catapult magazine

Here’s a question from one of the people out here that CAN’T give you a complete history of Alfred Hitchcock’s works cross referrenced with their Aristotelian influences and linked with the recent string of events in Ghana that are only reported in obscure newspapers printed with Soy Ink, whose environmental impact is clearly much less detrimental than normal ink.

A lot of times when I log on to *cino, I feel like a completely ignorant buffoon. I’m perhaps “moderately cultured,” not “very cultured.” I get up, I go to work, I do my job, I unwind in the evenings, I try to stay up on stuff. But here, I have very little to contribute. I have questions: Since Culture is, indeed, Not Optional, is it my duty to become as cultured as Grant? Feel free to say yes. I’m sure I need more discipline on these things. I’m just wondering if there’s something I’m missing. Since about 4 or 5 years ago, I have had to start training myself to like good music/movies. I grew up liking DC Talk and Jim Carrey was the epitome of funny. Thankfully, I think many of my viewpoints and “aesthetics” have changed dramatically over the past several years. Still, I often feel lost. Where do you get the time to take in all this culture (movies, current events, books)? When I read a book, it takes me a long time. I don’t have the cash to see a movie every week. And aside from the newspaper and the television, there’s so many things in current events that I miss, I wonder if I’ve got my eyes closed and everyone else has them open. It seems like too much to be able to hold down at once.

I’m not making excuses for my lack. I suppose no one’s a perfect angel here. I suspect that the cliquishness that’s perceived in communities like this comes from people not knowing what they’ve done wrong when their version of culture is what they’ve been handed and they don’t understand how a group of people can tell them they’ve gotten it all wrong. I think for some people, this stuff comes naturally. Others of us are having to break old, bad habits. And like with most habits, it’s not easy. Maybe some people can empathize with some of the stuff I’m saying here.

So tell me: what do I need to change? Go ahead, give me the easy answer. Give me the in-depth “zeitgeist” answer. You founders: stop preaching to the choir (throught I’d throw that in to link the Rush Limbaugh thing) and preach to me for a second.

I’m obviously being a little extreme here for the sake of the post.
Come on, just go with it.

Here is a thought I just had that I will toss into this pot, and we’ll see how it holds up.

The paintings we make today, and the books we write, the sky scrapers, airplanes, sculptures, Britney Spears Cds, all these tangibles will be, in a 1000 years the pottery shards, the crudley hewn idols and crumbling walls discovered by a future civilization. The “culture” will be that intangible element that produced the relics, not the items on their own. All our actions and productions, words, looks and constructions are shaped by the wavering constraints of protocol, by attitudes and understood limits. We live within this organism of “culture.” It shapes us, but it can also be shaped. It changes and evolves as new and radical elements are introduced. And I think what we are trying to get at with these discussions, and the grand purpose of our lives and of this website is that culture is not optional—we are living within this organizm—but we can affect its change, its next and newest manifestation, and that is a good thing.

Probably not helpful, a bit on the waxing poetic side, but my “fitty” cents worth o’ words.

cheers

Adam, does culture mean nothing at all if we define it as “everything human”?

The tree example:

Trees are not trees without us. Trees depend on us for their names just as we depend on them for shade. Because the tree provides shade, we might name the tree for its shady qualities—we’ll call it a “shader”, a “desunsidizer”, “umbra de floreo” or whatever. But we name it these things because of its relationship TO US. This is the strange marriage—that Bridget referred to—between the thing and the name (unfortunately I don’t know the etymology for the English word tree); but all of this activity is cultural. Whatever falls within the care of the human being falls within culture.

We can only talk about a group of trees because trees fall within human experience, within human cultural activity. If there is a group of trees that never met a human being, it is because our human cultural activity has no bearing on those trees. We humans care for what comes into our care. If we never meet that group of trees, then they do not come into the realm of our cultural activity. (If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, then we are not responsible for it. But we’d better keep our ears open!)

I hate the definitions of culture that our culture has defined for us. Thanks to such definitions, culture has become a way to pit majority cultures against minority cultures, to make art irrelevant to everyday life, to give academic-types more authority than they deserve, to form a hierarchy in the relationship of classical arts and pop culture. If Christians are going to involve themselves in this culture (and how can we not? we’re always already in it!), then we ought to see culture itself as……….

