The End of Cultural History?

Why the idea of a cultural crisis is everywhere and why it might not hold up.

‘There’s a prevailing sense that the zeitgeist is exhausted’ – I opened up this article, just casually surfing (cruising? Scrolling? Devouring!) the internet, not even looking for this quote, and voilá.

It feels like every other week, yet another new article comes out, arguing that we live in an age of cultural crisis (decline? declacrisis!) and that very few – if any – cultural products will survive from this decade, let alone ascend into ‘masterpiece’ status. A milder version of the same argument: while preceding decades, at least up to the noughties, had their recognisable aesthetics and cultural movements, our current decade lacks that. Are the doomsayers right? Is culture dead? Did we really reach the end of cultural history?

You might say: doomers gonna doom. In other words, doomsayers always said that culture is declining. The Greeks, after all, warned against writing as they were afraid it would destroy their oral traditions. I agree, and I wouldn’t want to get on that bandwagon. So, I suggest we look at a few defining features of our current cultural landscape and see whether we can locate where the current climate of ‘our culture is garbage’ is coming from. I am not denying cultural disorientation; I’ll try to locate its cause in structural and perceptual dynamics.

A quick disclaimer – as a European, I will be talking about ‘our culture’ as Euro-Atlantic culture.

Need 4 Speed

If you look at art from the Old Kingdom of Egypt (2650-2150 BC) and the depiction of Augustus (30 BC), you can see that it looks pretty damn similar. With some notable exceptions (if you are interested in this style, look up Akhenaten, he was an absolute mad lad, trying to establish a monotheistic religion in the 14^th century BC), Egyptian style remained remarkably similar for nearly three thousand years. The Gothic style started in the late 12^th century and remained popular until the 15th century – four hundred years, not a bad run. Romanticism was in fashion from the end of the 18^th until the middle of the 19^th century. A mere sixty years. As we entered the 20^th century, major cultural movements were lucky to have ten years in the sun. Later, things in our era, like ‘dabbing’ and the ice bucket challenge enjoyed popularity for around a year. As we entered the 20s – well, using Chat-GPT to make your photo Ghibli became uncool after the 20^th image. Often, by the time a meme, a cultural product or movement moves from its birthplace into the mainstream, it’s already passé. The pattern here is visible – as our world is becoming exponentially faster (bit early in the article for such a big cliché, but alas), the acceleration of both cultural production and consumption matches this.

Three thousand years difference, same drip.

It is crucial to emphasise that the acceleration affects both sides of culture. If you visit a cathedral, you’ll notice the various styles blending, the different types of stones layered and no wonder: they were built over hundreds of years (I plan to write about the cathedral mentality, very interesting stuff). You can also take paintings as examples, and I’m also pretty sure a lo-fi beat is quicker to make than a symphony. So that’s the production side. On the consumption side (for simplicity’s sake, let’s call engaging with culture consumption), this same phenomenon is visible. We cycle through movies, books, images, cities at dizzying speed, the consumption itself takes up everything with very little room left for reflection and contemplation.

One phenomenon that really pisses me off is short form content displaying 20 paintings/photos in a 15 second video (while a cursed floating-talking head is shouting at me). CAN I JUST ENJOY MY REMBRANDT IN PEACE PLEASE? Big breath. So, an increasing acceleration is one of – if not the most – defining feature of our current cultural landscape.

Personally, I like to enjoy my paintings in 20 second clips on a tiny rectangle, with someone shouting at me and covering half the fucking painting with their heads.

Multi-poly, sub-groupy

Before the 20th century, Europe was the clear centre of cultural activity. That is, at least from its own perspective. But in the 20th century, that centre shifted to the United States, whose cultural output began to set the pace for much of what followed. In the 90s, this seemed like something that would never change – the globalist, neoliberal, post-modern pace was set and it seemed like the march would never stop. Then 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the wobbling US power (and probably a million other reasons) led us to the point where we are now. The world is multipolar, connected in a million ways and the US doesn’t have the kind of cultural monopoly (hegemony?) that it once did. Arguably, stuff like K-pop or K-drama, TikTok (probably one of the most important cultural formers) and even such cultural milestones as Skibidi Toilet have originated outside the US. The loss of this agenda-setting power means that it is now more difficult to locate, what exactly is a major cultural trend.

Another process accentuates this: the developments of distinct sub-cultures that have limited (creative) interaction and none of them manage to ‘subdue’ or integrate with the others. Just an example: while in 1953, around 71% of Americans watched an episode of I Love Lucy, today ‘no narrative TV show captures more than 5% of American households at a time’. Internet ‘communities’, echo chambers and polarisation surely played their part, as well as the ‘liquid’ nature of these communities and identities. This makes up an incredibly eclectic cultural landscape. I will touch on this more in my next article, but for now, I’ll say that instead of true innovation and pluralism, this results in a lot of convergence and sameness.

As I argued in a previous article, modern identities and sub-groups are less fixed and more likely to bleed into each other than previous ones but these interactions have so far failed to produce one particular style or movement. Maybe there are simply too many cultural combinations. When you see an anime Lord of the Rings, you realise: we’re so saturated, it’s impossible to say ‘this is it—this is our culture.’

