Long-time readers would know my love of etymology. I like to think of it as semantic archaeology. You dig down into the deeper meanings of words and discover old truths long since buried.
One of my favourite examples is the etymology of the words “history” and “story”. Both originally come from the Latin “historia”. “Story” is just the shortened form of “history”. Once upon a time, they meant something like what we these days call a “narrative” and could denote both fictional stories and factual histories. Even in modern times, most European languages use a variation on “historia” for both meanings. Modern Italian uses the shortened form “storia”. German uses “Geschichte”.
By themselves, these facts are mere curiosities. What’s important is to think through the implications. For most of Western history, people did not feel the need to have different words to demarcate fictional stories from factual histories. This made sense because they had a worldview that we might call mythological or spiritual. In that worldview, the distinction between fact and fiction was far less important. By contrast, the reason why we need a hard distinction between fictional story and factual history is because we have what is sometimes called a demythological worldview.
Our worldview first arose during the Enlightenment. However, the specific change that occurred in our understanding of history has a more concrete origin. Our emphasis on historical facts arose from innovations in the scholarly study of history that occurred in Germany in the late 18th century.
The father of modern historical scholarship, the one who demanded facts and evidence be rigorously researched, was Leopold von Ranke. He turned the University of Berlin into the epicentre of the new approach. Alongside other luminaries such as Alexander von Humboldt, the success of the new German university model led to it being copied in all other Western nations. Our modern distinction between story-as-fiction and history-as-fact arises directly from these developments.
Thus, the changes in the meaning of the words “history” and “story” are not accidental but are tied to a major upheaval in our worldview, the one that still dominates in our time. It was this same upheaval that led to a similar shift in the meaning of the word “culture”, which is what we will be discussing in this post. If anything, the new concept of culture that arose in the late 18th century has even more relevance to our time since practically all of modern politics revolves around what is called the “culture wars”.
Because of the centrality of “culture” to our modern worldview, it is quite startling to realise that seemingly no thinkers of importance paid any attention to it prior to the 18th century. Plato and Aristotle never discussed culture. The word does not get a single mention in the Bible or any of the works of Shakespeare. It’s as if, all of a sudden in the 18th century, we started to think about culture for the first time.
Of course, that’s not true. What was really going on was a different understanding of what culture is. We can elucidate that by doing a little semantic archaeology on the word itself.
Like “history”, “culture” comes from Latin. “Cultura” meant to cultivate land in preparation for crops. Its primary meaning was what we would nowadays refer to as agri-culture. That was true in the ancient world all the way through the medieval era.
Let’s think about what it means to cultivate something. In last week’s post, we talked about sourdough “starter”. This is a culture (there’s that word again) of microorganisms that must be deliberately nurtured by a baker in order to produce high-quality bread. To cultivate a sourdough culture, you must understand something about what the microorganisms need in order to thrive. Like all living things, they need food, water, a certain temperature range, etc. A sourdough baker must create the conditions in which the right microorganisms thrive and the wrong ones do not.
Cultivation implies an understanding of the outcome you are trying to achieve. A farmer decides what crops to grow and then cultivates the soil accordingly, adding whatever fertiliser works best for the specific plant, and tweaking other relevant variables.
Therefore, cultivation implies both an understanding of the desired ends and the means to achieve them. That is what people understood by the word “culture” (cultura) prior to modern times. But when we think about culture in this way, we can see that some of the greatest thinkers in the Western canon were very much concerned with culture in the sense of cultivation.
The most obvious here is Aristotle. In his books on ethics, he reasons in the exact same way that we have just described, only instead of cultivating bread or crops, he talks about cultivating people and societies. He begins by asking what qualities make a person or society virtuous and then how we can attain those qualities. Plato had taken the same approach in The Republic.
The reason why Plato and Aristotle never talked about “culture” was because their discussions were carried out using the concepts of ethics and politics. This makes perfect sense because, in Greek, the word ethics meant character, habit, or disposition. Ethics was about defining virtue; the end goal of cultivation.
Because man is a social animal, the cultivation of virtue can only take place through the institutions of society. In Athens, this was the polis. Therefore, the means of attaining virtue had come via politics. Putting it all together, we see that the cultivation of virtue was a combination of ethics (defining the character, habit, and dispositions that were to be desired) and politics (how to achieve them).
Thus, the ancient Greeks were very much concerned with “culture”, they simply used different words to talk about it. Since Aristotle’s philosophy dominated all through the scholastic period of medieval Europe, these matters were always discussed using the concepts of ethics and politics. That’s why nobody talked about “culture” prior to modern times.
