If I may buttonhole you for a moment, other citizen, lament a common issue that might seem a little extra in the loud noise of different pressing issues. Have you also experienced the distressing decline of our social requirements?  ,
How horribly elite that noises! How cheese-tastingly, pearl-clutchingly, museum-board beautiful. Especially in a time of severe political groups, awful war worldwide and political hate at home, propaganda outside, and all manner of unwelcome gate-crashers occupying space in our thoughts. All of which is much more nebulous to our consciousness than vague notions of” tradition.” Until the oddly incorrect spectacle of the Village People dancing live at a national inauguration, which is supposed to be an important occasion and embodies the divine dignity of our highest institutions.  ,
The obvious obstacle one has to overcome frank is defining what constitutes lifestyle as opposed to, say, politics, entertainment, or religion — a challenging question since culture leaks into all for spheres. Then, when we discuss” social standards,” especially the infraction there, the question becomes less of a problem. We must not determine its compass because any open behavior that is vulgar quickly turns into a cultural issue. Ok, we may revert to the proverb that” I know it when I see it,” which skillfully avoids a Wittgensteinian discourse of meaning in its entirety. Put another way, until some outrage knocks us alive and we start noticing, which has become all too prevalent in recent memory, we don’t think much about it. It’s often an event in which there’s a clash between do and situation. Ask any designer if the Duchess of Y or Z wore the appropriate clothing at a royal function and you’re almost, if tiresomely, in the area.  ,  ,
Doesn’t every technology, as it years, bemoan the collapse in requirements? Wasn’t it always so? Criteria have been declining for years, but most of us are also present in sufficient quantities to bemoan the situation. So, it’s best to down a large concoction, put your feet away, and put aside the doom and gloom — this, too, shall pass. But goes the argument. which one can simply respond by saying that there are both absolute and relative falls. We have moved on from the days when women were first seen strutting their stuff around airports and wearing pajamas to the grating sight of Sen. John  , Fetterman (D-PA ) arriving at the inauguration in knee-length gym clothes. Can there be any more conclusive proof of a reduction in totality?  ,
I just say this in jest a little bit. Sartorial unseemliness perhaps, at initial, appear to be a minor indication of plummeting requirements. Let’s face it, nobody gets hurt. These days, people don’t even use overcoats to the office. Unfortunately, nevertheless, that’s not where it stops. The absence of community norms for proper attire, dignified deportation, and good manners in public serves as a warning of growing gaps in the social safety net that prevents us from barbarism. Look around you at our cultural environment. Cage-fighting cruelty is on show for the masses, cruel insults on social media, shouting and boasting and chest-thumping in staged sports, the forced taunting at boxing weigh-ins, and the indecency of younger women in the private/public zone of online videos. An important cordon sanitaire split private and public behaviour is a fundamental premise that underpins our social fabric. The unique position of Instagram, TikTok, online sex, and the like have elided that detachment, corrupting both. No, in reality, we are at a negative point in the decline of postcolonial principles.
Speaking of boxing — it’s no fine using the term “professional fight” again, which today can use to so many genres of ticketed bang-ups — , if any one event prompted this essay, it had to be the soul-destroying spectacle of the Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul fight, watched by 65 million viewers. In other words, a genuinely collective experience. Those involved got huge paydays, reportedly Tyson got$ 20 million and Paul$ 40 million, not to mention Netflix, the promoters, the stadium, and everyone behind the ignoble enterprise. Tyson, 58, showed his age fairly quickly; he typically walks with a cane, and Paul, who is mediocre at his fingertips, awkwardly held back afterward for fear of hurting him. The experience evoked some vile sadistic spectacle from the Roman period, depraving both the observer and the audience, because humiliation and shame permeated the fake proceedings, infecting the audience, and making it feel complicit in the cruel charade.  ,
One should pause here and briefly contribute to the Roman Empire’s yearlong semi-ironic viral chatter. The general meme’s underlying theory was that normal people didn’t think about Rome and that those who claimed ( mostly men ) were pompous and their justifications were specious.” How frequently do you think about it and why” was the general meme. It has become rather popular to be ignorant of Roman history, in stark contrast to our forefathers in the West, who grew up immersed in knowledge of the classical era. Many of my predecessors have experienced loss of this particular aspect of cultural literacy for a variety of reasons, but my is particular to the subject at hand. Knowledge of Roman history typically comes packaged with a sense of its decline and fall, acting as an implicit guideline for how to recognize milestones in the downward arc.  ,
