Not-so-'funny things have happened on the way to the Forum', or, how do Salesians understand ‘culture’ from an English language mindset?

 

ROME: 5th November '04 -- The company words keep is all important!  The gap between culture and faith is the word ‘and’, linguistically speaking.  That is, while we are expressing concern that there is a divide between the two in our modern world, our very discourse is able to keep them together by a small, positive conjunctive unit, subtly yoking them together.

    But the yokes are many: in Italy there is the Ministry for Cultural Goods, in London the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.  The company words keep...  recall that Boy George formed a band called Culture Club in 1981?  Beni-culturali is one message, culture-media-sport-club another, as is the contrast between a ministry and a department.

    Tankfuls of ink and terrabytes of inquiry have been given to culture, but have we noticed the semantic creep, in English?  Along with the fact that the EU officially refused to acknowledge the Christian roots of culture in Rome last week, other not-so-funny things have happened on the way to the Forum.  And they can affect the way you and I, as Salesians, read texts of our own kind, say, by Fr Viganò, who employed the term culture across nearly 90% of his writing.

    George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four blamed a fictional Oceania (pity about that choice) for reducing the language, thus restricting people’s memory and ability to think: you make Thoughtcrime impossible if you reduce the number and power of words!  But reducing words is not the only way to restrict thought.

    Matthew Arnold, a British contemporary of Don Bosco,1822-1888, did more than any English writer to keep culture firmly yoked to religion even while in gentlemanly fashion setting uphigh culture in opposition to Christianity.  But the pattern, since Arnold, has been to expand the word in  linguistically and possibly mischievous ways, where the expansion restricts our ability to think.  Let me explain.

    Pluralisation:  Just add an ‘s’ and a grand concept becomes so diffused it begins to lose meaning altogether;  as many cultures as there are groups of two or more!  Mind you, the pluralisation of culture goes back to Herder (in German) in the late 18th Century, but it wasn’t picked up in English to any great degree until the development of anthropology from ethnology in the 20th Century.

    Adjectival expansion: cultural only entered English in the 1870’s or thereabouts.  But tie it to genocide, for example, and you expand meaning in ways that lessen what genocide is, an unspeakable horror.  Cultural genocide has been levelled against the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, even the IRA, but what about the real genocide?

    Colloquial expansion: a subtle one this; a culture vulture is a person interested in the refined arts, but in the mouth of the utterer it has a belittling intent: a pretentious, excessive interest in the refined arts!  Then there’s pop culture, street culture…

     Meanwhile the term cultura keeps a very different type of company in our Salesian literature, rather more optimistic, intrinsically valuable, more geared to the grand salvific plan for the human person, rather more singular, I would say in general.  And that has something to do with the Italian mindset, and with Continental roots which are Christian even if denied.  It's just that the English reader carries rather more 'baggage' on the way to the Forum, and we do well to be alert to that as we read.

JBF