Confessions of a Philistine

A Thuringian

I don't read novels.  I have to be dragged to museums, live concerts and shows.   I think Public Television sucks.  I no longer read newspapers.  I don't travel except under my own power and generally to places I've already been. And I'm happy with that as long as I don't have to get out of the car.  Food doesn't do anything for me other than get me to the other side of a meal.  I don't live for sparkling conversation with the interesting strangers you meet at a party.  And when I apologize for any of the foregoing, I'm insincere.

I can explain myself.  I stopped reading novels because they started to reliably underwhelm me, especially the newest most buzzed about titles. Reading them had become a meta experience of endurance that I got tired of.  I got those titles from reading newspapers, a habit I acquired from a young age and maintained faithfully until I had had it with the guaranteed rage that their complicit neutrality toward our revolting age would never fail to arouse in me.  Their apologetic coverage of Iraq and the consequence-less financial meltdown were the last straws.  (For that matter, their promotion of the precious novels of the writing school era of fiction was really of a piece with the consensus-mirroring conventionality of their journalism and editorial positions.)  Deregulation of the airlines made travel to any place I couldn't drive to intolerable.  I just won't put up with that shit anymore and nothing, not even the possibility of some exotic paradise at the end of it is worth it to me. As for the rest of it, I'm a hermit; and when it comes to food, I really am a Philistine.  Good food is wasted on me.  And I'm aging.

But if you are not a Philistine, I'm okay with that.  In my circles, the assumption is that a person is trying not to be a Philistine, so conversations overflow among my cohort with illustrations of one's culture and worldliness, and to round things out, say, their gardening abilities and home improvements.  I am genuinely interested in hearing other people's experiences and cultural recommendations (to the extent that they are genuinely interesting).  It's just that being a Philistine myself, I'm not overly impressed by them.  I know that's rude, and I wouldn't mention it at all but after some recent experiences of sensing that the lopsidedness of these conversations -- my inability to contribute more than an occasional "oh" and a head nod and a "is that so" or two-- could be mistaken for my withholding of validation, I am compelled to explain to anyone who will listen that I don't have validation in me to withhold. 

To be honest, I am a bit suspicious of the drive to be cultured and worldly.  I am all for culture, and deeply grateful for the best examples of it when I come across them in the wild.  I am pro worldliness and anti xenophobia.  But I will admit that travel for the sake of worldliness and consumption for the sake of culture gall me just a little bit.  I am suspicious that on some level they are a submission to the neoliberal promotion of the individual as Homo economicus-- not a human being but an economic project whose purpose in being is to grow the portfolio.  I'm suspicious of ostentatious yielding to the pressure to succeed at being the market to whom the commodities of culture are sold.  But having admitted that, I don't fault anyone who came up in our confusing age for the compulsion to demonstrate their worthiness of belonging to it.  I wish them fun and enrichment in their pursuits as I pray for their souls.

The term Philistine, used to describe a cultural boor is a gratuitous slap at a people of the Levant whose name comes to us filtered through Latin translation of the Bible.  They are the tribe of Goliath, the citizens of Gaza,  as you might suspect, the forebears of modern Palestinians-- by circumstances forced upon them, a people of the World with a beautiful, highly advanced culture of their own.  The biblical reference that the term is derived from is in Judges 16, the story of Samson and Delilah, and specifically the repeated refrain "The Philistines are upon you"-- a scare tactic invoked by Delilah nightly to test Samson's extraordinary strength which she has been trying through various means to sap in return for a reward from the Philistines, and at which she is unsuccessful until she cuts his hair.  According to Google's Oxford Languages algorithm,  the term in the modern sense is from

early 19th century: from Philistine, originally with reference to a confrontation between university students and townspeople in Jena, Germany, in the late 17th century; a sermon on the conflict quoted ‘the Philistines are upon you’ (Judges 16), which led to an association between the townspeople and those hostile to culture.

It's yet another example of Europeans commandeering a neutral non-European concept to insult their own.  I can't find a demonym for the citizens of Jena who are the true target of the insult, but there is one for the state where Jena is situated, which I unilaterally declare to be close enough.  The term is "Thuringian".  I shall henceforth wear it in the proper shame.