[εις επαινον δοξης αυτου] New comment on Ideas Have Consequences, citation #1.
lilrabbi has left a new comment on your post "Ideas Have Consequences, citation #1":
As far as Pop Culture being one's culture, I think that is our problem. We use the term "culture" in a few different ways. In its broadest sense, culture is simply, "the way we do things around here". There are those who do things just like pop culture, so, in that sense, their culture is Pop Culture. If we go by the real idea of the word, culture is the cultivation of the good, true, and beautiful in our lives. It is the weeding out of the bad. It is work, like tending a garden. If that is what culture is, then Pop Culture is no culture at all. It is a substitute which man is all too happy to accept in place of real work.
Keying in on that idea of culture then, I see cultures of societies (the church, the town, or the state, etc.) as organic and growing (or degenerating). Each generation has the opportunity to build on the work of the previous...or in our case, to reject the degeneration of the previous and try to pick up the pieces for our own family, so that our kids can have a slightly better culture than our own, so our grandkids can have a slightly better culture than our kids, etc.
It takes time. Bach didn't just wake up one day and decide to be serious and meaningful. Successive generations built up a tradition-a culture-which Bach came into and used his genius to make it even greater. That is the work of culture.
That is what it looks like in my mind. The Eliot quote in the previous post is helpful.
Posted by lilrabbi to εις επαινον δοξης αυτου at 9:12 PM
As far as Pop Culture being one's culture, I think that is our problem. We use the term "culture" in a few different ways. In its broadest sense, culture is simply, "the way we do things around here". There are those who do things just like pop culture, so, in that sense, their culture is Pop Culture. If we go by the real idea of the word, culture is the cultivation of the good, true, and beautiful in our lives. It is the weeding out of the bad. It is work, like tending a garden. If that is what culture is, then Pop Culture is no culture at all. It is a substitute which man is all too happy to accept in place of real work.
Keying in on that idea of culture then, I see cultures of societies (the church, the town, or the state, etc.) as organic and growing (or degenerating). Each generation has the opportunity to build on the work of the previous...or in our case, to reject the degeneration of the previous and try to pick up the pieces for our own family, so that our kids can have a slightly better culture than our own, so our grandkids can have a slightly better culture than our kids, etc.
It takes time. Bach didn't just wake up one day and decide to be serious and meaningful. Successive generations built up a tradition-a culture-which Bach came into and used his genius to make it even greater. That is the work of culture.
That is what it looks like in my mind. The Eliot quote in the previous post is helpful.
Posted by lilrabbi to εις επαινον δοξης αυτου at 9:12 PM
posted by Matthew LaPine at
9:12 PM
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