It’s noteworthy in this respect that the rediscovery of ancient thought during the Renaissance also produced works that were concerned with the cultivation of virtue. One of the best of these is Castiglione’s “The Book of the Courtier”, which is about the cultivation of the Italian courtesan. Lord Chesterfield’s letter to his son on “the fine art of becoming a man of the world” follows in the same vein but aims to produce the English gentleman.
Machiavelli’s “The Prince” is about the cultivation of an ideal ruler in the ruthless environment of Italian city states. All of these works have in common that they define the qualities to be sought after and then give advice on how to attain them, just as Aristotle had done about two millennia earlier.
In summary, what we can call the classical approach to culture was concerned with the cultivation of virtue. Now that we know that, we can compare this way of thinking to the new concept which arose primarily in Germany in the late 18th century. What we find is that the new approach was almost an exact inversion of the classical one.
The first major difference was that the classical approach to culture was about the cultivation of excellence in the individual. One of the ways this manifested was that the writings themselves were usually composed for specific persons. For example, Aristotle’s two major works on ethics are called the Nichomachean and Eudemian, both referring to the intended recipient. Lord Chesterfield’s letter was to his son. Machiavelli’s treatise was for the Duke of Urbino, Lorenzo de’ Medici, with whom he was hoping to obtain employment.
The classical approach was also normative in the sense that it laid out a positive vision for virtue and then how to attain it. By contrast, the modern approach is descriptive. It finds a culture as it is and sets about illustrating its customs, practices, institutions, etc. This follows from the fact that the modern conception was born in university settings, including the fieldwork that occurred when scholars travelled to foreign lands. A scholar visiting a strange country is not going to have need of a normative vision of culture since he or she is not a member of that society.
Another major difference is that the classical approach appeals to reason. That is why it was subsumed under the discipline of philosophy. The underlying assumption is that virtue can be achieved by analysing it and disseminating information about it. The promise that Machiavelli makes to Lorenzo de’ Medici in the forward to The Prince is that he has spent much time studying politics so that the Duke may learn from his efforts. Since reason is seen to be the highest virtue in classical thought, the exercise of it is inherently good.
Appeals to reason were necessarily targeted to the elites of society since classical philosophy assumed that the general public was incapable of using it. The body politic was usually characterised as a rabble who were guided by emotion and base instinct. The exercise of philosophy, on the other hand, required an education, something that the average person did not have and was assumed to be incapable of attaining.
For all these reasons, the classical approach was concerned with exceptional individuals capable of attaining the highest possible virtue. By contrast, our modern conception of culture focuses on what can be said in general about the cultural practices of a collective. It is concerned with the average, not with the exceptional.
Another way to think about it is that the modern conception of culture is about the relationships between individuals and not with the individuals themselves. Because it is descriptive and not normative, it makes no value judgements about what it finds. This was one of von Ranke’s main precepts for history, i.e., that every epoch has its own value independent of any others (an idea that would later form the basis of Spengler’s comparative history, but not Toynbee’s).
From these qualities, it’s easy to see why a golden age of anthropological research followed in the wake of innovations that had taken place in German scholarship. Scholars trained in these ideas were far more objective than their predecessors, and although many of them still carried inevitable biases in their analysis, they did an excellent job of describing foreign cultural practices without passing moral judgement.
Furthermore, because of the deprecation of logic and reason and the incorporation of the practices of the average person, the new approach was able to identify a whole host of material that had been deliberately omitted from the classical schemes. For most people throughout history, the cultivation of culture did not happen through reading and reasoning but through doing.
In the medieval Western tradition, that job fell primarily to the Catholic Church, which was the predominant influence on the culture of the general public, whose cultivation as good Christians happened not through reason and logic but through ritual. The appreciation of these irrational aspects of culture came to play a major part in our modern understanding.
It’s no coincidence that these new ideas should have arisen in Germany in the aftermath of the Protestant rebellion. One of the things the Protestants rejected was the awkward compromise that the Catholic Church had made to try and synthesise classical philosophy with Christian teaching. The Protestant theology was faith-based and therefore irrational.
This had a major influence on subsequent German scholarship. Thus, even though von Ranke insisted on rigorous objectivity in the collection of facts, he nevertheless believed that each historical epoch and culture was independently motivated by the divine. (Once again, the later influence on Spengler is clear and can be contrasted with Toynbee’s more Darwinian perspective).
