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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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I like this take a lot. I even think Greer might be sympathetic in ways. Much of his writing about how people have less autonomy or self-governance is extremely American specific, they wouldn't make much sense in one of the many countries with a long tradition of serfdom (and of course wasn't true for the majority of Americans who came over as indentured servants or slaves). The way I interpret his argument at least is that American fiction expresses a unique dislike of larger systems partially because Americans have a genuine cultural memory of a different era and have some sense that the present state is historically unnatural.

At the same time, is there nothing moden about this trend? Was America writing popular fiction about plucky rebels fighting the empire in the nineteenth century? I think it's fair to say that when you read books like Huckleberry Finn or The Scarlett letter there's definitely themes of distrusting authority, but nothing (to my knowledge) like a complete revolutionary narrative, despite the fact that we were so much closer to that actual period of American history. The dystopian fiction about all encompassing, opppressive governments and corporations does seem to rise in tandem with the size and influence of the actual government and actual corporations. If Americans have an inherent distrust of institutional authority, it still took those institutions growing in size and scale for our distrust in them to grow towards producing a genuinely revolutionary literary culture.