Brownstone Pittsburgh Supper Club, June 24, 2026: Tom Harrington

DeBlaze at 131 | 131 E Main St., Carnegie, PA 15106

Wednesday, June 24, 2026 6:30 – 9 pm 

$53 includes appetizers and dinner

Pittsburgh Brownstone Supper Club is excited to welcome Senior Brownstone Scholar and Brownstone Fellow, Thomas Harrington, as he presents “Culture and Compulsivity: Can X and other Similar Platforms Really Help Us in our Struggle to Stay Human?”.

Culture is the soil in which we grow and develop as human beings. It precedes each of us into being and thus shapes us in fundamental ways. One of the essential tasks of adults in most societies throughout history has been to pass its structures and the knowledge they contain on to the rising generations, and should those structures begin to fail at the tasks  generating social stability and transmitting vital cultural knowledge to the same young, to generate new cultural institutions that will do so in a more apt and efficient manner.

This latter labor is never easy as it requires that the would-be reformers truly understand the history of what it is that he or she is trying to re-make, a process that, in turn, requires a healthy allotment of time for mindful contemplation. 

Consumerism, the dominant social ethos of our times, is different from all the other guiding ideologies that preceded it in its ferocious disdain for both contemplation and pre-existing cultural knowledge. It, and the profit-seeking media that serve its interests seek, above all, to play upon natural human fascination with novelty to generate compulsive behaviors that consign the citizenry to living in an eternally juvenile present, cut off from the historical wisdom needed to respond to the our social challenges we face in new and creative ways.  

Is it reasonable to think that a new and renewed humanism can emerge from such spaces? Or should we perhaps be looking more intently in other places? 

Thomas Harrington is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. His academic research centers on Iberian movements of national identity and contemporary Catalan culture, while his more public writing looks at how social elites make culture and tailor its contents to their strategic needs over time. He is the author of The Treason of the Experts: Covid and the Credentialed Class and the forthcoming Staying Human in a Soul-Stealing Age. Several of his other essays and a selection of his photography are published at his website, Words in The Pursuit of Light.