Do you sincerely believe that culture isn't dead?

And televised debates are indicative of the state of culture as a whole because...?

Because if the culture were of higher quality, so too would the most popular debates, retard.

If you assume that there is no third variable, sure.
But you'd have to be pretty goddamn stupid to believe that there are no external forces which determine the output of television program beyond cultural zeitgeist.

>"Because if the culture were of higher quality"
>thinks the few literate intellectual examples from centuries ago accurately represent their societies as a whole
>thinks that we haven't made widespread advancement in intellectual debate in society as a whole because of a few eloquent outliers centuries ago
>thinks he isn't being an ignorant pseudo-intellectual who's trying to increase his own ego by shitting on contemporary society and how bad it is

Contemporary society is very ugly. Former versions are sexier, healthier and more free. Michelangelo versus toilet seat.
Men do not chase after nor yearn for wall flowers.

What's hard for you to understand, brainlets?

A high-level of culture allows the existence of such extraordinary individuals. A low-level of culture doesn't.

>says culture is dead while reproducing in his discourse the validity of historically contingent cultural form of "public debate between... intellectuals."

Because of the contradiction in your post, which usefully indexes the extent to which you have been penetrated by the post-Enlightenment ideology of the rational, I would say no: culture is alive and is quite inescapably with us, whether you like it or not.

>A high-level of culture allows the existence of such extraordinary individuals. A low-level of culture doesn't.
Interesting hypothesis, but you failed to provide any empirical or logical reasoning to support it. You also failed to define 'culture' quantifiably, and have similarly failed to cleanly delineate 'extraordinary individuals' so that the relationship between the rate of occurrence of such individuals and the relative level of 'culture' can be analyzed. Finally, you failed to provide, or even attempt to provide, a reasonable argument as to the relationship between the prior two variables and the rate of occurrence of television broadcasts containing said 'extraordinary individuals'

Overall, I give you a 2/10. Not your best work.

Wrong.

I actually believe cultural has been declining SINCE the Enlightenment.

Go back to reeeeeeddit, thanks.

le analytic reply

Grow up, dork.

>it's another 200+ reply thread about the perils of modern society espoused by Internet dilettantes

Of course, here you are right.

The very complainers are the ones bringing about the fall but we must masochistically revel in this, no?

Make me fgt
You still haven't provided a meaningful argument

There is no fall. Only progression. Remove the masquerade of religious fall.

your post is non-sequiturial both in relation to mine and within itself so i don't know what to say other than to mention that the belief that culture is "in decline" is not an original or new belief, nor an interesting one, but probably always an ideological one in service of some larger social structure whose beneficiaries are anxious about the inevitability of its replacement

>Only progression

AHAHAHAH LE LINEAR HISTORICAL PROGRESS

ahahahahahahhahaha

The Hittite remain strong and well known, their ways have merely advanced.
One step at a time you go, yet you deny the last step. Why?

OP BTFO

Millennium ago they didn't have film, so there was no culture. You are making a similar argument.

When you hit rock bottom, you can always dig deeper.

>caring about ""culture""
I know who the pleb is

I watched a debate between Bart Ehrman and Michael Bird recently which was very good. What debates are you watching OP?

There aren't a lot of famous debates because, simply put, the current system is indefensible. The mean stream media does a good job of pretending things are fine and this economic arrangement is permanent, but if anyone tried to justify the system in words, the result would be obscene. In the past, Locke could have a legitimate debate with Filmer as to whether monarchy and patriarchy was justified, but who would want to argue that sweatshops and the NSA and bank bailouts is the best of all worlds?

.. And that's merely scraping the surface.

Right.

I mean, Alan Greenspan could have a legitimate argument with Joe Stiglitz on the merits of the market regulating itself in 2007. But not today. Today, the media pretends things are fine and the political police go after anyone who says otherwise. The debate is avoided at all costs.

>open your eyes, sheeple!

Oh look, a 2014 debate on the financial system, in a popular university and available for anyone in the world to watch. Hmm, guess your point is bullshit.

youtube.com/watch?v=bIyVjD7YA9Q

I'm not saying there aren't fierce debate in things like economics, but they aren't fierce PUBLIC debates, which is what OP was specifically referring to. In fact, there is a major debate as to the legitimacy of neoclassical, mainline economics, but the media is shielding the public from this debate. The mainstream media was never perfect, but in the 60s, you had Chomsky and Nader on network tv. Today, anyone who questions the system in fundamental ways is persona non grata.

but we're all psueds m8

Would you rather have thinkers like Julius Evola populate our airwaves?

Read:

Who is Julius Evola? What does he want? Why does he matter? Do Fascists shit in the woods?

Ride the Tiger starts with some standard criticisms of the Liberal-Democratic-Capitalist-Constitutional world, as well as the Materialist-Marxist-Soviet-COMINTERN world, again noting their focus on material conditions while ignoring 'spiritual' or mental processes. He briefly discusses a few contemporary philosophers in this early stage of analysis. Most of his time is spent wrestling with Nietzsche, his implications from "God is dead", a Zarathusthra, the Apollonian-Dionysian dualism of society, and so forth. He makes a few brief criticisms of Heidegger, Marx and Stirner, and notes the 'new nihilism' of existentialism, and takes a good whack at Sartre.

So what does Evola propose instead? He starts with Nietzsche's view of what must come after nihilism, after God has died, and proposes his new society from there. He advocates something called 'radical traditionalism', with emphasis on the old institutions of Europe which existed before 1789, or perhaps before 476.

