Cultural Literacy and the Human Bond

What binds people together? At the personal scale, the answer takes the form of marriage, family, friendship. At large scales, it is about things like shared realities, shared worldview, shared values, shared language. People who share a religion feel a bond. People who root for the same team feel connected through their shared allegiance. And so do the patriots who share a loyalty to nation.

The concept of “Cultural Literacy” can be understood in terms of helping to meet the need both of individuals for connection and of the cultural world for cohesion.

People who have books they’ve read in common, movies they’ve seen, fables they’ve heard, literature they’ve read, myths they’ve learned—have a common language that can bring them to the same substantive space at the mere mention of a phrase. Just as people can talk with each other about concepts like “truth” and “love” and “death” because they share a language, so also can we talk about a planet’s having a Goldilocks climate, or talk about not killing “the goose that laid the golden eggs,” or talk about the framers of the American Constitution. “Ever since Adam and Eve” conjures up an image in the minds of a great many people, as do “the assassination of Lincoln,” and the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

There are the commonalities that education tries to instill because they are timeless markers of our cultural meanings, and then there are those commonalities that are shared by a particular generation, as each generation has its own historical experience.

For one generation, “Cary Grant” means something. For later generations, other icons emerge. People get bound to their generations, and share less common culture with those that went before and those that come after.

(I spoke with a bright 18-year-old who’d never heard of Frank Sinatra. And one of the pleasures that I and others find in living among people of our own generation is that we can connect with each other on the various elements of culture – the movies, the literature, the shared historical experience – that we absorbed because of the eras through which we lived.)

When I am with people for whom my cultural references mean nothing, I feel more alone. Sometimes it seems a failure of their education, if they don’t recognize some major image from the Bible, or some great line from Shakespeare, or a major piece of history (like what were the major sides in World War II). And sometimes it feels like we did not get formed in the same era (like when they’ve never heard of a great baseball player from the 1950s, and I’ve never heard of a rap artist they like).

But our shared cultural knowledge plays a far more vital role in a society’s life than baby-boomers reminiscing about watching the Lone Ranger or Howdy Doody. The important elements can serve as the invisible infrastructure of social cohesion.

When Abraham Lincoln spoke of America as a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he was drawing upon words already known to his listeners from the Declaration of Independence, and it was precisely that shared inheritance that allowed his brief speech at Gettysburg to bind a grieving nation more tightly to its founding purpose.

When someone conjures up the image of “Big Brother,” the millions who read Orwell’s 1984 hear immediately a warning about a modern oppressive surveillance state.

Much can be communicated in few words. A single prompt can download whole files from well-cultivated cultural memory.

When someone warns that a society risks becoming “a Tower of Babel,” those who know the biblical story immediately grasp the deeper meaning—that mutual incomprehension can undo a great collective enterprise—while those unfamiliar with it hear only an empty phrase.

Without that shared inheritance, a society may tilt toward disintegration— just like how that enterprise on the Tower of Babel failed, when the absence of a shared language destroyed a society’s ability to achieve their common purpose.

So, when we talk about the importance of educating our children to be culturally literate, it is not just to furnish them with answers to some game of Trivial Pursuits, or enable them to impress the people they meet. A much more important kind of furnishings are involved in supplying their minds with a rich treasury of important aspects of their culture, their society, their community. Together, the elements of that treasury help constitute the identity that they share with other members of the human groups of which they are part.

It is through that shared inheritance of meanings, stories, and symbols that people are able to understand one another deeply, and to participate in a common cultural and civic life. Without such shared substance in their minds, they would inhabit the same physical space but lack the deeper bonds that make them a people rather than merely a population for whom society is just a shared address rather than a bond of shared meaning.