A Reasonable Culture

There are, in the end, matters more profound than culture, but every civilized community must yet possess some set of principles to last. What we think of as a people’s culture was originally a shared object of worship (we can sense that meaning still in our word cult), but we use the word now to mean something more abstract: a group of values or assumptions more or less consciously held which define for a group what the world is and what in it is, and is not, important enough to attend to.

The hyper-individualism we seem boundlessly committed to at present has broken a small number of anciently old human cultural values into a kaleidoscope of shiny personal aspirations, each of us holding our attention to our own bright objects of attraction and desire. But culture properly so called is not an idiosyncratic vision one imposes by oneself upon the world, nor is it even, at the other end of the scale, the universal and transcultural vision the philosophers call insight, by which they mean that one truth which every human culture intends to manifest. Between these two extremes, a people’s culture in its traditional acceptation is what makes one reasonable, because what we think and what we do will be in reference to the independent truth of things—as things stand without us. And therein lies, particularly at present, its urgent importance to understand.

In an essay titled Quantity and Quality in American Education, the twentieth-century American philosopher Brand Blanshard places this value of reasonableness at the heart and purpose of education:

It is a firm conviction of mine that the characteristic which a college should aim above all to produce is reasonableness. What does reasonableness mean? Not skill in reasoning, though it is always the better for that. It is not even wholly a matter of the intellectual side of our nature, though a trained intelligence is essential to it. It is the pervading habit and temper of a mind that has surrendered its government to reason. On the intellectual side it shows itself as reflectiveness, the habit of examining the meaning of a proposed belief, and looking to its grounds and consequences, before accepting it. On the practical side it is justice, a scrupulous regard for the rights of others as well as of oneself.

There is much to think about here, not least Blanshard’s strict qualification that education should aim to produce such reasonableness, that this should be its goal even while recognizing, as he does in his succeeding paragraph, that institutional education “cannot guarantee greatness of mind.” Still its work is to “put pictures on the wall and point at them, and then hope that in our sluggish hearts and minds admiration will begin to stir.” All this is another version of the critic Lionel Trilling’s remark that schools and their scholars must “keep the road open,” so that the artifacts of culture, whether plastic or scholastic, can point those who wish to the vision which inspired their making. But the rest of us, in our modern and isolated skepticism, might very well ask whether there really is anything behind all those cultural creations other than ourselves.

That doubt, I think, gets to the heart of what the ancient notion of culture was and what is so important now to understand correctly. Culture properly so called has to do with seeing precisely what is not ourselves. It is not the result of what we personally conjure up in our imagination and then present to the world, trying by an individualized effort to make life meaningful or at the least endurable. It is rather what we make and how we act as an image of the truth we unearth in our dealings with others and the world; only then does our rightly personal form and stamp become a meaningful cultural effect. Under this definition, culture is a paradoxical venture: in language and art and the unapplied sciences, we are to look for the unequivocal truth of things which, though other than ourselves, is still cognate to us. This findable meaning, the real object of a genuine culture, remains mysteriously not our own working selves, but the source of them, which is why we call real values principles, the sources or unprovable axioms of all we subsequently think and do. And what constitutes culture must and will in the end ring us round to our own depths, to a more profound comprehension of what it means to be together as human beings in a particular community we share. And therein lies the irony: we are to look beyond ourselves to find ourselves.

Reasonableness is ultimately the result of awareness, and the works of culture, those “pictures on the wall,” are the objects we must reflect upon in our best minds to catch a glimmer of what lies behind all that we do and truly make. There is no more a culture for culture’s sake than there is an art for art’s sake. The traditional notion, at least, has been that the best work is a collaboration of sorts, material with maker and maker with truth. In that pattern, reasonableness will both guide and create, and the pictures we paint and the words we write and the songs we sing and the dances we dance can temper the aggressive loneliness which will otherwise storm the streets to deny the life it knows in its bones it has missed. Culture, instead, says yes, and yes again to the bright array of life. And in doing so, it makes us reasonable and, as Blanchard says, scrupulous over the rights of others.

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