I have long been an admirer of Arnold's poetry and criticism, and following my last post but one: 'Odi Ergo Sum', and @love the girls's objection to my rather exclusive use of the word 'culture', I append Matthew Arnold's introduction to his extended essay 'Culture and Anarchy', in which I have printed in bold his definition, with which I whole-heartedly concur.
My objection to the use of the word 'culture' to refer to something lesser is not simply nostalgic. The word has been appropriated by ethnologists, anthropologists, multi-culturalists, and those more sinister folk who want to blend their interpretation of its meaning with that of religion, so as to reduce the latter word's meaning to that of a 'life-style choice.
I object also to having to apply the word 'culture' even-handedly to Shakespeare, Phillip Roth, John Lennon, and (pace Christopher Ricks) Bob Dylan
"To pass now to the matters canvassed in the following essay. The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, 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 but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically. This, and this alone, is the scope of the following essay. I say again here, what I have said in the pages which follow, that from the faults and weaknesses of bookmen a notion of something bookish, pedantic, and futile has got itself more or less connected with the word culture, and that it is a pity we cannot use a word more perfectly free from all shadow of reproach."
Hatred Explained
-
So, what is emerging one week after Charlie Kirk’s brutal assassination?
The assassin was the “boyfriend” of a male who fancies himself a woman.
That is, h...
5 hours ago
3 comments:
Culture, like spirituality, is a word that seems to be seldom correctly applied.
I am in full agreement with Matthew Arnold's definition of culture. Those libs sure do distort the meaning of certain words.
Of course a word can have more than one meaning where a secondary meaning is ordered toward the more proper meaning such your use of the word cultured, i.e. educated in the liberal arts and a gentleman as Cardinal Newman defined that term. Because such a man is formed, and formed to what is considered a perfection of formation.
As to your objection to the use of the word, culture to mean something akin to a life-style choice' the error that's made is in not taking the act back a step from choice to that choice's underlying cause.
Not that the libs misunderstand the underlying cause. In fact they understand it all too well.
____________
A while back I commented on a South Korean blog that we attachment parented, to which was asked "what is attachment parenting?" And as it turns out, in South Korea they don't have a term for attachment parenting because for them it is simply parenting, it's what they do, where as in the US it was a lost art. Similarly, culture as you are using it, would not have required a name because it simply was understood as the proper perfection among the higher orders. While the contrary would have had a name such as the dissolute.
Post a Comment