What is a cultural lifestyle, if not the fact that, although we don’t believe in Santa Claus, there is a Christmas tree in every house, and even in public places, every December? Perhaps, then, the “nonfundamentalist” notion of “culture” as distinguished from “real” religion, art, and so on, is in its very core the name for the field of disowned/impersonal beliefs – “culture” is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without “‘taking them seriously.” Is this not also why science is not part of this notion of culture — it is all too real? And is this also not why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians,” as anticultural, as a threat to culture—they dare to take their beliefs seriously?
The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity
by Slavoj Žižek
http://books.google.co.jp/books?id=znJnbrY3-5sC&dq=isbn:0262740257
When it comes to religion, for example, we no longer “really believe” today, we just follow (some) religious rituals and mores as part of respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong (nonbelieving Jews obeying kosher rules “out of respect for tradition,” etc.). “I don’t really believe in it, it’s just part of my culture” effectively seems to be the predominant mode of the disavowed/displaced belief characteristic of our times. What is a cultural lifestyle, if not the fact that, although we don’t believe in Santa Claus, there is a Christmas tree in every house, and even in public places, every December? Perhaps, then, the “nonfundamentalist” notion of “culture” as distinguished from “real” religion, art, and so on, is in its very core the name for the field of disowned/impersonal beliefs – “culture” is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without “‘taking them seriously.” Is this not also why science is not part of this notion of culture — it is all too real? And is this also not why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians,” as anticultural, as a threat to culture—they dare to take their beliefs seriously?