With the rejection of the classical viewpoint, one of the things that has disappeared from our modern conception of culture is the idea of cultivation. Each culture is believed to receive its character from an irrational source (God, instinct, nature). Therefore, it is all but immutable and there is no point trying to improve it, certainly not by the mechanisms of reason and logic.
That’s also why there is an implied fatalism in the Germanic notion of culture which played no small role in the events of the 20th century and which still haunts us to this day. Cultures are born whole and they die whole. They are either lively and rising or decaying and doomed. No adaptation is allowed. (Again, this is one of the main differences between Spengler and Toynbee).
The classical conception of culture as the cultivation of virtue still lives on in our time, although in rather degraded form under the guise of “self-help” or “self-improvement”. The implied individualism of these terms is something that Aristotle and the Greeks would have found difficult to understand. For them, the cultivation of virtue was inherently a political matter.
This is not to say that the new conception of culture does not play a role in modern politics. On the contrary, almost the entirety of our politics is now carried out via the “culture wars”. Culture once belonged to the realm of philosophy, but philosophy is all but dead in our time. Any public figure who even tries to define a conception of virtue can count on being howled down by a screeching mob.
Meanwhile, the inherent irrationality in the Germanic concept of culture has made our politics borderline hysterical. Public figures are no longer expected to make sense, only to have great conviction. Our politics has become “faith-based” in a way that is very much in keeping with its Protestant origins. Of course, mild-mannered scholars such as von Ranke would be horrified to witness it, and Aristotle and Plato would also be shaking their heads since it’s the exact mob mentality they warned about two and a half thousand years ago.
Still, there is no doubt that the new conception of culture opened up new truths that were previously concealed. One of those is tight correspondence between the concepts which a society foregrounds and the political and economic structure that dominates. In fact, the change that occurred in the meaning of “culture” is a direct example of this because it came into fashion at just the same time that the feudal economic and political structures were in terminal decline, taking the old aristocracy with them.
Meanwhile, the modern collectivist understanding of culture was a perfect match for the growing dominance of the bourgeois institutions of capitalism and democracy that arose in the late 18th century. We shouldn’t forget, however, that this dominance was not just ideological in nature. It was won with the pointy end of guillotines and gun barrels.
The funniest bit is, as Spengler pointed out, Aristotle and Plato would find even the concept of historical/anthropological analysis bizzare and hilarious, because history itself is a completely abstract creation of the mind, and so are the relationships drawn out. As soon as one begins a nominally objective study in the western fashion, it’s no longer objective, because the whole process of studying in this manner is caught up in a whole heap of assumptions about causality and time in general.
History as the Faustian mind conceives it is a powerful imagination tool that allows to travel in our heads back and forward in time, and to constantly keep in mind the infinite series and sets of relations (mathematic similarity obvious) of the generations of we are just a single point going unending into the past and future , but at the end of the day it’s still just a figment of our imagination, and the classics would probably say you could just be making it all up in your head for all you know.
Skip – that’s true. But I also think that, for Europeans of the dark ages/medieval era, it was real because there were Roman ruins everywhere. People had tangible evidence of this incredible civilisation which used to exist. You also had Christian monasteries scattered about that were the storehouses of whatever was known about the ancient world (prior to the Renaissance). Plus, the story of Jesus also includes Rome and is therefore historical.
Having said that, I think you’re right about the inherently abstract nature of it all. I wonder if that’s a big part of the reason why there was an insistence on rigorous standards for gathering evidence objectively. The problem then becomes the same one you have in the empirical sciences, i.e. the problem of induction.
It’s funny the Classics had Egypt and Babylon right there but basically couldn’t have cared less, in fact they held any interest in them as heretical (Pythagoras).
This is the reason the Classics just gave their descent from Hercules or however, because to them after a few generations it’s all a myth. The only great histories from their tradition were those written about current events within basically a generation, of which they are awesome like Polybius and Tacitus (not to mention Caesar himself) , but looking way back (or forward) was only really done by Livy and that was sort of epic myth filled story telling (perhaps for the benefit of the new emperor Augustus) than an actual historical analysis.
We struggle to admit that our history may just be a dishonest version of the same thing, but I think where ours has great use is the potential for pattern recognition and therefore predictive power. But as a very historically bent culture we probably need it to even form a proper sense of self.
True. But Egypt and Babylon were still active (although declining) cultures at that time. If the Greeks had come of age in the ruins of Egypt, it might have been a very different thing.
