Tag: virtues

what is culture?

Alan Jacobs asked a question in April, that’s really stuck with me ever since: “what is culture?” I’ve been turning this question over and over in my head since then, as culture is a term I use here quite often. But Alan is right: what is culture really, because what it seems like everyone is always talking about (myself included) isn’t really culture. Here’s how he puts it:

Almost everyone who writes on this subject treats it as unproblematic, yet it is anything but. In the late 18th century Herder wrote of Cultur (the German spelling would only later become Kultur): “Nothing is more indeterminate than this word, and nothing more deceptive than its application to all nations and periods.”

I suspect that (a) when most people use the term they have only the haziest sense of what they mean by it, and (b) no two writers on this subject are likely to have a substantially similar understanding of it.

Alan Jacobs, “Christianity and …?”

I don’t really have a good answer to this, but I think Alan is right when he writes later that “If we can agree on some boundaries for this elusive concept we might be able to have a more profitable conversation.” As with any term we might use, really. It’s hard to have a coherent coversation if we can’t agree on a way to define our terms.

So, reading Wendell Berry as I’ve been doing recently, I ran across this quote, which I find very illuminating on this subject:

A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence, aspiration. It reveals the human necessities and the human limits. It clarifies our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other. It assures that the necessary restraints are observed, that the necessary work is done, and that it is done well.

Wendell Berry, “The Agricultural Crisis as a Crisis of Culture” in The Unsettling of America

Berry here gives us both a sort of composition of (healthy) culture, and some of the effects such a culture would enact on society. He is, of course, writing here in this essay about agricultural settings, but I think his ideas here apply more broadly then that. And, of course, Berry would surely disclaim any authoritative attempt to “define” culture here, and I agree this shouldn’t be presented her at some final word on Alan’s question above. Those qualifications aside, it’s a stab at understanding such a nebulous term, and if there is a list of voices who I trust on the subject of culture, Wendell Berry is surely near the top.

I really want to focus on that first sentence from the Berry is quote. In a later blog post, Alan does some “hand waving” (his term, not mine) towards defining what culture, or maybe what it isn’t. It involves “spheres of symbolic activity”, politics, symbols and imagery, amongst other things. I think he is right when he concludes that any good definition of culture is inevitably going to require the complexity of any entire theology of culture, which “would combine an inquiry into the character of our power-knowledge regime — a study of powers and demons — with an iconology, an account of the deployment of the images and symbols meant to govern our perceptions and affections.” (links are from the original.)

I like the direction Alan points us in here, and I think Wendell’s idea of culture being a “communal order” of things conforms nicely to that direction. If we are looking to define the character of our power and knowledge, as Alan says, then the values of “memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence [and] aspiration” feel like good indicators of a healthy cultural character. Culture, then, is not necessarily one something among other somethings, but is instead a conglomeration of societal values, made possible by the presence of human virtues that society is forming its people in.

I also like Wendell’s cultural order because it opens the space to define an unhealthy culture as well, which I think is really important in our fallen world. So, just to riff off his essay, an unhealthy culture would be one defined by forgetfulness, shallowness, insignificance, sloth, suspicion, cynicism, and despair.

I have more to say about a healthy and unhealthy culture – for instance, I want to think about what forms these healthy and unhealthy cultures are expressed in – but I think I will leave those thoughts for the future, once I have put more thought to it. But, I do think Wendell’s writings can point us in a useful direction for answering Alan’s question.

“We become just by the practice of just actions”

Aristotle and Aquinas rightly argued that the virtues are acquired through habituation and, in particular for Aquinas, the habituation of the passions. The habits we acquire necessary to make us not only do what justice requires but to become just in the doing are complex responses learned over time. Therefore to become just means acting as the just act; but you cannot become just by slavishly imitating what the just do. Rather, you must feel what the just feel when they act justly. The virtue, therefore, can only be acquired through our actions if what we do is not different from what we are. The virtues can be learned through doing, but the “doing” cannot be a product separate from the agent. Aristotle observes, “men become builders by building houses, and harpists by playing harp. Similarly, we become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.”

Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, page 156.

I really like this explication of acquiring the virtues from Hauerwas, because I think it captures the a lot of the problems inherent to progressive justice-obsessed spaces online. A lot of progressive political life is lived on social media, whether that be Twitter, Facebook, or more recently, TikTok. Clearly, among these folks, there is a yearning for justice, and an ever present call for action and to “do better” at a personal level. These calls come paired with the irony-laced mockery of political foes, showcasing the contempt those foes are held in. These two things are often inseparable: a desire for a more just, loving and inclusive world, and an attitude of derision for those not as committed to such a vision.

