Slogging Through the Anticulture, II

     A few days ago an elderly woman we met on Cape Breton, where we spend our summers, asked us whether we didn't miss the opportunity for "cultural" experiences.  I think she meant whether we missed out on off-Broadway plays, or going to the opera, or visiting the Guggenheim, and suchlike.  No, I don't miss them; I don't like cities, never have.  I'll go to a museum now and then, but I do think that museums are rather like cultural morgues, where art goes in preparation for burial.  That might be a bit harsh, I guess.  Had I wanted to be rude, I could have replied that we come to Cape Breton precisely for culture.  Not to share an "experience," as of Etonians going a-slumming, but just to share the everday lives and habits of the old-time French and Scots fishermen, or to share a few of them, anyhow.

     Canadians on television are proud to call their country "multicultural," which is a contradiction in terms, if "culture" means what I take it to mean, or what Joseph Pieper takes it to mean in his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, or what everybody until the airplane and automobile took it to mean.  It would be rather like saying that you believe that a man and his four wives become one flesh.  What does the word, in popular use, signify?  Sometimes it means haute culture, or the trappings of it -- I imagine a gum-chewing gal from Brooklyn saying that she wants to go to Cawrnegie Hawl so's she can be a goil with culcher.  So parents might make their teenagers sit through a travesty of Shakespeare, to dose them with it, as a prophylactic -- however ineffective -- against their reading romances with half-naked ladies sprawling over the cover, or Maxim.  Sometimes it simply means "what is out there en masse," like corn flakes and Britney Spears.  This is also called "popular culture," because it is fed ad populum, to the point of choking.

     In chic political circles -- whose radii are never very great -- it seems to denote a set of superficial and inoffensive habits, or a set of ancient ritual gestures whose meaning nobody remembers, or feasts made up because nobody could remember anything better to do, all of them to be endowed with a mystical aura redolent of das echte Volksleben.  In other words, it's a soup and a meat dish, with a dash of nativist spirituality culled off the left hand side of the road.  So we have natives in Cape Breton pattering about Miqmaq Indian spirituality, 400 years after Chief Membertou brought his tribes over to Catholicism.  It's a hobby, like shuffleboard.

     What I miss in all of this is the thing itself, as it existed before the advent of the mass man.  "Canada has no identity," said another friend of mine, noting that a good many of the Canuck olympiasts have said that they divide their allegiance between the land of the tundra and the land of their birth.  What my friend didn't want to face is the possibility that none of the western nations now has any identity, because none of them possesses any culture, because their people, defined as masses whose residences fall within certain arbitrary political boundaries, have nothing much in common -- not so much as a prayer to their Maker.  No cultus, no culture.

Comments

[Stuart Koehl]

Why would that woman care about things like off-broadway plays and musicals when she has the incredible treasure of Cape Breton fiddle music right in her own backyard? The thing that annoys me about Canadians is their ability to appreciate everybody's culture but their own.

[Stuart Koehl]

And while you are on the subject of multicultural "hobbies", let's not forget the resurgence of Celtic pre-Christian culture, as kitschily embodied by the show "Riverdance". Never mind that St. Patrick and his followers were so successful in evangelizing the Irish that we don't even know what pre-Christian Irish culture was really like, Christianity is seen as a "foreign" imposition (the one unacceptable foreign imposition under multiculturalism), and therefore "authenticity" demands that the Irish create an indigenous Irish culture, even if what they produce bears no relationship to the historical reality.

[Matthias]

"I just like that they line up so well. It would be easy to shoot them. You could just mow them down all in one line."

Choreographer Mark Morris, when asked what he thought of Riverdance.

[Joe Long]

"I'll go to a museum now and then, but I do think that museums are rather like cultural morgues, where art goes in preparation for burial."

Hey! Ouch! At ours, it's where history, rather than art, has been entombed - but we do hope in the resurrection.

