What Culture?
by Clyde N. Wilson
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My late friend Sam Francis often wrote about the need for Americans to defend their “culture.” Most assuredly Americans have lives, families, land, and property that they need to and have every right to defend and preserve (which they are not doing a very good job of). But “culture”? I always wondered exactly what Sam meant by that and if he were in this instance slipping away from his usual clarity and precision of thought.
Culture is, of course, a big and elastic word that covers anything from flint arrowheads to Michelangelo to religious faith to indoor plumbing. So Americans, I suppose, do have a culture. They speak the same language, more or less, watch the same sports events and sitcoms, enjoy the same creature comforts, participate to some degree at least in similar institutions, and share certain expectations of behaviour (mostly a debased form of bourgeois manners). But in regard to the higher forms of culture, in a long civilizational perspective, Americans, apart from what we can see and count, don’t seem to have much at all to defend and preserve except some remnants from their own and the European past. (America as “the universal nation” need not concern us. It is a phantasm that does not and cannot exist.)
Culture, along with language which makes it possible, is uniquely human (although one can find analogies in animal behavior and societies: after all, humans and other beings have the same Creator). In its deepest origins culture rests upon “cult,” that is to say, religion, and “agriculture,” human dependence upon the management (not the impossible mastery) of nature.
Americans have not had much affinity for the spiritual—in fact, Americanism has been defined as pragmatism—a particular affinity for the tangible and useful. The pragmatic Yankee never cared about theory or meaning—he wanted to know what works and how much it pays, and his religion was more bookish than spiritual. Some time back he even turned agriculture, man’s immemorial subsistence on the land, into a scientific business proposition.
Probably, the possibility of an American high culture was damaged irreparably when the idealist General Lee handed over his sword to the pragmatist General Grant (who politely refused the impractical gift). Lee’s American republicanism embraced the equal right to strive for aristocratic excellence. Grant’s democracy rested on the equal right to seek maximum profit. Mencken, reflecting on the tragedy of Appomattox, wrote that it had wiped out any hope of humane civilization on this side of the Atlantic. He came to that conclusion by comparing the character of the honourable ex-Confederates who governed his native city of Baltimore to the crooks who ran most American cities.
Yet in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was a strong outpouring of significant literature, scholarship, painting, sculpture, and architecture that was of high quality and recognizably a new, American, expression of Western culture.
The 20th century did that in. For whatever reasons you may wish to offer: I blame war, industrialism, Yankee pragmatism, and polyglot immigration for strangling American civilization in its tender youth. The “culture” which the 60s generation rebelled against was already so lacking in humane quality that one almost sympathizes with them—except that their rebellion accomplished nothing but a further alienation of America from civilization. We now live in a world in which young white men, the heirs of two thousand years of Western civilization, adopt baggy pants, earrings, backwards baseball caps, and primitive music because that is the nearest thing to a cultural expression that their American environment has ever exposed them to. Even cinema, in which Americans in the first half of the 20th century made great accomplishments, has now become almost entirely the possession of actors, directors, and writers from Britain and its Commonwealths who still have some purchase on the Western cultural tradition.
If you want to discuss American culture, don’t tell me about art museums showing European pictures and symphonies playing European music. And don’t tell me about Irving Babbitt and the New Humanists who tried to restore the culture their New England forebears had destroyed at the root by pouring in European culture from the top.
Everything that America has produced in literature and music of enduring cultural value since the mid-20th century has come from Southerners who were raised in an environment that was still incompletely conquered by Yankee pragmatism. Whether our Southern bit of cultural residue will survive for much longer, and whether it can possibly do so without political separation from the American Empire, are questions that will probably be decided in the present rising generation.
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1 Comment by Jeff Willoughby on 4 September 2007:
Our culture is essentially dead, and most of the youth have indeed adopted the ‘ghetto’ culture, but a few of us have a distant shady memory of something better.
It comes out in history books that fail to totally vilify Lee and the Southern cause (even with a hostile historian, Lee shines through), those few springs of genuine culture still left, and in the fading memories of our grandparents.
It’s not much, but it’s enough to keep an essential spark alive, and and I do believe that the “present rising generation” is good kindling.
2 Comment by Sid Cundiff on 4 September 2007:
Well said, Dr. Wilson. And worth reflecting upon.
3 Comment by Steve Berg on 4 September 2007:
Thank you Dr. Wilson for discussing this subject far more eloquently than I was able to on another thread at this site over the weekend. I would welcome additional comments by the Chronicles Editors on this subject.
4 Comment by robert reavis on 4 September 2007:
“Whether our Southern bit of cultural residue will survive for much longer, and whether it can possibly do so without political separation from the American Empire, are questions that will probably be decided in the present rising generation.”
I believe it will survive in a very simple form. Something described by Thomas Hardy in the following poem. Southerners were the perennial branch of western ” culture ” in America –agrarian/craftsmen, as opposed to business men and lenders, cavalier as opposed to mechanized, chivalric and musical as opposed to calculating and conniving . This is behavior revealed to men and women, not behavior concocted by men and women. It will survive because it is human and scaled to achieve human ends. Cheers rr
In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”[1]
1
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
2
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
3
Yonder a maid and her wight[2]
Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
–Thomas Hardy (1916)
——————————————————————————–
[1]Cf. “Thou art my battle axe and weapon of war: for with thee will I break in pieces the nations” (Jeremiah 51.20).
[2]Man.
