Preserving the vibrancy of culture

I've spoken with a lot of pedantic and pompous people lately. You know the ones...who go on and on about some topic, thinking they know all the answers, when you realize not far into the conversation that they've not read anything new about that topic in a decade and don't realize or care that the discourse has moved on and left them behind.

I was thinking about such people when reading Raymond Williams' account of the need for culture to remain adaptable, flexible and vibrant. He believes that academics and intellectuals hold a particular place within culture, acting as the defenders for culture, but for the culture of the everyday and ordinary.

Williams says that culture is ordinary. It isn't something deliberately crafted and created by artistes and academics, but is instead the accumulated effect of numerous small everyday decisions and actions made by everyday, normal and ordinary people. He scorns the intellectual who patronizingly pontificates on the everyday culture of people, while still arguing for the need to preserve high end culture and educate and restrain the masses.

It matters also whether, in the inevitable tensions of new kinds of arguments and new kinds of claims, the defenders of reason and education become open to new and unfamiliar relationships, or instead relapse to their existing habits and privileges.

And he notes that intellectuals, academics and society leaders who do so would stifle culture because:

The culture that is then being defended is not excellence but familiarity, not the knowable but only the known values [p.8].

The open-mindedness and willingness to change that he exhorts all leaders and thinkers to embrace needs to stay front of mind for me as I prepare to enter into the thesis research part of my MA program.