3. FROM DAWN... June 15 ~ June 21 ~~ Part One - Chapters V - VI (91-133) Non-Spoiler

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

This is week three's reading assignment:

June 15 – June 21 ~~Part I (Cross Section), The View from Madrid Around 1540 (91-115)
Also: The Eutopians (through section on Rabelais) – (116-133)

Bentley

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

Sorry Oldesq that you will be out of state. Good luck with the deposition; those kinds of things take a lot of time, preparation and after hours prep.

Folks, I will take over the discussion in the meantime and move it forward. Also, feel free to post any of the questions that you might have while you are reading and areas that you would like to discuss; there is a lot to this book.

What are your impressions of Jacques Barzun and his analytical approach so far?

Bentley

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

Oldesq wrote: "Hello all,

Have been called out of state on a last minute deposition defense. don;t know that I will be able to comment until Friday. Please feel free to let fly with your thoughts about the r..."

All,


Oldesq, you used the term apocryphal: I take that you are questioning the integrity of the meeting itself which I did not; i.e. the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. I guess you might also doubt the authenticity of the account.

For folks reading the Perennial edition (Harper Collins Publishers); the reference to the meeting between Charles V and Francis is actually stated on page 94 versus 84 if you are trying to find it.

The account may be romanticized through the years; but it appears that Charles had more of a sense of honor and respect than his opponent (and that is not saying an awful lot - smile). I think that Francis' reign was a mixed blessing all around and I think he was not one whose word you could trust. Also he was probably preoccupied with his melancholy, migraines and syphilis and some very bad decisions (along with an absess on his head). Aside from all of the above, from all reports he was fairly popular with his countrymen. Since their rivalry (Charles and Francis) went on and on for almost 27 years; and Charles V was accused of actually poisoning one of Francis' sons; I doubt that they were ever able to solve any of their disputes; especially if their deep enmity actually lasted that long and from other resources there is a lot of supported evidence that all of their truces were always violated.

This is just my take from reading other outside reliable resources. Within this account; Barzun seems to present at the very least a "slightly romanticized rendition". It is an interesting observation that you made. I wonder what made you feel that way at first glance.

Source - Encyclopedia Britannica

I am not sure what conclusions others reading this account solely might come to.

Bentley

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

In the first paragraph of the chapter titled CROSS SECTION: THE VIEW FROM MADRID AROUND 1540: Barzun states the following: "A wide-awake youngster "of good family" (however defined) begins to be aware of the wide world in his or her early teens. By then, knowledge of the recent past has also been absorbed automatically: it was "the present" for the parents. who keep referring to it. Its striking events and startling notions come through this hearsay to seem part of the youth's own experience, so that with this headstart his mind keeps abreast of developments; that mind is in fact the place -- or one of the places -- where culture has it being. Given a life expectancy of forty years - a generous allowance for the 16 C -- such a viewer commands a panorama of at least half a century -- thirty years of direct knowledge and twenty or so of gatherings from the collective memory of his milieu, which may on certain points stretch back indefinitely into the past."

a) What is Barzun saying here? Is he implying that some of the past is in our DNA inherited from our parents?

b) What do you think about the statement that the mind is one of the places where culture has its being?

[Elizabeth S]

Bentley,

Good questions. Here's my take:

a) I think he is saying that parents discuss the world from their personal viewpoint and until a youngster reaches early teens, he or she isn't exposed to many other viewpoints. So the child absorbs "this hearsay" from the parents so naturally that the budding adult begins with a basis of his or her parents' opinions. It isn't DNA or nature, it is the nurturing the child has received until early teens, at which point the child begins observing the world for his/herself. Hmm, maybe I don't make any more sense than Barzun. :)

b) For this one, I think it goes back to What is the definition of culture? If culture is "the well-furnished mind" (page xviii), then it would be by definition that the mind is where culture has its being.

Another definition of culture, "that which is excellent in the arts, manners, etc." (Random House Dictionary) is more debatable. For this definition, I think there is a strong argument for the mind holding part of culture. One could argue that art begins in the mind, that art's physical representation (what we see or hear) is merely a representation of the mind's thought. In many ways, good manners are a reflection of the refined mind.

