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What is Culture?
Donald P. Goodman III
Version 1.2, 14 June 2009

Introduction

Culture has played an enormous role in the development of peoples, nations, and societies throughout history. It has provided the primary impetus for war and for peace, for good deeds and bad, from the unied eorts of Christian countries during the Crusades to the wholesale slaughter of the Indians in North America. It provides a powerful bond for personal loyalties and loyalties between peoples; being of a given culture can make one welcome among strangers or a stranger in ones own home. It is a powerful inuence upon all people in all times and all places. Furthermore, cultures have been able to form people into certain molds and certain ideals more eectively than any other material force.1 Peoples have retained a erce loyalty to given ideals and patterns of behavior without any apparent motivation other than what in English is commonly referred to with the word culture. Furthermore, culture has been of more service than even formal education, because of both its eectiveness and its universal availability, in imparting a given set of ideas eectively through
This work is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License, available at http://creativecommons.org/license/by-sa/3.0/us/. 1 That is, more eectively than any force other than the Sacraments.

the generations.2 Clearly, culture is a vital inuence upon individuals and societies and ought to be properly understood in order to understand their actions. Despite the importance of culture, however, very little has been written from a Thomistic perspective on the topic. This taciturnity is probably mainly due to the apparently easily understood nature of culture and its role. It is probably further due to the simple universality of culture; culture is as the air we breathe, and it is no wonder that so few have ever thought to sit down and think hard about it. However, delving further into culture than simply the common uses of the term allows a much greater appreciation of it, as well as a better understanding of its paramount role in society. Therefore, a Thomistic investigation of culture, even such an amateur one as this by necessity is, should be helpful for the understanding. Dialectic seemed the most eective means of acquiring a better understanding of culture, and therefore this essay has adopted a dialectical tone. First, as Aristotle observes, we must not expect more certainty than the subject matter allows.3 This is a social science, like ethics or politics, and therefore will rarely if ever allow for the demonstrations to which students of mathematics or some physical sciences are accustomed. This lack of demonstration is not a shortcoming; it is a necessary consequence of the subject matter involved. Therefore, rather than proceeding from demonstration to demonstration, like the books of Euclid,4 this discussion must proceed along the paths of dialectic, and resemble Platos dialogues much more than the average geometry textbook. The dialectic has proceeded along the lines of determining what exactly is meant by the word culture, and thence to the sources
2 See, e.g., Rev. Theodore J. Radtke, Mexican Family Customs In Our Catholic Southwest, in Customs & Traditions of the Catholic Family 37 (Neumann Press 1994) (explaining that where the opportunities for religious education are still meagre, religious traditions [that is, religion in culture] are a powerful inuence in safeguarding their [the peoples] faith). 3 See Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea I:3 (R. McKeon ed., W. D. Ross trans., Random House 1941). 4 See Euclid, The Thirteen Books of the Elements (Sir Thomas L. Heath trans., 1956).

of what we have just dened. A thorough explanation of those sources will enable a more precise subdivision of culture. Finally, these concepts will be applied to modernity and its cultures, in what sense these can be called cultures (with a particular focus upon American culture), and how culture can best be lived out within the modern milieu. Finally, it should be emphasized that this work is not intended to be denitive. Rather, it is a rst attempt to describe culture and the workings of culture from a Thomistic standpoint. As such, it is a work in progress, and any further work building on it, or corrections to it, are greatly appreciated, and the work will be altered to reect such changes as soon as possible after the author becomes aware of it. May Almighty God, the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. John the Evangelist and St. Francis de Sales, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the guardian angels of both writer and reader bless this work and all who wrote and read it.

Dening the Term

The most important part of outlining a coherent, Thomistic concept of culture is dening the word. In this section dialectic is engaged in to arrive at a denition of culture, similar to the way in which Aristotle arrived at a denition of good.5 That is, various thoughts about culture will be suggested and examined based on our ideas of culture; those which are struck down will be excluded, and those which are accepted will be included. In this way we will attempt to arrive at a good denition. A good denition, in Thomistic and Aristotelian philosophy, consists of two parts: the genus and the specic dierence.6 The genus is what type of thing the word dened is7 ; for example, the genus of story-book is book. The specic dierence is what
See Aristotle, supra note 3, at I:112. See, e.g., Aristotle, Analytica Posteriora II:12 (R. McKeon ed., G. R. G. Mure trans., Random House 1941). 7 Id.
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makes that thing dierent from all other things of its genus8 ; for example, the specic dierence of story-book is which tells a story. The two combined make a complete denition; in our story-book example, the denition is a book which tells a story, as opposed to a book which explains a craft or which explores some philosophical matter. Obtaining such a denition will speak volumes concerning the nature of culture and greatly increase understanding of it. Consequently, this denition is sought rst of all, and further specication of the nature of culture is held until later in the essay.

2.1

Common Uses of Culture

The word culture is commonly used for a number of dierent things. Most commonly, of course, it is used to refer to the customs and habits of an identiable group of people. One of the most common cultures in America is that of the Irish; it may be helpful, rst of all, to note the traits to which the word culture applies in regard to the Irish, and then to generalize from that usage of the word to a more universal understanding. The rst thing that often comes to mind is the Irish accent, or even the Irish language. Next will often come their religion, the fact that the Irish are usually at least nominally Catholic. Then will come music; the Irish have a body of songs that they will sing, generally concerning drinking, deceased loves, or military defeat. Finally, the more common but less signicant habits will come to mind; the Irish enjoy drinking whiskey and beer, and potatoes feature very largely in their cuisine. Often, there will also be more or less random snippets of other traits; for example, that the Irish all think of the English as an ancestral enemy. What can be drawn from the fact that the word culture will commonly be applied to all these traits, and oftentimes more? This question is equivalent to asking what the common characteristics of all these traits might be. Each, of course, is distinctively Irish; the songs sung by the Irish will rarely be sung by anyone
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Id.

