This grew out of a discussion on the value of teaching the classics in schools.
The problem is less a question of simply teaching the classics than it is of how to disseminate them as a lingua franca of cultural imagery. It is a top down sort of operation, but the problem is that, even where they are taught, they are not circulated among the people as a commonality. A hundred years ago, the community was narrow and common, most of all. Most people’s cultural heritage was based upon the Bible and the classics taught in school and, because of that narrow foundation, it was in that common heritage that the forms of the only available culture were expressed.
The Bible is probably the best classical artifact (in terms of utility,) because it not only allowed philosophical and moral foundation, but it also was a treasure of Proper Identification: the story of Job, for example, is one that virtually everyone at some point or another has identified with, either personally (how alike are my circumstances to Job’s) or by contrast (how much better my circumstances are than Job’s,) and it is in the identification and, in some cases, imitation, of those roles that the most common of people absorb and respond to a classical heritage, even if they themselves are illiterate; it is a classical heritage disseminated from pulpits everywhere. Which means it is a classical foundation to everyone in earshot. It was that common, and that is where the absolute utility of these cultural foundations lies: not in the professors and the students in higher education but circulated among common people.
But for the most part, these common people have become the most mobile generation of workers in human history, starting with the automobile factories, and then, because of the automobile culture, following where the jobs were, and in this a cultural heritage can find no root. Movies and radio and television most of all became our popular culture and, because it is aimed (by the market) to the lowest common denominator, it is not given to the interpretation and imitation by those it is to sustain in the same way the classics were so well suited for.
And it is not even a matter of whether culture is devoid of classicism or stupid either one; it is what it is. The problem is its efficacy in large and most examples to the contrary are pretty indicative as well; almost all classical references are left allusions and have no greater significance than allusions because the larger ground is no more fertile than it is.
The phenomenon when it works is more circulatory than anything else: classicism, as a living force, is both the ground (the foundation) and the ceiling aspired as well, and is nourished both above and below. The problem is, for the common people, like I said, their culture is a pop culture that has no illusions of being anything other than that, which means that the ground in this case cannot sustain the efficacy of a cultural system, classical or otherwise. All the “shots from above” of allusions in popular culture are left just that: occasional (if resonant, briefly) intrusions into an empty status quo, that rarely take root anywhere.
But what a classical culturalism used to do was maintain an “authoritative” range of subject and reference which was, while effective, at the same time, rather narrow as well. The exclusionary nature of that was, while deep enough to be interpreted by those capable of such a thing, it was also all the material one had to work with. As such, in a constant state of dissemination and reconsideration, from above and from below, it was the circulatory nature of a living culture, a culture able to adapt by those cultural artifacts instead of simply enshrining them.
What I think we are rather wistfully wishing to do is to enshrine these classical cultural artifacts in a world that has no particular use for them any more; a world that has drifted in such a direction and for so long there is no real means of rectifying it, because these things grow with us, and cut off from that, they become what they always were, relics with no power. They were instilled of that power by us, at both the higher and lower levels of our society.
The problem is that there is no reason to maintain them outside the “educated” culture unless they can be made relevant to the whole. But for them to be relevant on the ground, that would mean narrowing, rather than widening, the artifacts in our culture, which is probably more than most people (outside the church) are willing to do. By now the horse is already out of the barn.
It is important to remember that the question of efficacy is relative. The Iliad was perceived as a religious text; Homer’s means of severing the prevailing Orientialism down to an absolute profile would be the guiding principle of all classical Greek culture for hundreds of years. And that is just a poem. This was its absolute efficacy, at that moment, when it became a foundation for Greek society at the highest and the lowest levels of that society. The Gospels had a similar effect, as did the Koran. And far from simple references and allusions, these cultural artifacts literally bent societies through the prisms of their sensibilities. This is an awfully effective cultural classicism.
Greek mythology would fall in and out of favor in Western society as time went on, but its resurrection was, while nowhere near its original power, powerful enough because it was anti-social in nature and drew its power from that, until it was finally integrated into the very classical canon that it reemerged to counter to begin with. Only Nietzsche would be able to energize it with even remotely the same glamour it used to exercise on the imagination.
Compared to that—and in the relative curve of its efficacy—no matter how resonant the Iliad is to college students now, it is only resonant because we tell them it is so. (In this way it is like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, whose premiere caused a riot. Fond as I am of it, I never feel compelled to pummel someone while listening to it. But this is the difference, now, between the truly resonant and the canonical resonant. No one had to tell those people to riot. Someone had to tell me this was the reaction, though, at the premiere.) This is the value of authoritative texts (These are Important) but this value is not necessarily intrinsic, and this is no more apparent when the choices for our social value are so wide open with movies and the internet and the plethora of cultural objects of lesser and greater value—how many people, with all these things, can manage to identify with the classics anything other than superficially at best?
Some, certainly, but those are very likely the same number as would always take to them. But beyond that, most of these classical artifacts, regardless of their value, are little more than raw material for popular culture, whose only valuation is popularity. And there is nothing more fleeting than popularity. It is voracious.