But, as Hauerwas reminds us, Aristotle and Aquinas taught us that the doing of virtuous deeds cannot be separated from a character of virtue. And the making of such character cannot be done by oneself; it requires a community, the real presence of other people, who hold us accountable and teach us what it means to have character, who show us the virtues required for such a life, in action. In turn, those people learned from others before them, on and on down through the ages, from those who first learned them. If we want a better world for everyone, then we cannot expect it to be forged amongst a disparate collection of atomized individuals who have only a vision of the world shaped by the demands of Progress. No, it takes people trained and practiced to identify the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, not just to understand them, but to feel those things deep in their soul. As Hauerwas says above, its not about a pale imitation of a certain way of life; its a Knowing deep in the soul, a Knowing that can only be given as a sort of Grace, that will really change the world in any real way.

And if that isn’t a compelling case for the importance of the church, over and against the wasteland that is the modern technoculture, then I don’t know what else is.

Social media and the death of friendship

I posted this last week on my person Facebook page, but I wanted to share it here as well. Enjoy.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about friendship and the role it plays in the modern millennial techno-culture that I find myself inhabiting. There is a real tendency among people in my demographic – especially among those you find online tweeting and creating meme culture – to relish in the difficulty of creating and maintaining friendships, and an attendant valorizing of the “self care” of saying no to those who want to make plans. There seems to be real comedy to be found in the last minute breaking of plans and turning down attempts at connection. I’ve come to think of this as a phenomenon called “ironized introversion”, in which it becomes cool to radically embrace the identity of introverted- to the point of refusing to interact in an embodied way with people when it is not required by work or family obligations (and even those are becoming more and more optional for many.) Social life becomes a purely digital and online endeavor, where the other avatars and accounts on social media become more “real” than anything else about people. 

I know I sound like “old guy yelling at technology” here, but I’m really not meaning to. Because I do sympathize; I am an introvert, very much so, although I like to embrace the hubris of thinking I’m a real introvert, and not one for the social credit it seems to bring nowadays. Human interaction wears me out; an evening with friends requires about three times as much isolation afterwards to recover energy. So I get it, I really do.

At the same time, I do work hard to cultivate real, embodied friendships, in the “meatspace” and not only the digital one. I spent the majority of the last two years off social media by and large, and one of my fears in doing so was that I would lose a whole host of meaningful relationships with people who I am “friends” with here. But, in fact, I found that what it forced of me instead was intentionality and active cultivation in my building and maintaining friendships. Sure, the number of people I regularly interacted with in some way went down in absolute terms. But I also became vitally aware of my actual, important friendships, and they really flourished over the last couple of years in a way that I hadn’t really experienced since high school probably (school life is, after all, probably the peak for many people’s experience of real friendship.) Now, these weren’t all free of technology. The closest friendships I built were still over distance, maintained by and large via Zoom and FaceTime and phone calls and text chains. But notice the intentionality found even in that. We made regular, weekly plans to talk, face to face as we could. We hold each other accountable to these check-ins. And, when we could this summer, we all came together for a few days of real time together, time that I look back on already as one of the highlights of the year for me.

So, it really bugs me, the attitude contained in this tweet, that I see so often around me. Friendship is really hard. It’s risky. It’s messy. It can be exhausting. It involved real flawed human beings, so the likelihood you are gonna get hurt at some point is high. I get that. But there is also nothing like it. Friendship – real, honest to goodness friendship, with other physical human beings – is amazing and life-giving and vital to being a whole human being. Family is great, but there is nothing like real friends who are there and present and choose to love you and spend time with you.

Friendship is an embodied thing. It requires proximity and effort and intimacy and vulnerability. And it is a vital feature of the Good and Virtuous Life, for everyone. Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas all teach us this, that you cannot be fully human without the presence of others, without the love of friendship. Yeah, making plans is hard, and leaving the comfort and safety of home can be a lot, especially after a full week of work and obligations. But real friendship is necessary. Other human beings are not consumables or commodities, and they aren’t the stuff of memes and social media irony. To relegate friendship to the digital world and spend a lot of time laughing at your own ability to turn down other people’s attempts at relationship building is to make means of those around you, of which there is no greater sin we can commit against one another. 

So, make plans. Go out. Risk yourself. Court exhaustion. Cull your friends list. Be a friend, a real, flesh and blood friend.