else; their whiskey and beers are brewed dierently from those of other peoples; their religion is, while much broader than their own culture, adopted and ingrained into the national character; they have a distinctive way of speaking and otherwise communicating with each other. These traits are not necessarily unique to the Irish, for which see below; however, they are all distinctively Irish, in that all Irishmen will see and recognize them as Irish. Of course, many of these traits are shared, most particularly their religion. The Irish are far from being the only Catholic people in the world. However, their religion is certainly part of what is commonly called their culture; otherwise only the Greek Orthodox and similar national churches could properly be called cultural religions. So culture does not only refer to what is unique to a given people; it also refers to those things which are distinctive of that people, in the sense that they are thoroughly engrained in the peoples thoughts and practices. It is, therefore, proper to say that an Irishman is Catholic, even though it is most denitely not proper to say that a Catholic is an Irishman. Certain traits of a culture are certainly shared with other cultures; those traits may still, however, be considered part of an individual culture provided that they are distinctive to that culture. Culture, therefore, is something which applies to a given, distinct group of people and involves the habits of that people as distinct from the habits of other peoples. They may share some habits with others (the Irish, for example, are not the only people fond of whiskey, nor are they the only people fond of singing about it). However, these habits can still be considered distinctively their own, even if at the same time they are distinctively someone elses. Another observation about culture we can make based simply on its common usage is that it tends to bind a people together very strongly and instill certain values very eectively. When someone in a given culture hears another man using, for example, his language, or even just his accent, it is an instant attraction and incentive to camaraderie. Furthermore, certain traits and characteristics are very eectively inculcated by a peoples culture. Being able to say that, e.g., Irishmen like whiskey, or Argentines like soccer, is remarkable generalization that is nevertheless usually cor5

rect, simply because Irish and Argentine culture quite eectively raise their members into certain pursuits and practices. It seems that culture not only serves as a unifying force within a people, then, but also as directive force, pointing the members of a culture toward certain ends. This concludes our examination of the common usages of the word culture and what it describes. This discussion will help us move on to the word culture itself, from which we may learn still more about the concept.

2.2

The Etymology of Culture

Philosophy by etymology is always suspect. In the rst place, while linguistics has narrowed etymology, at least among reasonably recent languages with reasonably extensive corpuses, into something like an exact science, this sort of philosophizing is almost always done by popular etymologies, which are almost uniformly wrong.9 Philosophizing based on an erroneous etymology can hardly be helpful toward any reliable conclusions. Secondly, the etymology of a word tells us nothing about the concept to which it refers necessarily; it only tells us what the people who spoke the languages involved thought about it at a given time. Even this limited conclusion from an etymology in itself is suspect, as many languages use phrases of a given derivation without actually meaning anything like the literal meaning of the words.10 These are tenuous grounds for any philosophical discussion. Therefore, before even an accurate etymology can really be considered relevant to a philosophical discussion, one must determine
An excellent example is amateur linguists attempting to derive Spanish usted from Arabic. Linguists, however, have demonstrated quite conclusively that usted is descended from an Old Spanish address, vuestra merced, your mercy, which derivation is supported by continuous historical texts and transitional forms. The popular etymology is incorrect despite the supercial resemblence of forms. 10 Excellent examples can be provided by French, in which mother-in-law is belle-mre, from the words for beautiful mother, even if the mother-in-law e is not beautiful, and in which tout le monde is regularly used for everyone even when everyone is not meant to apply to everyone in the world.
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rst whether the opinion of the speakers of the relevant languages at the relevant times is one which is valued by the participants, and second whether that etymology reliably gives an indication of that opinion. In this case, the rst question can denitely be answered in the armative. Those speaking these languages were the early and medieval Christians, whose opinion ought to be valued above all others. As for the second, however, the derivation may or may not be a reliable indicator of their opinions; such a study is far beyond the purposes of this brief essay, and such a digression would in any case be unkind to the reader. Nevertheless, something of an etymology, though somewhat popular (in the sense that it is not supported by deep linguistic research) and therefore by necessity unreliable, may be helpful in indicating the direction of the debate, particularly when considered in combination with the considerations encountered in the investigation of common uses of the term.11 This etymology ts very well into those considerations and sheds considerable light upon the purposes of those traits observed as particularly referred to by the word culture. Therefore, this derivation will be presented; however, the reader is asked to remember that it is not intended to be an authoritative etymology, but merely a probable one which seems helpful for the discussion at hand, and must not be held to higher standards than it is intended to meet. The etymology of the word culture is subject to some confusion among the Catholics concerned with the matter today. Such Catholics generally connect the English word culture with the Latin cultus as used in reference to, for example, the cult of the saints, of Our Lady, or of God Himself. They use this to state that culture must be derived entirely from religion, and that what is not derived from religion is not truly culture. While this mistake is certainly understandable given the supercial resemblence of the two words and doubtedlessly stems from a laudable desire to hinge all aspects of society upon the Faith, it overstates the case of religion in culture and neglects a more obvious derivation. While one of the meanings of cultus is indeed worship or
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See supra, Section 2.1, at 4.

cult, that meaning is not primary.12 Rather, the primary meaning is that indicated from the English word agriculture: cultivation, making grow.13 Agriculture, of course, come from ager, eld, and cultura, cultivation, the cultivation of the eld.14 Another word for culture, then, along the same construction, might have been homoculture, the cultivation of men. This etymology derives culture from cultus in the sense of cultivation, rather than in the sense of worship; it nds in the history of the word an indication of the end of culture, rather than of one of its sources,15 as the prior derivation does. The nature of this end is not here particularly specied, and need not be. It suces to observe that the word culture indicates some development of human beings toward a given end. This observation will enable a formulation of a decent denition of the term culture, and therefore dening the word will be put o no longer.

