novapsyche | (no subject)

(no subject)

One of the reasons I feel America doesn't have a culture is because culture depends on a remembrance of the past--that is, history. Americans on the whole consider history an interesting pastime but nothing terribly important. We have a dislocated sense of time.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The past is prologue, baby! History is history!

Seriously, though, maybe it's not so much that we have a dislocated sense of time as that we have a more accurate one. All that exists is the moment -- not that we draw from anything is thoughtful as buddhism, too much attention to the past is a distraction from what's at hand. The past gave us things like segregation, slavery, patriarchy, the holocaust, the crusades. It gives us things like the Flat Earth Society, cripples things like stem cell research. It's not often that I'm on the side of America, but tradition sucks. We're better off without it.

maybe it's not so much that we have a dislocated sense of time as that we have a more accurate one.

I don't know if I would agree with this. Americans live in a society where the concept of time is highly accelerated from even 50 years prior. All these fancy, newfangled machines (cars, telephones, microwaves, computers). Things no longer take so much time to happen, so our concept of time as a lived experience starts to lose meaning.

too much attention to the past is a distraction from what's at hand

But we wouldn't have what's at hand if actions and events hadn't happened in the past. The past informs the present. Americans want to deny this causal relationship.

The past gave us things like segregation, slavery, patriarchy, the holocaust, the crusades.

But ignoring the bad parts of history doesn't make them not have happened.

It's not often that I'm on the side of America, but tradition sucks. We're better off without it.

I'm not generally on the side of tradition. But I'm not sure culture can exist without it.

Yeah it's definitely not as cut and dry as either of our arguments. You could also make a case, for example, that while Europe is steeped in culture, they've had a lot less trouble adhering to destructive traditions.

America has a culture. it's just so postmodern that it's virtually impossible to recognize until it's metamorphosed into something else.

We are all Themeparks.

Well, obvious- though I'm not knocking you for pointing it out- America is about either forgetting the past or enshrining it, and we only keep the parts that look good or allow us to feel superior to somebody or both. Instead of owning up to guilty secrets, we push them farther under the rug/to the back of the closet, and then say that it's not fair when someone else finds them and drags them out into the open, or that it all happened so long ago that it's irrelevant in today's 'social context', or whatever, anything to deny that someone was responsible for what happened and that something's got to give somewhere in order to make it right. (Finger-pointing is not contradictory to this impulse, as it involves putting the blame on someone who had nothing to do with it, or who was much less responsible than the actual ringleader.)

Um, either etc. or I should just shut up anyway because I feel like maybe I'm babbling.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only