SCHOLAR ISLAND
CULTURE
"That person is cultured who is able to see himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons."Jane Addams
"Culture opens the sense of beauty."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically."
Matthew Arnold
Culture and Anarchy
Cambridge Univ Press 1961
"Man is born a barbarian and raises himself above the beast by culture."
-Baltasar Gracian
"There was a time, not so long ago, when the stupid and uneducated aspired to be thought intelligent and cultured. The current of aspiration has changed its direction. It is not at all uncommon now to find intelligent and cultured people doing their best to feign stupidity and to conceal the fact that they have received an education. Twenty years ago it was still a compliment to say of man that he was clever, cultivated, interested in the things of the mind. To-day highbrow is a term of contemptuous abuse. The fact is surely significant."
Aldous Huxley (1932)
"Culture is a desirable quality in a critic of new books, and sits well on a possessor of belle lettres, but as applied to everyday life or politics, it means simply a turn for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action. The man of culture is one of the poorest mortals alive. For simple pedantry and want of good sense no man is his equal. No assumption is too unreal, no end is too unpractical for him."
-Frederic Harrison (former Oxford academic)
"Culture is simply how one lives and is connected to history by habit."
-Leroi Jones
"Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which , in the course of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved."
Andre Malraux
N.Y. Times Sept 8, 1957
"Culture is the key to revolution; religion is the key to culture."
Robert Bellah
"Culture, as Emmanuel Berl has pointed out in one of his brilliantly entertaining pamphlets, is like the sum of special knowledge that accumulates in any large united family and is the common property of all its members. Do you remember Aunt Agathas ear trumpet? And how Willie made the parrot drunk with sops in wine? And that picnic on Loch Etive, when the boat upset and Uncle Bob was nearly drowned? Do you remember? And we all do; and we laugh delightedly; and the unfortunate stranger, who happens to have called, feels utterly out of it. Well, that (in its social aspects) is Culture. When we of the great Culture Family meet, we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats. And do you remember that absolutely priceless thing Uncle Virgil said? You know Timeo Danos .Priceless; I shall never forget it. No, we shall never forget it; and whats more, we shall take good care that those horrid people who have had the impertinence to call on us, those wretched outsiders who never knew dear mellow old Uncle V, shall never forget it either. Well keep them constantly reminded of their outside ness. So pleasurable to members of the Culture Family is this rehearsal of tribal gossip, such a glow of satisfied superiority does it give them, that the Times finds it profitable to employ some one to do nothing else but talk to us every morning about our dear old Culture-Aunties and Uncles and their delightful friends .."
Aldous Huxley
..In the modern industrial state, highbrows, being poor consumers , are bad citizens. Long live stupidity and ignorance! Fostered by the propaganda of the industrialists, the fruits of universal education have sprouted and swollen out, like cabbages in the unsetting sunshine of an artic summer. The new snobberies of stupidity and ignorance are now strong enough to wage war at least on equal terms with the old culture-snobbery. For still, an absurd anachronism, the dear old culture-snobbery bravely survives. Will it go down before its enemies? And, much more important, will the culture it so heroically and ridiculously stands up for, also go down? I hope, I even venture to think, it will not. There will always be a few people for whom the things of the mind are so vitally important that they will not, they simply cannot allow them to be overwhelmed."
Aldous Huxley (1932)
Music at Night
"Thirty years ago the anthropologist Jules Henry, in Culture Against Man, wrote that ".....America's industrial progress has made many people spiritually useless to themselves." Economic pressures require a worker to accept work that means giving up an essential part of himself, which is "...pushed down with all his other unmet needs to churn among them for the rest of his life....selves have been ground up by the technological system...." According to Henry, the economy relies on fear".....of competition, of failure, of loss of markets, of humiliation, of becoming obsolete....." The final result of this cultural process is madness. We are as highly developed in psychopathology as in technology.....Psychosis is the final outcome of all that is wrong with a culture.....parents, blinded by their own disorientation, confusion, and misery, sometimes half mad themselves, make dreadful mistakes....How can a parent who is psychologically blind perceive what he did to his child?....Culture is a unified whole, even unto psychosis and death."
Charles A Reich
Opposing the System
"Two cultures cannot exist on equal footing side by side. That is out of the question. Hellenic culture could not live under Roman influence. Roman culture disappeared. The one in time must destroy the other."
-Houston Chamberlain
"...the massive influx of impressions is so great; surprising, barbaric, and violent things press so overpoweringly-"balled up into hideous clumps"-in the youthful soul; that it can save itself only by taking recourse in premeditated stupidity."
Friedrich Nietzche
What would a society or culture be like that was actually based on the teachings of the Bible? C.S. Lewis, described it this way:
"All the same the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more that we can take. it tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. Everyone is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one's work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them. And there is to be no "swank"* or "side,"**no putting on airs. To that extent a Christian society would be what we now call Leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience-obedience (and outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular) from wives to husbands. Thirdly, it is to be a cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New Testament hates what it calls "busybodies."
If there were such a society in existence and you or I visited it, I think we should come away with a curious impression. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and in that sense, "advanced," but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old-fashioned-perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic. Each of us would like some bits of it, but I am afraid very few of us would like the whole thing. That is just what you would expect if Christianity is the total plan for the human machine. We have all departed from that total plan in different ways, and each of us wants to make out that his own modification of the original plan is the plant itself. You will find this again and again about anything that is really Christian: Everyone is attracted by bits of it and wants to pick out those bits and leave the rest. That is why we do not get much further: and that is why people who are fighting for quite opposite things can say they are fighting for Christianity."
C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity
"If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism."
-T.S. Eliot Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
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Book:" Religion and Culture". by Michel Foucalt
Book: "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present" by Jacques Barzun
Book: "Transforming Human Culture: Social Evolution and the Planetary Crisis" by Jay Earley
Book: "The Treasury of World Culture: Archaeological Sites and Urban Centres UNESCO World Heritage" Ed. by Marco Abate
Book: "The Twilight of American Culture" by Morris Berman
Book: "Light At The Edge of The World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures" by Wade Davis
Book: "Dark Sky Legacy: Astronomy's Impact on the History of Culture" by George Reed
Book: "The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land, " edited by Norman Wirzba
Book: "Streams of Cultural Capital: Transnational Cultural Studies" ed by D. Palumbo-Lu & H.U. Gumbrecht