Today's Cultural Immaturity

To sum up the current state of American culture, I’d have to say it has a brilliantly glittering surface but no depth, very much like American culture of the 1920s. It took an economic crash and the Great Depression to restore some gravitas to American thinking, which gradually found its way into American society and culture in general.

Let’s look at the reception of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, Tender is the Night, as an example. Fitzgerald worked hard on that book for nine years, harder than he had worked on his previous three novels, including The Great Gatsby, and when it came out in 1939 it sold a mere 12,000 copies and was all but dismissed by the critics as lacking in wisdom and maturity. Although Malcolm Cowley has written that it remained in people’s minds “like an unanswered question,” and Hemingway said that it got better and better in retrospect, most readers in the years that followed its publication found it difficult to care much about its wealthy and privileged main characters, Dick and Nicole Diver, as they struggle to overcome marital discord while enjoying life on the French Riviera. I wouldn’t completely dismiss the novel as shallow – it does have some emotional resonance – but I wonder if it is about to be rediscovered by readers who don’t care much about wisdom and maturity in the books they read. (The story does reflect the lives of many privileged people today, particularly celebrities and movie stars.)

At the present time, American culture has returned to its adolescence, to the frivolities of the 1920s, and many of us who love and value the seriousness it once had must wait for it to mature all over again. Will it take another global disaster on the scale of the Great Depression to bring that about?