5 Comment by Bill Gardner on 4 September 2007:
Wow. Gorgeous. There are anomalies, exceptions to the rule which prove it…why was i always the reb the southern guy NEVER (sadly in a sense) a Yankee…playing civil war in brooklyn, n.y. … I suspect i’m an old soul (what does it mean, it’s unknowable) and i don’t know if i buy into reincarnation (but if i did – i was a reb in a former life not just for rebellion’s sake, perhaps that’s the problem – that it’s cast that way as ‘rebellion’ when it’s its own self- i stand for the Southern values in american history.) Probably why I got out of town often as i could afford and went south like a bird…and finally southwest. ?
I started out this post to copy & paste herein (in ‘mine’) what I thought was the essence or rhizome of dr. wilson’s above, gorgeous post… but i ended up copying the whole thing. So that’s too long to reproduce to any significant emphasis in this post…The whole thang is the thing itself.
clyde, as I at least read of sam francis, never having met him in person and so, as sam would say as I’ve read of him – ‘a tip of the hat to’ya.’ … I say that now. -There’s a little bit of culture rubbing off, I hope.
to this day i’m not a pragmatist per se… i’ll prove it – I don’t even ‘think’ that’s pragmatic. But then again that’s one thing i could do pretty good usually – - and feel… And they do run in reverse one >>>> forth.
wait… what’s ‘a’ me without a little schlock…
did i ever tell you you’re my hero ?????????????????? ! (and i’m not even on bourbon, fortunately) … that’s when I start spinning around on my saddle…and
6 Comment by Bill Gardner on 4 September 2007:
epilogue – the technology could not accommodate what i tried to say above… I.e.
- “And they do run in reverse (i.e. feelings led in human kind to thought) one led to the other… then of course afterward they CAN and should go back and forth.” Therein is the richness. -
*BUT unfortunately I used arrows above in the script and what reproduced (above) was merely – as you can see above –
‘And they do run in reverse one – forth.’
Huh? Well one for the human mind… which is still one step ahead of what the computer can do?
Besides can a computer drink? Which I haven’t, yet, today. I’ll get to it.
7 Comment by Bernie on 4 September 2007:
I believe Sam would agree with this excellent article. However, I think by defending our “culture,” he meant fighting the increasingly successful efforts to take down the Confederate flag, Confederate statues and plaques and Confederate names off of schools. When these names/statues/holidays are obliterated, new names/statues/holidays go up. While older generations of whites revered Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, today’s white children are taught to revere Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others who hate them.
He also believed our enemies would not stop with eradicating “Confederate” or “Southern” culture. While it is true that our elites hate the Confederacy and Southern whites, they also hate white people as a whole. Look at any film, book or documentary on slavery, racism and hate crimes. These things are universal, yet whites are only portrayed as the evil, ruthless racists. The fruits of this scapegoating can be seen in the interracial crime stats that Pat Buchanan recently noted.
Sam was pessimistic about stopping this onslaught. And if whites are too weak and depraved to even put up a fight then perhaps we deserve what we get. But the few who see clearly (like Sam) should at least keep speaking truth to power.
8 Comment by C Bowen on 4 September 2007:
I lay the blame with inflation, the income tax and the inheritance tax, which insured the power elite of the 19-teens would be locked in time rather than a sort of revolving aristocracy.
Say what you will about Mr.Rockefeller, but twice a summer I walk his Acadia National Park carriage trails and think about him fondly and who wouldn’t put the mansions of Newport Rhode Island or the Long Island, Gold Coast up against any McMansion for class and taste?
What a sad fate that our only literary accomplishment in the post-War years has been the mastering of the pop-literary anti-hero, the outlaw stripped of his guns or someone to shoot them with, and yet, starting with Hawthorne and Poe, reactionary tales of our demise seem to be a consistent theme, even now.
But it’s dangerous to spend too much time on the matter, when one is relatively young anyway, and next month Brad Pitt is going to get his Jesse James movie released with the grandest of titles still in tact: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
Our myths, and those who will keep telling them, live on.
9 Comment by robert m. peters on 4 September 2007:
The concept of “culture” is indeed illusive. However, it is to me quite obvious that it is no longer produced locally, i.e. from the crucible of family, church, local schools (they no longer exist), reflecting local custom, dialect and traditions.
It all comes from Hollywood and Madison Avenue. We have always imported “culture” in fits – notice the Beatles. However, the faux, synthetic and vapid mess that garbs the body and mind of many today reveals naught of essence.
10 Comment by G.S. on 4 September 2007:
Another great article.
“If you want to discuss American culture, don’t tell me about art museums showing European pictures and symphonies playing European music. And don’t tell me about Irving Babbitt and the New Humanists who tried to restore the culture their New England forebears had destroyed at the root by pouring in European culture from the top.”
Evokes the dark irony of wealthy corporate-philanthropists trying to make up for annihilating local culture by manufacturing a plastic substitute.
[OK, OK, so your kids no longer learn from grandpa things like how to hunt or play the guitar -- but hey, look! We're holding yoga classes for the pups at the "community center"!
Aaaand next month they can learn how to belly-dance!]
Looking at culture as a dim reflection of religion, such “philanthropists” are the modern-day equivalent of men who once might have tried to buy absolution for their crimes via indulgences.
A shopping mall is a much more significant cultural artifact than any opera house built by the Ford Foundation — given that the former edifice is a far more significant and fundamentally-integrated part of the average American’s life than the latter.
11 Comment by Frank on 4 September 2007:
A shopping mall is a much more significant cultural artifact than any opera house built by the Ford Foundation — given that the former edifice is a far more significant and fundamentally-integrated part of the average American’s life than the latter.
—
Is it the average America who matters though?
