Oh, I love getting cast as Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom in these culture wars. Very good then. I did say there was a cultural heritage of western civilization. I said nothing about private property; and as I said to Rakesh, I think the greatest hits of western civilization, to use your ugly term, and to expand on the metaphor, sell the way the greatest hits of western radio do--globally. And when they go go global, they are appropriated, transformed, and do not stay copyrighted. These ownership and commercial metaphors are yours.
You also impute to me a Bellowian-Bloomian admiration for the British East India Company and the American Slaveocracy. Now there is an official of the BEI Co whem I admire, Mill, but not because of his work for that firm. As for the Slaveocracy, Yoshie, you have to learn to read: as I said in my post, my list of cultural heros includes Uncle Remus and Frederick Douglass (after whom, in typical white racist fashion, I named my son), who are also part of Western culture.
Yoshie's reasoning here turns on the fact that western (and I am sure other) elites have in the past enhanced their ideological polish by training their young in the great works that, in virtue of being chosen for this ideological role, become the high cultural tradition. She assumes that since I admire that tradition, I must share the values and goals of those elites, or maybe, in a classical Stalinist move, I "objectively" advance their agenda whatever my confused wishes.
Now if I shared their agenda, I wouldn't be here on thsi list and I wouldn't be where I am. I would probably be comfortably ensconced as a tentured professor at the University of Chicago's Social. Thought Program. In any case, despite the hopes or fears of Bloom and Bellow, the classical canon no longer plays this role. for better or worse, that belongs to an earlier epoch. I probably have an education that is a lot closer to a classical one than most educated people, and I don't even know Greek or Latin. (Wish I did, though.)
Nor do I think that just because the ideologues of western high culture largely chose well that if I agree with their choices that I must thereby advance their goals. The culture the chose was useful to them because it was good stuff, and not vice versa. It could not have helped legitimate their rule if it had been second rate. Not, at any rate, over the long run. But like the Old Man, I think it's ours, not theirs, and we should take it and use it.
Now, as to the ecuminicalism Yoshie advocates. I think she objects to talk of the Western cultural heritage in part of all these reasons, because in recent centuries western culture has been imperialist and so forth. She wants us to be open to world cultures, and so do I. She wants more intermingling, and so do I. But there is a heritage there, and its value is not just in that it created good stuff, but also in that there is a tradition. The tradition is part of the way it created good stuff.
One might think of it in a smaller scale on analogy to Marxism. Marxists of all different persuasions and views start from Marx and feel obliged to answer to Lenin and Luxemburg, Lukacs and Gramsci, Cabral and Fanon--we participate in a conversation and a debate in which these are reference points. Its part of what makes it possible to talk of Marxism at all that we have read them and tested their ideas. We could not do it without the tradition. If, as seems possible to me, in the next few generations people stop feeling obliged to answer to Marx et al., then Marxism as a tradition will be dead. The world, I think, would be poorer for that.
Western culture is similar on a larger scale. There are disanalogies, obviously. Marxism is a project with a political goal; western culture is just a self-reproducing set of practices that also change over time. In it, westerners feel obliged to answer to Plato and Dante and Shakespeare and Leonardo, etc. Westerners are the people who do that, even if they are Japanese or Indian. Part of what makes someone able to do good work is that they work in such such tradition, which establishes the norms for good work and reference points to play off. It's not important that it's conceived as "western"; that's just the way we talk now. And a tradition like this is not closed. You mentioned Kipling, a second rank but not unimportant figure in the tradition. He learned a lot from India. If we seal the borders, as the French sometimes try to do, the thing dies.
But there is a tradition, and it's worth learning. If we are western. it helps define who we are. Moreover, it's not everyone's tradition. It's mine in a way that, say, Japanese culture will never be mine, even if I should become a great western scholar of Japan. I don't see any point in pretending that is not so. This is anotherr way that western culture is unlike Marxism. Anyone can make Marxism wholly theirs, be they Japanese or Indian or Zambian or Russian: Marxism is a voluntary affiliation--one which certain rules and standards of course. But being western (or Japanese or Indian) is not like that.
Western culture may someday be absorbed into a world culture. That mght or might not be a loss; depends on what the world culture is like. It will be transformed in any event. That is the nature of cultures. But in the meantime, there's no point in denying that it has the objectivity that any culture does, or in denying its many virtues as we criticize its many faults.
--jks
In a message dated 00-01-23 22:45:56 EST, you write:
<< I am in favor of reading & examining closely all the great works that
are Justin's favorites, and then some more. But such works, I contend,
would better circulate if they were consigned to the public domain, not
designated as the "cultural heritage" and "private property" of the
so-called "Western Civilization." What's the point of giving the
copyright to Aeschylus, for instance, to the East India Company and the
plantation owners in the American South, to say nothing of the current
managers & shareholders of the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust? They
have had and will continue to have their Kiplings. Why should we let
them take the ownership of our best & brightest? >>