I think our studies ought to be all but purposeless. They want to be pursued with chastity like mathematics.

---Acton

We see on every side fundamentalists, evangelicals and even emergents trying to assume the rôle of political demagogue and culture czar. What we do not see on any side is tillers of the soil.

Nevertheless, we can distinguish between higher and lower cultures; we can distinguish between advance and retrogression. We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity. I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even anticipate a period, of some duration, of which it is possible to say that it will have no culture. Then culture will have to grow again from the soil; and when I say it must grow again from the soil, I do not mean that it will be brought into existence by any activity of political demagogues. The question asked by this essay, is whether there are any permanent conditions, in the absence of which no higher culture can be expected.

If we succeed even partially in answering this question, we must then put ourselves on guard against the delusion of trying to bring out the conditions for the sake of the improvement of our culture. For if any definite conclusions emerge from this study, one of them is surely this, that culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake: the artist must concentrate upon his canvas, the poet upon his typewriter, the civil servant upon the just settlement of particular problems as they present themselves upon his desk, each according to the situation in which he finds himself.

[...]

We cannot say, "I shall make myself into a different person"; we can only say: "I will give up this bad habit, and endeavor to contract this good one." So of society we can only say: "We shall try to improve in this respect or the other, where excess or defect is evident; we must try at the same time to embrace so much in our view, that we may avoid, in putting one thing right, putting something else wrong." Even this is to express an aspiration greater than we can achieve: for it is as much, or more, because of what we do piecemeal without understanding or foreseeing the consequences, that the culture of one age differs from that of its predecessor. *

These are not words with which to comfort the weary. They have only the advantage of being true.

Look at what is being published by CT, Soundforth, Pettit, and rethinkchristianity.com and ask yourselves, who is saying "we shall try to improve in this respect or the other"? Each one darkens understanding by asserting the grave error of the rest and affirming his own—what do they call them?—"preferences".

* Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, January, 1948; Introduction