WHAT IS CULTURE?

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21415, 6 March 1935, Page 7

WHAT IS CULTURE?

! TO THIS BDITOa OF TUT. PKXS3. \ Sir.--In his excellent (so for as it i ::c>e*n address to Fotar.v. recorded in i "The Preys'" of Friday, the Rev. AJan j WVhl-oii. after dealing with the ideals ■..f truth and beauty, remarks of the ihird ideal of goodness thai there is ng vet no common agreement on the particular aspect of goodness which appeals most, to women and men of the twentieth century. At the same time, if we listen in to Radio-Centre, Moscow, we find the word "culture" cropping up in all sorts of connexions. 1 wonder whether we might equate "culture" and "goodness" and ask the pertinent question: "What is, or will be, or ought to be, the peculiar characteristic of twentieth century culture?" Or, more simply, "What is culture?" May I in a few words answer my own question in order to invite criticism? T think that the peculiar characteristics of culture, that which distinguishes all people to whom this word may be applied to-day. is "kindness." "Cruelty" is the great distinguishing mark of the uncul- i tured. As J. C. Powys says: | There is no sin but cruelty . . . The one command of Culture is "Thou shall not be cruel." The only thing the cultured person cannot overlook is cruelty. If this attitude towards culture be sound, then we can say at once that no one who is not consciously doing his individual best to lessen the area of cruelty and extend the area of kindness can be accounted "cultured" to-day. Can a man be cultured and anxiously advocate the continuance of a social system that produces automatically the cruel facts of unemployment and war? Can a woman be accounted cultured who wears ermine or fur garments when she knows or should know the cruel pain which the animals \Vh,ich produce the ermine and the fur have to bear? The usual way to catch ermine is to place a steel bar covered with a fat which the ex-mine likes out in the open air in the cold north. The result is that the tongue of the ermine freezes to the steel bar, so that it is finally caught, or if it manages to escape minus a tongue it starves to death. Fur animals are caught in steel traps, and there is often time for them to gnaw off their paws before their captors revisit the traps, so that often such animals are caught with only one paw left. Only imagination, i.e., the faculty of mentally picturing things as they really are, can envisage the cruelty of the whole process. Can a woman or man be accounted cultured who can endure living on a blood diet (meat, fish, or fowl)? Can a woman or man be accounted cultured who can defend vivisection, the torture of the innocent and healthy for the sake of the guilty and unhealthy? As Romain Rolland says in "Jean Christophe": "If there exists a good God, then even the most humble of living things must be saved. If God is good only to the strong, if there is no justice for the weak and lowly, for the poor creatures who are offered up as a sacrifice to humanity, then there is no such thing as goodness, no such thing as justice." I suggest that kindness to all living beings, to the whole family of life, is one of the marks of twentieth century culture.—Yours, etc., N. M. BELL. March 5, 1935.