciously dissolves commonality of tradition and environment. Mainstream conservatives will hone in on illegal immigration, but the subversion of cultural commonality knows not the status of formal legalities and regulatory technicalities. The pursuit of a multi-ethnic society that is not natural to the organic development of a culture (such as in, say, the Austro-Hungarian empire), but was rather the result of social engineering and ideological politics, has been a cornerstone of the collapse of American culture.
In pursuing the overturning of Euroculture, the postwar liberalism helped to facilitate a society absent of the very commonalities that once characterized the American way, and therefore the British culture on which America was based. This was a combination both of immigration, which by its essence denies to a society cultural commonality, and consumer capitalism, which replaces heritage culture rooted in place and continuity over time, with titillating distractions. The obligation of the presently living to be facilitators of their cultural inheritance to their posterity was eradicated from the popular mind and instead they became radical “Presentists.”
Caring only for the here and now, they became preoccupied with the material gratification and amusements that, because of the fleeting nature of human desire, would be in constant flux. A society engrossed in consumer interests that change from year to year cannot at the same time sustain a culture over decades, not to mention centuries. Whereas Western cultural norms were passed down over dozens of generations before the postwar Mass Capitalism, as the New America replaced the Old, change and fluidity became the new norm. The only constant was that nothing was constant. There was no common way of life, except mindless consumption and material gratification.
That is to say, the American culture was replaced by the American Anti-Culture, which was then exported to the entire Western world.
Indeed, one of the great interpreters of the Americanized West as Anti-Culture, Philip Rieff, has made it a key element of his analysis to hone in on our post-cultural society. Carl Trueman once summarized Rieff’s outlook in the following way:
Indeed, it leads Rieff to call this type of culture an anti-culture. Its purpose is not to transmit beliefs and practices from one generation to the next. Its purpose is quite the opposite: to shatter past values and to engage in the constant revolutionizing of beliefs and behavior.
Our music, our art, our phraseology and expressions, the way we dress, the entertainment we consume, the products and goods that we buy…. all aspects of Western commercial life exist in a unified conspiracy to transgress the Sacred and the Western culture that once acted as a soil for the garden of our human experiences. It is not an expression of culture that we are saddled with technology, efficiency, functionality, and mindless innovation; these are aspects of the Western assault on culture. The cultural revolution exists here, not as the making of a new culture, but as the ever constant tearing down of what existed before.
The replacement of the grandfather instructing and imparting wisdom to his grandson, with the grandson trying to keep his grandfather up to date with Wi-Fi, iPhones, and digital experiences, is the true cultural revolution in our midst. The trans movement is just an offshoot of the greater transformation of society.
It is not the crass and crude content that permeates our minds on social media that is an expression of our dying culture, but the existence of social media as the replacement for older forms of organic community. The degraded content that fills television entertainment, advertising, and popular music, are not the primary aspect of cultural revolution; the revolution is in the mere existence of these things as constant crafters of our sentiments and instincts.
We have reached a situation in the West where what we refer to as culture (the things we consume, are amused by, and that occupy our attention), is a sustained assault on True Culture. The things produced on “the market” have facilitated the destruction of our cultural patrimony.
It is a great irony of history that the momentous opponent of Western traditional social order, Karl Marx, was completely correct in what he foresaw as the effects of liberal capitalism:
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned….
Continuity and the facilitation of experience from one generation to the next, not constant innovation and economic progress, is the true Cultural Conservatism; and its absence is the real explanation of our continued Leftist momentum.