Smith is onto something enormously important, regarding the loss of collective culture and atomization. â??Clearly thatâ??s a quite serious thing,â? she says. Absolutely. Absolutely! And get this: Zadie Smith does not appear to be a religious believer, but she is quite cosmopolitan. And she was shocked to discover the culture her children had lost, or had never acquired. This is what happens in liquid modernity when you go with the flow, and do not consciously resist the forces of fragmentation.
Iâ??m not faulting Zadie Smith, necessarily. If Christianity, or the foundations of Western culture and civilization, were important to Zadie Smith, she would have taught her children about them. Thing is, how many of us non-cosmopolitan people, people who consider ourselves religious and cultural conservatives, are just like Zadie Smith, in that we wrongly assume that our children are inheriting basic knowledge of our civilization in the way we did? Donâ??t be so quick to judge Smith.
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