The various stages have since gained deeper significance, shifting from public immodesty to the ultimately mass slaughter of citizens, since the arc ended up in horrifying scenes of collective demise, well known to one and all up until recent decades. Underlying awareness of the process meant, yes, certain types of incidents, seemingly minor, raised alarms because they fit into an ominous pattern. The return of neo-gladiatorial spectacles, feral violence for popular consumption, would be one of them. We are no longer compelled to think in terms of civilization. These days, colonialism, racism, and sexism provide the criteria, essentially political, by which to shape and understand our historical imperatives. Personal morality, the dignity of bearing, reticence from public showboating, and the like used to be virtues to be upheld for the sake of one’s civilization — constricting, to be sure, but the alternative led to unthinkable disaster, or so one thought. We internalized the dialectic so deeply that we even knew what the good looked like, which, in turn, fashioned our aesthetics, our sense of high art and beauty. Since the eradication of that link between civilizational awareness and personal grace, neither one of the two matters anymore along with much else crucial to society’s fabric.  ,
If we can’t uphold standards as a duty to one another, we might at least do it for people who are far away who admire those standards and long to live by them. Let me share a story that occurred to me while I was in Iraq. I had essentially developed a new journalistic style, reporting on culture in war zones, spending months in Baghdad and roundabouts in the years leading up to and following the” surge” ( 2008 ), all for the Wall Street Journal’s art and culture pages. Unlike most other outsiders who lived on the base, for my kind of work, I really had to live in the city, meet people, and make friends. Which meant wandering the streets unprotected and unencumbered but free to operate covertly and keep my ear to the ground. I tried to look as shabby as any civilian surviving in war-torn surroundings. And so I covered subjects such as the last art gallery in Baghdad, the embattled ballet school, historic buildings from the golden age, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the like. I managed to contact the symphony’s director and cellist to arrange an interview. His orchestra members were a constant lull, their numbers were dwindling, and the city’s constant violence had an impact on them.  ,
We made plans to meet in a suburb near my obscure apartment building. When the time came, I ran out to the empty parking area featuring a bombed-out Fiat. Suddenly, a rather grand, lofty, all-white Range Rover sailed into view. Undoubtedly one of the few at the time in Baghdad. It drove up, and the figure at the wheel waved. I walked over and gawped. ” Are you my interview person”? The 40-something man driving the car was flawlessly dressed, wearing a blazer, ascot, and white flannel pants that resembled one of the Three Tenors, and I almost failed to say it. Surely, it was a mirage, the perfect simulacrum of a symphony director at any other time and place. You have to imagine that the average garb on display was either militia colors, al Qaeda Islamic or black, or deeply street-worn. The Schubert wafting from the car’s sound system was punctuated by the usual bangs and booms from far and near.  ,
Instantly abashed by my own down-at-heel attire, I asked him to wait and rushed back to don my own hitherto undeployed blazer over preppy button-collar shirt, returned with recouped self-respect, and we took off toward the town center. He switched the tune to Wagner, and as we accelerated, Ride of the Valkyries slammed into abandoned, blackened cityscapes. I inquired if he typically dressed that way. His English, having studied lots abroad, also sounded like a Placido Domingo, both in accent and gravitas. He said,” If I dress the part, it helps me remember why I do what I do, the values I represent. I make the decision to represent them as a flag in person. We live here in a war between barbarism and civilization. Of course, I enjoy classical music, but the wartime soundtrack also serves as inspiration. It’s part of the fight back and the middle finger to barbarism. If you’re someone who chooses to stay when you needn’t, then it means you’re willing to die for what you’re doing here. I would rather die dressed in the garb of what I stand for” . ,  ,
My education was only just beginning. At each checkpoint, of which there were several, I noticed the odd behavior of the guards. Invariably, they took one look at the singular vision confronting them and waved us on hastily. In war zones, you learn to read reactions instantly. Theirs was a mixture of astonishment, fear, and awe. Fear because any obvious or unusual sight could indicate illness. It might lead to an incident or snoop on snipers. Occupants of a vehicle surely knew that and were being foolhardy, a concern in itself. However, there was another factor. They recognized dimly the long-forgotten, far-distant but unmistakable signals of an atavistic authority, that of the civilized world, a sort of supernatural apparition amid the chaos. ” For them”, said my companion, “it’s like seeing a maestro at a piano in mid-desert”. A messenger from a fearless, timeless, abiding cultural force.  ,
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I remember thinking then, and it haunts me still, how little we revered our own cultural strengths. By which I certainly don’t mean pop or consumer culture. Pop culture has no context if it is not contrasted with classical culture, and it certainly has no standards. Rappers holding their crotches might be a part of K-pop bands, but they hardly improve or spread our fundamental values. I don’t want to sound like a casting call for all those in the world who, bless them, admire the best in us to come right over and help us uphold our own standards. No, the West must first come to an agreement on this with a re-hearsing of first principles. Something else the director said should haunt us all, in light of current events, “You’re very lucky over there because, from the legacy of centuries, you share a basic understanding of values high and low. You don’t go far wrong as a society. It’s just built into you. Just a basic idea of how to act in a certain way to prevent things from going crazy. Imagine if that weren’t the norm as an example of what to aim for.
That was less than 20 years ago, when it appeared as though he was uttering an ageless truth about the ongoing state of things.  ,
Melik Kaylan has a column on foreign affairs for Forbes and writes about culture for the Wall Street Journal.
