The crisis of bourgeois ideology - from Nietzsche to Heidegger | Dr Tim Black

The theme of The Academy 2019 was Culture Wars: then and now and examined the nature of contemporary cultural life and asked how and why does culture become politicised. The culture wars that continue to define Western life seem to pit differing identities against each other in the friend or foe dynamic of contemporary debate. Ideas seem to clash – say globalisation against nationalism – but they are hollowed-out abstractions. The debates between say science and religion, church and state, modernism versus tradition, used to represent a dynamic and productive tension. Today the debates seem much less ambitious and they jump around. The culture wars have their roots in the nineteenth-century, culminating in the First World War which marked an end of the authority of tradition but failed to replace it. Why are certain areas chosen as battle grounds for the culture wars: for example in the pre-political sphere of the family, marriage, parenting, and so on? What are the chances for and what might a democratic political culture look like in the twenty-first century?

LECTURER:
Dr Tim Black – editor, the spiked review; columnist, spiked

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This is where Nietzschean’s arguments falls down - the ultimate act of overcoming resentment, is forgiveness