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Re: CULTURE and the "City"

Written by Rood at 11 Apr 2003 05:54:50:

As an answer to: Re: CULTURE written by Ivan at 11 Apr 2003 04:41:50:


>>The word is "culture". A civilization is just a way of life. A culture is a way of making that life beautiful. There was a Frenchman who said that the United States is the only country to have gone from barbarism to decadence without any culture inbetween. He wasn't too far off.

>Well, I'll let that swipe at we Americans pass. I thought of culture, but that really embraces an even broader concept of socialization than civilization, After all, even hunter-gatherer tribes have cultures, really quite fully developed ones. They are literally not civilized - not in the sense so misused of being tame, but in the "civitas" sense of living in cities. I am looking for something beyond civilized - in an earlier age, we might have said noble, I suppose, but that does not work in a democratic age.


What is this about the "city"?

Abel was a wanderer with his sheep. Cain was a farmer, settled, and "civilized". After Cain "killed" his brother, he away from the presence of God, dwelling in the land of Nod, east of Eden, where he built a city.

Give me the culture of a man in touch with the earth and with Nature over any superficial cityscape. Civilization you will find there, but rarely, if ever, culture. The city denies its birthright, the earth. I have never lived in one, a city, and I never will. They are hideous antheaps, all nervous motion, without purpose.


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