These fears have not been unfounded. Today, we find ourselves in precisely the cultural crisis that Woolf, White, and Sontag anticipated—not a world without books, but a world where fragmented attention and superficial engagement have eroded the foundations of shared meaning and cultural coherence.
The definition of “culture” is as liquid as the phenomenon it seeks to describe. In Princes and Powers, James Baldwin observes that only a culture in crisis would ask for a definition of “culture.”
We are a culture in crisis. We lack, as Byung-Chul Han articulates in The Disappearance of Rituals, the structures and forms that make meaning possible, leading to cultural fragmentation. The result is a sense of civilisational ADHD. A generational restlessness, inattentiveness, and excessive movement in no direction, with insight elusive and ephemeral.
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