[lbo-talk] RE: Chomsky/sports

[Michael Dawson -PSU]

>No one I believe has responded to my
> query as to what are the various senses in which we use the word,
> "culture," and hence what are the (abstractable) features of human
> experience we are focusing on in a given thread.
>
> Carrol

OK, here's my response:

There are three main uses, one scientific and the others merely traditional:

Scientific definition: the learned and shared memes (symbols, behavioral
habits, and norms for creating physical objects) shared among a particular
population.

Traditional definition #1: the arts and letters (origin: upper-class
snobbery, see Raymond Williams, _Keywords_)

Traditional definition #2: what ordinary people do out side the spheres of
paid labor and politics (origin: late 20th-century subconscious adaptation
of traditional definition #1 in attempt to describe and analyze off-the-job
life, in response to rise of TV and movies as dominant leisure-time
activities)

There are problems, of ascending scale, with each definition:

Scientific: the concept is highly abstract and tautologous; it lacks
explanatory power; we want to know what gave rise to particular cultures,
not just that they exist (this latter was news to Europeans up until pretty
recently).

Trad #1: obviously unscientific definition, useless for social
science/rational description of human societies

Trad #2: same flaw as Trad #1; confuses issues; the worst of both worlds --
the vagueness/tautologousness of the scientific definition, plus the
imprecision of Trad #1;  virtually every time you see "culture" in modern
social science (perhaps excluding anthropology), it really means
"off-the-job practices"; by definition, economic life and politics are part
and parcel of culture, if you define that term scientifically.

My nomination for the single most harmful concept in modern social
science/social criticism = "consumer culture," which is a biased insult
("consumer") attached to a non-scientific muddle.

Herr Goebbels was correct about what to do when you hear the word culture, I
MHO.  Social science and left politics would both be much improved if the
word "culture" was dropped entirely.