by lo_zamoyski | 2025-10-29 17:48:01+00:00
I would first want to clarify the vocabulary.

The author mostly means "statistical deviance" within certain scopes, which has no normative force (there's nothing good or bad about statistical distributions as such - it could be either good or bad, or neutral), but equivocates by quietly switching to other meanings of the word, like "moral deviance". We don't want moral deviance, by definition: anything deviating from the "ought" deviating from the good and thus bad in proportion to its deviation. It is good that drug use among teenagers, for example, has dropped such that the statistically common case is that few teens use drugs. (Note also the funny entailment: if drug use were extremely common among teens, we would also have low statistical deviance, but high moral deviance. Would the author then dream of the case where half of the teen population takes drugs to maximize statistical deviance in this respect?)

Now, within the scope of fashion, design, art, music, architecture, etc., are in one sense subject to fashion and so each epoch will show signs of convergence, replication, exploration, and reproduction of certain similar forms as they are developed and copied. However, globalism has long been accused of having a homogenizing effect, so the scope and scale today permits continuous information flow that stifles the development of divergent exploration. Culture has been flattened as a result. We often connect more quickly with distant constructs of the media and the social media than we do with the physical human beings around us.

Cultural exchange, I claim, is a good thing in general, but it is only successful when it respects the principle of subsidiarity which successfully marries the local with the global without destroying one or the other, as well as the objectively moral. While parochialism excludes itself from the richness of exchange, globalism crushes the local [0]. But the global can only be a function of the aggregate of locals, as the global lacks cultural substance of its own. The corporate and commercial now fill that void. This would seem to explain the dominance of the corporate and commercial in popular culture and the homogenizing effects of industrial mass production moved by the profit motive, and the resulting homogeneous poor quality. The poor quality of cultural production is the real offense.

[0] The best example of something that manages to accomplish this is the Catholic Church. A Catholic can walk into any church on earth and feel spiritually at home, even while there is variation in the liturgical practices among cultures. The Church is a patchwork of cultural and ethnic diversity sharing in a common truth. Cultural exchange is transmitted through it without crushing any of the participating parties. Simply put, the universality of the Church - the word "catholic" means "universal" - doesn't smother ethnic difference, and within this scope, patriotism - a love of one's people - doesn't metastasize into some kind of ideology of chauvinism or hatred of others. The spirit of logoi spermatikoi permeates and seeks to embrace the true and the good and the beautiful, wherever it is found, and include it in the great patrimony, transfiguring it where necessary. It is not a vacuous, egalitarian, relativistic pseudo-embrace of diversity, but a love of the variety and varying degrees of the objectively good.