2.3

Dening the Term

Enough information has been gathered about culture to present a denition of the term. We have found that culture comprises the distinctive habits of a people; that it performs both a unifying and, more importantly, a directive role; and that it involves the cultivation of a people toward a common end. The genus of culture can be derived from this: the distinctive habits of a given people. However, a people has many dierent habits. Culture refers specifically to those habits which bind a people together into a single group for a common endand this marks the specic dierence. A complete denition of culture has been achieved: the habits of a given people which bind it together toward a common end, the common end being what that given people considers to be the good.
See, e.g., Cassells New Latin Dictionary 160 (D. P. Simpson ed., 1959) (indicating that worship is not a primary meaning of cultus). 13 Id. 14 See Websters New Universal Unabridged Dictionary 41 (1996). 15 See infra, Section 4, at 15.
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Readers familiar with Aristotelian philosophy will see this definition as very similar to that of a classically Catholic concept: virtue. Virtues are, according to Thomistic thinking, states of character (which are acquired by habit) which make a man good.16 In other words, they are the habits by which men are good men. Just as, for example, good baseball is a practice, living well is a practice; just as baseball has certain virtues that help one practice it well, like a good throwing arm and skill in choking up on the bat, so does living well have virtues that help one practice it, like patience and fortitude. In our case, being a member of a culture has certain virtues attached to it, which help make a man a good member of that culture. The similarities between culture and virtue are unavoidable and clear. Both, of course, intend to make men good. Culture, however, intends to make men good members of a given people; virtue intends to make men good men simply. The dierence lies, of course, in the end. The end of virtue is simply goodness; the end of a culture may be goodness (though always, of course, goodness as realized in a certain people and according to their ways), but it may also be something very dierent. The end of the culture is the key. This end is, of course, culturally dened17 ; the more this end approximates that of virtue proper, the better that culture will be. However, culture always performs these two functions, no matter what end it assigns to itself: it binds a people together, and helps direct them toward a common end. This latter characteristic is what makes it so closely related to virtue proper, and why culture can be so successful in instilling true virtues in members of those cultures which value them. Culture, then, is the set of virtues necessary to be a good member of a given group; that is, to attain the common ends which that group values. French culture is the pursuit of the virtues of being a good Frenchman; German culture is the pursuit of the virtues of being a good German. In some ways these two cultures will correspond; both French and German culture greatly value religiosity,
Aristotle, supra note 3, at II:56. Of course, the end toward which they should tend is not cultural, but universal. But many, of course, do not conform to that proper end.
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for example. In others, however, they will be dierent; a virtue of being a good Frenchman involves the proper pronunciation of nasal vowels, while being a good German requires gutterals. This notion of culture, the virtues necessary to attain the common end of a given group, is clearly extremely broad and encompasses a great deal of human behavior. It also has a number of important consequences that can be here examined. First, culture clearly plays a vital role in forming the individual and, even more, the family with what is necessary to be happy. As one prominent Old World refugee remarked after coming to the new, the thing which could not be taken away from us at the borderour faith and all the rich heritage of an old culture, like music and folk customswere the very essentials which made our family life such a happy one.18 This is, of course, the reason for the cultivation part of culture: it cultivates the family in a certain mold and helps them grow in a certain way. This is the real point of culture: it brings a people up, cultivates them, literally raises them as a parent raises children, toward a certain end. It follows that, since men can only be happy if they attain their true and nal end, culture is an enormously important factor in whether a given man will be truly happy. Second, culture is an enormously important factor in binding a people together: to its members currently living, to its ancestors, and to its descendents. Since culture so broadly includes all of the habits and actions which are distinct in a given people, it includes most of that by which the individual and the group identies itself, and thus most of that by which they consider themselves part of a greater whole. They will also remember the relations of their own ways to those of their fathers, and along with that the relation of their own ways to those of their children, which were received by their handing down. So culture has a very large unifying eect on a people. Finally, making judgements concerning the relative merits of a given culture will depend largely upon the source of that cultures
Maria Augusta Trapp, Living Holy Week with Christ, in Customs & Traditions of the Catholic Family 32 (Neumann Press 1994).
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end. While certainly the means of pursuing a given end is subject to moral judgement, no means of pursuing a bad end can be good. If, then, the end of a given culture is bad, that culture itself will require serious cleansing. Catholics, of course, know that the end of the culture must be the good life, a life well-lived in the grace of Jesus Christ; all cultures, to be truly good, must be pointed at that aim, and all cultures which are not are, insofar as they are not, bad. The end of the culture, then, provides the best way to make a judgement about a given culture concerning its goodness or lack thereof. Culture, then, is a set of habits specic to a given people which binds them together by cultivating them toward a common end. Having, therefore, come to a general understanding of culture, some examination of specics is now in order.

Parts of Culture

Culture is clearly not unitary; not every cultural practice is of the same kind, any more than every type of music is of the same kind. It is therefore helpful to examine the dierent types of practice which fall under culture and how they dier from the others. Essentially, each type of culture is a dierent means for pursuing the end of that culture. They are of essentially two types, symbols and customs, with appropriate subdivisions within each.

3.1

Symbolic Habits

Every culture consists partially of symbolic habits; that is, habits which represent something beyond themselves. These are clearly dierent in kind from many of the habits that constitute culture. For example, a given culture may have the habit of eating a certain kind of food; this habit represents nothing beyond itself. However, many habits represent something beyond themselves, in the same way that the cross represents something more than simply two pieces of wood put together in a certain way. These habits have, therefore, been put into their own category under the name symbolic habits. 11

These symbolic habits are among the most important of a cultures practices, insofar as they generally point to those things which the culture holds most dear. Catholic cultures, for example, employ many symbolic habits, like the sign of the cross, which point to what they hold most dear, namely, the Faith. NonCatholic cultures will have similar symbols representing their most cherished thoughts, as the Muslims often use the crescent. These habits, then, are very important for understanding a given culture. Symbolic habits can be divided into two distinct groups. First, there are those symbolic habits which are symbolic of things within the culture itself; these are called intracultural symbols. Second, there are those symbolic habits which are symbolic of things outside the culture; these are called extracultural symbols. Many habits will, of course, be partially both of these, referring to a thing both valued internally and externally; they can generally, however, be considered primarily one or the other. The intracultural symbols are often the most common, particularly in isolated cultures which have little contact with outsiders. Even cultures which are, or were, emphatically part of a wider cultural phenomenon, like those which once composed Christendom, however, do have intracultural symbols, and often many. In Spain, for example, the red beret represents an adherence to royalism, a symbol which would not be widely recognized anywhere else. In France, the white cockade or the eur-de-lis represent the same, and are equally unknown outside France.19 Occasionally, even religion will be a specically intracultural thing, and consequently even religious symbols will be intracultural symbols. Such religions typically focus entirely upon a given people, which has a fairly unied culture, and will often posit a certain people as being the only true people in the world. Thankfully, this is a relatively rare thing, though many religions tend in its direction. Extra-cultural symbols, however, are the more important, for the same reason that symbolic habits are the most important habits: they refer to what the culture considers higher than all
Nor, perhaps, even in France in these latter days, in which true culture is so rapidly dying. But the principle remains intact.
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else, and consequently often also to the end which that culture embraces. Most religious habits will be of this type, especially in Catholic cultures. These habits require little explanation; they clearly represent something beyond themselves and that something is clearly outside the culture itself. No one, not even the French, argue that the crucix formerly present in French classrooms was a symbol of some great, specically French ideal. The understanding is always that such habits are referring to things beyond and greater than France, no matter how great France might be considered to be. Specically, it refers to the end that French culture embraces, so long as it is still truly French. The nature of these habits is thus largely undeniable. These symbols can be further divided into two groups. First, there are culturally specic extracultural symbols. These symbols refer to something beyond the culture itself, but are used and recognized only within a given culture. The Welsh, for example, often wear leeks for St. Davids day in March; other cultures, however, would be completely blind to the meaning of pinning a vegetable to ones shirt. Other habits usually among these symbols are linguistic expressions of religious belief, or the reverent use of the name of God and of religious expressions.20 Such expressions, like adieu and adios, like godspeed or the insertion of God willing into a statement of intent, are generally unique at least to a linguistic group, and often to a specic culture within that group. The other group is largely self-explanatory. These are culturally unspecic extracultural symbols, namely, those which are used across many cultures. Crucixes, nativity scenes, and innumerable other habits fall under this category.

