"When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm"
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Futility is the gateway drug to cultural surrender. Stanley Crouch is warning that once a society internalizes the idea that nothing matters - no standards, no consequences, no distinction between craft and slop - it doesn’t simply get sad. It gets ridiculous, and then it gets used to being ridiculous. The line’s bite comes from its quiet escalation: “conclude” isn’t a mood, it’s a verdict; “the absurd” isn’t a quirky exception, it’s the new baseline. Crouch isn’t describing chaos so much as normalization: the moment when incoherence stops shocking and starts feeling like common sense.
As a critic, Crouch spent a career fighting the drift toward irony-as-a-lifestyle, especially in American arts and politics where posturing can replace argument and spectacle can replace achievement. The subtext is moral as much as aesthetic: cynicism is not neutral sophistication, it’s an alibi. If everything is futile, then any demand for rigor sounds naive, any appeal to tradition sounds oppressive, any insistence on excellence can be dismissed as elitism. Absurdity becomes protective camouflage: it lets institutions fail without admitting failure, lets public figures contradict themselves without paying a price, lets audiences consume without judging.
The context here is late-20th-century culture war terrain: mass media’s amplification of nonsense, the flattening of taste into brand identity, the temptation to confuse transgression with depth. Crouch’s point lands because it names the real danger: not that the world becomes absurd, but that we adapt to it.
As a critic, Crouch spent a career fighting the drift toward irony-as-a-lifestyle, especially in American arts and politics where posturing can replace argument and spectacle can replace achievement. The subtext is moral as much as aesthetic: cynicism is not neutral sophistication, it’s an alibi. If everything is futile, then any demand for rigor sounds naive, any appeal to tradition sounds oppressive, any insistence on excellence can be dismissed as elitism. Absurdity becomes protective camouflage: it lets institutions fail without admitting failure, lets public figures contradict themselves without paying a price, lets audiences consume without judging.
The context here is late-20th-century culture war terrain: mass media’s amplification of nonsense, the flattening of taste into brand identity, the temptation to confuse transgression with depth. Crouch’s point lands because it names the real danger: not that the world becomes absurd, but that we adapt to it.
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| Topic | Deep |
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