Cultural Moment Research Articles

Squid Game and the imagining of Afro-Asian connections through Black Twitter memescapes

Abstract The release of Netflix’s Squid Game facilitated a viral pop culture moment, as the show’s critique of capitalism and structural inequality resonated with global audiences. Memes about the series were frequently shared across social media, as users interpolated themselves into the Squid Game universe. We argue that the memes produced by Black Twitter users are a form of meme play that can be read as a significant moment in the shared cultural and activist lineage of Black and Korean communities. Although racial tension is often at the center of the relationship between these two marginalized groups, we suggest that Black Twitter users’ interpolation of themselves into a distinctly Korean cultural product provides us with a chance to imagine how interracial solidarities can be visualized. This is significant in the age of the Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate Movements, which are supported by members of both communities.

The processes-to-end(s) paradox of public relations

Public relations researchers, theorists, and practitioners should integrate professional practice with research topics, themes, concepts, theories, contextual intelligences, strategic processes, moral judgment, and functional practices by addressing the end(s) that public relations serves in community. Disciplinary intelligences feature outcomes that yield to specialized knowledge-based, processually achievable, intellectually justifiable, strategically valuable, and morally serviceable practices that constitute culture, society, and community. In that communitarian spirit, this paper draws on established research streams and strategic process-to-ends paradigms to argue that unique knowledge serves to collaboratively assist the constitution of community as place in search for order. Public relations’ unique knowledge, constantly refined and critically guided, adds strategic, emergent force to human’s communitarian imperative. This communitarian rationale for the constitutive paradigm reasons that as individuals, organizations and communities engage to communicate they communicate to organize through narrative continuity. Organizations, individuals, and groups engage on the winding path of agonistic, emergently epistemological and ontological cultural and societal moments to seek order in the public interest. Reputations (identities), complexes of relationships (institutionalized identification) and textuality of narrative continuity empower community members co-manage resources in service of shared interests’ license to operate.

Breaking Bad, Dostoevsky, Nihilism, and Marketplace Morality

ABSTRACT From the perspective of the television series Breaking Bad (2008–2013), Walter White, its antihero, is not just an “angry middle-aged white guy”. He represents the repressed rage of countless ill-used Ph.Ds. This is why “he is the danger.” The cultural moment of Breaking Bad may serve for us in Siegfried Kracauer’s term as a “close-up shot or establishing shot.” The series is an index of Kracauer’s “law of levels.” White has lived his life according to what he thought was standard and decent conduct. His life has been adequate. He echoes Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich whose life “was most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” White also recalls Stavrogin from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. Stavrogin condemns himself because he can only have been satisfied by himself (in both senses). He is more Mephistopheles than Faust; he is never out of hell because he will not accept the possibility of anything outside himself. Breaking Bad also reifies Carlo Ginzburg’s “estrangement.” The screens that we carry with us transmit endless meaninglessness. We are consumed by consumerism. Therefore, Walter White is not an antihero: He is the perfect hero for a world in which the marketplace alone determines value.

Occupational Hazard: American Servicemen’s Sensory Encounters with China, 1945–1949

In January 1947, William W. Lockwood, future president of the Association for Asian Studies, who had served for eighteen months as a U.S. Army officer in China, wrote that the “first venture in large scale American tourism in China” caused “many sour, even hostile, reactions to the Chinese.” He asked: Did millions of returned young GIs “gain a sympathetic and tolerant understanding of that world? Or were their home town prejudices simply confirmed?”1 This intriguing question should be understood not only as a critical reflection on the U.S. wartime presence in China, but also in the context of U.S. postwar involvement in the region.2 The expanding U.S. military presence after World War II exposed tens of thousands of servicemen and women to lives beyond their comfort zones back home. While performing assigned missions, determined by high-level diplomatic exchanges, political negotiations, and military strategies, U.S. soldiers on the ground often forged intimate connections with local populations by exchanging goods, services, language, and culture. These encounters both followed and contradicted official policies and popular representations. The rich corpus of studies on the U.S. military overseas has demonstrated that existing hierarchies of gender, race, and class informed attitudes, policies, and practices on both sides, and can be traced to earlier imperial traditions and colonial institutions.3 Meanwhile, recent Cold War international history has broadened the scope of inquiry to include accounts of various types of informal cultural exchanges by previously neglected groups, ranging from artists, tourists, and immigrants to military families.4 Christina Klein, for example, has identified the late 1940s and 1950s as a distinct cultural moment during which Americans became fascinated with Asia and the Pacific through the proliferation of popular cultural productions. Thanks to the empire’s unprecedented expansion in the region during the Cold War, Americans produced and consumed a proliferation of new plays, movies, novels, and nonfiction books about Asia.5 If these works helped to propagate the new ideology of global integration accompanied by mutual understanding and benefits, the large number of U.S. troops, which an Army official guide to China called “ambassador[s] of the American people,” formed a direct force of grassroots diplomacy.6 Together with the letters, memoirs, photos, souvenirs, reports, and stories they brought home, American soldiers’ intimate encounters abroad encompassed and went beyond mere cultural representation to shape postwar American identities and locals’ perceptions of the United States in significant ways.