3.2

Customs

Customs are those practices which do not represent something beyond themselves. Often included are those practices which are commonly most identied with a culture, like cultural clothing and
Rev. Edgar Schmiedeler, Your Home, A Church in Miniature, in Customs & Traditions of the Catholic Family 19 (Neumann Press 1994).
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cuisine. Customs both bind a culture together, to those living, to those dead, and to those yet to come, as well as instill the virtues which that culture values into its members. These practices can be divided into two main groups, etiquette and customs proper. 3.2.1 Etiquette

Etiquette is the set of customs which bind the culture together by easing social interaction. In common parlance these customs are often called manners. It includes eating customs, greetings, social honorics, and innumerable other examples of common practices which simply aim at giving to others the respect which is their due. Generally, of course, these customs are intended to make members of the culture agreeable to each other. When an Italian, for example, gives his friend a kiss on the cheek, it may make him more agreeable and be an expression of his friendship; but other nationalities might object to the familiarity. This cultural incompatibility is fairly common. However, oftentimes etiquette will make members of a culture agreeable also to members of other cultures. Nevertheless, these customs are particular to a given culture. Etiquette, of course, changes more rapidly than most other cultural practices, though even so it changes rather slowly. These customs may, however, if they last for a very long time and become particularly ingrained in cultural practice, become customs proper21 by that long use. However, it is the fact that they no longer primarily aim at easing social interaction, rather than that they have existed for a long time, which eects this alteration. Further examples can be found below. 3.2.2 Customs Proper

Customs proper are those customs which bind together simply; they do not have as their particular goal making the person agreeable to others within that culture, though they may, of course, have that eect. They are generally more established within a
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See infra, Section 3.2.2, at 14.

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culture than etiquette, but not necessarily. The specic dierence is which bind together simply, not the long establishment within the culture. Length of use by itself does not a custom proper make. Etiquette is a way of easing social interaction, as discussed above22 ; we can take the dong of a hat as an excellent example. This custom was a means of ensuring that the distinctions between dierent parts of society remained clear and respected, thus being aimed primarily at social interaction. Over long use, however, this custom became less and less aimed at social interaction and more simply at binding together society, insofar as it was expected not only as a gesture of deference but also as a characteristic act of a member of the culture. In other words, when a man failed to do his hat he was not merely being impolite; he was acting like a Quaker, or like a member of some similarly unconnected society. Both etiquette and customs proper are, of course, distinctive to a society; the distinction is in their primary ends. Customs proper do, of course, ease social interaction, but their primary end is binding together the culture without regard to that interaction. Similarly, etiquette binds the culture together simply, but primarily its aim is to ease interaction on a social level. The end, as always, is the rst principle, and the end in each case is quite dierent.

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4.1

Sources of Culture
Religion

Religion has, of course, always been a huge source of culture in any society which can be called devout. This has been especially true for cultures which adhere to the Catholic faith. Religion has, indeed, been so strong a force for culture that, as mentioned previously,23 some Catholics have been led to believe that it is properly the only source of culture. This, however, is overzealous, as this section shall explain.
22 23

See supra, Section 3.2.1, at 14. See supra, Section 2.2, at 6.

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Nevertheless, religion is the inspiration for many customs, both those particular to a given culture and those spread throughout many cultures. Indeed, the Faith infused culture with so many customs that families homes came to be considered miniature churches. [P]articularly has religion had a place in the Christian home. Indeed, to such an extent has this been true that from early Christian times it has been looked upon as a Church in miniture. . . . St. Augustine. . . in addressing a group of fathers of families in his own Diocese of Hippo, . . . referred to them as bishopsmy fellow bishops.24 The customs in various cultures which were inspired by religion were, then, many and strong. This was true not only in family life, but also in society in general, in which many practices arose from the religious life of the community.25 However, despite this enormous inuence, it is improper to claim religious faith as the source for all culture. The evident source of many customs in other, fertile areas of cultural inuence is sucient to disprove this claim.26 While religious faith is certainly the most important part of mans existence, and exercises an inuence over all other parts, there are still other parts which exist and have an inuence over man. To have religion absorb all of these would not be in accord with the plan of God, Who wishes us to enjoy our natural as well as supernatural goods. This doctrine of religion in culture, however, may present a conict for the Catholic convert who lives within a non-Catholic culture. Since the Catholic religion rightly insists upon providing the end for any culture, is the Catholic convert from a non-Catholic culture necessarily abandoning his culture for the Faith? In a
24

Rev. Schmiedeler, Your Home, A Church in Miniature, supra note 20, at

8. These are, of course, too many and well-known to require specic citation. Passion plays, festivals on the feasts of patron saints, public processions oering prayers for rain and good cropsthey are far too obvious and far too many to catalogue. 26 See infra, Sections 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4, at 17, 24, and 25.
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certain sense, he is so abandoning it; in another sense, he certainly is not. While his conversion removes an important part of his culture and replaces it, for him, with another, most if not all of the rest of his culture will be compatible with the Catholic faith. So he is abandoning his culture as it has been practiced, but he is attempting to change that culture by improving it by the insertion of the proper end. This insertion will not only provide his culture with a rich source of further customs and practices; it will make his culture what it should be, what God wants it to be. Therefore, while he is abandoning a part of his culture, he is doing his culture a service which it sorely needs. His culture should provide him only with more motivation to embrace the true Faith, rather than concern him about its adoption.

4.2

Language

Language is, naturally, an enormous inuence on culture, as well, and provides a culture with a great deal of its substance. It does this in two primary ways. First, language provides a great unier of culture simply by its existence as a separate and distinct speech. Second, language helps unify and inform the participants in a culture by providing a great deal of substantive content. Language also, of course, is inuenced by culture; that is, culture helps to form language just as language helps to form culture. However, this article is concerned with the substance and sources of culture, not with its products, which would make it overbroad; consequently, this aspect of language shall not be examined. 4.2.1 Language as a Cultural Unier

Language, second to religion, is the single most important provider of cultural unity. Language is the medium by which all of a peoples relations, commerce, and daily life is conducted, and the means by which a people comes to know its common end and how to pursue it. Many customs involve language in some way, and cultures themselves tend to treat their languages as vitally important parts of their cultural identities.

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Americans especially have a historical testament to the importance of language in cultural identity. While occasionally certain immigrant families, after a generation or two, will lose their language and yet retain signicant aspects of their former culture, in most cases upon losing their language their name is the only remnant of their previous traditions. As long, however, as the language remains in use, other aspects of that culture have a much stronger hold. This thesis is both logically tenable and historically conrmed. This connection between retention of language and retention of broader culture is logically necessary. When a language is held in common with a given culture and not with members of another culture, it presents a formidable barrier to cultural exchange. Lacking a means for communication and interrelation, most members of each culture will turn towards their own culture for their customs and ideas. Even those few members who speak both cultures languages will be surrounded most of the time by those who speak only their native language, which will lead them to turn similarly to their own culture for their traditions, using their bilinguality only for necessary interrelation rather than to replace his own tradition. On the other hand, when one culture is surrounded entirely by another culture which speaks a dierent language, the loss of its language will most likely be fatal to its other customs. The vast bodies of immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are ample proof of this fact. The Italians and Slavs who ocked to this country at the turn of the twentieth century were very distinctive as long as there was a large body which retained their national languages; afterwards their cultures were merely supercial semblences of their former selves, consisting largely of strange names and a predilection for hand gestures. The German immigrants of the earlier nineteenth century, however, provide an even better example. For much of the nineteenth and even during the early twentieth century, these Germans retained their language, and consequently were able to retain their culture. Many German-language newspapers were published, and they even requested, and were denied by largely Americanist Irish bishops, German-language catechetics in the Faith. This refusal in 18

