civilization & culture27 quotes

“Culture is the set of answers to the basic questions of mankind, be they humdrum or lofty: Whom shall I marry? What shall I eat and how shall I cook my meals? How shall I behave with my social and natural surrounding? Whom shall I worship? In each case, a culture distinguished a right and wrong behavior, hence what we call ‘values.’ What we call a culture or a civilization is a definite set of answers that distinguish a right way and a wrong one: thou shalt marry a suitable person belonging to this group, and not have incestuous commerce; thou shalt eat this food and not that disgusting filth; thou shalt worship this god of ours and not that foreign idol, and so on.”

“Every mythology remembers the innocence of the first state: Adam in the Garden, the peaceful Hyperboreans, the Uttar-akurus or ‘the Men of Perfect Virtue’ of the Taoists. Pessimists often interpret the story of the Golden Age as a tendency to turn our backs on the ills of the present, and sigh for the happiness of youth. But nothing in Hesiod’s text exceeds the bounds of probability.

The real or half-real tribes which hover on the fringe of ancient geographies—Atavantes, Fenni, Parrossits or the dancing Spermatophagi—have their modern equivalents in the Bushman, the Shoshonean, the Eskimo and the Aboriginal.

One characteristic of the Men of the Golden Age: they are always remembered as migratory.”

“As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren’t just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.”

“Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of the police and of its opinion.”

“Every positive law is rooted in a culture. Therefore, in order to have a world law there must be a world culture. And there is no such thing.”

“Human existence remains an enigma. The thinking species is destined to tragedy, in the sense that the questions it eternally poses never find a definitive answer. What is the answer to questions like: Why death? Why evil and conflict? What is justice? The deepest meaning of culture is to propose partial, provisional, or temporary answers to these queries. Man is the animal that interrogates his existence. The diversity of cultures characterizes humanity because humanity poses to itself questions that in their nature are finally unanswerable. Human existence, in other words, is an enigma, not a simple aporia, a ‘pathless’ condition. Human existence is not an impasse; rather, it opens up multiple ways to respond to these eternal questions. This is what creates those fissures, so hard to accept, between humans who are simultaneously alike in their common ‘tragic’ condition and different in the paths they tread as a consequence of such questioning. Only someone who had definitively resolved the enigma of human existence would have the right to unify and homogenize cultures. But this uncontested superman does not exist, even if during the past two centuries several have tried to personify him.”

“Individually, moral life consists in developing human relations between different personalities who are respected in their differences. Collectively, the search for unity passes not through the abolition of cultural differences but by their constant maintenance or sustenance. To become civilized is nothing other than to learn to genuinely recognize the other.”

“To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man’s follies and crimes, but also any encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing. The historian will not mourn because he can see no meaning in human existence except that which man puts into it; let it be our pride that we ourselves may put meaning into our lives, and sometimes a significance that transcends death. If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children. And to his final breath he will be grateful for this inexhaustible legacy, knowing that it is our nourishing mother and our lasting life.”

“Although modern man rarely questions the value of exploration, the explorer pursues a course of activity that seems, logically, at variance with man’s basic strivings for the good life, the best obtainable in food, shelter, and all those other physical, mental and spiritual comforts that characterize civilized life. The explorer deliberately turns his back on civilization and its pleasures simply to go and see unknown lands. Yet the explorer is always a civilized man; exploration itself is an advanced intellectual concept. The primitive or half-civilized man may move into new lands for food, protection or trade, but he is always driven there by necessity or greed and rarely troubles to record what he has seen. The true explorer goes only to see and to tell others what he has seen. It seems incredible, considering the hardships and dangers, that men would willingly do this. I speak of men rather than women because the spirit of adventure that leads to exploration is primarily a masculine trait; women, being more sensible and their curiosity being confined to more personal and realistic matters nearer home, are less afflicted by the desire to see what lies beyond the seas and mountain ranges. But this spirit lurks in all men, I would guess, to a greater or lesser degree. In some it is weak and easily satisfied by novels or television; in others it is a ruling passion that thrusts them to the remote corners of the globe.”

“A barbarian awareness of true danger can be an asset to any society, as well as a barbarian willingness to believe that straight action, not interminable moral confusion, is sometimes required.”

“In all times and in all places there were only three ways by which greatly differentiated peoples had lived together: as slave or serf and master; by miscegenation; or by some system of caste. The first and the last solutions, historically, were commonest; they had been employed from the New World to India. The Spanish, in America, had imposed a combination of the two, with considerable miscegenation on the side.”

“It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention—a word much abused in our time—that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless. When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions—why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise.”

“This is often exactly the task of the conservative—to restate old truths and reassert their relevance by helping a new generation understand them in its own terms. It is vital not only because conservatives believe that old truths remain true but also because we think that human nature does not change, and therefore that every generation—because it starts from scratch—must be helped to see what our civilization has learned through countless rounds of painful trial and error.”

“If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he have not done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.”

