soccer does matter.............

 

Successes allow leaders to strut and pontificate, to make grand speeches about the symbolic ramifications of victory.  Soccer has, at least if claims made in the moment of glory are to be believed, put Uruguay on the map, reintegrated postwar West Germany into the global community, and ended racism in France.  That's almost entirely nonsense, of course, but it doesn't mean that the assertions are not revealing.  And soccer does matter, does offer insights, often unconscious, into the desires and doubts of a culture, never more so than in the quadrennial snapshot offered by the World Cup.

-Jonathan Wilson, The Power and The Glory:  The History of the World Cup

The problem is never just the problem..........

.......It's the response to it that defines your team.

from this Tanmay Vora post

at the edge..............

 

When culture is in woeful crisis, the insights rarely come from parliament, senate, or committee, they tend to come from a hut at the edge of the village. Let’s go there. There is tremendous, unexpected hope waiting.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

via

the soulful gamble known as trust......

 

     Raising our children under the telescope of our permanent gaze is costly.  If you are trusting, you win some encounters and lose others, but in the long-term, you gain much more than you would from distrusting, which results in lost opportunities, says Hardin.  A panoptic culture teaches our children that we cannot take a chance on others.  Unintentionally, such a culture also teaches children that they are to be distrusted, and that we cannot take a chance on them.  Cameras, breathalyzers, software monitoring, GPS tracking, and other far-reaching paraphernalia of the eye take away our children's brief chance in life to gradually, with inevitable stumbling, to learn to take responsibility for their actions.  Surveillance erodes their freedom to fall.  "What I always say to parents is if you are giving your kids appropriate freedom, it will feel like neglect in our culture," says psychologist Wendy Mogel, author of The Blessings of a Skinned Knee.  We're setting up safe zones that are cages.  And we're substituting instamatic fragments for the homegrown mutual knowledge that slowly builds into the soulful gamble known as trust.  We've mistaken the monologue of surveillance for the dialogue that is care.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

Alexander.......................

 

The boy-emperor, barbarian though he remained after all of Aristotle's tutoring, had yet learned to revere the rich culture of Greece, and had dreamed of spreading that culture through the Orient in the wake of his victorious armies. . . .But he had underrated the inertia and resistance of the Oriental mind, and the mass and depth of Oriental culture.  It was only a youthful fancy, after all, to suppose that so immature and unstable a civilization as that of Greece could be imposed upon a civilization immeasurable more widespread, and rooted in the most venerable traditions.  The quantity of Asia proved too much for the quality of Greece.  Alexander himself, in the hour of his triumph, was conquered by the soul of the East; he married (among several ladies) the daughter of Darius; he adopted the Persian diadem and robe of state; he introduced into Europe the Oriental notion of the divine right of kings; and at last he astonished a sceptic Greece by announcing, in magnificent Eastern style, that he was a god.  Greece laughed; and Alexander drank himself to death.

-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

the hand of order..................

 

Philip [King of Macedon, 359-336 BC] had no sympathy with the individualism that had fostered the art and intellect of Greece but had at the same time disintegrated her social order; in all these little capitals he saw not the exhilarating culture and the unsurpassable art, but the commercial corruption and the political chaos; he saw insatiable merchants and bankers absorbing the vital resources of the nation, incompetent politicians and clever orators misleading a busy populace into disastrous plots and wars, factions cleaving classes and classes congealing into castes: this said Philip, was not a nation but only a welter of individuals—geniuses and slaves; he would bring the hand of order down upon this turmoil, and make all Greece stand up united and strong as the political center and basis of the world.

-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

seen and valued......................

  

So whether you're in retail, finance, real estate, education, health care, computer services, transportation, or communications, you have an incredible opportunity to be just as intentional and creative—as unreasonable—about pursuing hospitality as you are about every other aspect of your business.  Because whether a company has made the choice to put their team and their customers at the center of every decision will be what separates the great ones from the pack.

     Unfortunately, these skills have never been less valued than they are in our current hyperrational, hyperefficient work culture.  We are in the middle of a digital transformation.  That transformation has enhanced many aspects of our live, but too many companies have left the human behind.  They've been so focused on products, they've forgotten about people.  And while it may be impossible to quantify in financial terms the impact of making someone feel good, don't think for a second that it doesn't matter.  In fact, it matters more.