Culture has always been building on and from different bits and pieces. One of my favourite metaphors during the rococo was likening artists to bees. Gather pollen from different flowers but then create honey from it. Such is the duty of the artist to build something new and different from the different parts. But not all hybridisation leads to vitality. To me, much of contemporary interaction is mule-like – like the progeny of a horse and a donkey, it is incapable of having children of its own. In other words, these cultural cross-products are often impotent, without sequence, a dead end. What is the consequence of the anime LoTR? It’s a curiosity, it’s somehow different, but nothing really flows from it. It’s not honey – it’s the nest of a bird, just pushing different shiny things together.

Hear me out, so it’s LoTR, but they are on cars. What is it about? Family.

To sum this part up, we have a decidedly multi-polar cultural landscape that is further fragmented into different sub-groups. Add the speed, that I have talked about before and we find that no fucking wonder cultural commentators have a hard time recognising a dominant culture: even if a cultural trend becomes prominent enough to be worth talking about it, by the time they finish their article, it’s already outdated. In the absence of recognisable, strong cultural currents, we reach for the natural explanation, tried and tested in previous centuries: we live in an age of cultural decline.

Of course, this instinct is nothing new, in fact, even Tolstoy made fun of it in his 1878 novel, Anna Karenina:

“He was well acquainted with the way dilettanti have (the cleverer they were the worse he found them) of looking at the works of contemporary artists with the sole object of being in a position to say that art is a thing of the past, and that the more one sees of the new men the more one sees how inimitable the works of the great old masters have remained.”

The impulse to dismiss the present in favour of an idealised past is part of the cultural script itself.

Culture – it’s like, complicated, my dude

Let’s get a hot take out of the way: culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it is always influenced by the technology of its age. Every new technology results in the formation of a different type of culture. In Marxist terminology: existence precedes essence, and this applies to culture too. Novels make sense in a literate society, gigantic statues can only remain if the material is strong enough, oil paint’s longer drying time made possible the wonderful oil paintings that we now look back at with sheer admiration. New technologies usher in new types of cultural production and consumption: we live in the age of not only ‘the internet’ but in the ‘social media-smartphone’ age. This fact pervades our current culture so much that no matter what topic I start discussing in my articles, you can be sure to eventually find me verbally shaking my fists against those damn smart phones.

Additionally, cultural movements and defining features often emerge in hindsight. One of my favourite historians talks about being caught up in the ‘whirlwind of history’ – you don’t see where your path is leading you and it is only in retrospect that we put events in the straitjacket of a nice narrative. An even more acute example: the term Gothic (meaning: barbaric) comes from an Italian art historian, Giorgio Vasari, writing in the middle of the 16^th century. So, no Gothic architecture would go, ‘yah, I’ve built such a banging Gothic cathedral’. If we only label cultural eras retrospectively, perhaps our present just hasn’t been named yet—not that it lacks shape. Maybe a hundred years from now, people would look back and say ‘oh yes, it’s obvious that it was the age of…’. Perms (that’s the broccoli haircut, right?)?

Vasari wants you to find the difference between the two images. Hint: one is barbaric and ugly, the other is sophisticated and elegant.

We could also take a more abstract perspective and argue that moods or mindsets, like "dooming," can serve as the main cultural forces shaping an era. Think of the fin de siècle and the sense of malaise that connected the artists and thinkers of that time. Maybe each period can be defined by a dominant mood or concept, an abstract noun that captures its spirit. The 2020s, for example, might one day be remembered as the decade of dooming. Or perhaps of speed, fracture, or multipolarity. It's possible we just haven't found the right word to describe our moment yet.

The final piece of the puzzle is that it’s important to address whether ‘culture’ has a linear development. Yes and no (the usual answer). Yes, inasmuch as culture comes from and builds on previously established norms, traditions and generally uses a ‘language’ (or form) that makes sense in the given context. But no, it’s not linear in a sense as history is not linear – it does not have a certain goal, towards which it’s steadily moving forwards and thus the very description of ‘cultural decline’ is problematic. This expression (of decline) denies the validity of the norms and cultural forms that develop in a certain period, and implies a preferred destination for culture (or history) to march towards.

And something that even the most hardcore doomers must accept: culture always breeds counter-culture. For a visible historical example, just look at the pendulum swing from the sexually charged, aristocratic, over-the-top, super-sophisticated and frill-y Rococo to the much more sober, rational, civic-republican, straight-edge Neoclassicism. If you have too much ice-cream, you’ll crave your broccolis eventually – and the same is true for culture. Some of the counter-cultural currents are already visible today. Many features that we would associate with contemporary cultural production and consumption are already being challenged.

While a few years ago, binging became the norm, some networks realised that this is not the way, so they have returned to releasing episodes weekly. Similarly, a larger and larger part of the population are dreaming of the age of dumbphones and switch to them. States introduce phone-bans in schools with the full backing of parents and children. More and more activities get their version of ‘slow’ movement – from food to reading to art. Media companies are challenged by platforms such as Substack, promoting a wholly different form of engagement between reader and writer. Ted Gioiai recently drew the attention to the fact, that long-form videos, movies, albums and books are getting longer - a clear reaction to the over-saturation of brain-rotting short-form content.

In short: the whole culture crisis issue is complicated.

But it’s definitely not just doom and gloom and as cited above, there are very encouraging trends already visible. In my next article, I’ll dive into the details of a dangerous and truly scary phenomenon of our age. The aesthetic and cultural convergence that I believe to be more and more prevalent even if we’re not in a terrible state of decline.