State of the Culture

Cultural levels are difficult to measure. Elizabethan theaters had cheap standing room for the average guy. When Charles Dickens spoke on his American tour the lines for tickets were endless and egalitarian. When a Macbeth play in New York was controversial, there was a riot and thirty people were killed. Londoners wore black armbands when Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes.

It is easy to point somberly at rappers or soccer riots and decry the cultural condition. But the problem with culture is not what it is, it is what it is not. Culture can be broad and accepting but it also should be the center and source of civic virtue. It has become only broad and accepting. But without some cultural unity, some concepts held in concert among all those under the broad and accepting aegis of the society, the society will be nothing more than isolated shards at best and competing tribes at worst. The Greeks had a minor goddess, Homonia, who was the goddess of concord, unanimity, and oneness of mind. Her opposite number was Eris (Strife). This notion of unity in a political setting recurs in Greek thinking and is a centerpiece of The Republic where people of different status and abilities are unified over their happiness with the essentials of the makeup of the state. They are at peace with the State's ideals.

The ancient Greeks taught civic virtue. It's time for us to consider that.