Rather than see the world as cultures pitted against eachother, we might just as well start with the fact that we are all culturing human beings cultivating what God has given us to care for……

Nothing is beyond culture. Even God himself comes to us in our culture (though this should not be thought of as a limitation)……

This is why the thread deserves a book title!…………………….

Of course trees are trees without us. A tree doesn’t need a name to exist nor does it need someone to sit in its shade. Just because a group of trees is not part of culture doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist — it just doesn’t exist to us. Are you sure you want to make humans the reference point for this, grant? What about trees on an undiscovered planet? If they’re there, aren’t they there? Or are they waiting for us find a use for them? Because if we find them, I guarantee we’ll cut them down! Now if that’s not existance, I don’t know what is :)

And speaking of the title of a book, I think we could probably write one from the stuff that’s come out here. Good stuff Ryan, Bridget, Grant.

Grant: Here’s what I’m trying to say about the Everything thing. To me it’s kind of like the way Hinduism (I think it’s Hinduism) says that everything is God. I think it’s true that everything is affected by God, but not everything IS God. Apply that to culture instead of God, and that’s what I’m trying to say—in other words, it’s what we do with the trees, not the trees themselves. That, to me, makes for a useful definition. It’s a pretty minor point to quibble about, and I don’t think we’re really that far apart in what we’re trying to say, so I’ll shut up now about that. Bottom line is that we all participate in it, like it or not, and it touches every aspect of life.

I know that I’m not supposed to place all existence within human thought because it seems to make human beings creators of existence, but I’m sorry, that’s what I’m doing. Since we’re talking about existence of trees, we must admit that existence is a human act of defining something as existent.

A rock does not know it’s a rock. Only a human being knows such things. So a tree that lives on another planet does not know it is a tree on another planet—it doesn’t even know it’s a tree and it certainly doesn’t know what it means to live. It does not ask such questions about being a tree. It just “trees”. Existence is a human question. And it is therefore cultural.

I disagree. Trees know that they are trees as much as humans know they are human. I’m surprised to hear you say that a tree doesn’t know what it means to live. In my experience, it’s humans who have the problem understanding what it means to live. Trees understand perfectly what it means to live — they don’t have to bother asking what it means to be a tree.

I do agree that culture is always relative to human perception, but existance is something else. I’m not willing to say that if a virus killed all earth’s human population tomorrow that the earth would cease to exist. Other creatures would still scamper around the earth until the unmaintained nuclear reactors melt down, and the cockroaches would survive that, they say.

Grant, saying that “everything is culture” is wrong even though what you mean by it is correct, I think. Although, I don’t think we should say that everything is affected by culture, either, as if culture is just some seperate entity that has its way with things. Culture is an aspect of reality. The cultural aspect of a tree is that it has the ability to be formed into 2 by 4’s for houses, to be whittled into a little statue, and a myrriad of other things. The cultural aspect of a tree is always there, it’s just waiting for human beings to (in HD’s terminology) “open up” that aspect.

As far as existence goes, humans do define what exists. Take the eskimo’s words for snow as an example. I’ve heard that eskimo’s have anywhere from 60 to 400 words for snow. I would assume that they have this many words to describe different types of snow, just like we have different words to describe between a bulldog and a poodle and a german shepherd. It helps them differentiate between things that their society feels is necessary to differentiate between. Similarly, while snow exists for us, snowA, snowB, . . . exist for eskimo’s. I hope that makes sense.

Quick! Someone explain modes of being! I need the tin-can diagram, stat!!!

Okay, I can’t find the tin-can diagram, but here’s what ByTor is talking about. “HD” is Herman Dooyweerd, a philosopher. And here are the aspects of reality that he laid out:

http://www.basden.u-net.com/Dooy/aspects.html

Now, “cultural” isn’t in there. Could it be? Is everything cultural insofar as it relates to humanness? (I don’t think anyone on this board ever said “everything is culture”.) And if there is a cultural “aspect” to reality and all things have a cultural aspect, then what is “culture”? Does it even exist?

Or is Bridget closer with her definition of “culture is the outward expression of who we are”? (And, yeah, I think that’s what I was trying to say in my post a few days ago.)

FUN!

Formative = cultural, at least on that webpage.

I found this page, too: http://www.basden.u-net.com/Dooy/kernels.html