It would be fun to look at other definitions of culture. Anyone?

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

Elizabeth, very intriguing interpretation. (nurturing that the child receives). So Barzun is saying that culture is the well furnished mind; its being therefore resides in the mind itself (or better stated one of the places where it has its being).

There was a site called Define Culture that had definitions from around the world; the domain was lost for some reason. I am wondering if we could find other cultural theorists and find out what their definition of culture is and compare it to Barzun's. I think your suggestion would be fun.

This is a Washington State University site which tries to tackle what is culture?

http://www.wsu.edu/gened/learn-module...

Here is one for starters that is listed (Clifford Geertz in his "Interpretations of Cultures")

Clifford Geertz sees culture as being defined as:


1. "the total way of life of a people"
2. "the social legacy the individual acquires from his group"
3. "a way of thinking, feeling, and believing"
4. "an abstraction from behavior"
5. a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behave
6. a "storehouse of pooled learning"
7. "a set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems"
8. "learned behavior"
9. a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior
10. "a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men"
11. "a precipitate of history"
12. a behavioral map, sieve, or matrix

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

Here are Raymond William's thoughts on culture:

Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings.

Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land.

The growing society is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind. The making of a mind is, first, the slow learning of shapes, purposes, and meanings, so that work, observation and communication are possible. Then, second, but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience, the making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings.

A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested. These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings.

We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life--the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning--the special processes of discovery and creative effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction.

The questions I ask about our culture are questions about deep personal meanings.

Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind. (6)

A couple of books that he wrote are:

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

Laljit, that was quick. Your comments on culture are very helpful; thank you for this input. You raise an interesting point about Jung's concept of the collective unconscious as being culture that is passed through the generations (this seems to be quite in line with Barzun).

Bentley

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

Here are Matthew Arnold's view on culture:

The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it.

No serious man would consider all this culture, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all.

But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground of it.

There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it, come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good.

As in the first view of it [ie. the view associated with science/curiosity:], we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu's words: "To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent!" so, in the second view of it [ie. Arnold's view:], there is no better motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: "To make reason and the will of God prevail!"

The moment culture is considered not merely as the endeavour to see and learn about the universal order, but as the endeavor, also, to make it prevail, the moral, social, and beneficent character of culture becomes manifest.

The Greek idea of "a finely tempered nature" gives exactly the notion of perfection as culture brings us to conceive it: a harmonious perfection, a perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites "the two noblest of things,"--as Swift, who of one of the two, at any rate, had himself all too little, most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books,--"the two noblest of things, sweetness and light." The man with a finely tempered nature is the man who tends toward sweetness and light.

Arnold seems to also coin the terminology: "high culture" (crucial component of a healthy democratic state); he additionally viewed beauty, intelligence and perfection as states of culture.





Culture and Anarchy

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

Here is John H. Bodley's view on culture (more of an athropological view):

I use the term culture to refer collectively to a society and its way of life or in reference to human culture as a whole.

The Modern technical definition of culture, as socially patterned human thought and behavior, was originally proposed by the nineteenth-century British anthropologist, Edward Tylor.

This definition is an open-ended list, which has been extended considerably since Tylor first proposed it. Some researchers have attempted to create exhaustive universal lists of the content of culture, usually as guides for further research. Others have listed and mapped all the culture traits of particular geographic areas.

The first inventory of cultural categories was undertaken in 1872 by a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which was assisted by Tylor.

The committee prepared an anthropological field manual that listed seventy-six culture topics, in no particular order, including such diverse items as cannibalism and language.

The most exhaustive such list is the "Outline of Cultural Materials," first published in 1938 and still used as a guide for cataloging great masses of worldwide cultural data for cross-cultural surveys. Like the table of contents of a giant encyclopedia, the outline lists 79 major divisions and 637 subdivisions. For example, "Food Quest" is a major division with such subdivisions as collecting, hunting, and fishing.

