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tradition which restricts culture to refinement and to the high arts.
Culture, for me, is the effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the
existential predicaments that confront all human beings in the passage
of their lives. For this reason, tradition becomes essential to the vitality
of a culture, for it provides the continuity of memory that teaches how
one's forebears met the same existential predicaments. (Which is why
the psalmist says:
"If
I forget thee,
0
Jerusalem, let my right hand lose
its cunning.")
The emphasis on judgment is necessary
to
fend off that lack of
discrimination which regards all "meaningful" experience as good,
and which insists that each group's "culture" is as valid as any other.
The debasement of modernity is the emphasis on
"self-expression,"
and the erasure of the distinction between art and life, so that the acting
out of impulse, rather than the reflective discipline of the imagination
becomes the touchstone of satisfaction. To have significance, a culture
must transcend the present, because it is the recurrent confrontation
with those root questions whose answers, through a set of symbols,
provide a viable coherence
to
the meaning of existence. And since the
appreciation of tradition in culture, and judgment in art (and a
coherent curriculum in education) has to be learned, authority-in the
form of scholarship, teaching, and skilled exegesis-is a necessary
guide for the perplexed. And such authority can be earned only by
study, not by speaking in tongues.
The triune positions I hold do have a consistency in that they
unite a belief in the inclusion of all people into citizenship through
that economic minimum which allows for self-respect, the principles
of individual achievement of social position on the basis of merit, and
the continuity of the past and present, in order to shape the future, as
the necessary conditions of a civilized order.
II
In the broader sense, my theme is not just the cultural contradic–
tions of capitalism as such, but of bourgeois ociety: that new world
created by the mercantile and fabricating gui lds, the middle or bour–
geois class that revolutionized modern society after the sixteenth
century by making economic activity, rather than military or religious
concerns, the central feature of society. Capitalism is a socioeconomic
system geared to the production of commodities by a rational calculus
of cost and price, and
to
the consistent accumu lation of capital for the
