Eric Kaufmann: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think of yourself as a kind of cultural pessimist for this reason? I’m not a pessimist. I don’t think things are going to hell in a handbasket. I think, though, that there has been a downgrading of respect for people who want continuity and tradition and who want to rework those traditions perhaps, but who are not on board with the modernist aesthetic of novelty, difference, and complete individuality. I think there has to be a balance between those two. The high culture has moved, as Bell writes, really heavily in that direction of just the expressive individualism and the novelty. I think some balance perhaps, some more respect from the high culture for that tradition. There’s respect for foreign traditions and exotic traditions, but there isn’t really a respect for kind of Western native traditions. Martin Gurri has put forward the thesis that, because of the internet, people get a much closer look at their elites, including political elites. They see how crummy they are, and they’re disillusioned. And this turns politics into something negative. Do you agree?…

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