I mean the Opera house could inspire a man to build a great shopping mall.
It’s the elites who matter most, though I don’t reckon ours go to the Opera, eh?
12 Comment by Sid Cundiff on 4 September 2007:
Questions:
1. To what extent is American culture derivative from European culture? To what extent is it of its own making?
2. To what extent is the USA still a cultural colony of the UK?
3. To what extent is the USA a distant outpost of Western culture, on the remote edges of the West ?
4. Or is the US a culture that is by and large very different, fundamentally different, from the rest of the West?
13 Comment by Allen Wilson on 4 September 2007:
Well said, Dr Wilson. I couldn’t agree more, especially with your comment about those who look to symphonies playing European music and museums displaying European pictures. Even though there’s nothing wrong with the European art or music, in fact it also is part of our common Western culture and we should drink of it, still, we cannot depend on cultural imports exclusively and have a culture any more than we can depend on imports for our manufactures and make a living.
If we dont make it ourselves, it’s not ours, and we are not a cultured people. The fact cannot be escaped that during the greatness of the romantic period of European music, the conductors very often were composers, and they composed music of their own. They didn’t import it all, like American symphonies do.
In order to have a real culture, there must be creative originality operating within a local variant of a living tradition, which provides the proper bounds for the originality so that it does not become ridiculous, gaudy, or grotesque. Notice I said that it must operate within a local variant. It cannot simply operate within the broader tradition itself, since it must be rooted in place and produced from the ground up, not poured in from the top. That variant must be defined not in national terms, such as ‘German’, ‘British’ or whatever. It must be defined in ethno-cultural terms. Some of the local variants of the Western tradition are Southern, Flemish, Afrikaner, Bavarian, Serbian, Estonian, Catalonian, Provencal. Just as often as not they do not conform to national boundaries, states, or false modern nationalist identities. Even when we speak of a German tradition of classical music, we are using the word ‘German’ in a ethno-cultural sense, not a national sense, and we must include Austrian composers.
On this continent, the capitalists, ideologues and religious nuts have destroyed the local variants of the Western tradition. Sensing the lack of cultural potential that this has caused, they try to make up for it by pouring in aspects of the broader Western tradition, such as great art and classical music. That’s like pouring pure chicken manure on a bed of rocks. You still wont have a garden.
In the North, the local variants of the Western tradition are almost entirely destroyed, and many of the variants left are transplants brought in by later European immigrants. Only the South holds it’s own variant of the Western tradition to any great degree, though it is far from intact. If it disappears, there will no longer be any recognisable American variant of the Western tradition except for tiny, isolated pockets.
14 Comment by G.S. on 4 September 2007:
“It’s the elites who matter most, though I don’t reckon ours go to the Opera, eh?”
I can’t agree with you on this one Frank — an organic & human society possesses an aristocracy, which is distinctly different from an elite class (though given the absence of an aristocracy in the modern era, the two words are often conflated).
15 Comment by G.S. on 4 September 2007:
My point being that in an organic & human society, the aristocrats are bound to the peasantry, whereas elites are by definition alienated from the common man.
16 Comment by robert reavis on 4 September 2007:
#9
Mr. Peters,
” The concept of “culture” is indeed illusive. However, it is to me quite obvious that it is no longer produced locally, i.e. from the crucible of family, church, local schools (they no longer exist), reflecting local custom, dialect and traditions.”
As usual, you tend to reach for the essence of things. I agree with you. I agree with you almost always and those few times I didn’t, I later discovered I was wrong.
My brother who graduated High School in 1968 remembers his school principle speaking to his class extemporaneously during graduation practice–quoting authors and poets familiar to the whole class because they were graduates. He also studied Latin for three years in a very small rural community in Oklahoma. The High School is still open but the real teachers have all retired, the school board has been reduced to check signers, budget operators and night watchmen at school activities, while the only foreign language offered is Spanish taught probably by a coach who married a mexican immigrant in his third attempt at bliss and happiness.
T’is all in pieces ! Parents of my generation spend big bucks to get their children a smattering of what was once common fare in the South. Even the cowboys in Andy Adams knew a little Latin, the names of the constellations they slept under and which horses out of fifty or sixty were their own —even in the darkest night. Gus, in Lonesome Dove, knew Latin was important even though he knew very little of it and found cutting cards at thel whore house more inviting. It is impossible to know how much we have lost in the end because Tradition and culture are human expressions of spiritual realities. rr
17 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 4 September 2007:
“On this continent, the capitalists, ideologues and religious nuts have destroyed the local variants of the Western tradition. Sensing the lack of cultural potential that this has caused, they try to make up for it by pouring in aspects of the broader Western tradition, such as great art and classical music. That’s like pouring pure chicken manure on a bed of rocks. You still wont have a garden.”
But lacking “good” culture on our own, what is the harm in studying great cultures related to us, finding commonalities, and emulating their techniques within our own framework? Admittedly, Americans are incapable of even that at this point. But if I were to design a church for my current town (Miami, FL), I would use form and elements inspired by Italian Baroque.
18 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 4 September 2007:
“In the North, the local variants of the Western tradition are almost entirely destroyed, and many of the variants left are transplants brought in by later European immigrants.”
I like to think of it as we swamped out those stuffy ol’ Congregationalists.
19 Comment by Fred Breisch on 4 September 2007:
“The 20th century did that in. For whatever reasons you may wish to offer: I blame war, industrialism, Yankee pragmatism, and polyglot immigration”
Dr. wilson, excellent and pierceingly perceptive as usual; however, I would add our government education system onto your blame list. Would you have any thoughts on this?
