question of the day: Have we reached a point of cultural stagnation?

But I’m not alone in thinking about this! Kurt Andersen in Vanity Fair:

Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. (And then there’s the miraculous drop in violent crime in the United States, by half.) Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past—the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s—looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History.

Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972—giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps—with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins—again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising—all of it. It’s even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.

Yes yes yes! The recent past no longer looks old-fashioned. When we want to invoke a “retro” feeling today, we have to go back, at a minimum, at least 30 years, to the early 80s. But even at that point, there are only a few signifiers that say old: legwarmers, for one. It wouldn’t be that hard to time-travel back to 1982 and find someone who wouldn’t look out of place today. It would be almost impossible to travel back to 1972 or 1962 and do the same thing.

What the heck happened over the past 20 years? Andersen thinks he knows:

Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think, it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out. So as the Web and artificially intelligent smartphones and the rise of China and 9/11 and the winners-take-all American economy and the Great Recession disrupt and transform our lives and hopes and dreams, we are clinging as never before to the familiar in matters of style and culture.

If this stylistic freeze is just a respite, a backward-looking counter-reaction to upheaval, then once we finally get accustomed to all the radical newness, things should return to normal—and what we’re wearing and driving and designing and producing right now will look totally démodé come 2032. Or not. Because rather than a temporary cultural glitch, these stagnant last couple of decades may be a secular rather than cyclical trend, the beginning of American civilization’s new chronic condition, a permanent loss of appetite for innovation and the shockingly new. After all, such a sensibility shift has happened again and again over the last several thousand years, that moment when all great cultures—Egyptian, Roman, Mayan, Islamic, French, Ottoman, British—slide irrevocably into an enervated late middle age.

So it’s either a temporary glitch, a slowing down of some aspects of our culture while other aspects speed up. Or else it’s the beginning of the end of American innovation. (These excerpts here, long as they seem, are but a small slice of Andersen’s essay. I recommend reading the whole thing.)

Weirdly, the Onion sorta predicted our situation almost 15 years ago:

U.S. Dept. Of Retro Warns: 'We May Be Running Out Of Past'

November 4, 1997 | ISSUE 32•14

WASHINGTON, DC—At a press conference Monday, U.S. Retro Secretary Anson Williams issued a strongly worded warning of an imminent "national retro crisis," cautioning that "if current levels of U.S. retro consumption are allowed to continue unchecked, we may run entirely out of past by as soon as 2005."

The Onion worried that nostalgia for the recent past was getting too recent:

Such a warp, Williams said, was never a danger in the past due to the longtime, standard two-decade-minimum retro waiting period. "However, the mid-'80s deregulation of retro under the Reagan Administration eliminated that safeguard," he explained, "leaving us to face the threat of retro-ironic appreciation being applied to present or even future events."

"We are talking about a potentially devastating crisis situation in which our society will express nostalgia for events which have yet to occur," Williams told reporters.

The National Retro Clock currently stands at 1990, an alarming 74 percent closer to the present than 10 years ago, when it stood at 1969.

Nowhere is the impending retro crisis more apparent, Williams said, than in the area of popular music. "To the true retrophile, disco parties and the like were common 10 years ago. Similarly, retro-intelligentsia have long viewed 'New Wave' and even late-'80s hair-metal retro as passé and no longer amusing as kitsch," Williams said. "We now face the unique situation of '90s retro, as evidenced by the current Jane's Addiction reunion tour: nostalgia for the decade in which we live."

Did we perhaps subsconsciously appreciate, on a cultural level, the danger we were in, and so we built in some stagnant buffer for our sense of retro to realign itself?

(I’ve long pointed to the Onion as proof that we are beyond satire, but I had not previously encountered the publication as being so prophetically postsatirical.)

Have we reached a point of cultural stagnation? Can we get into gear again and start creating a world worthy of retro? Or are we moving into some new cultural phase that precludes it?

Thanks to Bluejay for the Andersen link.

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