I am always annoyed at the modern versions of "pre-Christian" culture, which nearly always work out to "what we wish culture would have been". The Christian Celt has had tremendous effects upon history; the pre-Christian Celt left behind so little of his culture, on the other hand, that the post-Christian part-Celt can merrily invent huge chunks of it with little fear of contradiction. The "ancient, pre-Christian" tradition of Wicca is nearly a hundred years old, and consequently a deal fonder of nakedness in the outdoors, than any healthy, sane pagan forest-dweller would have been.

[Bobby Winters]

>>>The "ancient, pre-Christian" tradition of Wicca is nearly a hundred years old, and consequently a deal fonder of nakedness in the outdoors, than any healthy, sane pagan forest-dweller would have been.
<<<

This is just God's way of feeding mosquitos.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>> "what we wish culture would have been"<<<

Translation: Lots of beer and nekkid women foolin' around.

[Kevin]

I've long been of the opinion that once any people begin to focus on celebrating other cultures (=multiculturalism), they will shortly cease to have any culture of their own worth celebrating.

But maybe it's the lack of a culture that comes first, and the multiculturalism is just a death notice.

Chicken or egg?

[Stuart Koehl]

The problem is, most people who espouse multiculturalism are truly multicultural, just self-loathing. They so hate their own culture (hence themselves) that they idealize other cultures without really knowing much about them. Now, I actually consider myself to be truly multicultural in the sense that, without denying or denigrating the Western culture in which I was raised, can appreciate other cultures for their contributions to human civilization while still remaining objective and as necessary critical of them.

The ability to observe, appreciate and when appropriate, assimilate aspects of other cultures, as well as the capacity for constructive self-criticism, are the defining feature of Western civilization. There is irony that only in the West can multiculturalism of any sort even exist, because in non-Western cultures, the notion that a foreign culture could be superior in any way to one's own, or even have something useful to contribute to it, would be so utterly radical as to be considered insane.

[T. Chan]

Ah yes, Cape Breton music! Dr. Esolen, do you and your family have the opportunity to listen to it live while you are on vacation?

[Judy K. Warner]

It was either Sweden or Norway that had a government official who said he welcomed immigrants because his own country had no culture and he was happy to have somebody else bring some. Both of those countries are now learning about the value of some of the traditions they forgot they had, like being polite and not raping women because their arms are bare. Do those count as culture?

[Joe Long]

Chesterton is always relevant to these discussions...he wrote at one point about the true English Francophile, and the false. According to him, the Englishman who could most appreciate Continental culture, was the one who was most English himself, and who never succumbed to the delusion that he could fully understand another culture the way a native understood it. Meanwhile, the shallow poser, convinced he was just as French as the Frenchmen because he'd latched on to a few superficial aspects of the society he was visiting...well. I suppose my point is obvious, though my memory of GKC's argument fades.

Being truly multicultural, like being multilingual, would be a product of circumstance or of diligent application...I aspire to a reasonable level of fluency in my own culture, and generally no more than a traveller's "Berlitz" conversational understanding of some others I commonly interact with.

[Stuart Koehl]

"What know they of England, who only England know?"
--Rudyard Kipling

[Kamilla]

Judy,

That has to be Norway - The Swedes are too arrogant, proud and self-assured to think they have no culture.

Kamilla

[John Paul Todd]

In a perfect world we would all be able to see what this thing called culture really is and how it affects us all, everyday. In missiology it has been said that the greatest contribution the science of anthropology (the mother of all social sciences) has given to the Church and her mission is the concept of culture.

[Tony Esolen]

Kamilla,

Believe it or not, it was a Swede! Yet I am pleased to recall that Sweden, well into the 20th century and for all I know still to this day, has had a tradition of troubadour poet-composer-singers. I've heard many of the ballads, ranging from merrily bawdy to sad and sweet. Good stuff.

Cape Breton -- as I write this, I am sitting in the Father John Rankin Cultural Center in Glendale, on Cape Breton. Father Rankin was instrumental in reviving the tradition of the ceilidh (pronounced kay-lee), and there are photos a few feet away from me of the field that I am looking at out the window, filled with hundreds of people for a Saturday afternoon fest. There were bathrooms and concession stands on one side, and the bandshell way at the bottom of a gentle hill.

