Some notes on Definitions of Culture

1

Steiner's Bluebeard's Castle isn't much better, alas: his argument that the world changed with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars because now everyone became involved in the great events of history (because war became omnipresent, there was general mobilization, troops marched outside Hegel's window while he wrote Phenomenology, etc.), "whereas in times previous war swept over human beings with tidal mystery" would surprise anyone who has lived through the total horror of the Thirty Years War (Germany lost half its population); or the French civil wars; or the English civil war; or the Khmelnitsky or Pugachev uprisings.

Besides -- excuse me -- what is "tidal mystery"?

2

Is there perhaps something lacking in the education of fellows like Geo. Steiner? Do they not get enough maths and logic? Would a course in chemistry perhaps teach them to write sentences that mean something? Should their teachers not have insisted that a sentence's best business is demonstrable truth?

Several in-depth courses on individual historical periods might have been useful, too, to teach these guys how difficult it is to make generalizations about an age (what is an "age", anyway?); and to deconstruct the trifling "grand-sweep of history" view which one acquires by reading only introductory textbooks.

(Too little education can be more dangerous than not enough of it).

3

I am not sure that Steiner is right in suggesting that ennui was more common in the nineteenth century than it was, say, in the eighteenth or seventeeth; but he is right in observing that many writers did express it. Perhaps boredom was merely generized, which is to say "made into an acceptable genre", that is, it was discovered that it's OK to write about it (i.e., if you do, someone will actually read it). But personally, I would not be surprised if the nineteenth century were in fact shown to be more bored than the eighteenth: unlike Steiner I have never thought the nineteenth century my Paradise Lost; its culture, for the most part, bores me. Why should it not have bored its own people?

I mean, come on, Donizetti?

4

But perhaps the nineteenth century did represent a kind of departure from the past: an informatics departure, if you pardon the jargon. The rise of the newspaper, the telegraph, and cheap mass-printed book meant, I am guessing, that cultural figures were now spending a far greater amount of their time chasing mundane news -- from the political (man bites dog in Bakhchisarai!) to the cultural (a new book of poetry by minor heath poets); leading to a low quality information overload. The truth is that the flood of low quality information must be interrupted (the newspaper subscription canceled, the tube turned off, the comments ignored, the minor heath poets not read); or else we become stuffed up with their mediocrity; our lives, full of it, acquire its tastelessness; and our own brains begin to bore us.