Notes on the Death of Culture

Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by John King, 226 pages

In this book of essays, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa explores the possibility of culture in our modern "civilization of spectacle" in which entertainment has eclipsed art, the concept of value has been wholly obscured by price, and a leveling egalitarian spirit has anathematized any notion of hierarchy.

At the heart of the book is a struggle between its two primary inspirations - Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture and Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies.  The former describes culture as an inescapably religious organic development grown by a creative elite, the latter celebrates an open marketplace of ideas as the best vehicle for progress.  The tension between the two is most explicit in his treatment of religion, which he endorses for utilitarian reasons while denying the validity of any claim to absolute truth, simultaneously asserting its necessity while leaving it hollow and lifeless.  This is, of course, the dilemma of any advocate of cultural renewal in late modernity - how to maintain the modern virtues of tolerance and equality while simultaneously rejecting relativism and its children, consumerism and nihilism.