     The answer is simple, if not easy: create a culture of hospitality.  Which means addressing questions I've spent my career asking: How do you make the people who work for you and the people you serve feel seen and valued?  How do you give them a sense of belonging?  How do you make them feel part of something bigger than themselves?  How do you make them feel welcome?

-Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect

On the importance of literature........

 

And literature conveys irrefutable condensed experience in yet another invaluable direction; namely, from generation to generation. Thus it becomes the living memory of the nation. Thus it preserves and kindles within itself the flame of her spent history, in a form which is safe from deformation and slander. In this way literature, together with language, protects the soul of the nation. . . . 

But woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against “freedom of print”, it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another. Silent generations grow old and die without ever having talked about themselves, either to each other or to their descendants. When writers such as Achmatova and Zamjatin – interred alive throughout their lives – are condemned to create in silence until they die, never hearing the echo of their written words, then that is not only their personal tragedy, but a sorrow to the whole nation, a danger to the whole nation.

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from this 1970 speech

Hope not......................

 

     The real issue is that a young generation of hyper-urbanised, always-on young people, increasingly divorced from nature and growing up in a psychologised, inward-looking anticulture, is being led towards the conclusion that biology is a problem to be overcome, that their body is a form of oppression and that the solution to their pain may go beyond a new set of pronouns, or even invasive surgery, towards nanotechnology, 'cyberconscious software' and perhaps, ultimately, the end of their physical embodiment altogether.

-Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

Uh-oh................

 

Cultures are built around claims and beliefs about the otherworld: about God or gods, about correct worship, about the nature of reality, about goodness and truth and the meaning of virtue.  These are also, inevitably, claims about what it means to be human.  Knock out the spiritual core of any culture, and however hard people fight, its fate is sealed.

-Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

splintered.................

 

     The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereignty and the representatives of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions—'the people' or 'liberty' or 'democracy' or 'progress'.  I'm all for liberty, and it would be nice to give democracy a try one day too, but the dethroning of the sovereign—Christ—who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice.  It has led, via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler, to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

-Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

Context matters...........................

 

When you’re younger, you are swept up in the drama of your own life: leaving home, making a career, creating a family. As you age, unless you are either a world-historical genius or self-deluded, you begin to realize that whatever you accomplished doesn’t actually amount to all that much. The meaning of your life has more to do with your place in a direct chain—proceeding, obviously, from you down to your children and grandchildren, but also, less obviously, from you upward through generations of people you may not have known or even have heard of. They’re your context. You need to know about them in order to understand your own life fully.

-Nicholas Lemann, as culled from this story

this aged well.................................

The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so.

-William F. Buckley, Jr., from this 1955 mission statement

Can I get an Amen.......................?

 

“Success Strategies” could be an exciting new academic field, but it may be even more beneficial if its lessons are addressed in elementary and high schools as a Life Skills program.

-Michael Wade, from his substack 

"units of cultural transmission".......

 

-from this Gaping Void post

Martin Gurri...............................

 

...............................is always worth reading:

Something new was afoot. In 2016, Trump won an electoral contest. In 2024, he stood at the vanguard of a profound cultural shift that touched on everyday morals and manners, the relations between the sexes, a freer but more fragmented internet—with artificial intelligence hovering in the near foreground—and the first concerted effort in 50 years to reduce the federal government to the dimensions suggested by the Constitution. Trump had become the definitive avatar of the revolt of the American public, and he had been granted much power by the election. The immediate question was whether such a volatile personality, assisted by a gang of eccentrics, could succeed enough to satisfy the public’s hunger for change.

The answer will not be long in coming.

Ah, culture........................

 

And all the time—such is the tragicomedy of our situation—we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible.  You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity.'   In a ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.  We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

-C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943)

dogmatically.....................

 

History and the study of cultures do not teach or prove that values or cultures are relative.  All to the contrary, that is a philosophical premise that we now bring to our study of them.  This premise is unproven and dogmatically asserted for what are largely political reasons.

-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

the common denominator.................

 

Mark Rothko   Number 10     1950   Oil on canvas

It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself.

This is surely the death of all thought.

-Mark Rothko

The dopamine...................

.............................................................culture:

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