[Discussion] The Culture Did It

[Ayse Kirtunc]

THE CULTURE DID IT
by Cullen Murphy
(Atlantic Monthly, December 2000)



THE indefinite articles "a" and "an" and the definite article "the" account 
for almost 10 percent of all the words we use, and in most cases they are no 
more obtrusive than a heartbeat. But leave one out, or put one in an 
unexpected place, and the effect can be substantial. 
 
Discuss this article in the Arts & Culture conference of Post & Riposte. 
More on arts and culture in The Atlantic Monthly and Atlantic Unbound. 

>From Atlantic Unbound:


American Grafitti: "Symptoms of the Culture Wars," by Scott Stossel 
(September 1998)
The much-publicized intellectual conflicts of the past decade may have lost 
their intensity, but they haven't lost their importance. A book like Marjorie 
Garber's latest reminds us why. 
 Slavic languages are famous for their lack of articles. The trait carries 
over into how some Slavs speak English, and this has long been a target of 
parody. (Here's the cosmonaut Lev, in the movie Armageddon: "I hear rumor on 
radio. My country broke. No steaks in freezer.") Adding an article before a 
noun that usually lacks one can bring about a variety of shifts in tone. 
Learning calculus and Greek was tough -- how much more romantic to have been 
able to study "the calculus" or "the Greek," as the Victorians did. Sometimes 
the definite article adds a pretentious note. I know of a socially ambitious 
commercial building where signs above the escalators direct visitors to THE 
SHOPS and THE OFFICES. Last year's Ryder Cup tournament was held near Boston 
at an establishment called simply The Country Club (and don't forget the 
annual Harvard-Yale gridiron encounter, The Game). In Celtic lands the 
definite article before a proper name designates a clan leader: Michael 
Joseph O'Rahilly, one of the martyrs of Ireland's Easter Rebellion, in 1916, 
is known in Irish history textbooks as "The O'Rahilly." A similar 
acknowledgment of singularity was bestowed by Sherlock Holmes on Irene Adler, 
the only person ever to outwit him; according to Dr. Watson, Holmes referred 
to her afterward as "the woman." The comedian Lenny Bruce once pointed out 
that there were a lot of churches and denominations in the world, but 
Catholicism was the only "the" religion -- there was only one "the Church." 

*  *  *
These attributes of the definite article come to mind because, judging from 
the evidence on the airwaves and the printed page, the word "the" has begun 
to flourish in a new semantic niche: in front of the word "culture." We all 
know what culture without an article is. It can refer to any product of human 
fabrication (stone tools, the Venus de Milo, Rhapsody in Blue, paintings on 
velvet) or to the folkways of a localized anthropological milieu (Samoa, the 
San Fernando Valley, Microsoft). But the term "the culture" connotes 
something bigger and broader than all these others. "The culture" is imposing 
and autonomous, and implicated in just about everything. 

The moderator of the National Public Radio program On the Media not long ago 
began by matter-of-factly lamenting a "coarsening of the culture." A headline 
on an article in WebMD Medical News declares, "Teen Binge Drinking Starts 
Early, With Help From the Culture." The actor and writer Eric Bogosian 
comments, "I think the level of irony and aggression has become just so 
absorbed in the culture that me throwing myself around out there doesn't rub 
people as wrong as it used to." A Detroit columnist describes guns 
as "embedded in the culture, like strip malls and cheeseburgers." A vice-
president of the Southern Baptist Convention speaks of the need for members 
of his denomination to remain engaged "in the debates that are going on in 
the culture." The publisher Victor Navasky, recalling his education in a 
politically radical experimental school in the 1940s, declares, "We were 
outsiders in the culture." 

The references sometimes get a little confusing, because "the culture" that 
different writers cite isn't always the same one. William McGurn, of The Wall 
Street Journal, is conjuring something elitist, leftist, modernist, and in 
control of all news, entertainment, and advertising when he spells it "the 
Kultur" and writes, "The Kultur's painting of Southern evangelicals as closet 
Klansmen is a vicious caricature." Brent Staples, writing in The New York 
Times earlier this year about a rampage of sexual harassment that occurred in 
Central Park, had a different, retrograde "the culture" in mind when he 
subtitled his editorial-page commentary "How the culture normalizes sexual 
harassment and abuse." 

Whatever the perspective, "the culture" is invoked as if it were a powerful, 
uniform, enveloping medium -- as vast and impersonal as the galaxy, as 
inescapable as the laws of thermodynamics. Some references make "the culture" 
seem like a pervasive global ectoplasm. Others recall the "ether" of the 
ancients. The imagery of atmospheric swirl is commonplace. We hear about the 
cultural "climate." We hear about being "flooded" or "saturated" with 
cultural by-products, of foundering in a "rising tide" of violence, 
permissiveness, vulgarity, banality, incivility, and insensitivity. The 
Republican pollster Whit Ayres has long been tracking the influence of what 
he calls the "cultural winds," and writers in almost every major newspaper 
have remarked the onset of what they call "cultural storms." (Behind all this 
one prominent media critic has discerned the hand of "cultural gods.") We 
can, of course, take steps to safeguard ourselves against "the culture," as 
we can against the weather, but the elements are likely to seep in anyway. 
Even government, the columnist George F. Will has warned, "cannot be 
hermetically sealed against the culture." 


*  *  *
In some ways our thinking about nature on the one hand and "the culture" on 
the other has undergone a reversal within a matter of decades. It used to be 
that the cultural aspect of ordinary reality was, by definition, the part 
most amenable to human transformation, whereas the natural aspect was seen as 
having a dynamic of its own, which was largely out of our hands. In his book 
The End of Nature (1989) the environmental writer Bill McKibben offered a 
revised assessment of the natural world. In his view, nature as a sovereign 
power has given way to nature as a dependent ward of human custodians. 
Befouled and denuded, gutted and gouged, the natural world has become a thing 
of frailty. Even the most trivial of human interventions can spell 
catastrophe. McKibben writes of nature, 

Having lost its separateness, it loses its special power. Instead of being a 
category like God -- something beyond our control -- it is now a category 
like the defense budget or the minimum wage, a problem we must work out. 
"The culture" is today the more fearsome realm, or at any rate the more 
convenient scapegoat, and the notion that we have only limited influence over 
it appears to be widespread. The rhetoric of resignation turns up in 
surprising precincts. Last summer Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, the representative-
designate to the United Nations from Afghanistan's Taliban government, spoke 
with a reporter about his country's problematic reputation in the West. The 
subject of oppressive measures against women came up, but Mujahid brushed 
criticism aside. The problem hasn't been the Afghan government, he said, 
adding, "I blame the culture." 


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Cullen Murphy is The Atlantic's managing editor. His most recent book is The 
Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own 
(1998).
 


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EgeNet Internet Servisleri (http://mail.egenet.com.tr)