Well said. I have always been disappointed with the available anthropological definitions of “culture,” which I’ve somewhat arrogantly and simplistically defined as “a society’s survival strategy.” This, I think, includes not just the logistics of its housing and feeding, governance, technology, the rules dictating social behavior, but also the way a society relates to, understands, and perpetuates itself with a common language, shared history and mythology, and of course art.
Successful societies are those with effective survival strategies, I.e., they are those with a culture that has adapted a compelling internal logic and order suitable to the unique challenges of its environment, but which, as you say, also embrace a degree of liberty in which the culture’s essential elements can flourish and evolve. A society with an ineffective survival strategy characterized by disorder or ossification in one or all of its core elements will, with enough pressure, eventually fail.
Some weird function of the modern arts has mistakenly conflated chaos with ultimate liberty, and this chaotic “liberty” (libertinism?) with creativity. In doing so, it has undermined art’s culture-perpetuating place in society. Art was never meant to be the _creator_ of culture but its chorus. Somewhere along the way, art—and the novel in particular—became about trying to fabricate (and in some cases destroy, or “deconstruct”) culture, reveling in its own chaos. That’s a terrible strategy for a society to adopt.
Art as the chorus of society. I like that a lot. Thinking about how the chorus plays off the soloists in an opera maybe says something about how we balance order and liberty. The soloist acts independently, and yet always with reference to the chorus.
My favorite definition of culture is a set of shared stories. Not necessarily stories we all agree on, but stories we all know. This is part of the notion of stories all the way down, the idea that every story is told by reference to other stories that are shared between the author and the reader. Thus when we lose our culture, we lose our stories. And when we lose our shared stories, we lose our culture.
And that goes to the heart of truth telling as well, because if we tell stories by reference to other stories, those shared, trusted stories act as a check on the truth of every new story. But when that base of shared stories is broken, there is less of a check on the truth of new stories, and we become easier prey to propaganda and ideology. So much of what is shouted in the streets these days is not merely wrong, it is unfounded. It comes from nothing and rests on nothing. This is what we lose when we lose a common culture.
A fine and articulated position. Much to say on this, but I too am in the Party of Original Sin. More later. Thanks Mark
Well said. I have always been disappointed with the available anthropological definitions of “culture,” which I’ve somewhat arrogantly and simplistically defined as “a society’s survival strategy.” This, I think, includes not just the logistics of its housing and feeding, governance, technology, the rules dictating social behavior, but also the way a society relates to, understands, and perpetuates itself with a common language, shared history and mythology, and of course art.
Successful societies are those with effective survival strategies, I.e., they are those with a culture that has adapted a compelling internal logic and order suitable to the unique challenges of its environment, but which, as you say, also embrace a degree of liberty in which the culture’s essential elements can flourish and evolve. A society with an ineffective survival strategy characterized by disorder or ossification in one or all of its core elements will, with enough pressure, eventually fail.
Some weird function of the modern arts has mistakenly conflated chaos with ultimate liberty, and this chaotic “liberty” (libertinism?) with creativity. In doing so, it has undermined art’s culture-perpetuating place in society. Art was never meant to be the _creator_ of culture but its chorus. Somewhere along the way, art—and the novel in particular—became about trying to fabricate (and in some cases destroy, or “deconstruct”) culture, reveling in its own chaos. That’s a terrible strategy for a society to adopt.
Art as the chorus of society. I like that a lot. Thinking about how the chorus plays off the soloists in an opera maybe says something about how we balance order and liberty. The soloist acts independently, and yet always with reference to the chorus.
My favorite definition of culture is a set of shared stories. Not necessarily stories we all agree on, but stories we all know. This is part of the notion of stories all the way down, the idea that every story is told by reference to other stories that are shared between the author and the reader. Thus when we lose our culture, we lose our stories. And when we lose our shared stories, we lose our culture.
And that goes to the heart of truth telling as well, because if we tell stories by reference to other stories, those shared, trusted stories act as a check on the truth of every new story. But when that base of shared stories is broken, there is less of a check on the truth of new stories, and we become easier prey to propaganda and ideology. So much of what is shouted in the streets these days is not merely wrong, it is unfounded. It comes from nothing and rests on nothing. This is what we lose when we lose a common culture.
Yes, exactly!