the late nineteenth century eectively required uency in English among all German children, at least those who wanted to learn their religion. Their language gradually died out in America, and their distinctive culture along with it. But while they retained their language, the inuence of that language was at least partly responsible for the retention of their culture. Furthermore, many stereotypical second-generation American immigrants consider abandoning their language to be a key part of assimilating into the larger culture. The loss of their native language strikes them as a tool for becoming truly American; if they do not speak American English, they think, they will not really be Americans. Partly this is simply the fallacy of equating nation with state27 ; partly, however, this notion is due to the quite correct idea that abandoning ones language is the biggest and most dicult step in abandoning ones culture and adopting another. It is well-known, for example, that the French people adhere strongly to their language.28 This is true of all cultures and all languages. The Gaelic language has always been a source of great unity for the Irish who still speak it, and a desire for those loyal Irish who do not.29 The German language was such a great source of loyalty to the Germans in recent times that it was the primary identier of nationality, and thus became the subject of great abuse. Examples can be endlessly multiplied. Perhaps the best example, however, are those nationalities which are just beginning to reawaken as separate and distinct cultures. Most specically, the various non-Irish Celtic peoples
Contrary to nationalistic notions of proper government, there can licitly be many nations, and thus many cultures, within a single state (sovereign governmental unit), or one nation spread among many states; each state need not encompass a single nation and vice-versa. 28 Rev. J. Albert le Blanc, Religious Customs Among the French of Louisiana, in Customs & Traditions of the Catholic Family 67 (Neumann Press 1994). 29 Indeed, despite these facts, the Irish remain the only counterexample of a people who largely lost their language yet retained their culture. The great and often violent religious distinction between the Irish and their conquerors is responsible for this remarkable retention. Furthermore, the fact that many Irish never did lose their language was doubtlessly a help.
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provide an excellent demonstration of the principles discussed in this section. The Welsh, the Scots, the Cornish, and the Bretons all have or once had their own languages; all have greatly diminished or, in the case of Cornish, disappeared under the pressures of the surrounding peoples. However, in the last century or so these peoples have been gaining a new awareness of their own distinct cultural identities; and one of the most important projects of these peoples has been the expansion or revival of their cultural languages. As cultural awareness has increased, their languages have also expanded; the recent expansion of the Welsh tongue is probably the most conspicuous example. Thus, the cultural unity provided by a distinct speech is paramount in binding together a culture, and thus is an immense help in the pursuit of that cultures ends. 4.2.2 Language as Substantive Culture

Furthermore, language is a necessary provider of substantive cultural content. This role is a necessary result of its place in cultural unication. Simply put, the substantive content of a culture depends in large part upon the means of communication within that culture, which is, of course, language. Therefore, many practices within a culture will be dependent upon the means of communication, or language, which that culture employs. Even a brief consideration of the pervasiveness of language will reveal the many cultural practices which depend upon it. Widely known poetry and literature, of course, will all be in a given language and, particularly in the case of poetry, quotable, and thus usable, only within that language. Cultural songs will have words in that language, and these songs will be largely untranslatable into other languages, having the same translation diculties as all forms of verse. Even relatively simple songs such as le chanson de la marie and sur le pont dAvignon defy easy and versied e translation; more complicated cultural pieces, such as le Chanson de Roland, will be completely impossible. Language also provides many common gures of speech which, while usually translatable into another tongue, will lose most of the traits which made them desirable. The English phrase whats 20

good for the goose is good for the gander is made easily memorable by the alliteration which the English language provides; other languages will most likely not allow for such an easy pneumonic device. This is, of course, a minor example, but other, more significant cultural phrases will also lose their desirable characteristics. An excellent example is the rhyme commonly used to remember the number of days in the various months: Thirty days have September, April, June, and November. If an English-speaking family has moved to, for example, Japan, and the children grow up speaking Japanese with English only in the home, this cultural device will be useless for them. Consequently it will pass into disuse, and by the second generation doubtlessly be forgotten. Examples can, as is usual in a cultural discussion, be endlessly multiplied. Furthermore, many of the linguistic devices used by the parents, speaking one language, will be unneeded by the children, speaking another, which serves to partially sever the children from their culture still further than adopting a new language itself already has. An example in English is the common spelling poem: I before e except after c and when sounding like ay as in neighbor or sleigh. The parents consider this an indispensible reminder for their own language; the children consider it a silly remnant of the tongue of their parents, decreasing their respect for the traditions of their fathers and thereby for the other customs which their fathers practice. There are several results of this substantive contribution of language to culture. The rst is the reinforcement of the fact that abandoning a language is in large part abandoning a culture. If language provides these important substantive qualities to a culture, particularly common literature and music, including folk songs, then losing that language must necessarily entail losing 21

those qualities, which in turn means losing a signicant part of that culture. Even more than the loss of the language as a tool for unication, losing these substantive aspects of culture brings about the fall, or at least the severe dilution, of the culture itself. The second is that it is important that a language never be abused. Linguists often decry such statements as prescriptivist,30 but this condemnation has no merit. In the rst place, the idea that a language ought not be abused in no way countenances the notion that some languages are innately superior to others, or that the language as spoken today is innately superior to the language as spoken in a few hundred years. In the second place, any prescriptivist content in the statement is amply justied by the important role that language occupies in any given culture. In other words, a certain degree of linguistic prescriptivism may well be justied in order to protect ones culture from decay. The abuse of language is the deliberate and widespread failure to conform to its grammatical and cultural rules. This principle does not mean that language should not be allowed to change over time; indeed, no principle could eectively forbid all change, though certain nations have been fairly successful at limiting it.31 It does mean, however, that the change should not be the result of laziness, but of natural and organic evolution. An example of natural and organic change would be the loss of case in the English language accomplished since the Norman conquest; indeed, an even better example would be the change of English from Anglo-Saxon to the English we know today. Two cultures had collided and were merging; it was only tting that their languages merged, as well. A new language and new culture was thus formed in the British isles. An abuse of language, however, would be such changes unmerited by the cultural facts. If, for example, Americans began to adopt certain random Swahili sayings, they would be abusing their language. Generally linguistic tendencies are merited by the cultural background against which
That is, as stemming from the notion that language has inherent value, rather than value simply in its ecacy as a tool. 31 Icelandic, for example, is largely unchanged for over a thousand years, and Icelandic students are able to read the old Viking sagas without concern for the dierences of language.
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they operate; however, language is of such paramount importance that such abuses must be carefully prevented. Language can also be abused by deliberate alteration, and by conformity to that alteration. The word seductive is an excellent example. At one time, seductive indicated a horrible wrongdoing, the taking advantage of an otherwise innocent woman. However, advertisements have begun to use it to describe the allure of their products, speaking of seductive chocolate cake or seductively delicious desserts. In this way, the meaning of seductive has changed. The meaning of the word has been reversed, from immorally inducing another to sin to really attractive. Modern media have reversed the meaning of this word. A man seducing a woman is no longer taking advantage of her, but using his innate charm to bring her to what she really, perhaps secretly, wants anyway. Such changes are truly abuses of language because they actively alter the sensibilities of a people regarding its cultural end, in this case, the moral and virtuous life. This runs contrary to the purpose of culture, at least in good cultures informed by Catholic values, and is therefore culturally bad. We have remarked already that the French people adhere strongly to their language32 ; however, there is more to the Frenchmans armation of the French mind than simply this. He goes further to say that they adhere also to their family traditions, [and] so too do they remain steadfastly attached to the Catholic Faith.33 This is, of course, equally true of all cultures and all languages. Adhering to ones language is, in large part, adhering to ones culture; and adhering to ones culture is, if that culture has a common religion providing its end, adhering to ones Faith. The importance of language as a source of culture cannot, then, be underestimated. Since culture and language are so closely intertwined, however, the question arises whether a culture which begins to speak a dierent language can be considered the same culture. The answer is probably no; they have become a dierent culture, no longer bound by that primary source of unity. They would be, of course,
32 33