Poetry as History: An Examination of the Role of Poetry in al-Murādī’s Biographical Dictionary of the Twelfth/Eighteenth Century

Abstract This article approaches early-modern biographical literature, in particular the centenary biographical dictionary of Muḥammad Khalīl al-Murādī, titled Silk al-durar fī aʿyān al-qarn al-thānī ʿashar as an integrated source. The article argues that as a biographer, al-Murādī relied heavily on poetry, not simply for its literary value, but as a historical tool, a primary source, whose contents provided the reader with direct access to the historical figures in question. This approach to the Silk allows the biographical dictionary to serve not simply as a historical reference, as it often does, but as a reflection of the cultural moment it emerged from. The poetry within the Silk, when read as a historical source, affords insight into the history of the self, of self-fashioning, and of the mentality of the learned community of eighteenth-century Ottoman Syria, and Damascus in particular.

Review: Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America, by Aaron M. Hyman; Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820, by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi

Review: <i>Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America</i>, by Aaron M. Hyman; <i>Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820</i>, by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi

Tasting Light: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Rewire Your Perceptions

Reviewed by: Tasting Light: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Rewire Your Perceptions April Spisak Cappetta, A.R., ed. Tasting Light: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Rewire Your Perceptions; ed. by A. R. Capetta and Wade Roush. MITeen, 2022 [320p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781536219388 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781536227093 $9.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 8-12 Hard science fiction is relatively rare in YA literature, which is unfortunate considering how well suited it seems for teen readers. By its very nature, adolescence is a quest beyond the familiar boundaries of childhood, a search for a unique identity formed from what was and what is. Hard science fiction uses that same model of combining known and not quite realized technology into speculation that pushes the world forward. This sublime collection highlights those parallels with both wit and wisdom, and the stories affirm how impactful and memorable this sub-genre can be. Editors Capetta and Roush deploy the short story format with precision and purpose; the stories are distinctly beautiful, immediately engaging, and relentlessly provocative. The connective tissue is the meaning and significance of identity—who we are, who we can never be, or who we can, with a healthy dose of luck or grit, become in the swirl of time, place, situation, and cultural moments. Each story here is intentionally, effectively diverse, and each celebrates the quest to create labels that actually fit individual identities, rather than choosing from suffocating frameworks that earn legitimacy only by their familiarity. Concepts of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and even humanity itself are challenged and redefined with a fearlessness and brash disregard for tradition that is reserved primarily for the young. "Melantis" by Junauda Petrus-Nasah is an instant classic, examining the political and cultural fallout of an expensive drug used by pregnant mothers to boost the intelligence of (almost exclusively white) babies. Years later, an unexpected side effect emerges: those children and teens are now experiencing a change in their melanin production, causing uproar about how their privileged selves are being treated now that they are perceived as Black. Similarly, K. Ancrum's "Walk 153" is immediately powerful—masked walkers roam cities with cameras on their chests, paid to essentially be proxies for their customers and send their anonymous perspective to people who can't or won't leave their homes. This premise pushes the limitations and dehumanization of gig culture out to an extreme degree before looping back to humanity after two people risk breaking the rules to make an actual connection. A.S. King's final story, "Smile River," wraps up the collection in stunning fashion, offering a tale that may feel startlingly familiar to readers who have been told to "just smile" all their lives. As the narrative jumps between different generations of one family, readers track how the societal emphasis on happiness (and control) [End Page 39] leads to the development of a neural implant that forces someone—most often, a woman—to smile. It is a sickeningly small leap to this future where smiling is compulsory and medically enforced for women from a present that has yet to fully recognize a woman's autonomy. The story makes a worthy finisher, as the clever and harsh critique of the whole darn time continuum and how women fare on it ultimately gives way to a hopeful, perhaps even quietly empowering, closing note. Science fiction is all about the "what ifs," but hard sci-fi with protagonists as bold as these becomes something more about how to get to a better future rather than wondering whether that future is possible. These characters are running full speed away from social limitations and toward entirely new models that could still exist within the known world. Teens who are very much living in a world that is on the brink of both disaster and possibility (in not always equal measures) will connect with the urgency in these stories. Such is the magic of hard science fiction, and these editors have found an impressive range of authors to explore the next possible steps, both dire and hopeful. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Christianity and Psychedelic Medicine: A Pastoral Approach

