The Culture We Deserve

I did not take a class from Jacques Barzun, nor have I ever met him. However, I have studied his works and the works that he wrote about, and both have affected my work as a teacher, occasional essayist, and citizen.

I first encountered Barzun almost thirty years ago as I prowled through the open stacks at the Brooklyn Public Library in search of some diverting, but substantive, summer reading. My eyes fell on The Energies of Art . That title intrigued me, so I flipped through a few pages to sample the writing of this (to me) unknown writer. In his introductory essay, "The Critic’s Task Today," he wrote: "Chaos in the world and art is in truth Criticism’s opportunity to shine. For chaos has causes; confusion has clues; history is not an impenetrable riddle, and if one can for a moment rise above the anxious fret of the personal, one will discover at least some namable sources of public dismay."

Then: "Who are we in the stream of time and Western thought? Supplying an answer to this question is the critic’s task today, and the best excuse for his existence. For my part, I am willing to be judged by this test for venturing to use up paper and print on ‘mere’ criticism."

I was surprised by the clarity of Barzun’s writing—surprised because the last few critical works I had read were jumbled mixtures of puns and quotations pompously declaring themselves deconstructions of texts. So I flipped to the last essay of the book, "William James and the Clue to Art," and found this:

A … way … of showing the relevance of James’s psychology to art is to sample its abundant evidence for the view that the mind is the original artist, who hardens into a geometrician only by special effort or dull routine. James’s radical new view itself resembles an artistic revolution in that, displacing from the foreground as ready-made all ideas and objects, it restores primacy to sensation and will. Objects are always clear, hard, unyielding things that remain ever themselves as they recur, whereas will and sensation fluctuate. The Jamesian mind is thus the innovator’s—bathed in sensation, individual, free, and confident of its power to shape the congenial material of its own perceptions.

In The Book of J, Harold Bloom wrote, "As we read any literary work, we necessarily create a fiction or metaphor of its author." In my fiction Jacques Barzun is my teacher, with whom I stroll through the Grove of Academe. He points out fads posing as breakthroughs and clichés disguised as tenets; he teaches me that the giving and the taking of meaning is not automatic; and he professes the virtue of clarity. Then he ushers me to the gate between the grove and agora and pushes me into the marketplace where, jostled by rivals and torn by critics I empirically test what I have learned.

Winded and sweaty, I return to the grove with the test results, and Barzun reminds me that the grove is as arduous as the agora, and that enlivened minds keep the gate between them open. He also introduces me to other teachers who can cool me off. Teachers such as Walter Bagehot, Samuel Butler, and William James, who all remind me of Bunyan’s great warning against "Knowledge not attended with doing.". And Lionel Trilling, with whom Barzun taught a colloquium of great books of the modern period at Columbia University. Their method—what Barzun calls a "methodless method"—defied classification. Trilling and Barzun dubbed it "cultural criticism," which Barzun describes in his essay, "The Imagination of the Real" (Art, Politics and Will: Essays in Honor of Lionel Trilling, Basic Books, 1977).

[The method] arose from a lively sense of the force of circumstances, balanced by an equally strong sense of the free life that ideas lead when hatched. It seemed clear to us that in order to know what books and works of art, philosophies and movements of opinion intend, one must learn their antecedents and concomitants of whatever kind; and to know how ideas thrive and change, one must trace their consequences. …The effort was a work of the sturdiest imagination—the imagination which springs from fact and is hedged in by possibility, the literal imagination, the imagination of the real.

Those last five words hang over the gate as I return to the agora again, ready to converse with my fellow citizens.

About conversation and its concomitant, meditation, Barzun writes in "Culture High and Dry" (The Culture We Deserve, Weslayan University Press, 1989):

Culture in whatever form—art, thought, history, religion—is for meditation and conversation. Both are necessary sequels to the experience. Cultivation does not come automatically after exposure to the good things as health follows a dose of the right drug. If it did, orchestra players would be the most cultured people musically and copy editors the finest judges of literature. Nor does ‘reading up’ on art suffice unless it spurs meditation and conversation. Both are actions of the mind along the path of finesse. No one can imagine a systematic conversation. As for true meditation, it excludes nothing; its virtue is to comprehend—in both senses: to understand and to take in the fullest view. Both are actions of the mind-and-heart, and therefore charged with the strongest feelings. Indeed both interior monologue and spoken dialogue aim at discerning which feelings and to what degree of each belong to an idea or an image. That is how culture reshapes the personality: it develops the self by offering the vicarious experience and thought; it puts experience in order.

Culture is not a diversion for the idle or the passive, though many believe it to be. William James alerts us to this tendency in his essay, "The Social Value of the College Bred (1908):"

We of colleges must eradicate a curious notion which numbers of good people have about such ancient seats of learning as Harvard. To many ignorant outsiders, that name suggests little more than a kind of sterilized conceit and incapacity for being pleased. … In Edith Wyatt’s exquisite book of Chicago sketches called "Every One his Own Way" there is a couple who stand for culture in the sense of exclusiveness, Richard Elliot and his feminine counterpart—feeble caricatures of mankind, unable to know any good thing when they see it, incapable of enjoyment unless a printed label gives them leave. … Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations [and] it pounces unerringly on the human core.

We get the words culture and cultivated from Latin: to till, to plow a field. Preparing a plot of land for a crop is no more sweaty an activity than cultivating one’s mind. As tools for cultivation, James’s "sympathies and admirations" go well with Barzun’s "meditation and conversation," and together they open the gate of our imagination of the real, so we can put our experience in order.

My experience has shown that the grove, the agora, and the gate are real. Even in my retired state, my stroll with Barzun and his colleagues continues. Daily, I work to keep my experience in order by reading, meditation and conversation. As I seek the antecedents, concomitants and consequences in the apparent chaos of the world and art, I sometimes find a namable source of public dismay.

For example, I am dismayed by the current Republican Party leadership’s lack of any imagination of the real. They encounter no cultures different from their own. They embody my definition of a Conservative: a person who takes action on the belief that if something has not happened to him, it is not important or it hasn’t happened at all.

I doubt that many Congressional Conservatives have stood in unemployment lines because their factory has closed. Their educations and life-experiences have kept them in the grove of clubs and board rooms and away from the agora swarming with their fellow-citizens, many of them currently unemployed. Their culture—history, religion, art, thought—is one of exclusiveness and has made them, in James’s words, "feeble caricatures of mankind, unable to know any good thing when they see it, incapable of enjoyment unless a printed label gives them leave." That label tells them two things: First, money is the final value of all things. Second, those who disagree are evil.

This is why Conservatives who preach bipartisan effort in governance practice narrow, one-sided politics. Their legislative behavior, meditations in caucus rooms, and conversations on the floors of the House and Senate all reveal their beliefs: Unemployed people should stop complaining and get a job. Banks, securities traders, and real estate brokers should be allowed to do anything to make a profit. So should food and drug processors and manufacturers. The rule of law applies only to political opponents.

Recently the Republican National Committee elected a new Chairman, Michael Steele, who declared in his victory speech, "We're going to say to friend and foe alike, we want you to be a part of us. And to those of you who will obstruct, get ready to get knocked over."

These words are not destined to be engraved in the tablets of our republic alongside those of Lincoln, or even Theodore Roosevelt. This new leader of conservative America offers an iron hand in an iron glove to his political opponents. So Congressional Republicans are continuing their culture-war by obstructing the progress of the badly needed legislation to stimulate the US economy.

As for the Republicans’ foes, we will not join in the conservative march toward the deterioration of our economy. Nor the destruction of the culture we deserve.