The Crisis of Modern Culture: It's Not What You Think

In a recent post, I discussed some famous answers to the question: “What’s wrong with life today?” Included in those answers were such themes as the decline of community, meaninglessness, marginality as powerlessness, money culture, and the “extravagant expectations” that many of us have. As might be imagined, other great thinkers have offered additional diagnoses, many of which I’ve recounted in my book Anatomies of Modern Discontent.

One of the most interesting explanations was provided by the German sociologist Georg Simmel. Writing during the early decades of the 20th century, Simmel pondered the changes in daily life he saw occurring all around him. A tradition-bound rural world was being lost—dominated by religious faith, local community, and intensely personal and sentimental relationships. In its stead, a colder market-based society, which prized individual achievement and social mobility, was arising. Cities were centers for the new ethic. Millions of strangers and semi-strangers wandered the streets, each aspiring to something better. Bureaucratic organizations, much like buildings and armies, became gigantic. Change was in the air.

A committed Berliner, Simmel loved the excitement and diversity of that urban milieu. However, he also saw that the progress he relished was problematic. Life, or so it seemed, was moving beyond human scale.

Simmel called the “crisis” of modern culture the increasing separation between objective and subjective culture. Objective culture is the set of publicly available resources, not only material items like buildings and machines but also symbolic ones like ideas, technologies, and values. That sphere of public creation was expanding at an accelerating rate. Falling ever farther behind was subjective culture, the sphere of knowledge, skills, and values held by individuals themselves. Essentially, people were losing control of the world they lived in.

It’s worth emphasizing that Simmel wrote during the early decades of the 20th century. He understood clearly the implications of automobiles and trains, assembly line production, technologized warfare, and the surge in scientific invention. Still to come was the world we know—with its airplanes, public radio broadcasts, sound-based movies, television, internet, and computer-managed processes.

Like Simmel, most of us are amazed by what people have accomplished collectively. We gape at the skyscrapers, travel on jet planes, and undergo the most complicated medical interventions. Our involvement in cell phones, global positioning systems, and cashless economic transactions is second nature to us now. But how much of these far-flung interactive systems do we understand? Have we become little more than button-pushers in a vast configuration of artifices that follow their own imperatives rather than the needs of their users?

In that spirit, let’s update Simmel to the 21st century.

Knowledge: Information bombardment

A key concept for Simmel is the “over-stimulation” of modern existence. Every day, we are bombarded with information, much of it an attempt to sell us some product or service. Media producers want us to consume “news,” the very modern notion that there are continually changing public events we as citizens should follow.

A century after Simmel’s death, these claims for our attention have expanded dramatically. We are expected to know of environmental catastrophes, governmental shifts, and military incursions from every corner of the earth. There are weather and sports reports. Add celebrity tittle-tattle, political jockeying, and spectacles of corporate malfeasance—movements in the stock market creep across the bottoms of our TV screens. There are “human interest” stories, perhaps about a missing dog or an athlete with a prosthetic leg. Like the proverbial weather, we talk about these things but can do little to change. Nor are we asked to remember much about them. Yesterday’s news is gone forever; there is only the clamor of the emerging present.

Advertisers' claims—pitches in mailed circulars, television promos, and magazine and website imagery—are beyond quantification. Most of us say we tune them out. Still, they insert themselves in our perceptual realm and distract us from other things we might be doing. Moreover, the collective effect of thousands of these ads each day is to shift our general sensibility. We should be “keeping up” with things. The “good life” can be purchased. Personal progress means having better possessions and experiences.

Emphasize the proliferating specialized forms of knowledge central to institutions such as education, law, medicine, science, and government. Clearly, we depend on experts who themselves have trouble keeping up with the latest developments and, indeed, may send us to a “specialist” of one sort or the other.

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This is the world we’re used to. But it means that we know very little of the matters at hand. Huge organizations become the gatekeepers of knowledge. We enter their premises, sometimes with hat in hand, only dimly aware of the resources they possess. “Getting the answers” means having these supplied by strangers.

Skills: From control to access

Most of us have some awareness of the experiences of earlier generations on this continent, first Native Americans and then waves of immigrants who displaced the first peoples and “settled” those territories. We know those people depended on communities of similarly situated folk. Jobs like hunting, raising crops, making shelters, cooking, sewing, and raising children were things they did for themselves. It was a strenuous life, but they persevered.

Nowadays, we depend on specialized service providers for most of these jobs. A broken car is taken to the shop, a paid seamstress makes alterations, a plumber changes the pipes. The person operating as their own doctor or lawyer is considered a fool.

As consumers, what is our part of the modern bargain? It is to pay the experts for their services and perhaps complain if they don’t do these well enough. Pointedly, we no longer know how to do many of the tasks at issue. Our “skill,” if one can call it that, is discovering and choosing the workers in question.

Many would say that this is how life works in an advanced industrial society with its highly specialized division of labor. Fair enough. But acknowledge the dependency of the new arrangement. And entertain the idea that knowing how to cook a meal, sew a skirt, fix a leaky faucet, and grow one’s own vegetables is a broadening, rather than a shrinking, of personal capacity.

Values: From principles to preferences

For the most part, our ancestors possessed strong moral principles and standards for operating in the world. These values, which came from their parents, were reinforced by churches, schools, and the local community. In that sense, moral frameworks were public affairs.

We moderns tend to be less strict and less judgmental in our moral codes. Our assessments of right and wrong defer less to ancient traditions than our sense of what is appropriate to our current situation. We pride ourselves on being flexible and open-minded. Our judgments, as we see it, are personal rather than public matters.

Such changes are consistent with what Simmel called the cult of individuality that characterizes modern society. Many of us would say that shift is a good thing. After all, public judgments in the past could be very harsh and bigoted.

However, the softening of moral standards means that principles are drifting into attitudes or even preferences. Pointedly, principles are beliefs that are often uncomfortable, indeed, that force you to adjust to them. Preferences are much weaker amalgams of belief, feeling, and interest. Often, they are just statements of things we “want” to do. In that sense, we prefer one car type, breakfast cereal, or presidential candidate to another. At least, that’s how we feel today. Tomorrow, we may change.

Critical then to the modern dilemma is the question of how we decide what is right for ourselves—and for others. All too often, our frame of reference is simply the individual self, as a mix of personal ambitions and insights. The question of how to decide the wider society's future is beyond our ken.

In all these ways, people have found themselves unable to control the vast social and cultural settings they live in. Commonly, they content themselves with “living small,” focusing only on their immediate circle of family and friends. Their purchases and votes are just expressions of self-interest. That shrinking of human commitment is the crisis of modern culture.