Louis Roney: Are you "cultured"?

If you really dote on Proust’s “Remembrances of Things Past ” and are honestly able to dig everything past page 47 in Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” are you cultured? If you met your future mate while you were sitting in the Fragonard Room at the Frick, are you cultured? If your thesis was titled “The decline of the mordant in the late motets of Josquin des Prez,” are you cultured? If you go all the way to Lyon just to experience Paul Bocuse’s culinary way with his latest fish dish, are you cultured? If you are a marked-down pearl, you’re more than likely cultured. If you are bacteria in a Petri dish of agar, you are cultured for sure! “Culture” in our culture is an ambiguous term.

That word brings to mind Shakespeare, Goya, Berlioz, just for starters. But there are also the ancient “cultures” of Egypt, Greece and Rome. Culture is something in which things grow and evolve. Under the word “culture,” Roget’s Thesaurus lists: “society, civilization, trait, mores, value systems, ethos, refinement, civility, enlightenment, education, gentility, tastefulness, elegance, intellectuality, erudition, tilling soil, nations,” etc.

We human beings are both the creators — and the products — of cultures. Culture includes anything that’s going on in our society, i.e., anything that people are thinking, doing and saying.

Belonging to our “culture” are such diverse things as our educational standards, manners, what’s playing at the local movie theater and on the TV, our crime, our punishment of criminals, our athletic codes, and our politics here and abroad.

As Lord Raglan put it, “Culture is roughly anything we do, and monkeys don’t.” “Man is a political animal,” said Aristotle in “Politics.” And humanity is evolving all the time — the individual person as well as the human race.

I can remember the Roaring ’20s – the culture of my early childhood – complete with flappers in short skirts doing the Charleston, and chanting “voh dough, voh dough dough-dee oh dough.”

The Crash in 1929 and the long Depression afterwards ushered in a new culture wherein my b.w.’s old New York friend Jay Gorney made himself many a welcome dollar with his song: “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

My college years were in the “Swing Era” of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller.

In 1938, Britain’s Neville Chamberlain appeased Hitler by caving in to his demands in Munich. “Appeasement” didn’t work. It promised “peace in our time,” but only postponed dealing with a bigger, more terrible reality: war. The worst had come. Dec. 7, 1941 brought the new wartime culture, in which concepts and attitudes changed overnight. Soon our culture spotlighted millions in uniform, hard work (“Rosie the Riveter”), patriotism (“Remember Pearl Harbor!”), liberty bond rallies, the “Stage Door Canteen,” Bob Hope’s USO tours, Clark Gable as the tail-gunner and real-life bomber over Germany, blackouts, rationing, and long lists of young American dead.

Suddenly — in one package— came victory and the Atomic Age! Our postwar “culture” combined long-sought blessings and an enigmatic curse. The same two bombs that ended World War II had killed thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Americans hoped that the awesome new atomic power would be “handled with care.” The war’s end brought humanity the new contradictory dilemma of good and evil residing side-by-side in the single element: uranium. The mushroom cloud became the symbol of a new terrible culture on Earth, where the gains in physical science were not sufficiently matched by concomitant gains in human morality. Atomic power’s ability to light a city also — infelicitously — holds the ability to blow the place to smithereens.

A dear friend, a writer, once told me something to this effect, “You and I have lived many different lives. We had whole existences before we ever heard of an atomic bomb. Our culture changed overnight. A writer cannot for a minute be oblivious to the culture he lives in, and writes in. He’s like an amoeba growing in it. There’s an old song that’s called, ‘The song is you.’ Well, the culture is you too.” He and I were two young artists who were lucky to survive years in uniform, and go on to do our life’s artistic work. When we were enabled to grow strong enough, we enfranchised our “discontent with the status quo” and – presto change-o! – a new culture was born. The French say, “The more things change the more they remain the same.” Change is “the way of life.”

Non-changers are condemned to join the extinct dinosaur.

Michelangelo is said to have spoke pragmatically to culture-seekers: “The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that we aim too low and we reach it.”