The Big Questions Are we really in a cultural golden age?

Sallust, the Roman historian who made his name by connecting great events to the moral outlook of the people involved in them, said it more than 2,000 years ago: “The golden age is before us, not behind us.” Twenty centuries later, we still don’t seem to have learned his epigrammatic lesson: We—both the critical we and the popular we—spend an inordinate amount of time looking backward and mourning a golden age of culture that is likely irrecoverable, while looking at the present day as either approaching or having already arrived at an utter nadir.

I’ve always hated this tendency. Even when I was young, people who looked back at the ’60s and ’70s as the pinnacle of American popular culture made my skin crawl. And the older I got, the less patience I had for the retro-minded bores of every age who bitched and moaned about how nothing was as good as it was during the years when they just happened to be in college. And on the flip side, I’m equally frustrated by people who don’t want to recognize that—at least in terms of culture—we’re in a golden age right now. Sure, there are plenty of individuals and tendencies to complain about, but doesn’t anyone recognize how great things are now?

The problem is, without digging any deeper—without looking at the causes and correlations that deepened both these reactions—I’d come off sounding like nothing more than a different variety of old crank than the one I’m condemning. Instead of the prematurely ancient hipsters whose rallying cry is “Everything sucks now,” I’m risking being the equally aged squeaker across the street who hollers “You kids don’t know how good you’ve got it.” To me, it’s evident that, as a general rule, there was no miraculous period in the past where everything was better, and that by almost any measure, the mass of culture is in a better place than it has ever been. But without looking at why people on both sides of the argument believe they way they do, this conversation quickly degenerates into little more than name-calling.

First, why—other than the natural laziness that informs most nostalgia—do so many people think that the culture is in decline? Why is the belief that things were better in the mysterious “before” so common that it jumps from generation to generation, like baldness or a bad ticker? While the tendency to be politically conservative knows no particular age, cultural conservatism is as predictable as prostate cancer. Why hasn’t this changed since Sallust’s time?

Part of this, I think, is because of the way people naturally tend, as they get older and gain more responsibilities, to stop paying as much attention to pop culture as they did when they were younger. A 23-year-old with an entry-level job, few expenses, and lots of free time finds it easy to fill that time with immersion in indie films, musical micro-genres, and new developments in videogame technology. Two decades later, when that same person has a wife, kids, and a mortgage, he likely has more to think about than the latest literary trend or hotshot graphic novelist. Once it becomes harder to make grapes part of your regular diet, it’s a lot easier to assume that they’re all sour anyway.

But beyond that, one factor in why I believe we really are living in a cultural golden age—the way technology has made art of all sorts more available to everyone than at any previous point in human history—also works to fuel this longing for the past. Particularly for the generation that grew up without the Internet, the easy availability of culture doesn’t seem like a boon; instead, by flooding everyone with an astonishing amount of choice, it seems instead to curse them with so much to choose from that it’s easy for their minds to shut down. In the face of media oversaturation—and media decentralization, which contributes to a situation where there are few trusted voices of authority to act as cultural guides—it’s tempting to just write it all off as a bunch of crap you’re better off not knowing about.

For younger generations, though, or older people who surf the culture and the web with equal ease, the flood-tide poses another problem: We develop a shortened attention span almost out of necessity, in order to avoid being overwhelmed by how much information is out there. As a result, we can focus so much on temporary tendencies in the culture, on micro-movements and what are likely passing phases and crazes, that we start to take them as signs of an overall decay. (I’m just as guilty of this as anyone else.) We forget that cultural tendencies are sporadic, inchoate, and unforeseeable, and begin to think of the trend of the moment as a harbinger of some eternal, irrevocable change. Auto-Tune isn’t just annoying; it’s the end of music as we know it. The music industry’s digital-age difficulties don’t mean the business is changing; they mean it’s ending. In 2007, there were so many good movies, it was one of the greatest years in film history. Now, only three years later, a year of duds signals the death knell of the entire art form.

Placed in combination, these factors—the natural tendency to reduce cultural intake as you get older, the oversaturation of the market in an age of globalism and digital media, and the short-sighted tendency to mistake short-term developments for long-term changes—make it pretty easy for almost anyone to develop a pessimistic, backward-looking attitude to the cultural scene. Combine them with a handful of other conditions (the general balkanization of the culture, the increased reluctance of cross-cultural groups to communicate, and the fact that specialists tend to outnumber generalists these days), and you’ve got a toxic soup of reaction that everybody wants to taste. 

Taken individually, those are all pretty measly reasons to give up on the culture, to grow cynical about how good things have gotten. But in combination, it’s an awfully heavy burden, and if we’re going to lighten it, we have to do more than sneer. The case that we really are in a golden age—if not of production, then at least of consumption—is easily made: With communications technology, increased globalism, and the seemingly endless proliferation of the Internet, it literally has never been easier to listen to any kind of music, watch any kind of movie, read any kind of literature, or experience any kind of culture you choose. Films that only two decades ago were almost impossible to see outside of big-city festivals or film schools can now show up in your mailbox within a day or two of a request for them. Television shows—in what even the jaded admit is a golden age of television—can now be watched in a variety of ways at almost any time, often without advertising. Technology has made rare books less rare, cult comics less cultish, and global culture more local. When I was younger, I used to cherish biographical encyclopedias and books like James Park’s Cultural Icons because they provided me with an indispensable lifeline to world culture in the intellectually arid Phoenix suburbs where I grew up; now, I could learn almost everything they taught me in a few hours on Wikipedia, and experiencing the books, films, and art they discussed might have taken me months instead of years, years instead of decades.

But beyond simple availability, actual quality is, I believe, on the increase. Democratization of every major medium has resulted in creative people from all walks of life, and from all means, being able to get their art to bigger audiences than ever before. Mainstream movies may be in dire straits, but the chances of a small, independent project getting released is greater than ever before. Television networks are beginning to populate their schedules with writers and producers who come from more diverse backgrounds than at any time in the medium’s history. Artists no longer need the sanction of a handful of publishers, networks, studios, or labels to get the public’s attention. Even if the talent pool remains static, we can now see the work of a far larger percentage of that talent pool if we so desire. The general public may still have a taste for chaff, but more wheat is being grown than ever. These are the things that are of paramount importance to point out to combat the cultural cynicism brought about by that same cultural overload.

Why bother? Well, other than the obvious fact that I make my living as a sort of cultural advocate, the fact is, as my colleague Donna Bowman put it, people living through a golden age often don’t know. And it’s important that they do, because this golden age, as with all the ones that lie behind us, depends on patronage. If enough people lament the death of culture, culture will die, no matter how sophisticated our means of disseminating it. And what will crush the horn of plenty won’t be the things it isn’t producing, but indifference to what it is.