100 Years of Identity Crisis

Conclusion: Awareness as Its Own Cause

The patterns set in motion a century ago – the imperative of leaving the past behind, the constant fetishisation of change, the tendency to represent previous forms of socialisation as obsolete – continue to reinforce the perception of culture as discontinuous. This condition of cultural discontinuity is constantly reproduced by the perception of rapid change. The constant references to rapid change over the past 150 years indicate that this perception has acquired a life of its own and, as Bell pointed out, ‘overshadows the dimensions of actual change’.⁷³⁵ The consciousness that corresponds to this sensibility assumes that the new necessarily represents an improvement over the old. This attitude is ...