There has been considerable theoretical debate by anthropologists since Tylor over the most useful attributes that a technical concept of culture should stress.

For example, in 1952 Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, American anthropologists, published a list of 160 different definitions of culture.

Although simplified in the brief table below, their list indicates the diversity of the anthropological concept of culture. The specific culture concept that particular anthropologists work with is an important matter because it may influence the research problems they investigate, their methods and interpretations, and the positions they take on public policy issues.

TABLE: Diverse Definitions of Culture:

Topical: (Culture consists of everything on a list of topics, or categories, such as social organization, religion, or economy)

Historical: (Culture is social heritage, or tradition, that is passed on to future generations)

Behavioral: ( Culture is shared, learned human behavior, a way of life)

Normative: (Culture is ideals, values, or rules for living)

Functional: (Culture is the way humans solve problems of adapting to the environment or living together)

Mental: ( Culture is a complex of ideas, or learned habits, that inhibit impulses and distinguish people from animals)

Structural: (Culture consists of patterned and interrelated ideas, symbols, or behaviors)

Symbolic: ( Culture is based on arbitrarily assigned meanings that are shared by a society)

Culture involves at least three components: what people think, what they do, and the material products they produce. Thus, mental processes, beliefs, knowledge, and values are parts of culture.

Some anthropologists would define culture entirely as mental rules guiding behavior, although often wide divergence exists between the acknowledged rules for correct behavior and what people actually do. Consequently, some researchers pay most attention to human behavior and its material products.

Culture also has several properties: it is shared, learned, symbolic, transmitted cross-generationally, adaptive, and integrated.

The shared aspect of culture means that it is a social phenomenon; idiosyncratic behavior is not cultural. Culture is learned, not biologically inherited, and involves arbitrarily assigned, symbolic meanings. For example, Americans are not born knowing that the color white means purity, and indeed this is not a universal cultural symbol. The human ability to assign arbitrary meaning to any object, behavior or condition makes people enormously creative and readily distinguishes culture from animal behavior. People can teach animals to respond to cultural symbols, but animals do not create their own symbols. Furthermore, animals have the capability of limited tool manufacture and use, but human tool use is extensive enough to rank as qualitatively different and human tools often carry heavy symbolic meanings. The symbolic element of human language, especially speech, is again a vast qualitative expansion over animal communication systems. Speech is infinitely more productive and allows people to communicate about things that are remote in time and space.

The cross-generational aspect of culture has led some anthropologists, especially Kroeber (1917) and Leslie White (1949), to treat culture as a superorganic entity, existing beyond its individual human carriers. Individuals are born into and are shaped by a preexisting culture that continues to exist after they die. Kroeber and White argued that the influence that specific individuals might have over culture would itself be largely determined by culture. Thus, in a sense, culture exists as a different order of phenomena that can best be explained in terms of itself.

Some researchers believe that such an extreme superorganic interpretation of culture is a dehumanizing denial of "free will," the human ability to create and change culture. They would argue that culture is merely an abstraction, not a real entity. This is a serious issue because treating culture as an abstraction may lead one to deny the basic human rights of small-scale societies and ethnic minorities to maintain their cultural heritage in the face of threats from dominant societies. I treat culture as an objective reality. I depart from the superorganic approach in that I insist that culture includes its human carriers. At the same time, people can be deprived of their culture against their will. Many humanistic anthropologists would agree that culture is an observable phenomenon, and a people's unique possession.

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

If anybody wants to share any additional definitions of culture; please feel free to do so. I thought we would get back to the reading for this week.

One question which Barzun raises on page 101 is a great question about spices.

He states, "Apropos of food, it remains a mystery why in earlier times spices should have been so much in demand as to impel merchants and sailor across deserts and oceans."

Barzun claims that the explanation that maybe spices were used to cover up unappetizing or spoiled meats does not hold any weight.

I have never thought about this question before either.

a) Why were spices in such high demand to risk men going halfway around the globe to get them?