AbstractIn recent years, researchers in the “psychedelic renaissance” have been reinvestigating the therapeutic potential of psychedelic compounds for conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder, clinical anxiety/depression, and addiction. Each of these has treatment-resistant cases, sometimes decades in the making, but studies employing psychedelics to address them are yielding impressive results. Given the evolving legal situation around these substances as well as corporate investment in them, their availability and appeal promise to increase. The question facing Christians is: How do these developments impact the theological significance of psychedelics as a broader phenomenon? This paper argues that since the population standing to benefit from these treatments is likely to include Christians, a thoughtful and rigorous response is necessary. The inquiry proceeds by analyzing some of the pertinent research, showing the insufficiency of previous Christian responses, and considering some hurdles and objections before issuing a call to theologize on this timely and important cultural moment.

Ambivalent Anality: Revisiting the Queer Ecologic of “the Jackass Moment”

The cultural roots of an aggrieved white masculinity—white man as victim—run deep in the popular imaginary. Media representation in particular has a long legacy of portraying white male bodies as injured or wounded, dating back to the bloody “hard bodies” of Reagan-era action films. This essay returns to another one of these earlier cultural moments, examining the vulgar physical comedy of the Jackass media franchise as a window into masculine formations in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century. Specifically, I examine Jackass’s “stupid” white masculinity, which combines bloody self-injury with a scatological logic of bodily incoherence displayed by the show’s pissing, shitting, and puking white stuntmen. Viewed retrospectively—against the contemporary horrors of Charlottesville, El Paso, and other places memorialized by Trumpian eruptions of murderous white masculinity—the dumb white dudes of Jackass appear almost a blip in the rearview mirror, now superseded by a return to something far more sinister. Yet Jackass in its own time expressed a hegemonic white masculinity specific to neoliberal and neoconservative forces of the Clinton and Bush years, one organized ambivalently around an excessive anality. This ambivalent anality both parodied national and gendered fantasies of “hardness” at the same time that it drew on dynamics of racial and queer mimesis to reinscribe hegemonic (white/straight) masculinity. However, the more recent development of a queer ecological perspective allows us to revisit the show’s scatology, also seeing in it what Nicole Seymour has described as an ethical “counter-phobia” which refuses the nature/culture binary that informs Western culture’s deeply embedded erotophobia and somatophobia. This essay takes up the ambivalent anality of Jackass, tracing the ways it has served as precursor to present-day logics of white male grievance, even as its spectacular scatology offers an undertheorized challenge to the cultural revulsion for embodiment and nature that informs all social (gendered, racial, sexual) logics of domination.

What’s Blood Got to Do with It? A Culture of Cinema Horrors at the Precipice of an Abyss

At a cultural moment in which the horrifying is central, what are the pedagogical options available by which to teach and think with our students? Horror movies, like all media, are mythmakers; media and culture reflect and reproduce but also create or consolidate. Teaching horror leads to new conversations, makes the familiar strange, and gives students new language and tools through which to assess and rewrite cultural and social narratives. This conversation bridges sociology, gender studies, and media studies to highlight the importance and usefulness of film analysis and theoretical texts that fall outside of sociology in developing robust sociological and interdisciplinary dialogue. We review the films, texts, themes, and approaches that we have used to get students to read difficult theory, think collaboratively and critically, and write in ways that push their voices and ideas beyond that with which they are accustomed and comfortable.