Rev. le Blanc, supra note 28. Id.

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very closely united cultures,34 but dierent cultures nevertheless, the remaining supercial resemblences notwithstanding.

4.3

History

History is, of course, a very important source of culture, and this fact is so self-evident that it can require but little explanation. The history of the English and Irish, for example, for the last ve hundred years have been a source of a great deal of their culture, especially in the great inuence which the English have had on the Irish despite the heroic resistance of the Irish to that inuence. Innumerable songs, practices, and other customs have arisen from this conict, from singing about heroic military defeats to toasting to the king over the water. Unquestionably this is a fertile source for culture, and this particular example will furnish an excellent study. England, of course, had been a tentatively revolutionary power since the schism of Henry VIII, and conrmed their own revolution by the usurpation of James IIs throne in 1688. The fact that Ireland had also paid homage to the English king some ve hundred years earlier meant that a revolutionary society was governing a counterrevolutionary society. Naturally, this could not but have some eect upon the counterrevolutionary society. This revolutionary inuence upon Irish culture is not meant to be in any way derogatory of the Irish; indeed, the fact that they adopted so little of the revolutionary theories of the English government is much to their credit as a strong and virile society. However, the inuence of the English was not entirely without eect. That English inuence was the primary impetus of the relatively quick and easy assimilation of the Irish into American society despite their Catholicity, a barrier not as easy for other nationalities to overcome. Though Catholic, the Irish tended to be revolutionary in several key ways, and these traits, derived from the English, resulted in the heresy known as Americanism. The history of the Irish contributed heavily to this strange anomaly of
Once again the Irish provide an excellent example. Those Irish who speak Gaelic can be considered a dierent culture from those who speak only English; however, these are certainly very closely related cultures.
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liberal35 Catholicism, an anomaly which led the way into the new, modernist Catholicism which we see today. Examples could be endlessly multiplied, but this multiplication would serve no purpose. The inuence of history upon culture is evident enough that this section may safely be considered complete.

4.4

Physical Realities

Physical realities, of course, are a fertile source of culture. These physical realities have an enormous eect on the way a people lives; this will naturally have a correspondingly enormous eect on the culture of that people. Three primary sources of culture from physical reality can be identied: the geography of an area; the climate of that area; and the means of sustenance to which that area is suited. Geography and climate naturally have an enormous eect on a people. The Swiss and other peoples who have developed in very mountainous regions often have very distinctive ways of building their homes and villages, as well as ways of shouting across long distances when blocked by mountains. Those who developed in cold regions wear certain types of clothing, those in hot other types. Examples could doubtlessly be multiplied. Means of sustenance is also a fertile source of culture. It will form many of the popular expressions in a culture, for example. The Germans once had, and perhaps still have, an expression along the lines of may you eat pig to wish someone bounty. Furthermore, it will often inuence clothing, and obviously has an eect on cuisine. While these variations in culture are generally not so great as to make dierences in them dierent cultures, they are certainly relevant to the culture as a whole. No complete study of culture could ignore them.
Liberal in the classical, rather than the modern American political, sense.
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Reclaiming Culture

This great concept of culture still exists in the modern world; however, it is sorely beleaguered. How culture can be preserved and revived in the modern milieu will be our next subject.

5.1

The Death of Culture

Culture, however, is not what it was once, and the Catholic must be hesitant about applying the term culture in its full sense, rather than in only an analgous sense, to the cultures of modernity. This is true not only insofar as culture is Catholic; culture is dying not only as Catholic, but as culture itself. The fact that Catholic culture is dying out is no new proposition; even before the recent Council the heirarchy regularly noted the massive assaults upon Catholic culture, particularly as lived out in family life. Consistently the Church warned the faithful against the threat of the secularization of the home,36 and even warned of a conscious experiment37 in that secularization. This campaign consisted primarily in the absence of those practices on the family hearth38 which we have dened as specically cultural, even if religiously motivated, practices. Catholic culture was wounded and dying even before culture in general came to those dire straits. The same privatization of the good39 which brought about that death, however, means the death of all culture, leaving only the supercial remnants of culture, what some have called the disneycation of once proud and noble peoples. First, the way in which modernity has eected the death of culture, properly so called, will be examined; then, this death will be examined using American culture as an archetype.
Rev. Edgar Schmiedeler, O.S.B., Introduction, in Customs & Traditions of the Catholic Family 3 (Neumann Press 1994). 37 Rev. Schmiedeler, Your Home, A Church in Miniature, supra note 20, at 7. 38 Id. at 21. 39 See Alasdair MacIntyre, The Privatization of the Good, in 52 Review of Politics 344377 (1990).
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5.1.1

Modern Culture in General

Essentially, modernity has induced a process of plasticization, or disneycation, of culture. While modernity insists that it respects all the practices within all cultures, this respect only extends to the supercial practices of various cultures, not to the deep and essential conceptions of the world which cultures engender in their members. Not only does this testify to the typical disingenuousness of modernity, but it also divests culture of its most important elements. Culture, as we have seen, requires a people to aim at a common end,40 and consists essentially in the virtues which tend to bring that people toward that end.41 This is the meat and substance of culture; while the outward practices by which a culture pursues that end are interesting, charming, and even picturesque, they lose their meaning when not applied toward the cultural end. One cannot make sense of, for example, traditional French culture without reference to becoming a good Catholic and gaining Heaven, for that was the end toward which French culture strove, and the virtues in which French culture consists are meaningless and aim at nothing without that end. Modernity, however, will not respect those ends; it refuses respect to any end which fails its own tests of individual liberty. The end of truly French culture, for example, was intolerable to modernity; consequently, the most violent eruption of modernity, the French Revolution, focused entirely on destroying the French pursuit of that end. Modernity will not respect cultural ends, and therefore under modernity culture itself must die. The objection to this conclusion is simple, yet misleading. Catholic philosophy, the argument goes, also does not respect all ends, but only a Catholic one, yet culture continues to exist even in a Catholic milieu. If that is the case, then surely culture can exist in the modern milieu, even though modernity casts a suspicious eye upon non-modern ends. This is simply a case of modern cultures adopting an end other than that which pre-modern, and specically Catholic, cultures have adopted. There is no disneycation
40 41

See supra Section 2.3, at 8. See id.

