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The Decline and Renewal of Culture
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15881 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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1 / 1989 |
6,236 Words |
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Warren Treadgold
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In the recent debate on college curricula, some have declared themselves scandalized by the disproportionate value assigned to the culture of a very few places and times. If we assume that literary genius is distributed more or less evenly, then Periclean Athens, Augustan Rome, and early Victorian London seem absurdly overrepresented in traditional lists of great books. By the standards of today's cities, each place had a population ranging from smallish to minuscule, much of which was not even literate. Yet no authors from the vastly larger literate populations of today's Mexico City, Cairo, or Lagos have received nearly as much attention as Thucydides, Virgil, or Dickens. Does this fact merely show that people who judge literary genius are biased in favor of dead Europeans?
One of many reasons for thinking not is that the people who acclaim the works of these places and times have far less enthusiasm for the works of the same places at somewhat later times. No one eulogizes the literature of Athens in the third century B.C., or Rome in the third century A.D.; in today's London, critics are discussing what has gone wrong with British literature. In each place, the Golden Age passed after less than two hundred years, during which populations and literacy rose but literature, or at least its reputation, declined greatly. In a similar way, the reputation of Western literature as a whole falls off drastically after late antiquity and recovers dramatically with the Renaissance. The tacit assumption is that culture itself declined and revived at those times.
That assumption tends to be tacit because today many find the process of evaluating culture to be uncomfortably arbitrary and unscientific. Yet virtually everyone does it, whether or not he is willing to talk about it, and supposedly neutral definitions cannot avoid the issue. Measuring culture by the volume of written material depends on the arbitrary assumption that a page of junk mail is as valuable as a page of Homer. Measuring culture by the advancement of scientific knowledge depends on the assumption that science is the only valuable part of culture. If every sign of achievement is equally valuable, culture has never declined since the making of the first tool, if not the first grunt. Though such assumption can be made, the usual assumptions about culture are more complex.
In fact, most people with much knowledge of literature probably still subscribe to the traditional view of culture, which may have gained authority even from being left largely unspoken. Most of what follows here is an attempt to interpret this conventional wisdom. Mine is a
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