When I hear the word culture…

The sky is falling! The oceans are rising! We're doomed Captain Mannering! We urgently need to either:

1. Change our light bulbs

or

2. Give up everything and buy a goat and a gun

None of the visions offered by climate change enthusiasts is compelling because none of them offers us anything inspirational. I like goats, but even so there's just not enough va-va-voom to get me going. The goals are survivalist and the messages are the sort of apocalyptic ones that so many people get off on... the frisson of excitement that we're all stuffed.

What we need is an inspirational goal to work towards.

Culture is the only mechanism by which we can envision the future in any sort of positive way. It is also the glue which holds our society together. Cultural philosopher and writer Roger Scruton argues that absence of culture results in dysfunctional societies, citing as an example the collapse of Islamic culture and the corresponding rise of fundamentalism to fill the void.

In my experience folks sometimes bristle at the word “culture” ("when I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun"*), and usually in those cases the word seems synonymous with “the ballet and the opera”, with its attendant whiff of elitism and pretention. Luckily we now avoid the issue by using the phrase “cultural capital” instead which gives culture the free-market seal of approval as something that can be weighed, measured, valued and sold.

It’s fashionable to dismiss high culture – Dead White Male culture – as irrelevant, as of no further use, as somehow anti-democratic. But works of culture can give us a collective insight into the sublime, the beautiful, the utopian. They imagine other ways of being and lay them out for us in stories, pictures and music. Culture presents alternatives; neither as something to vote for, nor as something to go to war for, but as something we’re free to take to our hearts or dismiss. Of course, the truth is that our reactions are usually somewhere in between, and culture accommodates this too. It is rarely black or white, and you can put an X in every box if you like. Culture understands and embraces duality.

Culture helps us ask the right questions. Tolstoy’s question, “what shall we do and how shall we live?” has been the touchstone for Russian literature for decades and remains the fundamental question for us all. At its best, culture strips away the flim-flam that obscures the basic questions we need to ask. One of the criticisms often levelled at culture is that it’s not part of the so-called real world. Far from being a weakness, this is its central strength. Culture dispenses with budgetary constraints and political policy, skips over contemporary mores, dodges fashion and gets to the heart of the matter.

The ability of cultural activity to illuminate fundamental questions and to propose answers might well be the sole measure of its value. Using this measure we can see that the community art project that asks questions about the future of our village and illuminates the past is of value. War and Peace is of value. Elegy to the Spanish Republic is of value. The open mic night at the local pub is of value. The latest Europop song, Strictly Come Dancing or CSI, while entertaining, are less so.

We cannot envision any sort of sustainable, enjoyable future for ourselves without understanding and supporting cultural activity. The great thing about culture is that it is a dialogue that has been going on for millennia. We are each free to make our own contributions to the dialogue, in whatever form we choose (even if we’re not old enough to vote, or live in a country where we can't vote). If we fail to acknowledge culture as central to how we move into the future then we will be forced to rely, as we have been in the past, on the reactionary visions of politicians, religious leaders, multinational corporations, and prophets of doom. Pick one.

*often wrongly (but compellingly) attributed to Goebbels. The actual quote is a line from the 1933 play Schlageter by Hanns Johst, a Nazi propagandist and Poet Laureat. "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!" "Whenever I hear of culture... I release the safety catch of my Browning!" Not quite as snappy, but then brevity is the soul of wit.