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of culture, but only an alteration of its underlying principles. This argument is misleading, however, because modernity not only fails to respect pre-modern ends; it fails to respect any ends. Because of its overly heavy focus on the individual, modernity refuses to allow that there can be one end which is good for everyone and which ought to be publicly, either politically or culturally, acknowledged. Rather, modernity requires that each individual choose his own end, which means that the role of culture, whatever it might be in the modern milieu, cannot be that of cultivating the individual towards a given cultural end. Culture, being deprived of its end, must be deprived of its substance. All that remains is a supercial remnant of culture, the practices without their purpose. While such cultures do provide excellent fodder for childrens movies and highland festivals, they do not fully qualify as cultures in the full sense, the sense which until now we have been investigating.42 Is there any way, then, that these modern sets of customs can be called cultures, or must that word be avoided when discussing them? The answer, of course, is that they can be called cultures, but not in the same sense as a culture with an acknowledged cultural end. Traditional logic states that a term can be used in three ways: univocally, analogously, and equivocally. It is used univocally when its meaning is precisely the same as its meaning elsewhere, as when the word paganism is applied to both Greek and Roman myth. It is used analogously when there is some relationship between the two uses of the term, but not an identity between the two, as when the word paganism is used of both Greek myth and the current irreligion which prevails in the modern world. The latter is not formally paganism; there is no pantheon, for example, or priests, or augurs. But there is some similarity in the two, such as hedonism and a rejection of the true faith. Finally, a word is used equivocally when the two uses are not related in the slightest, as when the word paganism is used
This is, of course, an internal inconsistency of modern pluralism in general; it demands that there be no universally required end, yet still insists that everyone respect that same principle. But the fact that modernity destroys true culture is not altered by the fact that modernity is internally inconsistent in this way.
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of both Greek myth and Catholicism. Clearly, culture can be used both of true cultures and of modern cultures analogously, even if not univocally. While true cultures and modern cultures are fundamentally distinct, they still have a great deal in common. Both take their practices from the same sources,43 for example, and both consist of many similar practices, such as music, language, cuisine, and other common habits. While they must be considered distinct, they are certainly similar in many ways, and consequently the term culture certainly applies to both, even if to modern cultures only analogously. This understood, it may be helpful to look at the process of the death of cultures; that is, to examine the way in which modernity destroys true cultures, and either assimilates them into a wider and emptier culture or, more rarely, simply petries them into a plastic mockery of their former proud nobility. By far the most successful culture of the modern milieu has been the American; consequently, it has been selected for some closer, though brief, examination on this point. The look at the specic and particular should help to clarify the general and universal. 5.1.2 American Culture

American culture prides itself on its individualism. Individualism, however, may take one of two forms: 1. A strong emphasis on self-reliance and personal responsibility. This form of individualism is no problem for our denition of culture or for Catholicism in any culture. 2. The emphasis of the individual such that he is beholden to none; that he chooses and pursues his own ends in his own way; and that his adherence to higher entities is predicated upon his own individual liberty and choice. Clearly, this individualism eviscerates our idea of culture and the hold of the Catholic faith on souls and families.
43

See supra, Section 4, at 15.

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However, American culture quite evidently supports the second kind of individualism. Americans pride themselves on going their one way and their live and let live philosophy. More recently, these notions have been expressed by sweet little phrases such as open-mindedness and not judging. Any attempt to claim that the ends or means of another are bad ends or means is being judgemental and closed-minded, whether it is from religious or, more pertinently to our discussion, cultural grounds. American culture, moreover, was the rst to truly internalize this sort of cultural milieuthat is, a cultural milieu in which there is no true culture. Consequently, its history provides an excellent illustration for our notions of modernitys murder of authentic cultures. This rst happened, of course, with the American Indians. American Indians had denite ends within their several cultures, and they all enforced upon themselves particular means of pursuing those ends. Their cultural dedication to their cultural ends made them into exemplary Catholics in Spanish44 and certain French45 lands. American culture, however, and to a certain extent revolutionary British culture before it, could not tolerate such community-oriented societies among it. So the Indians were systematically wiped out; after a time, when conscience forbade their complete extermination, they were isolated onto reservations and, very slowly and still incompletely, absorbed into acultural American society. Immigrants suered the same fate. We have already observed the damage done to Irish culture, previously infected as it was by English liberalism,46 when it found its way to these shores. Somewhat less well-known among Catholics is the fate of the German immigrants, often very Catholic, yet also destroyed by the inu44 See, e.g., Warren H. Carroll, Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness (Christendom Press 1983) (giving an excellent overview of the strength of the Mexican Indians conversion). 45 See, e.g., Warren H. Carroll, The Cleaving of Christendom 657663 (Christendom Press 2000) (discussing the French missions in North America, though his conclusions about the separation of converts from former culture is perhaps too strong, and neglects the adoption of many Indian customs among French Americans, not to mention their intermarriage). 46 See supra, Section 4.3, at 24.

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ence of American society. German Catholics came to America and generally set up small, largely self-sucient farming communities, in which their culture, including its language, was preserved in its entirety. The Germanlanguage press, for example, was very active in the nineteenth century. Even the Americanist heresy, by which Americanist bishops attempted to strangle the integrally Catholic (and therefore anti-liberal) society of the German Catholics, was insucient to demoralize or eliminate these German-speaking peoples, though it certainly put a dent in their armor by essentially requiring English uency for all Catholic school children. However, the United States went to war with Germany in 1917, and the German Catholic society in this country was nally destroyed. Germany and Germans were represented as all that was contrary to American ideals of freedom and liberty (meaning American ideals of individualism). Germans were, then, put under enormous pressure to abjure their particular culture, contrary as it was to American ideals. The German Catholic communities nally folded under this war spirit. They largely abandoned their own cultures, sometimes even Anglicizing their surnames in order to hide their backgrounds. They became as American as everyone elseand the authentic culture which they so long upheld, containing an explicit common end, was abandoned. These cultures were either eliminated or absorbed; either way they were killed. Acultural liberalism, however, has still another weapon in its arsenal to wield against authentic cultures: plasticization. Cultures can be plasticized to the point at which they are entirely supercial and no longer include the common end of that culture, though the outer signs of that culture are still retained. Highland culture in America is the best example. Kilts, bagpipes, and caber-tossing are well known to most Americans, and hearken to Scottish accents and strange, bearded men eating haggis. But none of the true, authentic ideals of Highland culture loyalty to clan, for example, and to the Churchremain respected. Highland culture has been plasticized; its now a Disney caricature of culture, not the true culture in its entirety itself.

