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HOW TO BECOME CULTURED
by
ROBERT J. LEWIS
_____________________
Almost
every man wastes
a part of his life
in attempts to display qualities
which he does not possess.
Samuel Johnson
To the extent
that we are all born into a particular climate that calls
for particular adaptations, that we speak a mother tongue,
respect and obey specific laws, customs and traditions,
we are all ‘cultured.’ Despite this definition,
when we express the desire to become cultured, or speak
admirably of someone who already is, we are referring to
something quite above and beyond what is naturally acquired
due to the circumstances of our birth and upbringing.
The dictionary
defines a cultured person as one who takes an interest in
and is acquainted with what is generally regarded as excellence
in arts, letters, manners and scholarly pursuits. Since
all of us early in life are quite naturally uncultured,
we undertake the pursuit of culture as an act of faith,
seeing in cultured persons the promise held for ourselves,
as a believer in a God unseen and unheard might catch intimations
of God in the exemplary life of a nun or priest. At the
onset, we, the novitiates, will be severely tested in our
faith because, best teachers and great works notwithstanding,
no one can understand for us what we wish to understand
ourselves. To become meaningfully engaged with what is excellent
in a culture requires we enter into a vital relationship
with a work of culture (an arduous one-work-at-a-time task),
so that what is essential and outstanding in the work can
be revealed and integrated into our primary structures of
consciousness.
Most
of us have a pretty good idea what one must ‘first’
do to become cultured: go to art galleries, read the world’s
great literature and listen to the world’s great music.
And in proportion to our ability and persistence, the more
effort we put in, the more cultured we become, a development
that runs parallel to one’s life over a lifetime
But we also
know that it is human nature -- the behaviour patterns all
cultures share -- to circumvent difficult undertakings,
or avoid the effort altogether. All of us, at some point
in our lives, will have affected knowledge of an esteemed
work of culture without having put in the necessary effort
to lay authentic claim to it. In fact, we place such extraordinary
importance in being regarded as cultured that, in order
to effect the appearance, we routinely avail ourselves all
sorts of ruses and short cuts (from Coles Notes, to watching
a movie of a book we’re too lazy to read) at the risk
of being discovered by our betters, whom we then conveniently
confuse with ourselves.
For the record,
every age has had its share of triflers and dilettantes,
who in their transparency have created, as a reaction, the
bloated category of skeptics mistrustful of culture, of
those who have given culture a bad name. Arthur Koestler,
in The Act of Creation, observes that a snob is
someone who when reading Dostoyevsky is moved not by what
he reads but by himself reading Dostoyevsky, referring to
people for whom culture is like a currency whose accumulation
is synonymous with power and status. And we all know of
people (excluding ourselves, of course) who would rather
be seen in prestigious art galleries than see what is prestigious
in the art, or be seen attending the opera than attend to
what is art in the opera. In other words, our great books
and collections of classical music may reflect our pretensions
and/or best intentions, or we may in fact be sufficiently
serious to want to incorporate them into our vital labours.
The biological-microorganism
sense of a culture is informative. We speak of growing a
bacteria culture, or the product or growth resulting from
such cultivation. If we begin to think of a work of culture
as a seed we plant by taking an interest in it, and its
germination and subsequent growth dependent on the labour
and care we give it over a period of time, the conditions
will be propitious for the ideas in the book we are reading,
for example, to establish a permanent space for themselves
in our thought structures. As we react to the book, which
in turn informs our life’s choices, we preserve and
renew its meaning and authority.
Henrik Ibsen’s
Hedda Gabler, from the play of the same title,
becomes meaningful as a category when the destructive principle
that operates in some people emerges consequent to our having
reacted to Hedda in the conduct of her daily life. It is
not enough to know what Hedda Gabler did in Act Two and
whose lives she ruined in Act Four. She must rival and compete
with the people we know who inform our choices and worldview.
We will have already imagined being attracted to her energy,
her enthusiasm, the quickness of her mind, her wit and charm,
her superb company and abundant femininity, only to learn
that the sum of these gifts was no match against her demons.
We finally, reluctantly abandon Hedda, no longer able to
bear witness to fits of passion that turn destructive when
life doesn’t conform to her expectations, for whom
malice and vindictiveness are their own rewards, and no
act too base against life’s tedium. Hedda’s
mediocrity weighs heavily on us like a regret over something
great left undone.
Through Ibsen,
an essence, or category of understanding emerges so that
we are able to recognize the Hedda Gablers of this world
whenever we confront them. To the extent that we are familiar
with at least one work in such a fashion, we can modestly
lay claim to being cultured.
In endeavoring
to understand the nature of evil, the eminent critic George
Steiner found it incomprehensible that Hitler henchman,
Göring, founder of the Gestapo, by all accounts a cultured
man, could listen to and be moved to tears by the symphonies
of Beethoven before attending to death camp duties; facts
which splinter the mind and render mute a wonderful mind
such as Steiner’s. But was Göring ‘truly’
cultured if, however moved by the creative powers of the
music, he wasn’t sufficiently moved to act on the
humanity the music should have unlocked? The answer has
to be, NO. Göring was not cultured; he was a barbarian,
a butcher, and we know this from the historical record.
It
is only through the deeds we perform and the duties we assume
that sufficient measure can be brought to bear on the question
of whether or not we have become better human beings as a
consequence of our engagement with what is excellent in arts
and letters. Best said by French philosopher Merleau-Ponty:
“A man is judged by neither intention nor fact, but
by his success in making values become facts.”
COMMENTS
mariano.covre@pobox.com
One thing I find myself in doubt rather than disagreement
with: you seem to draw the equation culture=empathy, and perhaps
the even more extreme culture=ethics; and then you cite the
example of Hermann Göring.
Nazi crimes notwithstanding, I think that culture and empathy
are two separate domains which sometimes, but not always,
overlap.
What about Frederick II, the "stupor mundi," who
was one of the most enlightened and highly educated rulers
of the Middle Age having no qualms in using people for his
"scientific" experiments? What about Thomas Jefferson's
racism and treatment of Native Americans? Yet no one can deny
that he was a cultured man...
History is full of ruthless leaders who ruled with great intelligence
and culture -- as well as totally uncultured people showing
empathy and a strong sense of ethics, leaving me to conclude
that your equation is far from solid.
According to Gurdjeff, there are two types of culture: Essence-culture
and Personality-culture. The first comes from being in touch
with what you are born with. The second is the result of learning
mostly from your family, your acquantainces and only later
from books and other media.
What you refer to as culture is, in my understanding, the
often laborious and suffered result of a striving for a balance
between the two: that's when the emotions coming from listening
to a Beethoven symphony evoke echoes of gratitude, respect,
love for everything that came before us and everything that
will come after us.
jbutler@ucn.ca
Good essay. Most of the businessmen who buy art are still
first-class Philistines who are only interested in themselves
being seen as art collectors, i.e. people who amass more stuff.
They know, as Oscar Wilde says, the price of everything and
the value of nothing.
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