Locomotive Breath: The Living Machines and Railway Dreams of Alexander Anderson's Working-Class Verse

Locomotive Breath:The Living Machines and Railway Dreams of Alexander Anderson's Working-Class Verse Ethan Taylor Stephenson (bio) By the turn of the twentieth century, the British railway system had left its mark on both the landscape and the literary imagination.1 The proliferation of rail lines and new railway technologies, what Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes as the "machine ensemble," combined with a substantial increase in passenger numbers and travel frequency to redefine conceptions of time and space—and thus, by extension, to influence both the content and form of poetic expression.2 The Scottish working-class poet Alexander Anderson was acutely aware of these changes as "surfaceman" and self-appointed chronicler of the railway.3 A contest winner in and frequent contributor to that "new wave of penny papers" like the People's Journal and People's Friend of Dundee, which, following the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1855, "catered first and foremost [to] the working class," Anderson was keen to inspire "a higher reverence for the 'nobility of labour, [and] the long pedigree of toil.' "4 His railway verse too attempts to transcend, even while it responds to, its cultural moment, and, in doing so, it both informs our understanding of late-Victorian attitudes toward technology and comments on the machine's broader viability as a poetic vehicle thereafter. Anderson's 1878 Songs of the Rail, a collection of thirty-four poems (most republished from his own earlier volumes), best expresses his complex attitudes toward the railway as an institution and toward railway technologies like the locomotive. Beyond this, though, it demonstrates the depth and sophistication of his drive to portray railroad workers and their gargantuan steam engines as ontological equals, co-denizens of a new technological age.5 This is not to say that Anderson was unaware of the dangers posed by the railway to both worker and passenger. Accidents were frequent and well documented both in the periodical press and in verse by contemporaries like William Aitken, [End Page 277] whose 1883 collection Lays of the Line, and Other Poems tells the "little histories" of those who were employed in that "most hazardous" line of work, and William McGonagall, who immortalized the 1879 Tay Bridge Disaster.6 Neither does Anderson ignore certain existential fears of the machine age. Besides portraying locomotives' raw, sometimes brutal power, his poems often respond to contemporary warnings about the human costs of technological advancement. Nevertheless, Anderson's work remains striking for its fervent embrace of "progress" wrought jointly by human and machine. Thus, even as Anderson often features what Kirstie Blair has described as rhythmic juxtapositions of "the pulse of the rails with the fragile and easily damaged rhythms of the human body," he more insistently imagines the future of human resiliency and enlightenment as inhering in a new hybrid poetics and, with this, a newly collective consciousness of human and machine.7 Alongside Blair's account of the mimetic properties of railway verse, then, we also need to figure in John Goodridge's assessment that Anderson himself saw the railway's "poetic potential as both a metaphor and a site of reverie, a place where the poet can dream of metaphysics, political progress, and social change."8 In this essay, I apply these two approaches toward a more detailed and specific characterization of Anderson's technophilic vision than has yet been offered—and one that is especially timely as Victorian scholarship is currently reassessing similarly overlooked histories of post- and nonhuman subjectivity.9 It is first important to appreciate how Anderson presented himself as a working-class literary professional. He parlayed his early and ongoing magazine-contest success into several poetry collections in the 1870s, and the reviews and sales of these volumes were favorable enough to win him appointments as a librarian at Edinburgh University and as secretary of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution.10 Even though the image of the laboring literary autodidact had seemingly become clichéd by the time of Anderson's career, his credentials were such that George Gilfillan, in his introduction to Anderson's 1875 volume, could at least plausibly locate him at the top of the Scots working-class poetic tradition as inaugurated...