I think modern Western historical and cultural scholarship is one our greatest achievements. The problem is testability. In the hard sciences, you have the same problem of induction, but you can actually run tests to verify hypotheses, and you can simplify the variables. Neither of those is possible in relation to history. All we can do is use historical examples. But, as both Toynbee and Spengler knew, we have very few to work with. In short, all of our conclusions are potentially bullshit. That’s actually a reason to be much more light-hearted about it all. But, I think you’re right that what is really going on is tied in very deeply with our identity at an emotional level.
Simon,
It seems to me that in a millieu where it is assumed that universal norms are impossible, it is also impossible to have a rulebook for adjudicating conflict between groups or between individuals with different worldviews. Here, victory and loss is amoral, being determined exclusively by effectiveness at wielding power. But if, at the same time, it is assumed that victory is in the hands of God, instinct as God’s replacement or nature as God’s replacement, then struggle for power, by way of philosophical sleight of hand, becomes Holy or Inevitable. And the victor is the embodiment/prophet of the Holy/Inevitable. Obsession with competition seems to have its roots here.
In addition, the Protestant worldview has buried into it the zealots’ obsessive compulsion to iconclastically announce his own faith as a sign that he is one of the Chosen Ones. Now, those in that worldview believe that power goes naturally to the Chosen Ones. In this space, the more one can a announce one’s utterly irrational and unrealistic conviction that one will win, the more one can convince himself that he is the natural heir to power and victory. Or simply put: he who screams the loudest is always right and always wins. But, of course, behind the screaming tableau, there is the conception that who really wins is the one best at cheating.
This makes sense of how jihadis visit the Whitehouse in suits by way of Presidential invitation, while those outside the Whitehouse try to scream themselves in. In a sense, they’re all the accidental children of Luther.
The suicidal, Millennialist-bent of the modern West can also be seen in this light. The willingness to infuriate others with iconoclastic behaviours reaches it’s Holy zenith with martyrdom. So even if one loses, there is this avenue of insane consolation.
Diplomacy and all the other foundations of peace (humility, forgiveness, hospitality, reciprocity, honesty, harmlessness, contentment … ) require the very opposite assumptions about life.
Simon,
I think it makes more sense to look for patterns in internal motivation, action and personal consequence over time for predictive power (assuming the nature of these domains is the same across the board). Especially because the way we construct history is, as all else, actually a product of these forces.
Jinasiri – I think that was an unintentional byproduct of the Reformation. It certainly wasn’t anything that Luther had in mind. What happened was that connection with God become an entirely esoteric matter that had nothing to do with worldly success of failure. That divorced worldly events from “sacred” ones and allowed the operation of power to become entirely amoral. Even the Greeks and Romans had always consulted oracles prior to wars etc and that meant that any victory or defeat was divinely mandated.
Having said that, there’s a weird synchronicity here because Machiavelli wrote “The Prince” at almost the exact same time that Luther nailed his 99 theses to the church door, and The Prince explicitly argues that political power must be separated from conventional morality not because it is virtuous to do so but out of necessity.
As for the patterns, as we’ve discussed before, I think that is where Wilber and Gebser’s work is important since it encourages us to look for connections across domains that are normally considered discrete. I think von Ranke was onto something, though. There really does look to be something that holds things together holistically, whether we call it God or any other word.
It’s crazy how big our western historical scope is now, completely dwarfing even the huge Indian and Mayan schemes and any other conceptions of it in the past (and probably anything from the future), going back literally billions of years, straight past all sensory or documented limits once we found the tools to unlock/imagine things.
We can read the red shifts in the stars themselves to grasp scales in the infinite, yet we may just be making it all up (no one has actually been to the stars yet), which as you say should make people laugh more about it. But for many it’s a faith based conviction, and it’s interesting that it is linear.
The problem also as Nietzsche pointed out is pseudo-objectivity used as a cover for simple Will to Power, which seems to be what a lot of our scholarship amounts to these days. I hate to think that maybe it always has been that way in the social sciences (and often the hard sciences), and they are just a post hoc rationalisation of whatever the political atmosphere was at the time.
Jinsari
It’s interesting, something I was thinking about the other day is that all true western Protestants are western atheists or Pagans now, and that all of us in the Protestant cultures will actually all return to something like (or called) Paganism, as in folk religion removed from the Church.
This leans on something John Michael Greer said that the thinks there are two pseudomorphosis in the USA, and that many of the Protestant churches there are actually Magian, no longer Faustian.
Many of them want what amounts to a Christian Caliphate, and all the European/Anglo Protestants outside America are now almost all atheist countries (Anglo, German, Dutch, Nord), and take their atheism far more seriously than nominally atheist Catholic people. The religion of the USA seems foreign to us and this may be because it actually is now.