Education seems to me such a key element of culture. It’s a powerful force; and if we are teaching the young to loathe and hate the past accomplishments of our Western Civilization and to look down upon those of the character of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson because they fought to defend their culture and lands, then we are indeed dismantling our true past and starting off into the unknown.
We really need a complete overhaul of the American education system. We need no more “no child left behind” drivel; we need to start teaching the truth.
It’s a real shame.
20 Comment by PcH on 4 September 2007:
When I was little I used to wonder why there were no American composers even close to the likes of Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. I soon found out that these were men of a decentralized, agrarian culture…
Now I know there are a thousand geniuses here, languishing in misery and almost certainly unaware of the extent of their gifts.
No one will ever know who they are.
Or care.
21 Comment by PcH on 4 September 2007:
Mr Reavis said:
It’s time to turn out the lights.
And maybe shut down a city or two. Plough up the freeways.
The only constellation I can see is Orion and even his belt is sagging.
22 Comment by robert m. peters on 4 September 2007:
My cultural sources and resources.
I grew up in a poor parish of Louisiana, a carpetbagger’s delight named Grant Parish.
My mentors were my grandmothers, both grandfathers having died before I was born; a score of aunts and uncles, including greats, and interesting people of my community.
I took piano lessons at an early age from a Polish lady who had married a WWI GI and who found herself in a log house down on Clear Creek. A dozen or so of us country kids, with no few boys, encountered Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin for the first time.
My maternal grandmother had been the close confidant of her father-in-law, my great grandfather. He had served in the 12th Louisiana from 1861 to 1865. Year by year, until she died in 1958, she added layers to his story and to the stories of the men who served with him.
Twice a year, my mother’s family held a “graveyard working” at the family cemetery near Fryeburg. Scores kinsmen would gather a weave and re-weave the story of the Madden clan and the ensuing generations each year for the first nineteen years of my life. I came to know the long-departed as well as I knew my own parents.
For the first nineteen years of my life, I had the same pastor who delivered the Word in season and out of season. He hunted with my daddy, and I got to hear all of the preacher stories.
I attended the same small school for twelve years. I do not recall a teacher turnover in all those years. Teachers were part of the community. My teachers were also my Sunday school teachers, my scout masters, my 4-H leaders, my vocational agriculture instructors, the volunteer firemen and the civil defense workers (before FEMA).
When I graduated, I knew by sight or name every student in the school, all 614 of them. Of those, only four, in 1967, did not live with their biological parents.
From my earliest memory, I was read to. I began reading early as well. Sixty of us began the first grade together. Of those original sixty, forty-seven of us graduated together. We were never separated by ability or by disability. We all struggled together. In the fourth grade, we all, without exception, had to learn Washington’s Farewell Address. In the 5th grade, we all, without exception, had to memorize the Bill of Rights. In the 9th grade, we all memorized the speech which Shakespeare put into the mouth of Marc Anthony. All boys took vocational agriculture, and all girls took home economics. Nerds had to learn to weld and to shoe horses. My pride in agriculture was that I made a chisel which passed the test: it did not break when I cut a nail with it!
We were all real country kids, working on large or small farms. There are few real country kids today. Rural life has become an extended suburbia: kids sit in well-cooled houses, watch TV or surf the surface of the Net.
With some exceptions, this way of life is no more. Gone are the Saturdays when my cousins and I would sit in the heat on the back steps while our daddies made homemade ice cream and talked of the Depression and WWII. Gone is the opportunity for some of my earliest memories – a toddler sitting under the quilting frame punching the toes of ladies’ shoes while taking in snippets of their conversation about their own childhoods which reached back to the 1870’s. I got a lot of “culture” sitting under a table. My papa was a cement mason. Summers he would come home hot and tired with a favorite meal prepared. We all, great and small, sat at the table. After the meal, he would smoke a cigarette, drink another glass of tea, and break into some story. I would take my place under the table and pull the cement off this pants and collect it for some purpose. My ears, however, were attune to his stories: the death of his brother Lester when he was ten; swimming amphibious ducks in the Avon River in England during WWII; telling about how he met mama.
During the War in Indo-China, I was about four. When I heard the word on the radio, I imagined a person, not unlike the Pillsbury Doboy, although that character had not yet been invented by Madison Avenue, with a Chinese face. I recall asking my maternal grandmother what an Indo-China was, describing as best I could what I imagined. She chuckled. We went to the library table in her living room where she kept a small atlas. She showed me that Indo-China was a place and not a Chinaman made out of dough.
Whatever culture is, this is how I got it.
23 Comment by G.S. on 5 September 2007:
“But lacking ‘good’ culture on our own, what is the harm in studying great cultures related to us, finding commonalities, and emulating their techniques within our own framework?”
Recognizing, of course, that we all have our different theories about culture — but my own is the biological analogy, that culture by and large has to grow naturally, from the bottom up, the hard way.
Not that transplants don’t work sometimes, on occasion — in terms of both cultures and ecosystems.
But for every one transplant that turns out well, I suspect there’s a couple dozen others that are pointless or perhaps even harmful.
Short-cuts are OK on occasion, but one should always be skeptical and wary of them, and err on the side of “slow’n’steady wins the race.”
24 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 5 September 2007:
Mr. Briesch, you are right about the culpability of the educational system. I include that under the title “Yankee pragmatism.” The triumph of Deweyite education was the Yankees’ biggest victory since The War.
