...when Mr. Eliot comes forward in a defence of culture, his first task is to rescue the word from the bad company into which it had fallen, to define its proper limits and to restore its intellectual respectability and integrity. In this he stands nearer to Matthew Arnold than he would perhaps be willing to admit. For, like Arnold, he is defending what are commonly termed the "spiritual values" of our Western tradition against degradation and debasement; and Matthew Arnold's Philistines who denied the value of culture are represented today by Mr. Eliot's antagonists who use the world "culture" as a convenient omnibus expression to cover all the subordinate non-economic social activities which have to be included in their organization of a planned society.

It is true that Mr. Eliot is no longer using the word in Matthew Arnold's sense. For while the latter was concerned only to maintain and extend its traditional classical sense as the harmonious development of human nature by the cultivation of the mind, the former has adopted the modern sociological concept of culture as a way of life common to a particular people and based on a social tradition which is embodied in its institutions, its literature and its art.

--- Christopher Dawson, T. S. Eliot on the Meaning of Culture

One week ago today we were invited to contemplate how Bach used the devil's music. I followed the links that were sent me, and I whispered to myself, more in fear than in awe, "there will be tears before bedtime!"

Turns out we're not sure now that it was the devil's music that Bach used, we're not sure what role dissonance plays in the advancement of music, we're not even quite sure what constitutes dissonance, and we are no longer persuaded that the authorities cited are real authorities. We also learned that to demand a clear answer to certain questions was irrelevant, nitpicking and bickering.

We also had a small refresher course on the definition of pernicious.

To represent others' views as extremist, counter-progressive, and wanting to "to set our church music back a few hundred years" is helpful, apparently; to ask for references is nitpicking.

So I followed this exchange during the week.

Have you ever seen film footage of old-fashioned steam locomotives pulling an entire passenger train over the last rails of a collapsed trestle bridge?

(I don't know why I asked that. The image just popped into my head.)

And the last contribution I read last night was this one:

What I find pernicious, is that this particular article would be considered "important"

While its an interesting theoretical exercise for sure, it certainly is not central to the saving of fundamentalism, nor is the problem with music and its various and sundry nuances one of a lack of scholarship. Its a lack of dealing with one another in a loving way, following the principles set forth in scripture to help us learn discernment and learning to deal with disagreements in a way that edifies and educates.

Greg obviously was willing to discuss the particular points of view in his post, he was not interested apparently in a literary criticism exercise where his specific words were dissected, disassociated from their context, and subjected to subjective and sudden analysis with a baseball bat.

I yawn, its just more of the same...if he erred on the side of progress (which he did not) he was bound to receive this treatment, if he erred on the side of tradition (which he did not), he would be labeled as a legalist or worse. Its barely worth the electrons required to push these posts out over the net any more.

I mention all of this in the context of Dawson's clarification about culture. What we have seen is clearly not a discussion of the merits of spiritual values in our Western tradition—unless by spiritual values you mean those things produced by "tedious rules of that period". The vaguest suggestions were introduced that there were no spiritual values of consequence at stake—either that or spiritual values are also trivial personal preferences.  That strikes me as an odd thing to say, even on SharperIron where the widest possible latitude is afforded for contradictory assertions.

The second definition suggests that for these fundamentalists, "culture as a way of life common to a particular people and based on a social tradition which is embodied in its institutions, its literature and its art" is an obstacle to progress.

(And by progress here, I think we are referring to the career advancement of guys like Patch, Renfrow, Pettit and Howlett.)

Alas, Howlett seems to have "withdrawn". Apparently the giggles are over for a while. Perhaps the time has come to leave this discussion and repair to our home theaters to catch up on some of those cartoons Trevor has recommended for our moral improvement.

But before we leave this subject entirely, let's clarify one thing and ask one question.

Progress is not always improvement. There has been advance in every phase of art; all the arts. In music there have been advances in rhythm, harmony, melody and form. There have been advances in technology, in the size and makeup of ensembles, there have been advances in orchestration. There have been advances in technique. There have been advances in pedagogy. There have been advances in musical theory. And at few times have these changes been more precipitous than during the baroque (oddly enough for this conversation).

But progress can never be the same as advance until you are prepared to discuss ends as well as means. Evolutionists tend to stumble a bit in their understanding of ends. And Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Wagner and Debussy can't all be naïve when it comes to an understanding of ends.

So that's the clarification. For those of you who might be more interested in history than music, ask yourself what sort of culture has produced a Greg Howlett and an SI. I will ask the question again since it was first mentioned elsewhere:

Is this a culture worth saving? and if it is not, what can be done to reassert a culture more in line with Arnold's and Eliot's?