The World Crisis in Culture
the permanent revolution of carnival
Pessoa wrote that to be in agreement with life we must disagree with ourselves. When any shaken modernist reflects on the world crisis, or, as Adam Tooze calls it, the polycrisis, it is prudent to be uncertain about one’s own ideas. To disagree with oneself opens the path to the comic, and avoids the cliff of tragedy.
Such uncertainty about our conceptual grasp of the world should prevail most of all in the field of culture. Culture is the most mutable and evanescent of human experiences. Culture is the field of the dynamic changes in our lives, and springs from the human imagination as Fernandez-Armesto argues in A Foot in the River: why our lives change and the limits of evolution. If chaotic change is the rule of the day in the field of culture, how stable can any prediction of culture be?
When I began the Burning Archive blog in 2015, and again when I launched the Burning Archive podcast in 2021, I made a prediction about culture, premised on a story about the past of culture. I forecast our culture was in decay. I believed it had cursed itself in abundance. I invested myself in the idea of preserving the fragments of the burning heritage, which I loved, from the chaos, decay and destruction that I saw in the clever but unrooted culture of the contemporary ‘West’.
I reanimated an old historical metaphor of cultures, civilisations and historical eras as organic beings that grow, decay, and may find the nutrients for renewal in their own decay. It is a metaphor that is itself deeply rooted in the culture, as for example in the studies of Toynbee and Spengler. It is almost a dream archetype of the human mind when it tries to conceive something so universal, so diverse as culture. But over the last two and a half years of public reflection on this major theme of world history I have changed my view.
This essay is a first attempt to articulate a different metaphor to think about the cultural dimension of the world crisis. I had imagined our long winter of discontent with modern culture as the death throes of a world tree; I am now trying to imagine this turmoil as a carnival.