Derek Holt's List: Culture

• It is difficult to make sense of many of the conventional arguments against censorship. The objection that in my experience tends to be adduced most promptly (and with the greatest degree of hysteria) is that of the “slippery slope”: grant some agency the legal power of censure, the argument goes, and before long political speech will be suppressed, privacy invaded, legal protections eroded, republican liberties abridged, schools taken over by fundamentalists from Alabama, women reduced to chattels, and the demonic ferment of fascism lying always just below the surface of American life set loose upon the world.
• Of course, we would all have been better off to have been spared the overrated, intellectually arthritic, and incompetently written Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but two cases out of three are sufficient to make the point.

  • Haha! Of course, now that the book has made it to film, it may seem tame in comparison to what graces the silver screen these days.
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• Nor does it seem plausible to me to suggest that our national literature has noticeably improved since these fetters were struck off. There is, after all, a kind of philistinism on either side of this issue. Is good art suppressed more by rules of public decency (even when applied with a heavy hand) or by the barbarism of a culture whose sensibilities have become so debauched by constant exposure to the scabrous and the vile as to have become incapable of any discrimination, or of any due appreciation of subtlety or craft?

  • I have often wondered this very thing: how exactly has American Literature noticeably improved over the last, oh, 30-50 years?
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• Well, nostalgia can be a particularly toxic opiate, perhaps.
• Obviously many extraordinary films have been produced since the Hayes Office vanished — there was even a brief golden age of sorts in the early 1970s — and among them have been many that could never have appeared under the old code.
• Simply said, it may be that we no longer have enough civilization left to save.
• were certain cultural products legally proscribed, we would be denying people things they want, denying them the right to choose for themselves, putting limits upon expressive freedom, refusing to trust in the law of supply and demand

  • If you manufacture it, they will buy it.
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• no society that simply concedes the prior right of its citizens to have whatever they want can ever really be free.
• This is the crucial issue, I think: not what we understand decency to be, but what we mean when we speak of freedom. It is a curious condition of late Western modernity that, for so many of us, the highest ideal of the good society is simply democracy as such, and then within democracy varying alloys of capitalism, the welfare state, regionalism, federalism, individualism, and so on.
• We have come to believe — more or less unreflectively — that the will necessarily becomes more free the more it is emancipated from whatever constraints it suffers; which means that, over the course of time, even our most revered moral traditions can come to seem onerous nuisances that we must shed if we are to secure our “rights.”

  • I am reminded of what Christianity in America has become...
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• True freedom, at least according to one venerable definition, is the realization of a complex nature in its proper good (that is, in both its natural and supernatural ends); it is the freedom of a thing to flourish, to become ever more fully what it is.
• inchoate

  • just begun and so not fully formed or developed; rudimentary
• One ceases to be governed by caprice, or to be the slave of one’s own liberty.
• This understanding of freedom, however, requires not only the belief that we possess an actual nature, which must flourish to be free, but a belief in the transcendent Good towards which that nature is oriented. This Christians, Jews, and virtuous pagans have always understood: that which can endure in us is sustained by that which lies beyond us, in the eternity of its own plenitude. To be fully free is to be joined to that end for which our natures were originally framed, and for which — in the deepest reaches of our souls — we ceaselessly yearn. And whatever separates us from that end — even if it be our own power of choice within us — is a form of bondage. We are free not because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well.
• Which is why it is not only perplexing but deeply disturbing that so many Christians and Jews in the modern world unthinkingly embrace and defend a purely libertarian understanding of freedom, even as they decry the constant gravitation of modern society toward ever more arbitrary, decadent, and extreme expressions of just this kind of freedom.
• there is no such thing as private virtue, any more than there is such a thing as private language
• Democracy is not something intrinsically good, after all.

  • Indeed!
• ochlocracy

  • government by a mob
• And a society that can no longer conceive of freedom as anything more than limitless choice and uninhibited self-expression must of necessity progressively conclude that all things should be permitted, that all values are relative, that desire fashions its own truth, that there is no such thing as “nature,” that we are our own creatures.
• We are very far removed indeed from a culture capable of such pedagogy — perhaps farther now than at almost any other point in Western history.
• fracas

  • a noisy quarrel
• This is not to say that there are no practical measures for those who wish in earnest for the battle to be joined: homeschooling or private “trivium” academies; the disposal or locking away of televisions; prohibitions on video games and popular music; Greek and Latin; great books; remote places; archaic enthusiasms.
• Probably the most subversive and effective strategy we might undertake would be one of militant fecundity: abundant, relentless, exuberant, and defiant childbearing.

  • HA!
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• we can hope for no “victory” at all — no matter what practical measures we take — if we are not resolved first and foremost to extirpate the habits and presuppositions of secular modernity from within ourselves. What we call the “culture war” is, after all, only one outward manifestation of a spiritual war that is being waged at all times and in all places, but whose first battleground is the heart.

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• I am prepared, however, to ask whether America might not be lost because the great middle class was persuaded that they must send their children to college with no questions asked, when in fact this was the near-equivalent of committing their sons and daughters to one of the circles of Dante's Inferno.

