Managing Cultural Anxiety: Western Culture’s Dilemma

There is perhaps no other culture in the world that is as dynamic and contested in the year 2024 as Western Culture. As I’ve mentioned previously, Western Culture can be most accurately described as a Culture of the Mind. It exists in isolation against every other culture on the planet, who are primarily Cultures of the Senses (or collectivist, in the traditional vernacular).

Naturally, this lends the West, and all those within it, to a place of profound anxiety. With the dispensation of top down and hierarchically driven models of society, as seen prior to the the Enlightenment period, the West is forging new ground in the cultural domain. Completely unbeaten, this path is not one for the faint of heart. It comes with little certainty, which in turn brings profound feelings of insecurity.

Its not hard to see how these feelings of insecurity lead to fear. Fear of change, fear of the future, and certainly the fear of the ‘other’. What happens when we are fearful and insecure? We tend to gravitate towards things we know with certainty, the things that are familiar, the things that can provide as much security and certainty as possible. These, in a cultural context, are those who are like ourselves. From our own tribe. Our own clan. In an era of cultural uncertainty, cultural tribalism runs rife. Tajfell’s theories on in group/out group dynamics are becoming more relevant now than ever before.

But the anxiety is unlikely to abate anytime soon. The West is at the vanguard of cultural evolution. And these cogs turn ever so slowly. As a case in point, it took a full five hundred years from the innovation of perspective, and it’s natural academic progression, post-modernism, to finally show up in educational institutions. Five hundred years. This sort of cultural landscape shift could take a thousand years, or more, for it to finally settle in its place. But even then, culture is never static, it constantly evolves. Constantly changes. And that’s a good thing. Change encourages growth.

Which leads me to a related point – the anxiety around the depth, descent and direction of this evolution into the Culture of the Mind is derived, in part, around the differences of opinion about how this change can or should be managed. How big the ‘part’ this role plays is an important debate. It might be argued that the early innovators in the Humanist space did not intentionally or actively attempt to change teh nature of the culture they lived in. It is hard to make that same case for many of the artists of the Renaissance, some of which appeared to make a career out of social and cultural provocation. So the very foundation of the great western cultural evolution is rooted in a sense of progressivism. The neo western cultural milieu being perhaps best known for the last half millennia as being one of constant cultural dynamism, renewal and revival. However even the early innovators in this space, saw a need for restraint and some, such as Luther, may have even been somewhat remorseful for the progressive chain of events that they set in place.

So the great question and solution to the the cultural anxiety of the west is one of four ways forward:

1) Put the proverbial brakes on. To bring changes to a halt so that existing cultural norms can enrich and mature.
2) Allow changes to continue, but in a far more organic way, so that the seeds can grow naturally, unmolested by the meddling and, when considering the length of time over which cultural changes occur, short sighted human interference.
3) Continue in the tradition of the great Renaissance artists with the intentional and active adjustment and renegotiation of cultural norms. And,
4) Try to put the genie back in the bottle and crawl back into the pre-enlightenment shell. Which would require a systematic ‘unlearning’ of a good many things that have been learned over the last five hundred years. As appealing as such a warm and comforting security blanket is for some, it is in my opinion, a pipe dream, short of some sort of North Korean style cultural isolationism.

Un/fortunately there is no certainty in the future. This is true of cultures who have not evolved much over the last five thousand years, but is particularly true of cultures that have largely only existed for the better part of the last five hundred. The one thing certainty that all can agree on for the here and now, is there needs to be a cultural acceptance, to debatable degrees, of cultural anxiety. This state of flux the west exists in. To not necessarily even seek security in certainty, but to accept what is, and to understand how this anxiety may impact our own outlooks and views. So that we can have better, more balanced and more informed decisions going into the future.

Mark