Cultural stagnation: false start

What are the most salient reasons for cultural stagnation? I wish to write an essay which addresses this. Yet each attempt so far has failed to unburden itself from the weight of the necessary preamble. Before seeking explanations for a phenomenon, the phenomenon’s existence should ideally first be established. Other people’s insistence on the phenomenon does not suffice. (For the sake of even more thoroughness, before one even embarks on proving the phenomenon’s existence, one should first argue why the phenomenon at hand is worthy of discussion.)

Establishing that cultural stagnation is happening is a fool’s errand. Culture is vast, amorphous, multi-dimensional and intangible aside from the artefacts left in its wake. A measure of culture would have to collate, sort and order these artefacts – jeans, playlists, reaction videos, fan fiction – and extract quantitative data from them in a manner which looks about right to the naked eye, and would yet still suffer from all of the shortcomings of large societal measures such as GDP. Even if a measure was to show a slowdown in cultural change, the methodology would have to be dissected. What localities and media were included? If there is a cultural slowdown in Brooklyn, is that offset by a boon in Zanzibar? And if rock is dead (or dying or undead), is that because podcasts are alive? (To use a historical case: though opera zombified after Wagner, there is no sane claim for a lack of innovation in Western music in the 20th century.)

Should the measures still hold and we can confidently say that yes, on the whole, culture has stagnated, we would then have to wrangle with the implied aesthetic judgement inherent in the term stagnation. Stagnation is bad, but is the slowdown of cultural change a necessarily bad thing? Have not previous periods of cultural stability led to fantastic pieces of art? Must every decade be as culturally disruptive as the 1960s? Surely some of David Bowie’s forays (take The Laughing Gnome for example or a good chunk of his works in the 1990s) showcase that there is nothing inherently good with innovation. Some cultural terrain may be best left undisturbed. Yet even now, though the topic of whether cultural innovation/stability is good/bad is definitely worthy of further discussion, we have yet to reach the true question I seek to tackle: why cultural stagnation? (And potentially, wherefore cultural innovation?)

So long as people have compared contemporary art to those of yester years, the topic of cultural stagnation has never strayed far. Any essay seeking to shine new light on the topic would first have to acknowledge prior work done, take stock of each explanation, travel further down roads already mapped out where required, before striking into the wilderness and forging new paths. And only now would the fun begin.