• We have, as a society, long accepted the legal fiction that we are incapable of even that minimal prudential wisdom necessary to distinguish speech or art worthy of protection from the most debased products of the imagination, and so have become content to rely upon the abstract promise of free speech as our only sure defense against the lure of authoritarianism. And perhaps, at this juncture in cultural history, this lack of judgment is no longer really a fiction.
• There is certainly no good reason why “free speech” should have come to mean an authorization of every conceivable form of expression, or should have been understood to encompass not only words but images and artifacts, or should have been seen as assuring either purveyors or consumers of such things a right of access to all available media or technologies of communication. We interpret it thus because of who we are as a society, or who we have chosen to be; we elect to understand “liberty” as “license.”
• The damage that pornography can do—to minds or cultures—is not by any means negligible. Especially in our modern age of passive entertainment, saturated as we are by an unending storm of noises and images and barren prattle, portrayals of violence or of sexual degradation possess a remarkable power to permeate, shape, and deprave the imagination; and the imagination is, after all, the wellspring of desire, of personality, of character. Anyone who would claim that constant or even regular exposure to pornography does not affect a person at the profoundest level of consciousness is either singularly stupid or singularly degenerate. Nor has the availability and profusion of pornography in modern Western culture any historical precedent. And the Internet has provided a means of distribution whose potentials we have scarcely begun to grasp. It is a medium of communication at once transnational and private, worldwide and discreet, universal and immediate. It is, as nothing else before it, the technology of what Gianni Vattimo calls the “transparent society,” the technology of global instantaneity, which allows images to be acquired in a moment from almost anywhere, conversations of extraordinary intimacy to be conducted with faceless strangers across continents, relations to be forged and compacts struck in almost total secrecy, silently, in a virtual realm into which no one—certainly no parent—can intrude. I doubt that even the most technologically avant-garde among us can quite conceive how rapidly and how insidiously such a medium can alter the culture around us.
• I know perfectly well that, as a culture, we value our “liberties” above almost every other good; indeed, it is questionable at times whether we have the capacity to recognize any rival good at all.
• To judge from popular entertainment, our favored images of women fall into two complementary, if rather antithetical, classes: on the one hand, sullen, coarse, quasi-masculine belligerence, on the other, pliant and wanton availability to the most primordial of male appetites—in short, viragoes or odalisks. I am fairly sure that, if I had a daughter, I should want her society to provide her with a sentimental education of richer possibilities than that.

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• ecalling Berry’s story about a very small place—his fictional town of Port William, Kentucky—is to raise some important questions about the story of a very big place, the story of America.

  • nullPort William is a microcosm of America -- 2010-02-23
    Not only microcosm, but metaphor... -- 2010-02-23
    
• I have not settled in my own mind the place of the teaching of history in the formation of character and judgment—I mean the place of real history with all its weightiness, and seriousness of purpose, and messy complexity as opposed to romanticized versions of the past that make us feel good about ourselves and serve some narrow agenda.
• But did we tell the stories right?  It was lovely, the telling and listening, usually the last thing before bedtime.  But did we tell the stories in such a way as to suggest that we had needed a better chance or a better life or a better place than we had?
• Suppose your stories, instead of mourning and rejoicing over the past, say that everything should have been different.  Suppose you encourage or even just allow your children to believe that their parents ought to have been different people, with a better chance, born in a better place.  Or suppose the stories you tell them allow them to believe, when they hear it from other people, that farming people are inferior and need to improve themselves by leaving the farm.  Doesn’t that finally unmake everything that has been made?
• Robert Nisbet asked us to consider whether it was remotely possible to belong to, truly to be a member of, a community (so-called) of hundreds of millions of people and of so many millions of square miles.  Such a scale and such distant horizons were not conducive to life lived face to face with other human beings.  The shear magnitude was simply beyond human experience and capacity.

  • Community must be tangible. The Internet is not tangible. Ultimately it fails as a community.
• will you at least grant that through his art he opens our modern culture’s imagination to a fundamental insight about identity, community, and the formation of character?

  • Berry seeks to probe and critique the American's concepts of identity, community and character through the element of PLACE, and asks what becomes of our collective moral imagination in the constant revision of our national and cultural story in the hope of incorporating more and more fragments.
• all of these institutions play a role in civic education because they all pass down a version of the past to the next generation in line, a version of the past that will make some things attractive and other things repellant, some things normative for human beings and other things aberrant.  These stories either cultivate pietas or they subtly or not so subtly destroy it.
• There is not one story that unites all Americans.
• A hundred years ago we experimented with something called “Americanism” to tie us together.  And that experiment is still underway.
• When Lincoln spoke in 1863 of “our fathers” bringing forth a new nation, the content of that claim, the very identity of those “fathers,” had been contested for more than a generation.  States no longer believed they had a common future as a union in part because they no longer believed they had a common past, or enough of a past in common, to bind them together.
• Berry’s distinction between “telling the right story” and “telling the story right.”
• I do not believe that telling the right story means purging the American past of all its unpleasantness.
• The “right story” of America, then, will have the courage to acknowledge the role of ambition in building our success.  To use Walter McDougall’s memorable phrases, we were a nation of hustlers who built a republic of pretence.
• Surely the good citizen does not make a god of his nation.  Surely the good citizen does not confuse the voice of the people with the voice of God.  Surely the good citizen fears the lust for dominion that he knows lurks in every human heart, beginning with his own.

  • Confusing the voice of the people with the voice of God: this is characteristic as much with liberal-minded Americans (see Episcopals) as with conservatives.
• Hannah Coulter feared late in life that she and her husband had told their story the wrong way.  Even if unwittingly, they had told their story in such a way that they made contentment and thankfulness unappealing and abnormal and restlessness and ingratitude appealing and normal.
• connection between story and character.  For the study of history to play its proper role in the development of character it must be true and it must take care how it fires the imagination and strengthens the will.  As a mother and grandmother, Hannah Coulter knew that children are “always wanting stories.”  She watched the consequences of her own stories in the lives of her children and grandchildren.

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