The Devaluation Of Culture

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Today’s culture has become suspicious. With each day that passes it is more difficult to believe in the institutions, awards, verdicts and actors of the culture industry. Every day it is more difficult to distinguish the criteria used to value a writer, to award a prize, the criteria behind the success or failure of a cultural enterprise. How to distinguish if the award given to an African-American writer is due to his artistic merits and not due to his skin color and the predominance of Critical Racial Theory? How would anyone know if the success of a feminist and lesbian writer depends on her writing talent and not on her gender and ideological stance, which is dominant in today’s culture? And, above all,how to believe in the verdicts of those who hold power in the cultural sphere when the vast majority openly defend an ideological agenda with totalitarian aims?

The capture of culture

Under these conditions, it is entirely legitimate to be suspicious of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature Jury. Not only because in the cited example there are criteria such as gender (she is a writer) that were probably also decisive, but because the entire process was a power game. Ultimately, the West needed to demonize Putin, portray him as a bloody dictator, and what better way to do it than by rewarding a dissident Belarusian writer?

Now think about the situation I just mentioned but on a larger scale. That is what is happening with culture today. And it does not only affect the public, which loses confidence in the culture industry due to the obvious capture of culture by a faction of society. In reality, this affects, above all, the artists themselves, the writers, who every day see how the circle around them closes more and more. In Colombia, the progressive ideological agenda can be detected in the economic stimuli assigned to culture by the State. With each day that passes it is increasingly notorious how certain topics are imposed  in order to be able to participate, i.e., a novel prize is announced that highlights the struggles of African-American minorities or women. Another example are literary competitions whose theme is “inclusion”, “diversity” or any other progressive category.  In these cases, in which the subject matter is dictated from above by the State, the aim is to strengthen the official discourse. Writers are nothing more than the instruments to achieve this. And the State achieves it in a very effective way: by imposing the themes in advance, it is automatically excluding all those dissident writers who are not willing to speak in the same language as the State.

Culture wars

Indeed, what place occupy those who do not agree with the dominant progressive ideology? Don’t they have the right to express themselves in their own language? That is what is happening in the present. If I can only express myself in the language of one faction of society, what they are denying me is the right to express myself freely, the right to talk about what I, as an individual, want to talk about, in the terms in which I want to talk, not in those that society imposes on me.Worse yet, artists and writers are being forced to become state propagandists, otherwise they would be excluded from the sphere of culture.

This is not the first time this has happened in history. In the Soviet Union the same process took place. When, in 1934, Zhdanov declared socialist realism as the official artistic style, the consequence was the impoverishment of Russian culture, which until then had shown incredible dynamism (Think of Rodchenko, who fell into obscurity despite being one of the greatest innovators of modern art). Of course, the measures against dissident writers and artists were more open than now. In order to publish a novel in the Soviet Union, it was necessary to belong to the Writers’ Union, for which it was necessary to belong to the Communist Party. And even so, you had to avoid all the cultural authorities’ controls, the secret services and, even, the executive, which had the power to stop the publication of a novel if it was deemed unorthodox. And since all the publishers belonged to the regime, there was no way the order could not be followed.

Currently it has not reached those extremes, but if the capture of culture continues, it is likely that we will end up in a similar situation. Today  the subject matter is dictated to artists and writers, without directly censoring opposing visions; tomorrow they will not only dictate what we can talk about, no, they will directly prohibit us from speaking against it.The elites know very well that things are easier when they are done gradually, bit by bit, without creating scandal or big debates that could ultimately be detrimental to their cause.This is why those in the field of culture must act. It is necessary to take a clear position: either you are in favor of the totalitarian tendencies that are being imposed in  culture or you are against them. There is no center.

We are in the middle of a culture war. It depends on us if a single worldview is imposed or if a framework is imposed in which several visions coexist. Multipolarity is not, therefore, only a political objective, it is, above all, a cultural objective. But how many in the sphere of culture understand it?