Welcome to the CD or tape that we've called Controversial Considerations on Culture.
A few introductory comments are warranted.
First of all, what follows...
is a talk that I gave on a Sunday afternoon
to an audience assembled here in our hall at St. Benedict's Center in Richmond, New Hampshire.
The talk was pretty much an extemporaneous talk that I gave
after making a very quick outline before I got up to speak.
the nature of these Sunday talks is that they are quite informal.
What gave me the ideas to say what I said
was reading the book by Richard Weaver
called Ideas Have Consequences. Richard Weaver was a great
American philosopher and sort of social critic.
who taught at the University of Chicago, which is from North Carolina.
He wasn't a Catholic, but his thinking was very much
impressed by and informed by Catholic
thought from the Middle Ages forward.
I was encouraged to make this talk available to anybody at home, in other words, people
who weren't here on the Sunday talk, because they thought that some of what I had to say
concerning culture, concerning music and the arts, was worthy of consumption by a much
larger audience.
Thank you and I hope that you profit from hearing it.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Come Holy Ghost, fill the hearts of Thy faithful, and enkindle in them the fire of Thy love.
Send forth Thy Spirit, and they shall be created, and Thou shalt renew the face of the earth.
Let us pray, O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit,
disinstruct the hearts of the faithful.
Grant that by the gifts of the same Spirit, we may be always truly wise, and ever rejoice in His consolations.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Our Lady, a seat of wisdom.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Well, for those who aren't aware of it, there's going to be a festival next week, Friday and
Saturday.
I'm sure you can see signs for it posted around.
I wanted to make an announcement, too, this is something I've been meaning to do for a
few weeks now, but you know that the tippidos, the family who've been coming here for mass
lately, the young man is one of our Boy Scouts.
They have a little farm, and they sell milk, and they have a few other things that they sell as well besides the milk.
These are people who are in our community now. I mean, they don't live in Richmond.
They live in Winchester. Their farm is in Winchester.
But they are part of our community in the sense that they come here for Mass.
Their young people are being catechized here, and they're kind of fitting into our community now.
It would be a very good thing if we would kind of give them a welcome embrace by way of supporting them in what they're doing with their farm.
It's not easy to do what they're doing.
In fact, I happen to know that it's a tremendous struggle.
for them, but they have
They have good milk. I can tell you that because I drink it just about every day and they have other dairy products as well and
Alpacas, I don't know what you do with alpaca stuff coats or something
What do you do with alpacas?
Sell the wool, okay, well, yeah, if you need any alpaca wool.
They have other stuff too.
I think they call the farm country critters,
and they've had some little signs up on our bulletin boards.
I'm encouraging people here to support them.
Now, it is a tad bit of a distance.
In these days of $4 a gallon gasoline,
it might be a little more expensive to go to Winchester.
than it is to go to something more convenient, however, what you can do is combine, you know,
or run with other people, you know, like people carpool, you can sort of milkpool.
or something. This is done elsewhere and to good effect.
You know, we have this speaker every year,
John Sharp, who speaks at our conference every year and who
often gives us very illuminating and dilating considerations
on distributism and the whole sort of
economic and cultural ambit which surrounds distributism.
Well, this is distributism in action here. We have a family trying to do the difficult thing of
maintaining
a small farm, with all the odds against them, and we should support that.
John Sharp isn't the only speaker at the conference who's holding out these ideals.
We had Mr. Elon this year as well, proposing much of the same.
Jared, raise your hand.
Raise your hand.
He's a tippet-o, so if you have any questions about what they've got besides milk, ask him.
All right, I was going to give a few words today about culture, what I would call questions
concerning cultural literacy and what constitutes good and decent culture and how
a high culture, or just a good culture, is integral to the practice of the faith.
Now, what I'd like to do, this presentation might be rather hodgepodge,
but what I'd like to do to begin it is to paint for you a mental picture
from which we will draw some lessons.
Considering culture at its worst, we have what we would call barbarism, literal barbarism in the time that the barbarians, the Germans, the German barbarians invaded the Roman Empire, the original barbarians, the bearded ones, who invaded the Empire and made it kind of a cultural zoo after it had been at its height and then had degenerated politically and morally.
barbarianism, just like Vandalism, we abstract the concept of Vandal from the people called the Vandals,
and we've abstracted the concept barbarian from the original barbarians.
But a barbarian is somebody who is basically a cultural illiterate,
somebody who has absolutely no appreciation for what constitutes a decent culture.
And I'm not necessarily saying a high culture.
I'm going to distinguish between a high culture and a good culture in a minute.
But what I'm saying is a barbarian is somebody who has no regard for any culture who is just a cultural
Now, we have perfect examples of it in our midst.
We have barbarianism becoming enshrined in our modern American,
you can't really call it a culture, it's become an anti-culture.
I just read a passage in an excellent book,
which distinguish between barbarism and philistinism.
Philistinism is simply barbarism
when it's surrounded by culture. Philistineism is barbarism which doesn't recognize the culture which surrounds it.
So the Philistine is someone who might hear good music or see decent social order and simply rejects it as something utterly undesirable
because he would prefer the kind of trash which is his own element.
Now, here's the mental picture I'm going to start with.
Instead of thinking of a cultural barbarian in the abstract or in a complete picture,
let's just paint a very narrow picture, just a sliver of his existence,
so that we can see in a way that hopefully we can all equally appreciate.
Let's take a modern barbarian in his diet.
First of all, this modern barbarian, and let's just say for good measure that he's a teenager,
a cultural concept that didn't exist 100 years ago.
So along with all the other descriptions I'm going to give you, he has an attitude.
Okay, he doesn't know what a family meal is.
because he's not really had one. I mean, sometimes they sort of sit down and reach into the trough together, but it's rare.
Usually, they eat all on their own.
He thinks that McDonald's is good food. That's what he'd go out for a fancy occasion,
as distinguished from his ordinary fare of Twinkies and Ho-Hos and sugar bombs, too.
When he feels run-down, as he inevitably will, because he eats Twinkies and Ho-Hos and sugar bombs and McDonald's,
he picks himself up with a real treat. He gets a rock star or a jolt.
You know, the combination of caffeine and taurine peps him right up.
And he's back in his feet again until he crashes.
He eats as much as he wants of any of these things that I've just named.
I don't want to limit it. I mean, he's got a variety.
I mean, he's a bit of a gourmet. He might have little bebbies, too.
There are a few other items that he has on his list of favorites.
His normal sustenance. Perhaps even Dunkin' Donuts.
He eats as much of this stuff as he wants, and when he is depressed, he resorts to more of his caffeine and taurine drinks,
because those kind of lift him up from his depression, which inevitably he'll have because of all the sugar he's ingesting.
Now, because of his diet, he is fat, lethargic, depressed, anxious, and acne-ridden.
Now, this is not a pretty picture.
I hope you don't think this is a pretty picture.
This is a pretty garish picture.