“Notes Towards the Definition of Culture”

Last updated on: September 5, 2018 at 9:53 am by Dan Peterson

“Notes Towards the Definition of Culture” 2018-09-05T09:53:27-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A sunset at Dana Point, California, taken by Mike Tilley
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My most recent Deseret News column went up on Thursday:

“An exceptionally interesting ancient Egyptian papyrus”

***

Many years ago, I was deeply, deeply impressed by T. S. Eliot’s 1948 essay “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.” I really need to dust it off again and write something about it, sometime. In the meanwhile, though, here are two passages from the essay:

“It is important that a man should feel himself to be, not merely a citizen of a particular nation, but a citizen of a particular part of his country, with local loyalties. These, like loyalty to class, arise out of loyalty to the family. Certainly, an individual may develop the warmest devotion to a place in which he was not born, and to a community with which he has no ancestral ties. But I think we should agree that there would be something artificial, something a little too conscious, about a community of people with strong local feeling, all of whom had come from somewhere else. I think we should say that we must wait for a generation or two for a loyalty which the inhabitants had inherited, and which was not the result of a conscious choice. On the whole, it would appear to be for the best that the great majority of human beings should go on living in the place in which they were born. Family, class and local loyalty all support each other; and if one of these decays, the others will suffer also.”

It’s one thing, of course, for the above passage to have been written by the ardent Anglophile T. S. Eliot. As a native of the quintessentially rootless state of California, though, I probably shouldn’t resonate with it so well. (Neither of my parents was born in the state.) But I get his point.

This second passage is the one that powerfully hit me when I first read the essay as a teenager:

“Whether education can foster and improve culture or not, it can surely adulterate and degrade it. For there is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards, and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture—of that part of it which is transmissible by education—are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.”

Posted from Newport Beach, California

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