Can We Save Culture?

CULTURE shapes our lives and affects every action we take. The Left knows this simple fact; we seem not to know it, and as a result we are content to leave the Left in control of culture.

By “culture,” I mean the realm of meaning and value—how we live and how we want to live. Culture is the mental component of life, and its capacity to influence the material, while not total, is enormous. This modern usage of “culture” includes education and entertainment, the high and the low, the serious and the popular, the private and the public. It is a usage far removed from the pure nineteenth-century conception of culture as aspiration and uplift, which I cherish, but culture, however defined, is still capable of being better or worse aesthetically, decent or sordid morally.

SL

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Samuel Lipman

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CULTURE shapes our lives and affects every action we take. The Left knows this simple fact; we seem not to know it, and as a result we are content to leave the Left in control of culture.

By “culture,” I mean the realm of meaning and value—how we live and how we want to live. Culture is the mental component of life, and its capacity to influence the material, while not total, is enormous. This modern usage of “culture” includes education and entertainment, the high and the low, the serious and the popular, the private and the public. It is a usage far removed from the pure nineteenth-century conception of culture as aspiration and uplift, which I cherish, but culture, however defined, is still capable of being better or worse aesthetically, decent or sordid morally.