From Anthony Esolen's "Culture? What Culture", a speech I heard on Youtube and began to transcribe until I did a google search and realized he's already posted
the full text of it. The speech is rather long and begins by revisiting an obscure English play. I'm a great fan of Esolen's oratory, though mere text does not convey his voice.
We have just endured the great quadrennial national exam. Neither one
of the major candidates referred to the wisdom of the Constitution.
Neither one reminded us of what our revered statesmen once said and did.
The so-called conservative did not broach the shrewd pessimism of John
Adams; the leftist did not turn one page of the pamphlets of Tom Paine.
Just as we have lost a sense of the holy, so have we lost our national
and cultural memories, for without reverence the past is but a burden of
irrelevant particularities, which historians may study if they so
choose, but which most of us will cheerfully ignore. And that amnesia is
one of the conditions of enslavement. For just as our apparent freedom
from worship helps to enslave us to the State and its tentacles in mass
entertainment, mass education, and mass technology—since there will be
no Sunday against which to judge the everlasting Mondays of modern
life—so our apparent freedom from memory only enslaves us to
manipulation by what I call the Anticulture, the infantile fads we take
in helplessly from our keepers in the media and the schools. A man
worshiping God on a Sunday with his brothers in a tumbledown chapel is
free, receiving the gift of the world, and giving praise freely in
return. A man commemorating the birthday of Stonewall Jackson is free,
receiving his heritage in gratitude, and passing it along in turn as a
gift to his children.
But when I am in an airport, that most harried image of the eternal
tarmac of Hell, crowded without community, noisy without celebration,
technologically sophisticated without beauty, and see people engaged in
loud conversations not with one another but with a business partner in
Chicago or a spouse and children far away, I see not freedom but
confinement. And above them all, as if to remind us of our unhappy
state, blare the everlasting televisions, telling us What Has Just Happened and What it Means, and preventing us from ever experiencing a
moment not of loneliness but of solitude, not of idleness but of peace.
It too is a tool of the Anticulture. For culture by its nature is
conservative. It remembers, it reveres, it gives thanks, and it
cherishes. A farmer tilling the land his father tilled, whistling an air
from of old, in the shadow of the church where his people heard the
word of God and let it take root in their hearts—that is a man of
culture. He might live only fifty years, but he lives them in an expanse
of centuries; indeed, under the eye of eternity. How thin and paltry
our four score and ten seem by comparison! For we are imprisoned in
irreverence. Our preachers are neither the birds nor the old pastor
peering over Holy Writ, but the nagging, needling, desire-pricking,
noisome voice of the mass educator, or of the headline, or of the
television, which could never have won our attention without encouraging
in us amnesia, indifference, petulance, and scorn, all destroyers of
culture.
nice use of language, but i'd have to warp my brain quite a bit to understand what he's talking about... history was nothing like what he's referring to... at least from what i've read...
ReplyDeleteThese are two paragraphs from a longer speech that gave his remarks more context, but he's commenting on the dissolution of culure in the west -- both the evaporation of a bank of shared songs, stories, myths, etc, and the radical atrophy of voluntary social/civic organizations that people formed and which were...cells and organs, so to speak, of society itself. Robert Putnam observed the same (in more formal, academic language) in his sociological work, "Bowling Alone". Esolen would also be commenting on the desecration of society, the disappearance of people's mythic attachments to one another, their roles, and their places. He often quotes Wendell Berry, if you're familiar with him.
Deletetx for the clarification... WB is one of my favorite guys: i like his poetry... not so sure about Esolen probably because i'm not religious and haven't heard of him anyway... i guess i think that taking historical data and organizing it inside a sort of framework like cells and organs is rather like planting a garden: it's pretty and well organized, but nothing like what nature is like... as i indicated above, my impression is that most of history was a mass of accidental and messy cultural collisions out of which unpredicted results skewed whatever directions the social and political leaders had imagined they were aiming toward; and that the ordinary family was so occupied in clutching onto a bit of food, land, or a bit of money, and trying to stay out of trouble, that they never had much impact on events except when they mindlessly erupted into revolutionary fervor and generally tore things up... and as a rule forced into complying, one way or another, with whatever social or religious behavior seemed to be expected of them... color me pessimistic, i guess; maybe i'm too old to be thinking: the thought police are not, i hope, monitoring my comments... lol
DeleteI like Esolen. He wrote a scathing commentary in his book How to Destroy a Child's Imagination or something like that; I don't exactly remember the title. He showed quite accurately how our society and public education system is turning children into adults who all march in lock step to the same drummer without inspiration or the ability to think clearly or originally.
ReplyDeletethat sounds good, Sharon... sometimes the old brain extrapolates when it shouldn't... i should find out more before letting my mind have it's own way... tx for the update...
DeleteHi Mudpuddle. I understand. Esolen is Catholic and I'm not Catholic but I do agree with a lot of his social commentaries.
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