I like Cape Breton music a lot, and I am not going to ring its knell yet -- it has quite a few chances to survive. However, it's been many years since that field has been used. Now they have the ceilidhs in a small room in this building, or in the church hall next door. Some of the elder fiddlers are dying now, and though there's a music school down the road, and though you can always find a fiddler somewhere or other, my impression is that the most creative musicians among the young people are doing something else. I can think of a few exceptions ...

[Stuart Koehl]

Norway has its own dynamic folk tradition, based on two indigenous instruments, the nickelharpe and the Hardanger fiddle. It can be both stirring and incredibly soulful (we've got lots in our collection). You might remember what it sounded like from the opening ceremonies of the Lillehammer Winter Olympics. If not, then you can hear it on Howard Shore's soundtrack for Lord of the Rings--he used it for all the leitmotifs associated with Rohan.

Finland is another Nordic country with a thriving folk tradition, to say nothing of epic oral poetry (what would you expect from the land of the Kalevala?). There are literally dozens of Finnish groups singing both traditional music and contemporary music derived from the fold tradition. In addition, there is a small but outstanding group of serious Finnish composers writing classical music derived from Finnish traditional themes.

[Kamilla]

Tony,

How funny! I am a bit surprised I was wrong. The joke around the Twin Cities, last I heard, was that the Sons of Norway were meeting in the Swedish Cultural Center as they could no longer afford their own building.

Kamilla

[Stuart Koehl]

Actually, it's getting to be moot. Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland have formed a Nordic Cooperation Group for collaborative defense and economic development. Can a new Union of Kalmar be far behind? Like the Ring of the Niebelungs, Scandinavian history will end back at its beginning, with the three kingdoms reunited.

[Kamilla]

http://www.menofthedeeps.com/

I did a "google" search for Cape Breton Music and came up with this group - a coal miner's chorus!

Kamilla

[Stuart Koehl]

Try this link for a U-Tube video that gives an overview of Cape Breton fiddle music and some examples.

>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xr5WYYbXzk<<<

[Judy K. Warner]

Estonia is another country with an interesting musical tradition. It gained its independence with what became called the Singing Revolution. From Wikipedia:

From 1987, a cycle of mass demonstrations featuring spontaneous singing eventually collected 300,000 Estonians in Tallinn to sing national songs and hymns that were strictly forbidden during the years of the Soviet occupation, as Estonian rock musicians played.

On 14 May 1988, the first expression of national feeling occurred during the Tartu Pop Music Festival. "Five patriotic songs" were first performed during this festival. People linked their hands together and a tradition had begun.

In June the Old Town Festival was held in Tallinn, and after the official part of the festival, the participants moved to the Song Festival Grounds and similarly started to sing patriotic songs together spontaneously.

On 26-28 August 1988, the Rock Summer Festival was held, and patriotic songs, composed by Alo Mattiisen, were played.

On 11 September 1988, a massive song festival, called "Song of Estonia", was held at the Tallinn Song Festival Arena. This time nearly 300,000 people came together, more than a quarter of all Estonians. On that day political leaders were participating actively, and were for the first time insisting on the restoration of independence.

On 16 November the legislative body of Estonia issued the Declaration of Sovereignty.

The Singing Revolution lasted over four years, with various protests and acts of defiance. In 1991, as Soviet tanks attempted to stop the progress towards independence, the Estonian Supreme Soviet together with the Congress of Estonia proclaimed the restoration of the independent state of Estonia and repudiated Soviet legislation. People acted as human shields to protect radio and TV stations from the Soviet tanks. Through these actions Estonia regained its independence without any bloodshed.[4]

I have read that mass singing had been a tradition in Estonia before this.

There's an independent documentary film, The Singing Revolution, playing in theaters around the country now. I'd like to see it, but it's not playing anywhere near me. I guess it will come out on DVD eventually.