27 Aug 2014

The Culture Cult

Westview Press (2001) 


The fact that this is a badly written and bad tempered book with a strangely dated frame of reference, lacking both philosophical rigour and insight, certainly detracts from but doesn't entirely negate the fact that it's an interesting study on what has once more become a vital question - namely, that of culture and civilization. Or, rather, culture contra civilization.

Roger Sandall - a former lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney - is not a man who likes to leave anyone in any doubt where he stands. In The Culture Cult he offers an unambiguous critique of romantic primitivism and an unapologetic defence of modernity and Western civilization. He also analyses how designer tribalism is used to undermine the values and achievements of the latter by people who, for one reason or another, choose to reject civil society, science, and secularism.

For those who often violently oppose corrupt (i.e. complex) modernity in favour of pre-modern ways of life - such as radical Islamists, for example - human rights, healthcare, and education are besides the point. They insist on the moral superiority of their traditions and beliefs and offer a fictionalized account of the past to justify this insistence. Depressingly - and disastrously - as members of religious and/or ethnic minorities who have migrated to the West, they are encouraged (often by those who mean well) to effectively lead separate lives based on practices and views that are at irreconcilably at odds with the world around them and which thus keep them trapped in poverty, superstition, and ignorance. This often leads to resentment, criminal behaviour and, ultimately, opens a pathway to extremism. 

Sandall regards everything associated with noble savagery and the culture cult as bad news. And he is at pains to remind us that most traditional cultures "feature domestic oppression, economic backwardness, endemic disease, religious fanaticism, and severe artistic constraints", concluding that if you want to live a free and full life then it might be worth your while defending civilization - not stone age stupidity or a sentimental ideal of Otherness.

Remember: the life of the Maasai warrior who drinks fresh blood from the neck of a cow, is no more noble, authentic, or spiritually enriched, than the life of an American tourist sipping a can of Coke.  


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