25 Comment by G.S. on 5 September 2007:
Just to add — I realize that the phrase “within our own framework” and “inspired by” imply and pre-emptively recognize my # 22 qualms about casual and crude transplantation.
Mr. Moses was clearly talking about *adapting* techniques, as opposed to simply cutting-and-pasting cultural artifacts from one continent to the other.
But I just wanted to emphasize the cautious side of the matter.
26 Comment by Frank on 5 September 2007:
G.S.,
I was thinking an aristocracy matters more than does the rest of the general population, it is the head and the rest is the body in a sense. Also, elites in general – among any group there are those who have a greater impact than do others – are more important.
And perhaps in a healthy society, there is a high culture such as would be found at an opera that would enrich the majority of the elites.
27 Comment by Red Phillips on 5 September 2007:
G.S.
“My point being that in an organic & human society, the aristocrats are bound to the peasantry, whereas elites are by definition alienated from the common man.”
Good point. In America, our elite try to “flyover” the peasantry. The only exception is our elite politicians during election years. Then they try and act like peasants. The home page of Hollywood Fred Thompson’s website used to have him wearing a denim shirt, propped against an old fence. Just a small town boy from middle Tennessee, you see.
28 Comment by Gail Jarvis on 5 September 2007:
The latest guage of our culture comes from Hollywood actor George Clooney who hopes Barack Obama will be elected president because he has the “aura of a Rock star.” Mr. Clooney was not being flippant but stating a serious and widely held opinion as to what is important and what isn’t.
29 Comment by Allen Wilson on 5 September 2007:
Mr Moses, I agree with you. I didn’t mean to say that some aspects of culture cant be borrowed or get transplanted from one cultural region to the next. In fact, that comes with being part of the great civilisation we call the West. We often influence each other. Waltzes and Polkas, architectural styles, etc., have to start somewhere then get transferred between cultures in order to become common to all, although this is more of an unplanned, natural phenomenon rather than anything planned. In the absence of anything real, borrowing what we can in order to start all over may be our only option, but this has to be done with the understanding that we must use our own originality so that we can take what we borrow and create a living tradition, rather than just be a museum of what other (or earlier) cultures have already produced.
30 Comment by Allen Wilson on 5 September 2007:
Dr Wilson, I know this has nothing to do with the subject under discussion, but somebody needs to go to Wikipedia and do a search for the League of the South. The article that will come up concerning the organisation says many accurate things, but I think it is meant to give the impression of being impartial and fair while actually destroying the reputation of the League. It says that Dr Hill wishes to reinstitute black slavery, and cites a speech he gave in Virginia at the 2005 LOS state meeting to back up the claim. Is anyone in the League aware of this Wikipedia article?
31 Comment by Tobias Torgerson on 5 September 2007:
I’m sitting here, looking at the copies of Longfellow on my bookshelf. Yankee or no, one great poet. Are the Transcendentalists an exception to the Pragmatism of the north, or not?
Incidentally, and I know I will irk some people with this, but many of the plots and jokes of Menander and Plautus are not that much different from, or more refined than, sitcom premises. There are some (and I mean *just that* — some) very astute, whimsical, witty, and satirical sitcoms on television. Of course you don’t watch it, and hence don’t know.
32 Comment by robert m. peters on 5 September 2007:
Red Phillips,
Your words:
“Good point. In America, our elite try to “flyover” the peasantry. The only exception is our elite politicians during election years. Then they try and act like peasants. The home page of Hollywood Fred Thompson’s website used to have him wearing a denim shirt, propped against an old fence. Just a small town boy from middle Tennessee, you see.”
Agreed, merely another version of “log-cabin quaintness” to usurp our sentiments. It works. In the world of business, the chain Cracker Barrel does an excellent job of exploiting that down-home feelng.
I borrow Brecht’s term: Zweckentfremdet – estranged from the original purpose. These “quaint” portrayals of politicans such as Thompson have just enough objective correlative to the sweet memories of a past era as to cast a false aura of those periods over the candidate and to lure sentimental fools to cast their votes for the pretender. Add to this his smooth and mellow Tennessee-whiskey voice and you’ve got youself a folkish presence with, however, utterly no essence, a folkish presence which serves to mask opportunism and a man quite loyal to the urbane but banal Party of Lincoln.
33 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 5 September 2007:
Mr. Peters, the phony down home approach is a stock in trade of the Republicans. Their predecessor Whigs’ W.H. Harrison, born a Virginia aristocrat and living in a Cincinnati mansion, was portrayed as living in a log cabin with a coonskin cap and a jug of cider. The biggest swindle before the Bushes was the corporation lawyer Lincoln sold as the “rail-splitter.” The Big Business lackey and political manipulator Coolidge is still thought of a a simple Vermont farm boy. The Wall Street lawyer Wendell Wilkie was sold as a simple Hoosier, and the rich Connecticut preppy Bushes got great m ileage out of pretending to be Texans.
Mr. Wilson, correcting Wikpedia would be a good job for someone. There is plenty of work to go around. I was defeated in an effort to correct what they said about me.
34 Comment by Bill Gardner on 5 September 2007:
“My point being that in an organic & human society, the aristocrats are bound to the peasantry, whereas elites are by definition alienated from the common man.” G.S.
Bears repeating…an organic cream as it were is part of the milk (i.e. beautiful organic relationship between aristocrats/peasantry yet in the womb of mother Nature)…Today with mankind’s setting himself Up outside of the womb of mother Nature [stupidly] ‘as if’ (i.e. ‘make believe’) – he could EVER be happy in such a state of imagined and attempted separation, instead of cream/milk you have a monstrous oil slick…not a part of the water, and never the twain can mix or meet. Just ask – penguins all drenched in the black-goo or people trying to breathe the air or the planet trying not to get too hot or hurricanes trying not to be too fierce.
