Overcoming cultural pessimism
Liberalism and the internet do not erode culture, but are its best friend
I often hear, predominantly from conservatives, that we’re in an age of irrevocable and unprecedented cultural decline. Liberalism, and the perceived atomisation of “community” and even beauty, is the culprit. Social media gets unfairly maligned for promoting short-form, and reducing the relative status of longform books.
Yet access to culture has never been more seamless. Want to view the latest Rembrandts? Just download one onto your phone gallery. Is Beethoven's 3rd symphony your melodic orgasm? Listen to it for free on SoundCloud today. Revising your memory of the classics, and fancy a read of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice? Again, a feat that can be done online for free. If you live in a major city, I won't even uncover the plethora of food options or gigs and other cultural events regularly available.
Alternatively, you may be into an emo subculture - never has it been a better time to satisfy your cultural tastes. Or maybe you're a classic nerd that enjoys playing board games for hours? In Leeds, there are shops regularly hosting events where anyone can just show up to play. Chess? Look out for the matches in the town/city squares. A niche sexual fetish that you're repressing in daily interactions - the seedier parts of the Web will take care of that.
A devout Muslim? There are plenty of towns and cities in Britain where that lifestyle is culturally incentivised. Contrary to the prevailing narrative on the right, British Muslims mostly just want to practice their faith freely in peace, and will not coerce others to adhere. In this sense, most Muslims are liberal and assimilated into a core value of the West. What is this core value? Cultural heterogeneity. It seems to me that a core emphasis of liberalism and multiculturalism is on cultural heterogeneity - the ability to practice whatever lifestyle you choose, and match with like-minded others, free from social or legal persecution. Unsurprisingly, as Western society becomes more globalised, liberal, and secular, we are living in an unprecedented area of cultural diversification. Any small niche will now easily be catered for. The internet, by reducing fixed costs to approximately zero, increases the supply-side of culture too, and facilitates easier search and matching. From reading lists of the best music of 2025, it's apparent that not many share my enthusiasm for electronic drum and bass music, so if I was reliant on the centralised legacy media for my music, I would be much worse off as a result. For those of us with unconventional pursuits, there has never been a better time to live!
Cultural heterogeneity may also promote cultural evolution, which via epigenetic mechanisms may accelerate biological evolution. This value is an underrated benefit of liberalism, and an underrated driver of innovation, in my view. Hence, I'm sceptical of the notion of cultural drift. Globally, our institutional cultures are converging onto a universalist liberalism, of the sort espoused by Kant. Yet this only focuses on one dimension of culture, and increased homogeneity on this dimension actively promotes heterogeneity on the other dimensions.
As for the claim that beauty has disappeared as a salient driver of modern aesthetics, for anyone to credibly believe that, you would have to be a Philistine blind to most contemporary artworks. Richter, Klimt, Twombly, and (my favourite) Hockney - how can anyone say their paintings are so not possess a deep sense of intricate, euphoric, almost overpowering beauty? Yes, most “pop” music, TV, films, and artwork are absolute drivel: this was almost certainly the case for any time in human history. We inevitably recall only the very good works, which is why the past may appear culturally superior. A classic form of availability bias continues to pervade cultural commentary to this day.
Regarding the proliferation of short-form, this is a classic case of increased specialisation and much lower transaction costs to information exchange. Previously, if you had a thought, it was essential to wait until you had enough (chains of) thoughts, plus a sense of coherence to unify them, to write a book or an opinion piece. You had to jump through hoops to get published. Then with the internet came blogging. Afterwards, social media. Not everyone has enough content worth writing to create longform, yet do we not benefit from others’ contributions on X? I certainly do, and on here I regularly cite thoughtful X posts. In this Coasian sense, the market is more complete, and trade in ideas that individuals were willing yet previously unable to enact can now go ahead. This is an unambiguous welfare gain, considering the positive spillovers of ideas. For those with a preference for consuming and publishing longform, a burgeoning market for such exists today on Substack. This patterns holds for other mediums too: TikTok vs YouTube documentaries a prime instance of this specialisation.
Most of the recent empirical literature establishing a causally negative effect of social media on cognition reports small average treatment effects. Yes, even small ATEs can accumulate to generate large aggregate costs. Yet how do we square these results for the cultural dominance of social media with the Flynn effect? The answer is that the studies measure ‘cognition’ via PISA scores, or educational attainment, rather than raw IQ (presumably to get the socially desirable results). We all know that EA is a weighted average of IQ and conscientiousness, and to a lesser extent status variables, with wide variation in accordance with attention (so exogenous distractions themselves presumably introduce an endogenous measurement bias here?). Moreover, is PISA even the right dependent variable to measure? It's not obvious to me that the most valuable knowledge, acquired in the most cost-effective manner, is derived via schooling. Most of my acquired knowledge has been derived from the internet. With regard to reading physical books, where do I find out about those books on my list? You guessed it, the internet!
The Web has served as an outstanding tool for highly intelligent individuals to enhance their consumption of (and hence their production function of) ideas, independent of established institutions that may prioritise prestige and conformity over knowledge, and hence drag those individuals down. These geniuses drive our knowledge economy, and the scientific and technological advancements that propel growth and the Enlightenment. None of the commentary on social media contagion has focused on the tail effects, and the resulting positive externalities.
Overall, cultural pessimists tend to focus on some moving average of cultural utility, as opposed to the second moment. Yet it seems that the variance itself is an especially important point estimate of cultural richness, particularly when fixed costs to many forms of cultural production are near zero, and transaction costs to cultural exchanges are near zero. These changes to the supply-side, coupled with a markedly increased tolerance of cultural heterogeneity, to the extent that this is perhaps the predominant value that distingues the West from other cultures, is driving a cultural renaissance that we are all living through right now. Don't be a pessimist - take advantage of the best society and age in history to live in!