The problem is less a question of simply teaching the classics than it is of how to disseminate them as a lingua franca of cultural imagery. It is a top down sort of operation, but the problem is that, even where they are taught, they are not circulated among the people as a commonality. A hundred years ago, the community was narrow and common, most of all. Most people’s cultural heritage was based upon the Bible and the classics taught in school and, because of that narrow foundation, it was in that common heritage that the forms of the only available culture were expressed.
The Bible is probably the best classical artifact (in terms of utility,) because it not only allowed philosophical and moral foundation, but it also was a treasure of Proper Identification: the story of Job, for example, is one that virtually everyone at some point or another has identified with, either personally (how alike are my circumstances to Job’s) or by contrast (how much better my circumstances are than Job’s,) and it is in the identification and, in some cases, imitation, of those roles that the most common of people absorb and respond to a classical heritage, even if they themselves are illiterate; it is a classical heritage disseminated from pulpits everywhere. Which means it is a classical foundation to everyone in earshot. It was that common, and that is where the absolute utility of these cultural foundations lies: not in the professors and the students in higher education but circulated among common people.
But for the most part, these common people have become the most mobile generation of workers in human history, starting with the automobile factories, and then, because of the automobile culture, following where the jobs were, and in this a cultural heritage can find no root. Movies and radio and television most of all became our popular culture and, because it is aimed (by the market) to the lowest common denominator, it is not given to the interpretation and imitation by those it is to sustain in the same way the classics were so well suited for.
And it is not even a matter of whether culture is devoid of classicism or stupid either one; it is what it is. The problem is its efficacy in large and most examples to the contrary are pretty indicative as well; almost all classical references are left allusions and have no greater significance than allusions because the larger ground is no more fertile than it is.
The phenomenon when it works is more circulatory than anything else: classicism, as a living force, is both the ground (the foundation) and the ceiling aspired as well, and is nourished both above and below. The problem is, for the common people, like I said, their culture is a pop culture that has no illusions of being anything other than that, which means that the ground in this case cannot sustain the efficacy of a cultural system, classical or otherwise. All the “shots from above” of allusions in popular culture are left just that: occasional (if resonant, briefly) intrusions into an empty status quo, that rarely take root anywhere.
But what a classical culturalism used to do was maintain an “authoritative” range of subject and reference which was, while effective, at the same time, rather narrow as well. The exclusionary nature of that was, while deep enough to be interpreted by those capable of such a thing, it was also all the material one had to work with. As such, in a constant state of dissemination and reconsideration, from above and from below, it was the circulatory nature of a living culture, a culture able to adapt by those cultural artifacts instead of simply enshrining them.
What I think we are rather wistfully wishing to do is to enshrine these classical cultural artifacts in a world that has no particular use for them any more; a world that has drifted in such a direction and for so long there is no real means of rectifying it, because these things grow with us, and cut off from that, they become what they always were, relics with no power. They were instilled of that power by us, at both the higher and lower levels of our society.
The problem is that there is no reason to maintain them outside the “educated” culture unless they can be made relevant to the whole. But for them to be relevant on the ground, that would mean narrowing, rather than widening, the artifacts in our culture, which is probably more than most people (outside the church) are willing to do. By now the horse is already out of the barn.
It is important to remember that the question of efficacy is relative. The Iliad was perceived as a religious text; Homer’s means of severing the prevailing Orientialism down to an absolute profile would be the guiding principle of all classical Greek culture for hundreds of years. And that is just a poem. This was its absolute efficacy, at that moment, when it became a foundation for Greek society at the highest and the lowest levels of that society. The Gospels had a similar effect, as did the Koran. And far from simple references and allusions, these cultural artifacts literally bent societies through the prisms of their sensibilities. This is an awfully effective cultural classicism.
Greek mythology would fall in and out of favor in Western society as time went on, but its resurrection was, while nowhere near its original power, powerful enough because it was anti-social in nature and drew its power from that, until it was finally integrated into the very classical canon that it reemerged to counter to begin with. Only Nietzsche would be able to energize it with even remotely the same glamour it used to exercise on the imagination.
Compared to that—and in the relative curve of its efficacy—no matter how resonant the Iliad is to college students now, it is only resonant because we tell them it is so. (In this way it is like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, whose premiere caused a riot. Fond as I am of it, I never feel compelled to pummel someone while listening to it. But this is the difference, now, between the truly resonant and the canonical resonant. No one had to tell those people to riot. Someone had to tell me this was the reaction, though, at the premiere.) This is the value of authoritative texts (These are Important) but this value is not necessarily intrinsic, and this is no more apparent when the choices for our social value are so wide open with movies and the internet and the plethora of cultural objects of lesser and greater value—how many people, with all these things, can manage to identify with the classics anything other than superficially at best?
Some, certainly, but those are very likely the same number as would always take to them. But beyond that, most of these classical artifacts, regardless of their value, are little more than raw material for popular culture, whose only valuation is popularity. And there is nothing more fleeting than popularity. It is voracious.
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