The Burden of Culture, Part I

The title of this post is an archetypal demonstration of its premise. We'll come back to that.

WiFi router sold separately.

Many points have been suggested as the dawn of modernity, or the modern age.  Several possibilities that come to mind are the rise of agriculture (cereal grains for the win), the birth of Christ (common era indeed), the Renaissance (the West gets back on the horse), the printing press (Gutenberg's series of woodblocks), the Declaration of Independence (liberte, egalite, fraternite), the industrial revolution (moar kittehs!), WWII (everything was founded in 1947), the Interweb (Al Gore's series of tubes), and... gun! These are all historical game-changers with effects that have permeated society and continue to influence its course. I'm sure you could think of many more roots of our culture, any time between 10,000 years ago and your coffee this morning.

Daily cosmogony?

I'm going to posit "the culturally relevant period" as my working definition of modernity. That is, the period of time preceding this moment from which the bulk of known or typical actions, constructions, or artifacts continue to have significance for people today. It's the context-providing period. Unless you propose an unusually short modernity, comprehending the great corpus of its attendant relevant culture is an incredibly imposing task. Even with a shorter period, the rate of cultural production today is so high that breadth of information could easily overwhelm an intent observer.

The magnitude of accumulated culture is problematic because context is necessary for words and actions to have meaning. A precision of meaning may only be gained when both the communicator and the observer have a coextensive knowledge of the appropriate or intended context. Laminated layers of meaning can reinforce each other in conveying the communicator's message. A threefold cord is not quickly broken, but a failure of shared context can fray it. Context-dependence touches and concerns every cultural unit:  every person, every word, every deed.  The problem is that the summation of plausible contexts is really, really big.

The burden of culture for an observer is to understand the cultural basis for the acts of the communicator. This is no simple task, unless the communicator takes pains to be perfect in his clarity, as in a good textbook or other academic or legal writing. Where the communicator fails to disclose her sources, or hides the ball in any other way, the observer is challenged to make whatever mental connections are necessary to make it make sense. If you don't get the joke, or if you laugh at an inappropriate moment, you've made the wrong connection. More often, we simply fail to see the precedents from which undercurrents of modified meaning should flow. The observer's burden to know cultural precedents is made weighty not only by the details required, but also by the sheer volume of those precedents which may be relevant in the multitude of situations in which he will have to interpret information from another. The possible incorporation of elements from other languages and cultures makes it even more difficult. Only a Jeopardy champion has a chance.

The burden of culture for a communicator or actor is to act in a way that is comprehensible to the intended observer. This means going explicit, working in from broad topics to narrow, and providing references to precedent. It requires knowing the observer and what basis for understanding is shared between them. Sometimes it means going back and trying again. We learn to do all this by instinct, but practice can help you reach toward near-universal intelligibility when desired.

The burden of culture for a professional or conscious producer of culture is even higher. A casual communicator can conceivably carry on with only the quantum of cultural connection strictly necessary for communication. Producers must place their performance in the panoply of culture with piercing particularity.  They depend on successfully evoking (and also evading or repudiating) exactly the right combination of cultural strands to achieve the desired effect. They have to manipulate context and cultural citation to make themselves understood at some level (e.g., be understood as a "writer", "artist", or "musician"), but also differentiated. Most great cultural production stems from the highly skilled manipulation of themes and specific references gathered from the outside world.

He beat Mozart at his own game.

To me, this is most clearly demonstrated in contemporary classical music. Composers know that their core audience is familiar with the major works of the Western canon, at least from Monteverdi to Britten or so. If a modern composer writes like Mozart, everyone but his mother will just go listen to Mozart instead. If he interprets Mozart through a lens of minimalist serialism with baroque-style fugal episodes, and it somehow doesn't sound like silverware in the disposal, we might have something. But getting to that level requires an extraordinary mastery of the craft and awareness of those who have gone before.

The result of these burdens is a struggle between knowledge and performance; between understanding and action. It's somewhat akin to the production possibility frontier of macro-econ 101 (but with some significant wrinkles discussed in Part II):  we can have some combination of perception and participation, but the total is limited by our time and faculties. We cannot undertake more than that of which we are capable. So we optimize the tradeoff:  how much of the world do I want to understand, and how many systems will I let slip through my fingers?  Will I assembly my bouquet from the flowers of a hundred gardens, but leave my plot untilled? Will I paint in a flat modern acrylic, or punch holes through history with layers of oil?  How much available meaning have I missed today already? What have I failed to convey because I was too concerned with finessing the end of this sentence?


(If the previous paragraph sounds either drastically overstated, or just plain wrong, I agree. The most obvious counter-point is that much of learning is from experience. I have two responses:  1. I'm more focused on professional producers of culture, rather than those who are simply de facto cultural participants due to their presence in society; and 2. Come back for Part II.)

Now let's return to the title:  "The Burden of Culture."  Some readers may recognize that my use of the term "culture" in the title and this post generally is wholly incorrect, at least per one classic exposition, which I have not yet finished reading after all these years. What I have called culture here is closer to what Spengler would have called civilization: essentially the massive decaying exoskeleton of a dead culture, consumed with itself and slowly surrendering to the living cultures around it (and occasionally in it). It ceased to be a culture and became a civilization when expressions of culture ceased to be natural outpourings of its members' shared way of life and became cosmopolitan and self-critical. In the terminology of this post, culture dies when its burden on producers and observers becomes overwhelming.

In Part II, I intend to write about the consequences and practical choices arising from these observations. So, you know, come back and see what happens. FYI, it probably won't be until after the Bar.