private cultures

Two observations. First, I believe many of us have had experiences like the following. I look back on the objective facts and accomplishments of my life to date, and I at once intuit “there’s so much more to me than that”. What though? Perhaps my unactualized potentials? A young man might naturally think this, but one with more years behind than ahead no longer flatters himself for having worlds of unrealized potential and is driven to suspect that the problem is more metaphysical, rooted perhaps in some gulf between the subjective and objective.

Second, we sincerely believe that the most important things in our lives are our relationships with loved ones and with God, that our communion with them is more important than solitary pleasures, however elevated (e.g. thinking, creativity). However, we cannot just be with friends and family. For short periods of time, it is enough to be silent in each others’ presence. On dramatic occasions like a reunion after long separation or a deathbed, expressions of love and gratitude are in order, but again quickly run their course. If one is to enjoy the presence of a beloved friend or kinsman for any length of time, one must turn with him to some other subject; one must turn to chatting–about shared memories, hobbies, politics, fiction, or some other subject admittedly of less importance than the bond of the two discussing it–or to some sort of activity. ”Well, we can’t just sit and stare at each other!” you’ll say. Still, I find it interesting that the bond of the two requires a shared attention to a third.

Each human soul is a whole world unto itself. But each family, as well as each deep group of friends, is also its own private world. This became especially clear to me during the pandemic years. My wife and daughters and I have always spent a lot of time together, but then we spent little time with anyone else. With what ingenuity we had turned inward, the stories and games (our games being mostly stories acted out) we made up for each other became ever more elaborate, with ever more layers of character development and backstory to our imaginary world, a dramatic collaboration that continues to this day. My wife and I were and continue to be the main conduits of the larger culture to our children. Some of what we read to them I’d consider great literature; some of what we exposed them to were television shows from our childhood for which I’d make no claim to objective greatness. Either way, carrying these books, movies, and television shows from the wider culture to our family’s culture meant them becoming parts of a new whole (for example, the game my wife and I have of trying to stump each other with obscure Star Trek quotes), probably taking on new contextual qualities. I know other families who had similar experiences of the lockdown years.

A modest example of the same thing is the inside joke. I’d suppose every family and close group of friends has some of these. The point of inside jokes is not that they’re not funny enough for public comedy; some of them are brilliantly clever. But they are too attached to particular personalities and a shared history to be intelligible without them. Some plays and novels begin as stories shared among a group of intimates around a friendly fire; what sets them apart from truly private stories is that these others were detachable, able to be understood and enjoyed by those outside the circle.

I’ve said before that one reason American culture exports so easily is because it is insufficiently intimate, overly public and detachable, because its creators and audiences belong to different subcultures.

When close friends, spouses, or families are together, they automatically fall into building up their private culture of shared memories and imaginations. If each family is not only a group, but also a culture, then most of humanity–not only the great poets and artists–are significant cultural creators, just for private, intimate cultures and not the public, wider one. It is not outrageous to say that I am the Homer of the culture of my little family of four, and that my public life is neither my most important legacy nor the one into which I have objectified the most of my self.

In fact, I belong to two private cultures, the one I grew up in and the one my wife and I formed with our children. This cleavage feels unnatural, a terrible price I’ve incurred by living far away from my parents, my brother and sisters, and (in yet another distant part of the country) my wife’s parents and sister. Indeed it is not historically normal to live far from one’s family and in-laws, and I have not sufficiently considered the rights of my parents to their grandchildren, of whom they have seen too little since the lockdowns.

Totalitarian Leftism is devouring the public culture, replacing everything with itself. Those of us who have not internally submitted to Leftism find the public culture increasingly loathsome. At some point soon, we may cease to see any value in participating in it at all. That is, even the idea of contributing a great novel, musical composition, or scientific discovery to the wider culture will lose any sort of appeal (even supposing one had the talent to do such a thing); how could I desire any creation of mine, anything into which I have mixed my self, to be recognized by and incorporated into that? Leftists may still wish to contribute to the public culture that they own, but however talented they are, the requirement that their work serve the hegemonic ideology will make it more a simulacrum of true art or science than the real thing. The rest of us will come to prefer our audience of a few.