Abstract
In this recent address to a UNESCO doctoral summer school in northern Italy, the author argues that all cultural tourism has underlying and implicit philosophical-religious dimensions that are particularly important in the era of “late capitalism,” in which “the idiosyncratic has triumphed over the normative” and there is a deeply nihilistic drive and trajectory to the ascendant culture. After drawing on the sociologist Daniel Bell’s analysis of “the cultural contradictions of capitalism,” the author argues that there is an irreducible sacred dimension to the human person (res sacra homo) and his or her life always has the character of a pilgrimage, cognitively comprised of a quest for significance beyond the separate meanings of the normal occupational and utilitarian life. Master-works of urbanism, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature offset the nihilistic dynamic of “late modernity,” and the author draws particular attention to literary works of cross-cultural understanding such as the trilogy of historical novels about India by L. H. Myers, The Root and the Flower and the novels of the great modern Japanese writer Shusaku Endo. As works of fundamental importance for orienting his analysis he adduces C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.
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