Borrowed Wisdom

I ran across the following quote at Jerry Pournelle’s place. It pretty well sums up a fairly serious problem with the “multi-culti” society so sought after by subliterate morons on the Left.

“Not a few of the students who apply to me for admission to the present form of Erskine’s [Great Books] reading course give me as a reason that they want “the background” and will have no other chance to “get it”, because they are about to study medicine or engineering. Their idea is we “give it” and they “get it.” But what is it that changes hands in this way? Background is the wrong word altogether. What is acquired is a common set of symbols, almost a separate language. I open today’s paper and I see over a story of naval action: ‘David-Goliath Fight by Foe at Sea Fails.” Immediately, I infer that some small enemy flotilla fought a larger force of ours. The image was instantaneous, and would have suggested more—namely the foe’s victory—had not the writer added that it failed.
“A common body of stories, phrases, and beliefs accompanies every high civilization that we know of. The Christian stories of apostles and saints nurtured medieval Europe, and after the breakup of Christendom the Protestant Bible served the same ends for English-speaking peoples. Bunyan and Lincoln show what power was stored in that collection of literary and historical works known as the Scripture, when it was really a common possession. We have lost something in neglecting it, just as we lost something in rejecting the ancient classics. We lost immediacy of understanding, a common sympathy with truth and fact. Perhaps nothing could better illustrate the subtlety and strength of the bond we lost than the story Hazlitt tells of his addressing a fashionable audience about Dr. Johnson. He was speaking of Johnson’s great heart and charity to the unfortunate; and he recounted how, finding a drunken prostitute lying in Fleet Street late at night, Johnson carried her on his broad back to the address she managed to give him. The audience, unable to face the image of a famous lexicographer doing such a thing, broke out into titters and expostulations. Whereupon Hazlitt simply said: ‘I remind you, ladies and gentlemen, of the parable of the Good Samaritan.’

“It is clear that no account of explaining, arguing, or demonstrating would have produced the abashed silence which that allusion commanded. It was direct communication; the note that Hazlitt struck sounded in every mind in the same way and it instantly crystallized and put into order every irrelevant emotion. That, if I may so put it, is what ‘background’ does for you. Even today, without Bible or classics, everyone possesses some kind of tradition which he uses without knowing it. The man who should look blank at mention of George Washington and the cherry tree, or who had never heard of Babe Ruth, or who thought that Shakespeare was an admiral, would get along badly even in very lowbrow circles. He might be excused as a foreigner but he would be expected to catch on as soon as he could. This does not mean that culture is for keeping up with the Joneses; it is talking to your fellow man—talking more quickly and fully than is possible through plodding description.
“In college and after, it so happens that the fund of ideas which it is needful to possess originated in great minds—those who devised our laws, invented our science, taught us how to think, showed us how to behave. They spoke in highly individual voices, yet rely on the force of a common group of symbols and myths—the culture of the West.”

For a more complete development of this concept, I commend to you attention, E.D. Hirsch’s very accessible, simple approach in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. If you have school-aged children (or suspect your own schooling to have been sorely lacking) Hirsch also has a reference and reading guide available as, Books to Build On: A Grade-by-Grade Resource Guide for Parents and Teachers. Those of you who recall Edith Hamilton’s Mythology–that “Cliff Notes” version of Greek mythology so misused by many high schools in days of yore–and who might like to have something similar to provide a guide for your grade school students can also make use of Hirsch’s, “What Your 1st (2nd, 3rd, etc.) Grader Needs to Know” and other such books, as well as such books as the children’s “A First Dictionary Of Cultural Literacy” and the adult version, “The Dictionary Of Cultural Literacy,” though they are both just brief sketches of cultural memes.

Better, IMO, is the Great Books of the Western World collection edited by Mortimer J. Adler, Clifton Fadiman and Philip W. Goetz, with its companion study guide (in ten volumes), though even it merely covers the basics of a literate person’s education in the cultural memes of Western Civilization.

Still, just having the “Cliff Notes” versions of the shared memes that were at once both the glue of society’s shared values and the lubrication of social communication (a strange image, eh? *heh*) would be beneficial and for more reasons than Jacques Barzun outlined above.

Pournelle also references this 1945 article in Time Magazine.