The death of the Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025), who won the Nobel prize for literature in 2010, prompts these melancholy musings. Although some of his works, such as The Times of the Hero (1963), Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1997), the last clearly flagging a deep appreciation of sexual pleasure, were based on his own colourful experiences of real life, it was in his essays (e.g. Making Waves [1996] and Touchstones [2007]) that I found much that was startlingly in tune with my own thoughts concerning the unpleasantnesses going on all around us.
As the “cartographer” who mapped structures of power and chronicled aspects of how the individual might resist and revolt against them, he was bound to be of interest to one who has long been worried by the creeping manipulation of just about everything in order to create public images that disguise the real nature of what is actually happening. His many works pouring scorn on so-called “celebrity culture”, and his loathing of authoritarianism of any kind, struck me as being of enormous importance, refreshingly sane in contrast to the emptiness, intellectual mediocrity (painfully apparent among British politicians), and vulgarity all too obvious in these benighted islands.
Vargas Llosa, like many, adopted left-wing postures when young, but became disillusioned with Castro’s Cuba when it dawned on him that any writer who did not kow-tow to the “revolution” could face not only “cancellations”, but punishments, including doing time in chokey or worse. This realisation led to his transformation into an outspoken critic of totalitarianism in any form, probably best expressed in his thriller, The Feast of the Goat (2000), set in the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo dictatorship. That transformation continued apace after a dinner he attended in 1982 at the home of Hugh Thomas: with Isaiah Berlin and Margaret Thatcher among those gathered there, Vargas Llosa’s conversion to the liberating virtues became complete, and he evolved his own version in what he termed as “Andean Thatcherism”. His attempt to become President of Peru in 1990 failed, however: he became a Spanish citizen, and subsequently was ennobled by King Juan Carlos as 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa. Even then controversy accompanied his expressions of affection for Barcelona, because his fierce opposition to Catalan Separatism got him labelled as a “legitimiser of colonialist oppression”, but no sane person reading his last novel, The Neighbourhood and his anthology of political essays, Sabers and Utopias (both 2018), could ever accuse him of being a supporter of oppression in any form.
Many recent, deeply thought, and sensitive warnings about the destruction and corruption of values have come from Latin America, where some elements of an old culture precariously survive, despite attempts to swamp them with consumerist bling. In my own conversations with colleagues from Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, I have been struck by a sensitivity, integrity, and cultural awareness now lacking in many in Western Europe. In his Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society, Vargas Llosa held that “high culture” involves judgements that should equip humankind, confident and sure of where it stands, to discard what are merely fashionable “popular” (but actually imposed on the public) ephemera in favour of those values that inform great art, and regretted that relativism, levelling, and the spectacle have replaced analytical thought. High culture, to him, was an autonomous reality in which “ideas, æsthetic values, and works of art and literature” connect with the “rest of social existence”, and are not just reflections but the very sources of economic, political, religious, and social phenomena. The problem, as Vargas Llosa recognised, is that judgements themselves have become unacceptable: exhortations not to be “judgemental” have become commonplace, presumably because they involve discrimination, and that is not allowed either. Humankind is becoming conditioned to accept without question what is advertised: the widespread acceptance of “iconic” buildings by “starchitects”, promoted in glossy pufferies, is a prime example of this tendency.
Popular “culture” largely depends on spectacle: the products churned out in modern consumerist societies have little to do with use, but are all about appearance, image, and sensation, advertised just long enough to attract purchasers in droves until superseded by different ephemera. There is evidence everywhere of a disorientated society and a global non-culture dealing in representation, brand-names rather than objects, and seductive imagery concerned only with commercial gain, something on which Roger Scruton was to elaborate in “After Sacred Mystery, the Great Yawn” (2015). And almost everything, including architecture, from which any understanding of history and the importance of religion in history has been abstracted, is hugely diminished by the phenomena of image, sensationalism, and the seeking after anything that could be described by that over-used and foolish word, “iconic”.
