Towards A Genuine Culture

Posted on January 1, 2004 in Culture

Gina has given some thought to counter-materialist measures of success over at Misbehaving.net:

To me, the point is living one’s life deliberately and consciously. Often that means choosing some things and not choosing others. I’m wooed by romantic notions of running a one-woman shop, but to be honest, that kind of work just isn’t for me. It’s important to remember that not all work of value contributes to the GDP, though corporate culture wants us to think otherwise.

I would add that not everything that contributes to the GDP is of value in the broader sense of the word. I took some time to read Edward Sapir’s classic, 1924 article “Culture Genuine and Spurious”. Sapir took a halberd to the notion that everything that came out of technological and economic “Progress” was a good thing:

Perched on the heights of an office building twenty or more stories taller than our fathers ever dreamed of, we feel that we are getting up in the world. Hurling our bodies through space with an ever accelerating velocity, we feel that we are getting on….It is excellent to keep one’s hands spotlessly clean, to eliminate smallpox, to administer anaesthetics. Our growing sophistication, our ever increasing solicitude to obey the dictates of common sense, make these tendencies imperative. It would be sheer obscurantism to wish to stay their progress. But there can be no stranger illusion — and it is an illusion we nearly all share — than this, that because the tools of life are today more specialized and refined than ever before, that because the technique brought by science is more perfect than anything the world has yet known, it necessarily follows that we are in like degree attaining to a profounder harmony of life, to a deeper and more satisfying culture. It is as though we believed that an elaborate mathematical computation which involved figures of six and eight digits could not but result in a like figure. Yet we know that one million multiplied by zero gives us zero quite as effectively as one multiplied by zero. The truth is that sophistication, which is what we ordinally mean by the progress of civilization, is, in the long run, a merely quantitative concept that defines the external conditions for the growth or decay of culture. We are right to have faith in the progress of civilization. We are wrong to assume that the maintenance or even advance of culture is a function of such progress. A reading of the facts of ethnology and culture history proves plainly that maxima of culture have frequently been reached in low levels of sophistication; that minima of culture have been plumbed in some of the highest. Civilization, as a while, moves on; culture comes and goes.

Gina asks of herself — and of Halley whose article entitled “If I had it to do over again” inspired her counterpoint — whether collecting things and accomplishments actually enriches her life or not. Elsewhere, Sapir says “The telephone girl who lends her capacities, during the greater part of the living day, to the manipulation of a technical routine that has an eventually high efficiency value but that answers to no spiritual needs of her own is an appalling sacrifice to civilization.” To have the latest technology does not mean much if we feel frustrated with our lives. When we find ourselves asking “If I had it to do over again” questions and come up with the answer that we should have grabbed for more of the toys and sigals, it does not seem to me that we have thought through our existence very well at all.

Sapir thinks that without a rich soil on which to base our traditions, we are like the hot house orchid, raised in the best of conditions, suddenly transplanted to dry, sandy soil. What can we realize in the terms of creativity, he asks, if what we draw on is so devoid of sustaining ideals? He doubts the ability of the individual to effect true personal expression without a culture to draw from, to warp, to refine, to rethink. The genius of the American people, he thought in 1924, was lacking. If he saw our computer culture of today, he might say the same.

I am not so pessimistic as Sapir about America’s ability to produce works of genius. The rhythms of popular music contain within them the sounds of our jungle. Comic books often speak to the struggles each of us faces as a human being. The Internet has become a vibrant media for interactions between citizens and an instrument of social change. The song of America is sung, roughly as in Carl Sandburg’s praises of Chicago at the turn of the century. There is room for escape and for delving into the character of our land. Yet to do this demands that we seize onto a thread, to be what we are without apology. The prevarications of the Bush administration about what we are doing in Iraq are a sign of a spiritual maladjustment where conflicting social habits have induced in our society severe polarization between its members and within each self.

But they are not the only symptom of our illness and the cures remain accessible. First, I advise that you turn off your television, stop dreaming from episode to episode of Survivor. Take a walk through your neighborhood. Listen for the crickets, the songs of the earth. Do something that takes you out of the packaged thinking of Fox and MsNBC into your own mind.

Second, I invite you to openly question the standards of success in our society. Is Dick Cheney the better man because he has amassed wealth which he must protect in a paranoic fashion? Do the lines and bars signifying the viscissitudes of the Dow speak to anything more than a transitory thrill? A rich man may buy the pacified work of an artist, but it does not make the work his nor does it allow the artist to sing the song of her or his own soul. It is better to write, as Gina did, a novel that will never be published than to equip yourself with the newest electronic wizardry if the latter does nothing but amuse and grant a few moments of pleasure. Where civilization can serve out sensual gratification, it cannot grant us happiness.

Third, fight Fear. The damper which George W. Bush has placed on the American spirit, which includes questioning authority, is killing us. We did not have to become the paranoid nation which we became after 9-11. When we are suspicious of those around us, we do not share: we evade and, at best, commiserate. This does not lend itself to satisfying our need for personal security which must be based on personal integrity and trust in the integrity of others.

Finally, be yourself and serve others. Take what you have learned and give it to others. Bloggers, I dare say, do this better than most people. They represent the greatest hope not merely for literacy in an age of Philistinism, but for spirituality in an age of Fundamentalism. By sharing what you have discovered, what you have read, what you have tested, you help yourself and others. You become part of the soil that the America needs to thrive in this next century. Under no circumstances, to no person or system or “new way of doing things” surrender your values.