And yet we’re only half-way through the earth’s oil reserves…and we’re still in lock-down by the powers that be until we burn up the other have. They even have the gall to ask on t.v. in their commericals in pointing this out… “are you with us?” … ['until we use up the other half, constantly screwing you to the wall along the way,' ... -if the actual subtext were elevated Up to the consciousness of the masses, they assume they can yet buffalo, and apparently - can.] -?-
No we’re NOT with you, I’m a Southerner… fools. We were NEVER ‘with’ you. And we never will be. Are you with us?
35 Comment by robert m. peters on 5 September 2007:
Dr. Wilson,
My 11th grade history teacher, Miss Maxine, told us back in 1965 that Lincoln was simply W.H. Harrison recast as far as his electioneering in 1860 was concerned. I recall that she quipped that it was a pity that Lincoln hadn’t taken a cold! Miss Maxine taught us that American history really began in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople and that U.S. history did not actually begin until 1775. (We were not given to arguing with Miss Maxine.) When that year started, she said that the first six weeks would be spent covering American history from 1453 to 1860; the last six weeks would be spent covering American history from 1865 to the then present – 1965; the middle four six weeks would be spent fighting the War for Southern Independence bullet by bullet. In all fairness, Miss Maxine used the events between 1860 and 1865 as reference points for flashbacks and glimpses forward into American history. Miss Maxine would not be allowed in the teaching profession today. She knew too much, was bold to speak, and was free of the common frameworks imposed on teachers. We feared her, and we loved her. She had a look which could wither a fig tree at 1000 yards; but she was able to get us brats to learn; and she told us about Harrison and Lincoln.
36 Comment by Fred Breisch on 5 September 2007:
Dr. Wilson,
I thank you for answering my question. The Deweyite education apparatus, now firmly in control, is very much responsible for multiculturism now forced upon the young impressionable minds attending our public schools. They are being brainwashed. “Yankee pragmatism” seems a good way to ascribe it. This is destroying our culture, not building on it. What it will lead to heaven only knows, but I doubt it will be very nice.
Several things have made this take place. As you pointed out, Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox was a sad turning point and then, in short order: The Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, and on and on. War is the health of the state; and then there was the revolution within the form that Aristotle warned of and Garet Garrett highlighted in his Saturday Evening Post editorials. The New Deal has done us in. Now we worship Democracy (whatever that is…ask Dr. Hoppe) and try to spread it throughout the world. We have politicized virtually everything, even science — look at the Global Warming question.
Literature, scholarship, painting, sculpture, and architecture when completely politicized (as it has almost been) will be very ugly. From a Western civilization standpoint the most recent example of this would be the former Soviet Union. Take a good look at the former Soviet Union’s culture, is that where we are heading?
37 Comment by PcH on 6 September 2007:
Dr. Wilson writes:
Theirs was a counter-revolution against the one that almost was. Theirs was financed and organized against poor men with names like Wallace, Whitaker, and Wilson.
Ours may come yet, if we are careful and aim for essentials, such as who we are by birth, and if we remember the Creator.
38 Comment by robert akman on 6 September 2007:
you people are all idiots it’s all simply cheesy Jew culture!
39 Comment by G.S. on 6 September 2007:
“Bears repeating…an organic cream as it were is part of the milk…”
A very good analogy — even if I rarely understand your posts, I still like many of your metaphors, Mr. Gardner.
40 Comment by G.S. on 6 September 2007:
Mr. Akman, on the other hand, appears to be lactose-intolerant.
41 Comment by Derek Leaberry on 6 September 2007:
Conservatives should be part of a counterculture instead of trying to reform the wretched majority culture dominant today. My wife and I and six children attend a Latin Mass Roman Catholic Church in northern Virginia where dozens of families like ours have decided to withdraw, to a large degree, from the mass culture and be part of something more authentic and closer to God.
Remember, Christianity was not only a counterculture religion which outlasted the Roman Empire, it created the vibrant dominant culture called Christendom, which the West had adandoned over the past few centuries to its peril.
42 Comment by robert m. peters on 6 September 2007:
Since Chist, the Living God, is the head of the Church; and the Church is his body, then I have no doubt that the Church will survive all empires: those which have been, those – including the United States – which are, and those yet to come.
Whether or not the Church will be the bringer of the evangelium, the salt and the light, the informer in Christ’s name and for his sake of the societies in which she finds herself is the question of ultimate concern to me. There are, of course, times of spiritual, intellectual and even physical peril for the Church during which she must find refuge to gain strength to follow the Christ. Yet, the Church, following the Christ, is not on the defensive; she is on the offensive; for as Holy Writ says, “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it (her).” This means that she is assaulting hell, not running from it.