This is because for the rest of us we have pushed the individual liberation from the hierarchical church to its logical endpoint (but I think also the ethnic northern rejection of the southern church), liberation from Christianity itself, but now we are lost in the void.
But many are looking for metaphysics in the void and what seems to be happening is we are going all the way back to start of our ancestral history, or literally encountering the divine out there in the wilds of nature or history.
Skip – but that assumes that politics comes before ideology. It may be the other way around. That’s another idea of Nietzsche’s i.e. that we can create reality through ideas which, if you think about it, is obviously true at a small scale. Why not at a larger one? In fact, I’d say that’s the main point of Nietzsche’s later philosophy. He’s willing the “free spirits” of the future into existence.
On the subject of atheism, this is exactly what John Calvin predicted five hundred years ago – “There remaineth nothing else for the rest but the reproach of atheism.”
Yeah I suppose it’s a chicken or the egg, but our culture leans towards ideology being the driving factor, but I’m sure the classics would say it’s men driving ideology, or that ideology itself is just an abstraction, and action/outward posture is the important thing.
Thats interesting Calvin said that, and from the time of the Reformation I think there have been two strands growing together, rationalised atheism which I personally think is the honest first step into the second religiousness, offset with an aesthetic Paganism, one the enlightenment and the other side the Romantic movement and all the reinvigoration of folklore and ancestral Pagan images and themes.
The final rejection in modern times for younger folk has been to dump Christianity itself as a foreign invader, something only a deeply historically aware culture like ours would do. Then it comes down to what do you directly experience of the divine out there, outside of any mediation whatsoever, which is probably the culmination of the movement.
And then it’s hilarious that we arrive all the way back at the start, which we probably never left.
Well, I’d say aesthetic paganism died with Wagner (actually, it died when Wagner got co-opted by nationalism). Meanwhile, post-war US imperialism has completely corrupted what was left of the enlightenment, mostly by destroying the universities. They got away with it all by flooding the world with consumer goodies. I think the big question is what happens if the consumer goodies dry up.
Yeah I’d push back that paganism ever really went away, the Lord of the Rings is most popular book in the English language and the whole fantasy genre that stems from it is just literally Celto-Germanic pagan myth and imagery. Tolkien himself was a devout Catholic but even be did his best to try and syncretise the two together because he acknowledged his ancestral lineage.
Play with any western child Knights/dragons for boys and princesses/unicorns always feature heavily, which I always thought was just cultural imposition but after having my own kids you realise so much is simply innate and they prefer certain things no matter the influence. I really can’t understand the unicorn thing for girls but my daughter’s are just obsessed with them (they don’t watch any TV), same with elves and fairies.
Hmmmmm, it’s a good point. I still say that the difference is that Wagnerian aesthetics was taken seriously as a direction for broader society, i.e. a kind of art-driven anarcho-socialism. It seems anachronistic, but only in hindsight. Intelligent adults at the time (including Nietzsche) really believed in it. Meanwhile, LOTR has been Disney-fied into mere entertainment. Nobody sees it as a viable vision for the future. In fact, among some on the right-wing, it’s even become a meme of sorts – “there’s no going back to the shire, bucko”.
Still, maybe if consumer capitalism collapses, people will just self-organise into decentalised collectives and Wagner/Tolkien will have the last laugh.
Simon,
“I think the big question is what happens if the consumer goodies dry up.”
We both know the answer to that: absent alternative philosophical and religious vision(s) that serves as foundation to practicable alternative(s) to current greed-based culture and economy, people will choose to go to war with whatever side that seems like it can bring the goodies back.
Skip,
“Then it comes down to what do you directly experience of the divine out there, outside of any mediation whatsoever, which is probably the culmination of the movement.”
I think Early Buddhist teachings conveyed (initially) by way of fairytale imagery can work to satisfy that drive in the Protestant heart.
Jinasiri – well, that’s what makes it interesting. Everybody that we could go to war against has nukes. Maybe that will force a religious re-evaluation?
Simon,
Or a re-evaluation of whether Mutually Assured Destruction can be made unilateral by thinking outside the box.
Or we finally arrive at fully automated space communism. Elon Musk says that robots and AI will run everything from now on so we can all sit back and take it easy 😛
Touche. And yet … the crazies in the basement who have access to the red buttons and keys may believe these things.
Amor Fait. 🕊️
Yes. Our technical capacities have well and truly exceeded our moral ones.