[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Cultural Conservers

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (May 21 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


A few years back the American middle class indulged in another of the
periodic orgies of self-congratulation in which it proclaims its opinion
of its own historical importance. The inspiration for this particular
outburst was a 2000 book entitled Cultural Creatives by Paul H Ray and
Sherry Ruth Anderson, which announced that the spread of certain
fashionable ideas through the middle class meant nothing less than the
imminent transformation of American society.

Apparently none of its more enthusiastic reviewers remembered that the
same imminent transformation had been announced just as confidently in
the pages of Marilyn Ferguson's The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Charles
Reich's The Greening of America (1970), and a long line of predecessors
reaching back well into the nineteenth century. Like so many of today's
new ideas, in other words, this one has been around for a good long
time, just as the "new" attitudes Ray and Anderson identified as
hallmarks of their "cultural creatives" have been widely accepted among
a sizeable sector of the American intelligentsia since the heyday of the
Transcendentalists in the 1820s.

Yet there's more going on here than the simple failure of memory
discussed in last week's Archdruid Report post. What is at issue here
touches on the meaning and value of culture itself.

Mind you, it's difficult to talk meaningfully about that topic in
America today, after decades of "culture wars" in which all sides
redefined the very concept of culture to fit their own Utopian fantasies
and political objectives. It's doubly difficult because the last half
century or so has witnessed the systematic destruction of America's own
national and regional cultures, their replacement with a manufactured
pseudoculture based on the values of the American urban intelligentsia,
and the consequent revolt of many working class Americans against the
concept of culture altogether.

Culture is memory. An authentic culture roots into the collective
experience of a community's past, and from this source draws meaning for
the present and tools for the future. Thus culture, like memory, is a
constant negotiation between the living and the dead, as new conditions
call for reinterpretation of past experience and redefine the meanings
that are relevant and the tools that are useful. When a society gives up
on these negotiations and abandons the link with its past, as last
week's post suggested, what remains is not originality but stasis, in
which a persistent set of common assumptions and popular narratives are
rediscovered and rehashed endlessly under a veneer of apparent novelty.

Woven into this process is the social schism Arnold Toynbee traced in
his magisterial A Study of History. As each civilization enters its
imperial stage, he showed, a split opens up between its privileged
classes and the rest of the population. The latter becomes what Toynbee
called an "internal proletariat", expected to perform the work that
maintains the civilization but deprived of participation in its benefits
and, as the schism in society unfolds, increasingly alienated from its
values. The internal proletariat is deprived of its folk cultures by the
destruction of the economic basis of traditional lifeways, and barred
from participation in elite culture by class and income barriers that
grow steadily higher as the imperial stage proceeds.

In the bare ground that results, any number of strange seeds can sprout.
Eventually, Toynbee suggests, what fills the cultural vacuum is religion
- not the traditional religion of the imperial culture, but some exotic
faith dissonant enough from the values of that culture to express the
alienation felt by the internal proletariat. As the imperial stage ends
in collapse and the privileged classes find themselves stripped of
wealth and power by the upwardly mobile warlords of the ensuing dark
age, the imperial society's own cultural resources generally hit the
scrap heap. The result is a curious feedback loop amplifying the process
of catabolic collapse; pious hands tore down the temples of the Roman
gods and recycled the mathematical papers of Archimedes to provide
parchment for Christian homilies, for example, because most people in
the postclassical world no longer felt any loyalty to the culture of
their ancestors.

We are already well into that process in modern America. The schism in
society outlined by Toynbee was clearly visible in his lifetime, and has
widened since then. A parallel chasm now gapes down the center of
American culture, and most other industrial cultures as well. It bears
remembering that in the nineteenth century, opera counted as popular
entertainment, and women in the privileged classes practiced most of the
same handicrafts as their poorer sisters; nowadays very few such common
factors connect, say, the university-educated middle classes of an east
coast suburb with the rural poor of a Midwestern farm state. Folk
cultures have guttered out or survive only as museum pieces, while elite
culture withdraws behind walls of obscurantism - compare the accessible
and deservedly popular fine art of the late nineteenth century with the
deliberately unwelcoming and often offensive product served up by
today's art scene.

In a world lurching through economic crisis and the first wave of
impacts from peak oil, it's easy to dismiss the continuing implosion of
American culture as a minor issue, but such a dismissal is as much a
symptom of cultural collapse as anything I've cited already. Again,
culture is memory, and among the things it holds in store are the tools,
insights, and lifeways that served people well in the days before our
civilization started chasing the suicidally addictive rush of empire.
Again, Rome offers a useful example; by the time the Roman empire began
coming apart at the seams and the grain ships no longer sailed from
North African wheat fields to Ostia's wharves, nobody remembered how
things had worked in the days when the classical world consisted of
independent city-states producing most of their own necessities at home.

