Not-so-funny things have happened on the way to the Forum!

or, how do Salesians understand ‘culture’ from an English language mindset?

What happens to words can alert us to what happens to thinking. The company words keep is all important! The gap between culture and faith is the word ‘and’, linguistically speaking. That is, while there is understandable concern that there is a divide between the two in our modern world, our religious discourse is able to keep them together by a small, positive conjunctive unit, subtly reminding us of their essential association.

Or to put it another way: in Italy there is the Ministry for Cultural Goods (Il Ministero di beni culturali), in London the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The company words keep... recall that Boy George formed a band called Culture Club in 1981? Beni-culturali is one message, culture-media-sport-club another, as is the contrast between a ministry and a department!

Tankfuls of ink and terrabytes of inquiry have been given to culture, but have we noticed the semantic creep, in English? Along with the fact that the EU officially refused to acknowledge the Christian roots of culture in Rome last week, other not-so-funny things have happened on the way to the Forum! And it can affect the way you and I, as Salesians, read texts of our own kind, say, by Fr Viganò, who employed ‘culture’ across nearly 90% of his writing, based on a corpus of his Letters to the Congregation.

What has occurred in English is not quite along the lines predicted by George Orwell in his Nineteen Eighty-Four, where he blamed a fictional Oceania (pity about that choice) for restricting the language, therefore restricting people’s memory and ability to think: you make Thoughtcrime impossible if you reduce the number and power of words!

Matthew Arnold (a British contemporary of Don Bosco almost precisely: 1822-1888) did more than any English writer to keep culture firmly yoked to religion even while in gentlemanly fashion setting up high culture in opposition to Christianity. But the pattern, since Arnold, has been to expand the word in linguistically mischievous ways, where the expansion has restricted our ability to think! Let me explain.

Pluralisation: Just add an ‘s’ and a grand concept becomes so diffused it begins to lose meaning altogether; as many cultures as there are groups of two or more! Mind you, the pluralisation of culture goes back to Herder (in German) in the late 18^th Century, but it wasn’t picked up in English to any great degree until the development of anthropology from ethnology in the 20^th Century.

Adjectival expansion: ‘cultural’ only entered English in the 1870’s or thereabouts. But tie it to genocide, for example, and you expand the meaning in ways that lessen what genocide is, an unspeakable horror. Cultural genocide has been levelled against the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, even the IRA, but what about the real genocide?

Colloquial expansion: a subtle one this; ‘culture vulture’ is a person interested in the refined arts, but in the mouth of the utterer it has a belittling intent. A pretentious, excessive interest in the refined arts! Then there’s pop culture, street culture…

Meanwhile, cultura keeps a very different type of company in our Salesian literature, rather more optimistic, intrinsically valuable, more geared to the grand salvific plan for the human person, rather more singular, I would say in general. And that has something to do with the Italian mindset, and with Continental roots which are Christian even if denied.

It’s just that the English reader carries a lot more ‘baggage’ on the way to the Forum, and we do well to be alert to that as we read.

JBF 1^st November 2004