The question, a mere second unto that one is, how will the society (culture?) into which I am born, live and have my being respond to the informing mission of the Church. If a given society is informed through the Church of the values of the Christ and if that society is transformed by the values of the Christ, then such will be reflected in the customs, traditions, mores and morals of that society and in the laws of whatever polity which that society creates. Such as society is what, in my opinion, some of us here on these fora have labeled Christendom. When, however, the society ceases to receive the informing power which the Church brings to it and (or) when the Church becomes so apostate that it no longer informs, then that society decays and dies. For any entity to transform, mutate or evolve, information must be added. When that entity ceases to receive information, it cannot change. When it looses information, it begins to decay and to die. It is moral entropy or the fall, if you will. When the “hand of God” – Old Testament or “the Corpus Chrisi” – New Testament is withdrawn or withdraws from a society, a culture, a people, the the life-giving information – in the most denotive sense of that word – becomes absent and the society decays. This is what St. Paul means in the first chapter of Romans. God honors our choice. When we worship the creature or the creation, i.e. when we say, “Not God,” then He gives us up; the decay – outlined in the list in Romans 1 – sets in. I suppose that the question would be whether or not the apparent absence of God’s hand in our society is His decision to give up this society to its rebellion or whether the Church, in failure, has given up on society and has started longing in error fraught notions to be delivered from doing her duty by entertaining such notions as the rapture – abandoning society and the world in their darkest hour.
I live in the hope that our thoughts, words and deeds, done in His name and within His will, regardless of how small or seemingly insignificant – fixing my wife a meal which she enjoys, for example – will be kept by Him and preserved for all eternity. I, in correlation therewith, also live with the understanding that grand deeds – such as saving the world for democracy – when allegedly done in His name but actually done in the name of the god of war – will be utterly cut off and consumed.
Thus, the old Latin phrase in the ablative absolute -Deo vindice – “God having already vindicated ” as on possible translation – leaves with us the understanding that the Great I Am has already, before the world began, vindicated, justified, redeemed and preserved that which was yet and will be yet to be done in His name.
This is why I have hope and why I continue to struggle against the seemingly overwhelming odds. This is why my many defeats in life have always, as the old hymn says, given way to victory.
43 Comment by Bill Gardner on 6 September 2007:
‘Thus, the old Latin phrase in the ablative absolute -Deo vindice – “God having already vindicated ” as on possible translation – leaves with us the understanding that the Great I Am has already, before the world began, vindicated, justified, redeemed and preserved that which was yet and will be yet to be done in His name.
This is why I have hope and why I continue to struggle against the seemingly overwhelming odds. This is why my many defeats in life have always, as the old hymn says, given way to victory.’ -robert m. peters
A tip of the hat to you.
The great I AM … that I AM …
if it’s more than the totality, the ebb and flow, the going back and forth out to the limits and boundaries of the universe, and as if by magic, like the seeming magic of mother Nature, recycling back again…everything even the universe is a two-way street. And if the I AM or transcendant started it…then he’s also the omega, out there after where the universe itself ends or borders and recylces back.
So how could there be room for the universe…and perhaps other universes if the I AM THAT AM is everywhere and fills all space?
God withdrew from Himself so that there would be room for that which is actually other [inevitably] than himself…actual others, containing the spark but dimensional and within the time-space continuum, until they are elsewhere more. People sense it, their spark or spiritual sensibility. That’s why in the worst case scenario where human beings are concerned everyone wants to go to heaven but no one wants to die…humorously put. No one wants to carry the cross to wear the crown… Funny universe, ha-ha.
But too much adversity even under God can crush and not challenge, even the cross can crush. Of course anyone who ‘believes’ they cannot lose in our world here…may be ‘dead’ certain because a coward? We can’t judge, per se. We can only intuit. That’s between a person and his creator…and at least between a person and themself.
I tend to suspect no one thing is true it is all true…even the unknowable God. If we only have faith in that which we believe we can know, why do we need the word faith? I think faith exists because we Can NEVER know. But because of undeniable limb which stands in the world we stand, and perhaps because of the spark of the divine and eternal, God willing, we may stand therein as well.
I ‘think’ there’s a God because something like this universe and probably others don’t come out of nothing. And once it’s something it, as it is – don’t last forever either, so it wasn’t always.
Thus, what came before and what sits [or 'whatever'] out there, after. And perhaps Is wherever it wants to be as well?! I suspect that’s God.
The great I AM.
‘hello – out there, – and wherever, how are you?’
I usually don’t like to do that…I try not to draw God’s attention to myself…I’m a conservative – leave well enough alone.
____________________
44 Comment by Helaina Hinson on 6 September 2007:
General Lee never handed over his sword. General Grant, in magnanimous spirit, noted Lee’s elegant sword while he was writing out the surrender terms, and included the provision that officers could keep their sidearms. Grant recorded this in his memoirs years later.
45 Comment by Frank on 7 September 2007:
G.S.,
regarding elite theory, the cream can still be regarded as an elite even if it is still a part of the milk as I recall. However, I wasn’t thinking so much of elite theory as an idea akin to Pareto’s 80-20 rule (20% tend to own about 80% is the rule – akin to my thinking that: 20% tend to exert about 80% of the impact upon society.)
For clarity, I suspect what you object to is
Source: Dr. Francis. Because such thinking might lead to an elite becoming corrupt, that is acting in its best interests rather than in the best interests of its whole (community, nation, etc.) which was its original purpose.
However, I think it’s safe to admit the unequal influence an elite few have on the rest of society: they must be virtuous!
Anyway, it could just be that I’ve misunderstood elite theory.
46 Comment by Hucbald on 8 September 2007:
20. PcH
Since I compose traditional music of the Western cultural variety, I am often asked that question: “Where are the Beethovens today?” – Or “Mozarts” or “Bachs,” depending on the questioner’s biases and tastes.
I alternate between two stock answers:
1) “A very pale one is sitting right in front of you.”
2) “They are writing code for video games.”
47 Comment by Thers on 8 September 2007:
Whether our Southern bit of cultural residue will survive for much longer, and whether it can possibly do so without political separation from the American Empire, are questions that will probably be decided in the present rising generation.
