It is very convenient, and not always misleading,
to visualize the culture of a society as simply a loose
assembly of various coherent activities being pursued in more or
less regular fashion, and with interrelations, under a common
umbrella of an assortment of shared values. For instance, history
gives us glimpses of a world of medieval kings and barons and
farmers and merchants, priests and monks and friars and teachers
and writers and builders and sculptor-craftsmen going about their
affairs, largely dominated by a framework of beliefs and
institutions of a universal Christian Church, and carrying on their
various traditions of war, government, crafts, trades, theology,
building, sculpting, writing, etc.
A cultural 'picture' of this kind cannot possibly
correspond to reality unless we also take account of something that
has already been mentioned: namely creativity, novelty. Or more
widely still, change of virtually any kind. It may come from
outside or from within, it may be well or ill perceived (like
changes in population), a discovery or an invention, willed or
unwilled, accepted or rejected: any intrusion changes the picture.
Perhaps only within a tradition, to begin with (in that medieval
world of ad 1200), examples of novelty include a new kind of
religious order, the creation of a hybrid corporation of learning,
the spread of some newly recovered writings of Aristotle, the
windmill, the compass, history writing in the vernacular); but
sooner or later, to the extent that there are interconnections,
there are repercussions in other areas too. Typically, a 'new'
style makes others old; a new grouping of individuals coming
together develops its own ideas, different from those already
existing; or to take an example fresh in our own memories, changes
occurring after 1945 in European societies, aided by inputs from
elsewhere, open the way to changes in the 1960s which can be traced
in music, clothes, theology, literature, manners, philosophy,
drama, work attitudes, sexual mores, politics . . . and these
changes are all in some manner interconnected.
The idea is commonplace enough, if difficult to
pin down; these complex processes, constellations of change, are
never absolutely identical, always unique. At best we can point to
one or two invariable, indeed logical, features of them: they are
associated with time-lags (the provinces are backward, the old
coexists with the new), and they introduce stresses within a
culture: resentments, the need for new accommodations . . . Other
features we shall return to in a closing section of this book. But
for the moment, we have to retain the plain fact that no culture
ever stands still, but is changing all the time and therefore
subject to stresses always—however much we might prefer to
believe that it can also possess a certain stability. That makes it
much more difficult to describe at a moment in time; we are dealing
not with a picture, but with a kind of huge animated
cartoon—such of it as we can see— whose abstract shapes
are constantly bulging and melting and transforming themselves into
other shapes—changing colour, too, in the process—even
though at any particular moment there is no absolute break in the
continuity of the picture. There is no convenient way of rendering
this in ordinary prose discourse.
Anyone at all may be the agent, witting or
unwitting, by whom some eventually significant novelty enters the
culture of a society; there are, however, two kinds of activity
which we find especially closely related to change.
One of course is scientific discovery, with or
without consequences in technology; for science is by definition
concerned with introducing change into 'right' knowledge. In some
forms it does this by simply adding, or extending, a habitual
approach; in others, by bringing about a veritable Copernican
revolution and opening out whole new avenues for further advance.
Our own world is so massively aware of this, so well provided with
theoretical analyses of the processes, paradigms, constellations of
conditions involved, that we arc prone to map out the past in terms
of 'progress'; progress being defined as solving problems in such a
way as to enable further problems to be faced and in their turn
solved. This vision is of course quite recent (Bacon, Descartes),
and there have been huge tracts of earlier time when such an idea
has been entirely absent from 'natural philosophy': ages satisfied
with Ptolemy's astronomy, Greek doctrines of the four elements of
nature, or the four humours of the body, or astrology, or alchemy.
The scientist has not always been a revolutionary, a threat to
stability.
The other category is the expressive arts.
Artists (by which we mean painters, musicians, sculptors, poets,
dramatists, architects, and so on, shading off into those concerned
with the applied arts, dress design, media copy-writing, etc.)
capture and objectify values and attitudes, collective perceptions
and dreams and intimations, often with peculiar precision.
Sometimes they do this to order, sometimes not; occasionally they
convey more than they intend; but at their best they convey the
very latest state of feeling, even when they are not out to
announce it. It is not by accident that the word 'culture' is often
narrowed down to refer to their business of producing expressive
objects, the symbols or distillations of much more
broadly-spreading patterns of value. By their nature artists are
more or less fated to reflect change, and in modern European
societies they have come to be expected, very often, to herald it,
to anticipate it, to be prophets, seers, scouts of the future; but
already in the earliest example of literary criticism known to
us—Aristophanes' comedy The Frogs (405 bc)—the
lately deceased Greek tragedian Euripides is taken to task for
going along with what are evidently the then modemtastes of
his Athenian audience. Creativeness in the arts is either a matter
of building forward within an existing tradition or of moving to
reflect in some new way the shift of outward circumstance and its
bearing on a tradition, or both: and this is as true of Pheidias as
of Henry Moore, of Rubens as of Max Ernst, of Euripides as of
Samuel Beckett.
And just in case, in a tough-minded age, we
should be tempted to think that the prominence being given here to
expressive symbolism alongside scientific discovery is
disproportionately large, and that the arts are 'only' arts, one
might care to have in mind Plato's well- known, and repeated,
attacks on poets and his resolve to have all arts heavily censored
in his 'ideal' (closed) society of The Republic. Careful
heed has been given to this recommendation in one way or another in
nearly all societies of subsequent ages, including some
well-known examples in the present day.
These somewhat abstract remarks are enough to
supply us with a clue as to how to conduct our 'orientation'. Given
that we are interested in 'large' cultural phenomena, we will
attempt to sec them emerging in their original context: not with a
view to investigating them in close detail there, but in order to
see what society, what kind of culture, presides over their birth.
Since we are interested in novelty as well as pattern, we shall
seek to centre attention on each occasion on a relatively short
span of time, a clip, so to speak, of one or two generations, and
to localize so far as possible on one region or country. (In one
instance, this localization is impossible: where we consider the
transmission of the heritage of the ancient world to something more
properly to be called Europe.) Of necessity we shall be looking at
the arts for something more than hints—for rounded- out,
dense presentations of values clotted together, either in
the consensus of dominant parts of a society or in the outlook of
quite small groups within it. But we cannot, obviously, confine
ourselves to them: for example, if poets in the sixteenth century
attempt to capture something of the scientific thought of that age,
they are no longer doing so three centuries later.