Essay On Cultural Criticism Examples

Cultural criticism is an act practiced by the cultural critics who have literally taken to themselves the work of taking information from one individual to another, give judgments of how a particular behavior impacts a culture and give suggestions on what they think is a more favorable state of the affairs. Some people have gone further and dismissed social criticism as an unworthy course because they think everyone is free to choose what they want to do with themselves or what they have to say as freedom of speech and expression is in most of a counties constitution.
There is need to have cultural criticism but in this case, a good cultural criticism. Our societies have aspects that are way far reaching from a definition of good. These aspects need to be addressed else we will see an era of life without value. Human rights being violated and no one is questioned, why? It has become a norm. There is always two sides to a coin, and therefore, someone has to be a voice of reason to criticism.
The literature by TADEUSZ BOROWSKI a survivor of two Nazi concentration camps in Germany clearly depicts the wide gap that exist between the wealthy and the poor, how people from different origins are treated and also their social statue. The American Commandant on arrival to the camp, he is greeted with a line-up of armed men for his security; he is escorted to the sleeping area by an interpreter and the chairperson of the Prisoners’ Committee. The writer observes how these three are dressed and this openly explains that the prisoners’ dressing was left to everyone’s imagination. On the other hand, the prisoners’ living conditions is disgusting. The food in which they feed on is stolen from their neighbors, their rooms are filled with smoke, they are sweaty and some are spotted killing fleas from their bodies.
This culture is seen in mostly in the developing countries. People of high social status live in luxurious lifestyles and the poor continue to languish in their poverty. The poor fight for the all great and mighty and it is them who suffer in the long run. The gap between the poor and the rich continues to widen as communities prefer hiding in their societal cocoons instead of attacking their problems outright.
These wars and violence that we continue to experience at every break of dawn are reaping us off of our dignity, our families leading to depopulation; it generally affects the economy of a country as the losing country has to pay the country that emerged victorious. War has adverse effects on the participant where they suffer psychologically and physically. There is also destruction of properties where buildings worth billions are brought down with a single blow. All these happening the society ends up to be the sole loser and will be needed to start from scratch to get back to where they were before but the loss of their loved ones cannot be compensated.
“.the S.S. men were made to bury the dead” this statement shows that the leadership had switched hands. And the prisoners in the camp were taking revenge on the former camp guards. This violence leads to killings due to the grudge that was formed earlier in the previous regimes qualifying it as a cultural violence. The same can be said of our societies today. Violence erupts from a once peaceful society due to fueled utterance from leaders or a deal gone bad. Lives are taken, women and children raped, properties destroyed and so on. In most of these cases, people struggling with life (low social statue) are the ones involved in this violence.
TADEUSZ BOROWSKI in his literature was more interested in portraying the life that the prisoners lived while in the concentration camps and how all these came to change as a voice of reason came out to stand by them. The freedom that the prisoners now enjoyed saw a new form of violence erupt where the hunted becomes the hunter. Freedom is good but too much of it is dangerous that’s why there are limits to how we exercise these freedoms. When these rights are again suppressed by a tyrannical leadership, it causes violence as people want to be heard and the leaders think their opinion is not relevant or called for. Such a society that is not stable leads investors away and hence suffering from inflation. The ‘superior’ ones enjoy all the powers and privileges whereas the ‘inferior’ ones are left to suffer.
In conclusion, cultural criticism can be positive or negative. Negative criticism is meant for self gain whereas positive criticism is used to point out wrongs in the societies that need to be rectified.