Introduction: Black Laughs Matter

Introduction: Black Laughs Matter

Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

Micro-celebrities of information: mapping calibrated expertise and knowledge influencers among social media veterinarians

ABSTRACT Influencers are a defining feature of the contemporary social media landscape, but little has interrogated how these individuals may privilege information sharing as essential to their brand. This article interrogates the role of the knowledge influencer, or those who perform micro-celebrity to convey information and expertise to lay audiences. Knowledge influencers can be doctors, lawyers, or anyone, regardless of class, who is an expert in their occupation. In doing so, knowledge influencers perform what I call calibrated expertise, or the curated performance strategy in which experts harness social media affordances, platform dynamics, and aspects of micro-celebrity to impart information. Through a case study analysis of social media veterinarians on Instagram, I show how calibrated expertise is discursively performed, and knowledge influencers emerge, at a cultural moment in which neoliberalism continues to blur the lines between work and play, and populist backlashes against experts are ubiquitous. By navigating micro-celebrity, authenticity, and relatability, knowledge influencers put a human face and contemporary cultural spin on expertise. Though, this does not mean the knowledge influencer is the answer to sweeping distrust, but rather, is an untapped resource for considering information sharing and power dynamics in neoliberal, populist times.

Midge Dector (1927-2022)

A trenchant culture warrior and a warm and lively raconteur, author Midge Decter leaves us with a cache of incisive criticism to guide us in this decisive cultural moment.

Modalities of the psychedelic experience: Microclimates of set and setting in hallucinogen research and culture.

Mid-20th-century American research on psychedelics evinced a stunning diversity of interpretations of hallucinogenic effects. While some researchers viewed psychedelics as invaluable tools for psychotherapy, others persisted in treating them as psychosis-inducing agents. As some groups considered psychedelics as catalysts for artistic creativity, others investigated their potential use as psychochemical weapons in the battlefield, or conversely as tools for spiritual ecstasy and revelation. This bewildering array of perceptions regarding the nature of hallucinogenic effects led to stark contrasts in the contexts (set and setting) of psychedelic research and experimentation, leading to wildly divergent outcomes and reports on the effects of the drugs, and strident disagreements between the actors in the field. Examining this remarkable historical moment of epistemological unclarity regarding psychedelics and their effects, this article describes how distinct scientific and cultural trends and moments of mid-20th-century America contributed to the creation of diverse microclimates of set and setting that reproduced investigator beliefs and attitudes and brought about a beguiling Pygmalion effect that left researchers befuddled and perplexed. I propose the concept of psychedelic modality to describe how distinct sociocultural microclimates lead to thematic aggregates in which distinct types of expectations, intentions as well as physical, social, and cultural environments all tend to cluster, producing characteristic outcomes and results. By exploring the historical context and consequences of the emergence of seven psychedelic modalities (psychotomimetic, military, psychotherapeutic, spiritual, artistic-creative, tech-innovative, and political) in mid-20th-century America, this article outlines the varieties of psychedelic experiences in their relationship with culture at large, and subcultures in particular.

World Without Masks

World Without Masks

Cameron B. R. Howard. The Old Testament for a Complex World: How the Bible’s Dynamic Testimony Points to New Life for the Church