Evola is anti-cosmopolitan, anti-financial, anti-Marxist, anti-rational, anti-scientific, anti-pacifist, anti-materialist, anti-feminist, anti-egalitarian, anti-Christian, anti-individual, anti-modern, anti-democratic, anti-bourgeois.

This leaves us with tribal nationalism, agrarianism, neo-paganism, traditional family organization, an aristocratic caste system (with people like him on top, naturally - he was born into Italian nobility) as well as a bit of Eastern Mysticism thrown in, especially the 'Kali Yuga', the 432,000 year long age of darkness and sin in Hindu theology.

He is not solely an ordinary 'traditionalist', with reference to familial customs or little traditions. Instead he wants to throw out all of the changes over the past few hundred years and start again 'anew' with older traditions, a grand mystical warrior existence, 'riding the tiger'. Before the French Revolution, before Marxism, before 'human rights' or 'democracy'.

This is where Evola shows his true inner self - not in his criticism, but what he does advocate. He snarls at modern society, but perhaps because it has passed him by. He is frightened of the 'degeneracy' of the world, and such is made very clear.

He advances a few tentative points against 'scientific rationalism', but these are laughably muddled. For example, because he does not understand atomic theory, it is therefore 'useless knowledge' and to be discarded.

1/2

American hegemony is the problem

On culture, he is insipid. His rants are that of a grumpy racist grandfather complaining that 'new music' rap jazz is intellectually bankrupt because it is from 'primitive' peoples. I quote:

One can deduce that modern man, especially North American man, has regressed to primitivism in choosing, assimilating, and developing a music οf such primitive qualities as Negro music, which was even originally associated with dark forms οf ecstasy.

Women? Their best place is raising a family. Men are suited for war and should thus kill. The modern world is wholly bosh and should be tossed.

So - the big question: is Evola a fascist? Perhaps, although not necessarily - he was a 'Radical Traditionalist', and gives himself a substantial intellectual covering to prevent himself from being mistaken for a fascist immediately. Though not all traditionalists are fascists, all fascists are traditionalists.

Evola, here, comes across as a man who wants so desperately, so futilely, for the world to be simple, black-and-white, good-and-evil, with himself naturally on the side of good. He wants a return to simplicity, with some people naturally in power (such as himself), and all of the annoying complaints of others (women, people not in his ethnicity, people who aren't 'superior') to be sidelined. Everything else can go. Agriculture, technology, politics, art, all of it which cannot be controlled or changed for the better (and very little can) is to be eliminated. The simple fact is that our modern world is pluralistic, save for a few isolated locals in the Amazon, the Sentinel Islands, and the militias of North Midwest, and this cannot be changed very easily.

One of the core tenets of fascism - at least, fascism in its 20th century unholy incarnations, is the cult of tradition. Hitler had his imagined Aryan race, the restoration of German glory, as well as his 'cult of pastoral life' - his view was for Germany to be a nation of soldier-peasants after the war, gleefully exterminating the brutish Poles and Russians. Mussolini made plain his ambitions for the New Roman Empire, as well as his rejection of democracy. Francisco Franco imagined himself to be a new Crusader of Spain's glory days in the 16th century.

Of course, the poisonous ideas of fascism still endure. Most recently, Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the Utoya massacre imagined himself to be a Crusader, a defender of traditional Europe and its Values, as he bombed civilians.

As such, he is to be pitied as much to be held in contempt for his intellectual garbage, and providing a pleasing lie for the radical traditionalists who complain about 'foreign invasion' on one day, and shoot children in the head and beat homosexuals and immigrants the next.

2/2

This is so true. There was an expression in the Arab world that, "Egypt writes; Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads." And now look at what we have done: Egypt lives under a US backed dictator. Beirut had its publishing houses destroyed by the Israelis during the early 80s invasion, and I don't even need to tell you what happened to Baghdad. Cultures and societies who actually have real debates, who actually consider real alternatives to American global rule are systematically reduced to ruin.

Love this

You're trying to describe the entire media with a few anecdotes. There were loads of debates and comments om the flaws of the flaws of the system after the 2008 financial crisis. In highly televised debates Bernie Sanders criticised the financial system. The current president criticised the system. There's no evidence for your cover up.

r u saying he was wrong about rap music?

it promotes violence, materialism and nihilism
and is successfully used as psy ops on immigrant, black and 'indigenous' youths to form fifth columns in societies with an emphasis on criminal activity, non-conformity and sedition

makes me laugh so hard seeing pacific islanders, aboriginals, pakis and arabs wearing nigger costumes and enacting their favourite nigger gestures and language

its fucking poison, of course youd have to travel abroad to actually see this pattern in the commonwealth and Europe in comparison to societies that have not fallen victim to it and still maintain their superior culture

rant over

But remember how the media pretended that Sanders didn't exist until he won so many states the media couldn't ignore him? I remember when he won his landslide victory in New Hampshire and the local news talked more about a giant pig on the loose at a polling station than Sanders. And there are issues Sanders won't even touch, like our unsustainable military budget or whether we should even be an empire.

As for Trump, yeah he brought up a lot of issues that normally don't get covered, but that is why he was such a media sensation.

By "rap music" I assume you mean hip-hop which is an actual genre. It's a broad music scene and foundational groups like Geto Boys made social commentary and criticized the inner-city gangster lifestyle. I'm guessing you heard a few snippets of Snoop Dog which got you into a rage about "niggers".

Film escapism is a meme lol

same could be said for any musical genre ever

There is a difference between mass produced rap, which endorses destructive activities like violence and hyper materialism, and rap as a vehicle to deliver a political message, which is how it started.

yehh, Thomas mann mentions this in magic mountain