If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it is obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the death of each of its constituent members is as certain as if an epidemic took them all at once. But the graded difference in age, the fact that some are born as some die, makes possible through transmission of ideas and practices the constant reweaving of the social fabric. Yet this renewal is not automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group will relapse into barbarism and then into savagery. In fact, the human young are so immature that if they were left to themselves without the guidance and succor of others, they could not acquire the rudimentary abilities necessary for physical existence. The young of human beings compare so poorly in original efficiency with the young of many of the lower animals, that even the powers needed for physical sustentation have to be acquired under tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with respect to all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral achievements of humanity!
The Collected Works of John Dewey: The Complete Works
To summarize all of the essays I’ve placed here up to this one: I’m confused by genres. Maybe it’s my tendency to think in spectra instead of delineated categories. Law, scripture, and fiction all appear to exist on a gamut to me. Which is fine. But maybe I haven’t properly understood the distances. Where we can, for our purposes, draw boundaries.
In Candor and Perversion, Roger Shattuck’s eighth thesis asks us,
In order to affirm literature in its full humanist sense, let us eschew the freestanding text. Its indiscriminate use today provides evidence of deadening stylistic conformity. Rather, let us take advantage of the full range of terms like book, work, poem, play, novel, essay, passage, chapter, and the like. There is no need to modify serviceable expressions like “the text of” a work, and “sacred texts.” But let us refrain from endorsing, indirectly and inadvertently, the doctrine of textuality by chanting “text” in every other line of what we say and write.
Shattuck and Camille Paglia diagnose a problem with US culture to be a failure to do what Dewey describes above. I have a friend who studies eighteenth century English novels. He knows a lot about the development of epistolary novels. He can tell you about Clarissa. But sometimes talking with him about literature, I feel very sad. He has the expertise of the specialist, but he doesn’t seem to care about the cultural significance of myth and ritual.
Isn’t it interesting how a document can affect someone’s behavior? I think that is fundamentally what compels me, and I think it’s because of something missing in my development. I’m looking for some standards. So I look at law, at procedures, at scripture. I look periodically at fiction, but I usually find that wanting. I’m rereading Klinkenborg’s novel Timothy. I’m in love with it at the moment.