In our era the defining human cultural battle is going to be between two different views on organizing society.

The first is the emerging consensus of those who seek a more cooperative existence. This is an aspect of the growing phenomena of self-conscious, self-confident, self-organizing, self-teaching multitudes.  That is the everyday man and woman, the proverbial common people, taking culture directly into its hand and shaping and reshaping it everyday, every hour, every nano-second.

The other elements are those holding on to the shadows of archaic ideas and illusions.  Men and women such as Cabinet member Geithner.  He made the infamous observation that the world will not survive economically unless it pours material resources into resuscitating and maintaining the US.  The world has no choice but to prop of the US, for, given Geithner’s logic, the US-centric global economic and financial systems of the twenty-century and the current decade is the absolute requirement for the existence of human culture and civilization.

This arrogance is reflected in the fact that the attempt to mitigate mortgage terms at the discretion of the presiding judge of bankrupt cases, led by Majority Whip of the Senate, Durbin of Illinois, was rudely slapped down by the banking industry.  Leading Durbin to remark that the banks own this place, referring to the Congress.  Bill Moyer added that they also owned the White House in his article on the failed senate effort.

This Geithner ultra-powerful, mega-wealthy approach, with its unrestrained robber baron mentality, hasn’t a snowballs chance in hell to make it, notwithstanding the bruising they give the US political process. 

Already much of the various non-western global regions are devising strategies for greater coordination between themselves and similar regions in the world, and more independence from the old US dominated financial and economic structures. As if that was not enough there is significant rancor and discord in and among the general European family of nations, differences of bloc, region, and national state policies are beginning to rapidly approach trade protectionist actions and some might even turn violent.  That is a sobering thought, as this would repeat the pattern of the two world wars of the 20th century.

These factors and actors are critical components of the global society and civilization.  Between them, in their contest and cooperation with each other, a new global consensus will have to be formed, either nonviolently, or failing that, violently 

This process we are going through now is the major determinant of the nature and degree of democratic stability in the world. It will impact on every critical factors of culture, society and history.

Right now it is still the financial e
lites who call the shots.  But based on the their history of gross mishandling of our common material legacy, the world cannot long survive if its is to be dependent on the piloting and navigation skills of this segment of the human population. They are way to likely to throw the world in deadly crises, simply to fatten their own already considerably bank accounts..

It is in the larger, generic battle for social-economic leverage between these two particular demographic divisions that, will determine the outcome of this remarkable period of history.  The two competitors could not be more  different.  One of them is immensely powerful in the contemporary construct of society.
One side, the multitude, is fortified by its use of various forms of self-induced group cognition and the fact that the circumstances have forced them to develop the innate capacities of surviving under adversarial conditions.  This will become even more important as the process is gradually formalized.

On the  other hand the elite, with their immense financial power and consequent political clout is very impressive and can make many believe that it is invincible, how did they get so much power?  Well, a leading contemporary researcher in the field demonstrates that it is a simple function of the elites of the financial world having a strangle hold on the total wealth of the society.

"The growth of financial institutions' holdings of stock during recent decades may be viewed as an aspect of the growing institutionalization of social savings. Financial institutions have become the managers of savings belonging to all income groups Personal trust funds represent the savings of the upper income group, particularly the economically inactive sections of that group. Investment companies gather in the savings of small investors from the upper-middle income groups. Employee benefit funds mainly represent assets that "belong" to middle and lower income groups. This process of institutionalization of saving has given a great deal of potential power to the leading financial institutions. As the power of financial institutions over nonfinancial corporations based on the capital supplier relationship has declined due the historical trends discussed above, the process of institutionalization of savings has placed a growing share of the ownership claims over larger corporations under the control of financial institutions, particularly the leading commercial banks. To what extent has this latter trend provided a significant basis for continuing financial control over the large corporations that dominate the American economy?"

p. 71 David M. Kotz, Bank Control of Large Corporations in the United States

However this method of amassing greater and greater wealth is in fact the basis of much of the financial and economic dislocation haunting modern society  This entropy is the reality of the societal decay that is dominating western culture.  It corrodes the institutions and demoralizes large section of the citizenry. The system by its act is teaching more and more citizens to oppose its actions,

And thus in the end will truly create its own collective superiors who will in common en masse dismantle all the antiquated, largely dysfunctional aspects of our global system and culture will flourish in response.

What is Culture?

Every people, every nation, every society produces culture. People create culture in response to their physical environment, their biological needs, social requirements and their specific moral-ethical view of the universe as they understand it. The fact that cultures borrow from and reinforce each other has been documented by historians dating back to the time of Herodotus.

We must never forget that culture is the fundamental glue of human civilization and society. It is the reality of the way we behave, think our manner of creating art, mores, ethics, beliefs and everything else. It is the cumulative product of the array of discrete cultures found around the world and the way these cultures responded/respond to human-made problems, such as gender oppression, slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism as well as to the way we cope with and adjust to the ever changing demands the constraints placed on human beings by nature.

We understand the need to launch a new cultural renaissance aimed at enriching our common understanding of the beauty of being human and the beauty of human cultures. Human development and civilization, in all its myriad forms, is a product of the planet's discrete human cultures. Every people, every nation, every society has a culture. Cultures borrow from and reinforce each other as documented by historians dating back to Herodotus and demonstrated by such talented individuals as Pablo Picasso.

We are talking about launching an all around cultural renaissance, not just culture in the sense of artistic and related phenomena, but cultural in the holistic sense, culture as everything that human beings or sets of discrete, specific human beings do, which are the rivulets of universal human culture.

Contemporary Culture

There are many players in our contemporary culture. We will touch on many aspects of today's society both good and bad.

Like many of you viewing this site all forms of human culture fascinate the owners of Cultural View. We appreciate Mozart, Bach and Beethoven to Nancy Wilson, War and Bob Marley; traditional African art to Picasso's cubist derivatives of African art...from the 70s musical Hair to Cats. From the Red Badge of Courage to The Great Gatsby, Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, The Grapes of Wrath to The Scarlet Letter, the Purloined Letter, Agatha Christie's Poirot and Miss Marple adventures to Shakespeare's Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Mac Beth and much much more. We are into films from to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Catch 22 and The God Father.

We get into Columbo, Foyle's War, Jerry Seinfeld, Men Behaving Badly, The Black Adder, Shrek, Honex, Jeeves, and Wooster and Absolutely Fabulous.

We salute the contribution of Association Football, Artistic Gymnastic, the NCAA Basketball Championship. Chinese Ballet, ballets such as The Nutcracker and The Green Table, Stepping tournaments, Country Line Dancing, Lord of the Dance to Ballroom Dancing.

We can curl up and read a good Walter Mitty tale, Homer's Iliad, Herodotus' The Histories, a tome on the History of Physical Education, Freud's Mose and Monotheism, good romantic erotica or the rather gory history of folks like the Medicis and the Borgias...

We are deeply into a wide range of the human cultural fabric from ecology, human relationships, films, music, the fine arts, knitting, quilting, photography cooking, dancing, sewing, purely economic and financial matters, psychological conditioning, sports, education, music, politics, modes of organizations and any and everything else that we humans do.

So we have tried to create a website that reflects our interest that is in accordance with our understanding of the historical and contemporary reality of our society and our planet. We hope you will find our approach useful.

Cultural View hopes to be able to help make sense out of what is going on all around us: at the same time we want all of us to have a little fun, learn things that are of interest and generally speaking enjoy life a little more.