While some have seen critical biblical scholarship as a death knell to the Bible’s capacity to inspire Christian faith and worship, Howard shows that this need not be the case. With a vibrant style of writing, she unlocks the possibility of rich theological reflection in critical contexts. I expect her book will be well received in mainline seminaries and among well-educated laypeople in mainline congregations. She offers a well-reasoned articulation of how critical theories of composition can lead to theologically shaped praxis today. Her aim is to “propose three modes of innovation that can be gleaned from the Old Testament: adapting popular culture, rethinking theological assumptions, and developing a new genre” (p. 3).Howard’s introduction and first chapter do for progressive Christians what John Walton and Brent Sandy’s Lost World of Scripture does for conservative evangelicals—it expands the layperson’s vision of how texts were produced and what that means for how to read them well. Howard problematizes the idea of authorial intent, affirming the complexity of oral and scribal traditions. She rejects the idea that there is “one correct meaning or interpretation for any given biblical text” (p. 27). Still, she affirms the Spirit’s role in energizing biblical interpretation, helping readers discern how to read creatively for their contexts.In ch. 2, Howard explores the Bible’s adaptation of other cultures. She uses Proverbs and the flood story as her first examples of the Bible’s literary dependence on other ANE texts. For Howard, the biblical flood account is both similar and different from these accounts, which gives this composite text its own theological appeal. Her second example is court tales, the “deeply entertaining” accounts of Joseph, Esther, and Daniel, which she calls “largely fictional” but which foster consideration of the relationship between the community of faith and worldly power (45, 54).Chapter 3 facilitates a revision of theological assumptions by highlighting distinct voices that interpret history differently. After surveying Zion theology in the OT, she concludes that it predates Ezekiel (p. 73), who offers a stunningly innovative view of God’s presence as portable and available to the exiles. Deuteronomy is her other example in this chapter. Howard accepts a late date for Deuteronomy—an invention during Josiah’s reign. However, she refrains from calling it propaganda, since we cannot discern what motivated its production (p. 65).In ch. 4, Howard considers the emergence of new genres. She explains that apocalypses are written from below, by marginalized peoples, as a way of reframing political tyrants as limited and under God’s ultimate control. For this reason, she cautions against the use of these texts by those in power. Howard notes the specificity and generality of this genre to provide explanatory power to the first generation of listeners as well as productive imagination for subsequent generations. For Howard, the Daniel apocalypses were written after-the-fact to “predict” the past and make sense of suffering. She compares the Bible’s apocalyptic literature with efforts of minority communities today to reframe their experiences of suffering.Howard closes her book with “biblical principles for creative change” drawn from the preceding chapters (pp. 113–21), encouraging readers to use creative storytelling to reimagine each community’s identity, to “recognize and celebrate” the diversity of perspectives in Scripture, center new voices, and “embrace uncertainty” in biblical interpretation and in the life of faith.Conservative readers who do not share Howard’s posture toward critical biblical scholarship may find this book frustrating or simply less helpful for their contexts. In my view, Howard is too pessimistic about human ability to discern literary design (p. 26) and too flippant in her claims that the Bible is dependent on other texts (p. 34). For example, she argues that the biblical flood story is dependent on Mesopotamian accounts simply because surviving Mesopotamian flood texts are much older than surviving biblical manuscripts. Howard fails to acknowledge the possible oral prehistory of the biblical text that complicates attempts to discern the direction of influence. No doubt, if this were a different sort of book, Howard could make a fuller case for her claim. Still, her conclusion is unsatisfying. If a devastating flood really happened (whether local or global), then it is no surprise that multiple cultures would preserve memories of the event. Many conservative readers could accept the possibility that the biblical account is told over against the Mesopotamian version, offering a different rationale, but they may struggle with her presumption of literary dependence on it.However, even those whose starting point differs can benefit from the ways that Howard highlights “creativity amid crisis” in the Bible (p. 83). Her method could fruitfully inform other interpretive communities as well, encouraging us to take a step back and consider how the larger scene of textual production and canon formation in its historical context might lend insights for the role of the church in response to this cultural moment.

Virtue developmental considerations of mindfulness

ABSTRACT Mindfulness is an umbrella term for a set of practices and strategies related to attention and non-critical awareness of our thoughts. Mindfulness is currently having a moment in popular culture and in clinical psychology for its many perceived benefits. However, there are reasons to worry about whether certain commitments and strategies of mindfulness might conflict with long-term progress in character development. This article places mindfulness in conversation with developmental considerations of virtue, asking how mindfulness practices might impact the various stages between natural character and mature moral virtue in different ways. Moreover, it proposes a distinction between two kinds of virtues, presence and absence virtues, that are differently impacted by the continued use of mindfulness practices in the later stages of virtue development.

The shaken realist: Bernard Williams, the war, and philosophy as cultural critique

AbstractBernard Williams thought that philosophy should address real human concerns felt beyond academic philosophy. But what wider concerns are addressed byEthics and the Limits of Philosophy, a book he introduces as being “principally about how things are in moral philosophy”? In this article, we argue that Williams responded to the concerns of his day indirectly, refraining from explicitly claiming wider cultural relevance, but hinting at it in the pair of epigraphs that opens the main text. This was Williams's solution to what he perceived as the stylistic problem of how to pursue philosophy as cultural critique. Taking the epigraphs as interpretative keys to the wider resonances of the book, we show how they reveal Williams's philosophical concerns—with the primacy of character over method, the obligation to follow orders, and the possibility of combining truth, truthfulness, and a meaningful life in a disillusioned world—to be recognisably rooted in the cultural concerns of post‐war Britain. In the light of its epigraphs, the book emerges as the critique of a philosophical tradition's inadequacies to the special difficulties of its cultural moment.