Still, the Roman world lacked the extraordinary sense of historical time
and change that, as John Lukács has pointed out, is one of modern
industrial civilization's most distinctive traits. Roman writers in the
declining phase of the empire apparently never noticed that their
experiences mirrored, say, the implosion of the Mycenean world in the
13th century BCE, nor did such Roman historians as Livy treat Rome's own
past as a guide to the future. Thus it seems never to have occurred to
the Romans of the late Empire that their civilization might need to be
handed on to a very different future. The task of salvage was left to
Irish monks some centuries later, and by the time they got to work, a
huge amount of material had already vanished forever. Nor did the
monasteries preserve everything that came to them; the immense musical
heritage of ancient Rome, for example, was not of interest to monastic
scribes, and as a result, all that survives of it is one fragment of a
single haunting melody, taking some 25 seconds to play.

Our situation differs from theirs only because the contemporary sense of
history makes it possible to place our own experience beside that of the
Romans, and any number of other fallen civilizations as well, and draw
conclusions about the likely shape of our own future. We are arguably in
much the same case as the Romans of the late Empire; we have, as they
had, an immense cultural heritage, nearly all of which is disastrously
vulnerable to the impacts of collapse; we have done our level best to
abandon the heritage of local folk cultures at home and elsewhere in our
empire, just as they did, and thus risk losing precious knowledge that
might make it easier to weather the descent from today's vertiginous
imperial heights. The one difference is that it's possible to talk in
these terms today, and to propose concrete responses to what will be one
of the most challenging features of the decline and fall of the
industrial world.

In an ironic way, the "cultural creatives" whose specter I evoked at the
beginning of this essay offer a glimpse at one of the most promising of
these potential responses. Behind the inevitable rhetoric of innovation
and originality was a very different reality: a sector of America's
middle-class intelligentsia discovered a set of ideas their parents,
grandparents, and great-great-grandparents had valued in their time, and
applied those ideas to the present day. True, most of the people
involved in this rediscovery had no idea that this was what they were
doing, and thus never made use of the rich heritage of the
Transcendentalists, the Theosophists, the Beat generation, or any other
expression of the same current of thought. Still, what they did
half-unconsciously can be done in a more deliberate and conscious way.

Thus I'd like to suggest that one crucial need of our present
predicament is the rise of a movement of cultural conservers -
individuals who choose, for one reason or another, to take personal
responsibility for the preservation of some part of the modern world's
cultural heritage. That's a tall order, not least because the crises
inseparable from the decline and fall of a civilization will leave many
of us scrambling for bare survival in the face of soaring death rates
and increasingly harsh conditions. Still, it's not an insurmountable
challenge.

Three themes, it seems to me, sketch out a basic frame on which cultural
conservers can weave the individual patterns of their own work:

* Focus. The cultural heritage of the modern world is far too vast for
any one person even to encounter it all, much less to know enough about
it to preserve significant elements of it in any meaningful way. Thus
each cultural conserver will need to choose a handful of traditions at
most, and focus his or her efforts on those. Since a consensus on what
is worth saving is almost certainly impossible to reach, and might not
even be a good idea, it seems to me that the best guide to the
prospective cultural conserver in choosing a focus is sheer personal
passion. The tradition that speaks to you most deeply - be it tablet
weaving or Wordsworth's poetry, mountain dulcimers or handbuilt radio
technology, classical philosophy or the great American novels - is the
one that will inspire you to the efforts necessary to pass it on to the
future.

* Simplicity. As the requirements needed to maintain a cultural
tradition go up, the likelihood of its survival in a time of scarcity go
down. Musical forms you can play yourself on an instrument of your own
construction are thus more likely to survive as living traditions than
musical forms that require a symphony orchestra and an opera company
trained to today's exacting vocal standards. More complex traditions can
sometimes be stored in easily maintained forms; the intricate reasonings
of Greek philosophers, for example, made it to the Renaissance because
they were written down on durable parchment and left to gather dust in
monastic libraries through the intervening centuries. In many cases,
though, it's possible to choose between simple and complex options for
preserving a technology; if you want to preserve the technology of
printing, for example, a hand-operated letterpress is much simpler to
use, maintain, and build with hand tools and locally available resources
than a computer and a laser printer. Technologies that are less
efficient in the abstract, as this example suggests, may be more durable
in the deindustrial future ahead of us.

* Transmission. It takes more than one lifetime for a civilization to
decline and fall, and so the flip side of preserving some bit of
cultural heritage is the challenge of passing it on to a younger
generation. Those traditions that will have obvious economic value in an
age of decline and disintegration have a huge head start here; it's
unlikely in the extreme, for example, that today's advances in intensive
organic food production will be lost anytime soon, since the skills in
question grant a huge survival advantage to those who know them and have
the opportunity to put them to use. Still, cultural transmission does
not always follow the economic line of least resistance. Those who know
must be prepared to teach, and also to use their knowledge in ways that
meet community needs.

These three themes sketch out only the first rough lines on a very broad
canvas. In posts to come, I hope to develop these ideas in more detail.
It's worth noting that a significant number of people have already taken
on some elements of the sort of project I am outlining here, some quite
consciously, and I propose to draw on their experience as much as I can.
Just as the "cultural creatives" could have benefited by placing their
own projects in a historical context, too, I intend to offer some
historical context to the mission of the cultural conservers, in the
hope that a sense of what worked (and what didn't work) in the past will
help shape constructive responses to the immense challenges of our future.

_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/05/cultural-conservers.html#links


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