31

Not only does such plasticization eectively strip a culture of any threat it poses to the liberal milieu, but it also provides the acultural denizens of modernity with some facsimile of culture, making them feel as though they truly live in the multicultural paradise which liberalism falsely promised to mankind. They see examples of such culturesHighland, Italian, Greek, and so on and feel as though they truly do live in a melting pot, in which all cultures come together to live in harmony. In truth, however, liberalism does not harmonize all cultures; it destroys them, gutting them of their real signicance and identifying them with supercial accoutrements which, apart from their full cultural milieu, are often ridiculous. Highlanders are ercely loyal and simple people; those are some of their dening characteristics. Wearing a kilt and tossing a telephone pole are not. Liberal society, which is by denition acultural, cannot tolerate the existence of authentic culturesthat is, cultures with a well-dened and common endwithin their areas of dominance. Such cultures explicitly call into question all the notions of selfdetermination and individualism which liberalism values above all else. So these two means, absorption (or elimination) and plasticization, are employed to neutralize their eects while still maintaining some of their supercial aspects. Modernity neuters culture, and no culture can live within it without specically rejecting it and remaining constantly on guard against it. History teaches this lesson without any doubt.

5.2

Reviving Culture

This death of culture, as we have called it, is unquestionably a baneful development for the good life in the Western world. Culture has been primarily responsible for the passing down (the tradition) of religious and societal values. When culture failed, that tradition necessarily failed, as well, and modernity and the Enlightenment found themselves nally and denitively triumphant. An excellent means of reviving tradition, of ensuring that our religious and societal values are reliably passed down to future generations, is to rescue culture from its current malaise. Some might even argue that, excepting prayer and fasting, it is the only re32

liable means of passing the truths which we know down to our children. Some discussion, then, of the revival of culture is certainly warranted. Culture, can of course, only be saved by practicing it, by learning about and embracing what modernity has, through its philosophical errors, given up. In other words, we must embrace the traditions of our own cultures, sometimes unearthing them from under many years of neglect. This is often a challenging task, involving new languages and customs which may be entirely alien. However, no other means of regaining the benets of culture, so ecacious in preserving the faith and other traditions, will be sufcient. Furthermore, we must be conscious of the danger which modernity oers to these revived cultures and ensure that we are constantly on guard against it. True and authentic culture is fundamentally antithetical to modernity, and consequently cannot survive within its milieu. Children especially, who must be raised in these revived cultures if those cultures are to survive, must be shielded from modernity until they are mature enough to comprehend and avoid its threats. In the passing down of culture (in other words, in tradition) lies the only hope of cultures survival. A failure in this means a failure in the entire project. Culture can be revived in one of two ways. The rst involves the simple adoption of many customs from various cultures; the second is the adoption of a single, given Catholic culture of the past, emulating it as far as one is able. The second is the only sustainable method. Authentic, unied cultures develop over hundreds and thousands of years; they cannot be patched together in the haphazard way suggested by the rst option. The development of culture is, of course, uncertain, this and it is quite probable that, in this country, the various Catholic cultures which Catholics have revived will blend into a single culture. However, this must be permitted to occur organically; attempting to sidestep the slow, natural process cannot be successful. As Catholics, we know that the richness of culture cannot be obtained except by the accumulation of centuries. As Catholics, then, we know that culture cannot be revived but by tapping into those centuries of growth by adopting an authentic culture, probably from our own descent. Otherwise 33

the culture we adopt will be schizophrenic, disunied; the means by which it pursues the common ends of Catholic cultures will be inconsistent, and the ends not common to all Catholic cultures will be confused and unobtainable. We must trust our ancestors and what they tried to hand down to us, and take what we can from them; it will develop from us as it developed from them, in a natural way over many years. First and foremost, of course, the Catholic must revive the religious customs . . . of the past47 which so many of the faithful in the modern world completely neglect. Even this, however, will often depend upon the individual culture which the Catholic chooses to emulate. Some religious customs were, of course, universal throughout the West; many, however, were particular to given cultures, and consequently a full revival of these customs will require adopting in at least some manner some authentic, developed culture, preferably one from the individual Catholics own descent. Next, once the Catholic has determined the culture which his family will attempt to emulate, he must dedicate himself to learning, as far as he is able, the language of that culture. While the English have what may seem an unfair advantage in this matter, as we have discussed above,48 language is a vital part of culture, and so some familiarity with the cultural language is necessary. While naturally uency in another language will not always be obtainable, the greatest possible retention of the language is imperative for the fullest possible adoption of the culture. The Catholic endeavoring to reclaim his ancestral language can take comfort in the fact that large portions of the world are bilingual,49 and they have little diculty shifting between the two languages in appropriate situations.50 It is further a myth that children learn languages more easily than adults51 ; rather, children
47

Rev. Schmiedeler, Your Home, A Church in Miniature, supra note 20, at

17. See supra, Section 4.2, at 17. See Francois Grosjean, Life with Two Languages 1-24 (Harvard Univ. Press 1982). 50 Id. at 25051. 51 Id. at 19293.
49 48

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devote substantially all of their time to learning their native languages, while adults seldom devote as much as a quarter hour a day to language study. A rm commitment to the project cannot but have excellent results, even if uency is not shortly ensuing. Next, of course, comes some familiarity with the cultural history and normal forms of art. The Frenchman, for example, must learn about St. Louis and Gothic architecture.52 This is undoubtedly the easiest and most pleasurable part of acquainting oneself with ones chosen culture. One must also reach into the cultures store of traditional music and stories. These are rich sources of everyday culture which will be an immeasurable help in giving the Catholic the strength to stay the course. That, after all, is one of cultures greatest benets: it is a completely surrounding milieu which constantly reminds its members of the ends they pursue. In this way Catholics can help ensure that their descendants will receive the values which our ancestors have passed to us. That is the denition of tradition; that is the primary way in which our faith is handed down in families. And that is how culture helps to keep that faith alive.

G P Goretti Publications 708 Orchard Street Martinsville, VA 24112 http://gorpub.freeshell.org

For, as Emile Mle states, the French (and everybody else) have produced a no better. Emile Male, Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century 39899 (Dover 2000).
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