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

On page 109, Barzun comments that the "inquisition is alive and well".

He states, Inquisition as such, that is, apart from methods and severity of results, has remained a live institution. The many dictatorships of the 20C have relied on it and in free countries it thrives ad hoc --hunting down German sympathizers during the First World War, interning Japanese- Americans during the second, and pursuing Communist fellow-travelers during the Cold War. In the United States at the present time the workings of "political correctness' in universities and the speech police that punishes persons and corporations for words on certain topics quaintly called "sensitive" are manifestations of the permanent spirit of inquisition.

I did not know what to make of this paragraph. It seems to me to be a long personal comment which is his private opinion. Do you agree or disagree?

1. Do you believe that the inquisition is alive and well in free countries?

2. Was Barzun implying that after the war that German sympathizers should not have been sought after?

3. I can see that he disagrees with the interning of Japanese Americans during the second world war and many share his view; but what is he saying about pursuing Communist fellow travelers? What does this have to do with the Spanish Inquisition and the search of heretics?

Unless he claims that we are still separating out special groups or sects of people for severe punishment.

4. Barzun then goes on to a personal topic which must be germane to him or to the university where he taught. He claims that we are punishing people and corporations for words that they are using on special topics. Does anybody have any idea what Barzun is talking about? I am not sure that I see such a direct parallel between the Spanish Inquisition and the United States today. Possibly I am missing something that Barzun sees clearly. Any ideas?

Bentley

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

Also on page 109, Barzun makes some curious comments on fame.

"It is a mistake to believe that "anything really good" will cross frontiers and find its due place. Such countries as Portugal, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, and other parts of Slavic Europe cherish classics that are still confined to home ground. The prime 16 C example is the poem about Europe's expansion westward, the epic Lusiads by the Portuguese Camoens, himself an explorer Humanist. Why is fame so capricious a goddess? In any country its favor depends on attention by one group of critics rather than another, or again by the fanatical devotion that goes to the right man at the right time. Some element of the work must chime in with some concern of the moment."

1. Do you believe that what Barzun is saying (which was true from his perspective) in the 16C is true today? With the internet technology and other sophisticated means of communicating with each other; is it still true that "anything really good" will fall by the wayside and not "cross frontiers and find its due place"? Was Barzun's thinking a little dated? Was he making a generalization about the past and applying it to the current time period?

2. He asks a good question: "Why is fame so capricious a goddess?" What constitutes fame? Is it someone's good attributes or bad ones? What characteristics and skillsets do we hold dear in today's culture and society? Should we be proud of our choices? Why and/or why not?

3. It is hard to understand why some become so famous and others not; for example, what made Thomas Paine so famous worldwide (or possibly infamous in some places) and others who wrote on the same subjects did not find an audience? What made Obama such a phenonema? Why did Tolstoy find such positive affirmations for his work which was originally in Russian? What made them different from the rest?

4. What element of the work or person chimed in with a "concern of the moment"? Can you think of any? Does the media represent the group of critics that Barzun is talking about? Or are there others?

Barzun raises some great topics for discussion.

Bentley

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

What did everyone think of the play on words in the opening of the chapter called THE EUTOPIANS? (page 117)

Did you think it was a little corny; I did.

Bentley

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

Barzun claims that "the great argument used to sustain right conduct is "Live according to Nature. Nature is never wrong and we err by forgetting it." Does anyone buy this argument unless he is making a case against global warming.
This attitude sounds very Zen like; do not upset your environment, etc.

I thought that Barzun was trying too hard to transition from talking about the battles for social justice that have been fought against the tyranny of poverty and class to his transition of individualism and self consciousness.

I was not in love with the beginning of this chapter. Did anyone else feel the same way. I was relieved when he got to Rabelais on page 128.

Bentley

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

Laljit, so you have changed your opinion regarding the reference to Jung. I like your example of 100% natural apple juice (smile).

Without discussing all of your excellent points which I will have to reread and think about; I guess it is fair to say that you had some very similar questions to what I had.

I promise to come back and to give your observations another look; great analysis at first glance.