Bangs and Whimpers

Has American popular culture hit a dead end—-essentially stopped evolving and contented itself with endlessly regurgitating the past? That’s the premise of a rather  provocative essay  in the January issue of  Vanity Fair  which speculates that, rather than having reached the teleological end of history, we have instead reached an ‘end of culture’:

it was exactly 20 years ago that Francis Fukuyama published  The End of History , his influential post-Cold War argument that liberal democracy had triumphed and become the undisputed evolutionary end point toward which every national system was inexorably moving: fundamental political ferment was over and done. Maybe yes, maybe no. But in the arts and entertainment and style realms, this bizarre  Groundhog Day  stasis of the last 20 years or so certainly feels like an end of cultural history.

Unfortunately for its sweeping thesis, the essay is rather short (far shorter than it could be, and perhaps should be) so it only hints at the deeper significance of this plateau:

rather than a temporary cultural glitch, these stagnant last couple of decades may be a secular rather than cyclical trend, the beginning of American civilization’s new chronic condition, a permanent loss of appetite for innovation and the shockingly new.

Most provocative, perhaps, are the final lines of the piece, with allusions to decline narratives and “The Hollow Men”—-the sort of doomsaying one usually finds in a certain kind of reactionary. It’s interesting that one species of this sentiment has now become sufficiently mainstream as to appear in a magazine like  Vanity Fair , even if the lament is more focused on the relative stagnation of bubblegum pop, casual clothing trends, and chain stores than it is on symphonies, formal wear, and classical education.

It’s also notable that the author omits any suggestions for restarting this supposedly-stalled culture. Perhaps the editorial rigors of a word count would not permit it. Or perhaps, with virtually all taboos broken and transgressions made, he simply can’t think of any—-older pillars like family, community, and religion being apparently unmentionable or unremembered.