The lessons of culture: What are they?
One prominent lesson revolves around the recognition that we are living in the midst of one of those “plastic moments” that Karl Marx talked about.
To revise an old song: Will there always be an England?
That “will there always be ...” is everywhere on our lips, in our hearts.
And it’s not just England we worry about.
The law, the economy, the political prospects, changes in our intellectual habits wreaked by changes in our technology, the destiny that is demography—the United States, the West, and indeed the entire world in the early years of the 21st century seem curiously unsettled.
Things we had taken for granted seem suddenly up for grabs in some fundamental if still-difficult-to-grasp way.
Fissures open among the confidences we had always assumed—in “the market,” in national identity, and in the basics of social order and cultural value.
The always hazardous art of cultural prognostication seems brittler now, more uneasy, more tentative.
Granted, the parochial assumption of present disruption is a hardy perennial.
As Edward Gibbon observed in “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” “there exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.”
But we know from history (including the history that Gibbon gave us) that there are times when that natural propensity has colluded seamlessly with the actual facts.
Is there something unique, or at least distinctively different, about the economic crisis that began in 2008, that was supposed to have evaporated by now but that is lingering on if not getting worse?
Has the ideology of transnational progressivism made such inroads among political elites that it threatens American self-determination and individual liberty?
Is the United States on the brink (or even beyond the brink) of a “fourth revolution”—following on the original revolution of American Independence, the Civil War, and the revolution wreaked by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal—are we, another 90 years on, facing a new revolution that will fundamentally reshape political and cultural life in this country?
We do not know the answers to those questions, Mr. Murray observed, because “we are facing unprecedented situations.”
“We have never observed a great civilization with a population as old as the United States will have in the twenty-first century; we have never observed a great civilization that is as secular as we are apparently going to become; and we have had only half a century of experience with advanced welfare states,” he said.
Which leaves us where? In 1911, the poet-philosopher T.E. Hulme observed that “there must be one word in the language spelt in capital letters.”
“For a long time, and still for sane people, the word was God,” he said.
“Then one became bored with the letter ‘G,’ and went on to ‘R,’ and for a hundred years it was Reason, and now all the best people take off their hats and lower their voices when they speak of Life.”
I think Hulme was onto something, in his observation about the inveterate habit of reverence and the choice that sanity dictates.
I wonder, though, whether we as a culture haven’t shifted our attention from “L” for “Life” to “E” for “Egalitarianism” or “P” for “Political Correctness.”
It is noteworthy, in any event, to what extent certain key words live in a state of existential diminishment.
Consider the word “gentleman.”
It was not so long ago that it named a critical moral-social-cultural aspiration.
What happened to the phenomenon it named?
Or think of the word “respectable.”
It, too, has become what the philosopher David Stove called a “smile word,” that is, a word that names a forgotten or neglected or out-of-fashion social virtue that we might remember but no longer publicly practice.
The word still exists, but the reality has been ironized out of serious discussion.
It is hard to use straight. Just as it would be difficult to call someone “respectable” today without silently adding a dollop of irony, so it is with the word “gentleman.”
Leo Strauss made the witty observation that the word “virtue,” which once referred to the manliness of a man, had come to refer primarily to the chastity of a woman.
We’ve moved on from that, of course.
Chastity was for centuries a prime theme of Western dramatic art even as it was an obsession of Western culture.
Who can even pronounce the word these days without a knowing smile?
And as for manliness, well, the philosopher Harvey Mansfield wrote an entire book diagnosing (and lamenting) its mutation into ironized irrelevance.
Here’s the question: Absent the guiding stringencies of manliness, which are also the tonic assumptions of cultural confidence, how should we understand “the lessons of culture”?
In one of his essays on humanism, T.S. Eliot observed that when we “boil down Horace, the Elgin Marbles, St. Francis, and Goethe,” the result will be “pretty thin soup.”
“Culture,” he concluded, “is not enough, even though nothing is enough without culture.”
In other words, culture is more than a parade of names, a first prize in the game of “cultural literacy.”
Another lesson concerns the fragility of civilization.
As Evelyn Waugh noted in the dark days of the late 1930s, “barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity.”
“The danger,” Waugh wrote, “does not come merely from habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy.”
He went on to warn: “The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat. At a time like the present it is notably precarious. If it falls we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.”
It is a prime lesson of culture to acquaint us with those facts. Walter Bagehot wrote in “Physics and Politics,” his clear-eyed paean to liberal democracy, “History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.”
The moral is this: Culture is a precious inheritance, immeasurably more difficult to achieve than to destroy, and, once destroyed, almost irretrievable.
It’s not at all clear that we have learned the lesson, though wise men from before the time of Pericles have sought to bring us that sobering news.