Oh, come now. It is certainly possible that the Dusky Races will someday be able to contribute something positive to the American Ideal at some point in the future, bless them.
48 Comment by JerseyGeorge on 8 September 2007:
American Culture: What is It?
Hugh Barbour had a great article in a very recent issue of Chronicles, where he looked into the etymology of the words culture and cult. In my view culture has much to do with religion. In a sense it is very much top-down, from God to man.
American is still a fairly recent civilization and so it borrows much of its culture from the Old World.
The American civil religion significantly overlaps Christianity, and so American culture is based on the word of God and its Hebrew, near-Eastern and Hellenistic authors.
A fair amount of our movers and shakers from Washington to the Bushies have been either Anglicans or their Methodist offshoots, and so the Englishman Thomas Cranmer and his Book of Common Prayer have to make up a significant component of most of the culture of the significant English speaking nations.
At first one might say the Mormons are a peculiarly American born influential component of our culture. Certainly the writings of Joseph Smith have had a huge influence on millions of Americans. He claimed he translated the Book of Mormon, which may be the all-time American made best seller, from “reformed Egyptian Hieroglyphics”. But the Mormon rites have a distinctly Masonic flavored hocus-pocus to them.
Sports are a religion in a sense. Sorry to tell you Southern die-hards that basketball was a northern invention. Golf may be the religion sport of the over 35 set, and that seems to be a transplant from Scotland. Baseball likely has English origins but the mid-19th century explosion of the sport came from Hudson County, New Jersey and Brooklyn and Manhattan – not the South. For parents with children under the age of thirteen, watching soccer has become part of the American religion. Apparently soccer was a violent mob sport by the middle of the twelfth century in England.
By the 1950s my area of the country was overrun by African-Americans fleeing Southern culture and Italians fleeing Italian culture. So, arguably, whatever culture was In New Jersey before then, was more attractive than the best the South and the Old World could offer.
Apple pie started out in New England. I assume the hot dog had its early origins in Germany and pizza in Italy – and that is pretty much American food culture.
The automobile has a claim to being part of the American religion. I have to agree with Jane Jacobs who assigned it an even higher impact than TV or probably the internet. The horseless carriage is all about Detroit and nothing about the South. The Japanese and even Koreans are far better at mass-producing semi-humane versions of these mechanized brutes than the Old World ever was.
As far as American music goes, Springsteen and Sinatra, for better or worse, are Jersey guys and Dylan was from Minnesota.
Culture is generally about cities. City living followed hunter gathering but predated farming. The great cities of the Old World are and have been for a very long time, London and Paris. In America the great cities are for starters: New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles. The only one of which that has a significant Southern aspect to it, being Washington. Mexico City, Tokyo and Osaka probably have more influence on America today than any Southern city.
Consumer goods are a part of our culture. Mao’s China became America’s workshop. Mao still has a colossal influence on China – which exerts an increasing influence on America.
Now getting back to religion. Probably the most read author in America today is the New Age Englishwoman, J.K. Rowling. Dan Brown, a Phillips Exeter New Englander, may be in second place with his American twist on Jesus and Da Vinci.
49 Comment by Allen Wilson on 10 September 2007:
JerseyGeorge, I do not see how your comments have anything intelligent to add to this discussion, they are very Yankee-centric and intended to ignore any cultural contribution made to America by the South. Much of what you say is ridiculous and has an arrogant overtone. Apple pie came from England, not New England. Mormons have never been part of the mainstream in the North, much less in the South, and have had very little real impact on American culture. Baseball was played in Virginia in colonial times, regardless of who invented the game. Basketball was invented by a Canadian. Springstein, Dillon, and Sinatra, great as they are, are only a tiny part of American music, most of which originated in the South. Aside from all the other biased or even a-historical statements, your statement that Mexico city, Osaka, and Tokyo have more influence on America than any Southern city is so ridiculous that it needs no further comment.
50 Comment by JerseyGeorge on 10 September 2007:
Well, like Clyde Wilson says “culture” is a big and elastic word.
I don’t have time to respond to everything, but will to a few.
1. I guess “American as Apple Pie” means English.
2. I’m pretty sure that the Book of Mormon is the most published book written in America. Joseph Smith was a Western New York Yankee with a family history in New England. It is true that only about 2% of the U.S. population is Mormon (believe it or not Tonga, American Samoa and other U.S. related Pacific Islands havea Mormon population of 20% to 30%) — but it is a relatively fast growing population. It is very uniquely American in origin. It is more “intense” than say Anglicanism. In a sense 1,000 Mormons are more Mormon than 1,000 Anglicans — who are often just nominally Anglican. I think Joseph Smith, for better or worse ( I think for worse), has had roughly 100 times the influence of say Faulkner or Calhoun.
3. Baseball may have had origins in England. But as an organized sport, with rules, — you have to look to NJ and NY.
4. If you are correct about baseball and Apple Pie — then our culture is neither Northern nor Southern just English. But who did more to develop these two cultural components that are popularly considered American — the North or the South.
I’ll admit that the whole topic is a bit silly. In a nutshell — I don’t think the South between say 1550 and 1865 was particularly impactful on world or American culture when placed along side and in context with other modern and pre-modern “civilizations”. The South borrowed the Bible, some culinary arts, and some amusements from the British, who had in turn borrowed them from other cultures — and the South did not do any more than the North to develop these borrowings.
51 Comment by Craig Kincaid on 22 September 2007:
To PcH: “Even Orian’s belt is sagging”. It would make a good book title or a CW song. If you should go with the latter would you please sing it to JerseyGeorge.