Vargas Llosa called as witness to his profoundly argued case the Mexican Octavio Paz Lozano (who also won the Nobel prize for literature in 1990), with whom he shared a gloomy view of a dying culture. Paz Lozano was suspicious of “The Spectacle”, by which he appears to have meant something akin to the mass-witness of pre-Columbian human sacrifice transmuted into public executions and later widespread use of media such as film, television, and the internet to watch extreme violence and killings. “The Spectacle”, therefore, is something intrinsically cruel, for “spectators” who enjoy it have no memory, lack any conscience, and are incapable of feeling remorse. A society of voyeurs, which is clearly what has evolved in the West, lives for novelty of any sort, provided it is new (a little word constantly employed in advertisements): it views exponentially more violent scenes of death and destruction as “entertainment”. If the society of “The Spectacle” careers towards lurid, violent, distorted ugliness, even murder, sated, it will be left with nothing but the boredom of a grotesque surfeit of idolatry: and idolatry, as we learn from a study of religion, is the Great Sin through which even the deities are finally lost to humankind, but to judge from the current state of the West, the Lares and Penates were sent packing long ago, and our habitat is watched over by them no more. Absence of standards by which hideous crimes can be judged underscores that, increasingly, there are no measurements for crime on any scale, and so the evil, the false, and the hideous, universally imposed, become inevitable. Humankind has been detached from the cultural and religious roots of its history, quite deliberately, as those roots are not commercial, to be sold in the market-place: their value is incalculable, and therefore of no value to a society that, arguably, has lost its way.
High culture enshrines, in some aesthetically refined way, many centuries of humankind’s experiences
Culture is certainly not about the Derrida-led “deconstruction” of works in order to expose “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobic”, “Eurocentric”, and other labels, then writing about such unravelling in obfuscatory language that makes no sense, other than as a manifestation of a widespread repudiation of the spirit of free enquiry and the dethroning of reason, both once central to the Enlightenment. Use of jargon in the rarefied “compound” of “Academe” ensures the survival of that “compound” as the habitat of those who set themselves apart, a kind of priesthood of Nihilism. And that “compound” was certainly set up from the 1920s, from which the high-priests of Modernism issued their manifestoes, slogans, assertions, and demands from which reason was indeed dethroned and history and culture expunged.
High culture enshrines, in some aesthetically refined way, many centuries of humankind’s experiences: its essence, as history shows, is steeped in religion. One of the obvious problems of “popular culture” is that it depends on spectacle and fantasy, on products churned out for the pleasure-market, ever more outlandish, to distract from realities and truths, and obliterate what remains of any spiritual essence in everyday existence. As Vargas Llosa emphasised, that which nourishes the inner being has to be earned: it cannot be obtained on tick, or acquired online like a commercial commodity; it comes to console, if at all, through endeavour, humility, and penitence. It also presupposes the acquisition of a basic vocabulary, a language, an understanding, all of which require patient, dedicated study and attention-spans of more than a few seconds: it needs to be understood in context, and that means in terms of history and religion. Communication necessitates the use of a certain syntax, a grasp of the morphology of a language, but it requires, above all, a culture in order to support “the weight of a civilisation”. Unfortunately, the virus of Deconstruction has been highly successful in the dismantling of traditions in much of cultural relevance: like a biological virus it partially destroys its host, avoiding complete obliteration, because, as Nikos Salingaros et al. have pointed out, if that were to occur, further transmission would cease.
Social identity and a healthy common culture give stability as well as freedom to develop high culture to new plateaux within social frameworks, but since there is always a dynamic and dæmonic principle in civilisation-culture (the Nietzschean Apollonian/Dionysian clash of opposites), there is an element of risk to the structure. Repressive régimes are well aware of this, and tend to stultify or exploit (within prescribed limits) creativity; but in the third decade of the twenty-first century, by substituting packaging and commercialised fashion for true creativity, the danger of real ideas erupting and threatening the modern State has been considerably minimised. By cheapening art, the greatest enemy of the modern State has been rendered impotent: that has been part of the disastrous legacy of Modernism, the ally of repression, and itself repressive.