“Just as we would be inestimably poor to be denied the opportunity to see giraffes, roses, bombardier beetles, tulips, and little black house cats with white spots on their chests that sit on our laps as we write, we lose one of the true wonders of the world every time one of these glorious variations on a theme set by the first language slips away unrecorded for posterity. We will never encounter a stegosaur, but we can be thankful that fossils allow us to know what it was like. In the same way, if we cannot enjoy all 6000 of the worlds languages alive for much longer, let us at least make sure to afford them high quality preservation…The world’s riffs on basic materials that emerged in East Africa around 148,000 B.C. represent 6000 ways of being human.”

“The American project—a phrase you will see again in the chapters to come—consists of the continuing effort, begun with the founding, to demonstrate that human beings can be left free as individuals and families to live their lives as they see fit, coming together voluntarily to solve their joint problems. The polity based on that idea led to a civic culture that was seen as exceptional by all the world. That culture was so widely shared among Americans, that it amounted to a civil religion. To be an American wants to be different from other nationalities, in ways that Americans treasured. That culture is unraveling.”

“A culture comprises unfinished intellectual and emotional journeyings, expeditions now abandoned but known to us in the tattered maps left behind by the explorers; it is composed of lighthearted adventures, of relationships invented and explored in exploit or in drama, of myths and stories and poems expressing fragments of human self-understanding, of gods worshipped, of responses to the mutability of the world and of encounters with death. And it reaches us, as it reached generations before ours, not as an accumulation of human achievements we are called upon to accept, but as a manifold of invitations to look, to listen, and to reflect.”

“To have command over the languages of our civilization is, not to know the rules of their grammar, but to have the opportunity of a syntax and a vocabulary, rich in fine distinctions, in which to think for oneself.”

“What every man is born an heir to is an inheritance of human achievement; an inheritance of feelings, emotions, images, visions, thoughts, beliefs, ideas, understandings, intellectual and practical enterprises, languages, relationships, organizations, canons and maxims of conduct, procedures, rituals, skills, works of art, books, musical compositions, tools, artifacts and utensils—in short, what Dilthey called geistige Welt.”

“Aggression and eroticism are deeply intertwined. Hunt, pursuit, and capture are biologically programmed into male sexuality. Generation after generation, men must be educated, refined, and ethically persuaded away from their tendency toward anarchy and brutishness.”

“For the longest period of which we are at present aware, for hundreds of thousands of years in the Paleolithic, humans walked around, like healthy animals, in a state that we would today call religious delirium, but which is in fact the default state of all conscious and semi-conscious life. For long after the coming of civilization also, many continued in this condition, or did so during special times of the year or festivals when man could regain his free and natural state. It was civilization and in particular agricultural civilization that forbad this condition and plunged the majority of humans into a semi-permanent repressive or depressive frame. That this is consistent with, and even a prerequisite for, the impressive works and development of higher civilization and higher culture shouldn’t be surprising: the majority of mankind suffered terribly also in their bodies from the coming of agriculture, the backbreaking labor, the malnourishment that shows itself in the smaller stature and more slender build of farmer’s skeletons, of the destruction of their teeth, the atrophy of their brains and other organs. Agriculture allowed a steady food source, an increase in numbers, and above all the maintenance of an elite, free from these exactions, that lived parasitically on the many. But agriculture broke the human animal and domesticated him. Do you understand then what the ‘disenchanted’ worldview is? I have to laugh at the ‘secular worldview,’ the disenchanted worldview, which is fact the worldview or mood of the broken peasant farmer.”

“Peoples are nature’s circuitous ways to great specimens and for this reason the peoples that have arisen out of nature must be preserved in their distinct forms.”

“Thus everywhere we see that the very comforts and safety produced by the best men leads to the usurpation of society by those parts of the human spirit that are oriented instead toward a different kind of life, that everywhere the mode of the yeast wins out…and usually wins out very quickly. And in the West, whose special fate has been confused for History or Progress of the entire species, this development has taken place through the promotion of logos or reason and all the manifestations of this: the adulation of empty words, of legalism as a guide for social and political life, of the cult of science that is very far from real science. All of this has been a cover for the ascent of the blob human, of the lower orders of the spirit and is instead delivering not just the West, but all of mankind, to a condition of domestic brokenness and servility.”

“No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.”

“In the long run, it must be good to be open to the truth that different societies maintain equilibrium, order, and peace in different ways. The conservative is the one who understands his own society from within and loves and defends it.”

“Without an economic wealth that is concentrated in a few hands, there can be no ‘wealth’ of art, of thought, or of elegance, not to speak of the luxury of possessing a worldview and of thinking theoretically instead of practically. Economic impoverishment at once brings spiritual and artistic impoverishment in its train.”

“President Trump appointed some excellent judges to the federal bench, and I expect that will have some desirable effect on abortion jurisprudence — but a culture in which the normal thing to do is to pay off the porn star with whom you were having an affair in order to avoid a confrontation with your third wife and grease the skids for your presidential campaign is a culture that is going to have abortion, whether there is one Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court or nine.”