There is no way to predict the
content of our cultural vocabulary in a thousand years, although I imagine that
a hundred years from now, the traditional part of it—Moses, Don Quixote,
Abraham Lincoln, biblical and Shakespearean aphorisms—will mostly be intact.
The more recently a cultural reference has entered our cultural vocabulary, however,
the more likely it will disappear. It is likely we will remain loyal to Abraham
and Faust, but perhaps not to J. R. Ewing and Stephen Hawking.
It’s also safe to predict
that for the foreseeable future, cultural ephemera will appear and disappear at
an in ever-increasing rate. There are
just so many inputs to our cultural vocabulary nowadays, including
advertisements, television shows, movies, pop music, celebrity culture and
political scandals, in addition to works of high culture like serious drama,
classical music, literary novels and scientific advances. The mixing of
cultures adds to the inputs: African, Latin, Indian, Chinese and Japanese and other
cultural references seep into any western culture much more readily and easily
than during medieval times.
Beyond predicting
the probable sources of change in our cultural vocabulary, we can’t say much
about the future. For one thing, it’s possible that government and large
organizations will exercise more social control in the future and freeze the
development of our cultural vocabulary. Or perhaps somewhere today lives a
woman or man destined to found a new religion and thus join Moses, Buddha,
Mohhamad and Confucius as important religious figures with whom virtually every
adult has familiarity. No one could have guessed in 600 CE that most people
around the world would know something about Mohammad. Julius Caesar in 60 BCE
was merely another scurrilous politician and the richest man in Rome, not the
embodiment of empire and imperialism.
We can identify the
processes by which our cultural vocabulary will evolve, but it’s impossible to
predict what its actual contents will be in the future. In a thousand years, will
audiences smile knowingly on hearing the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth?
Will Odysseus still serve as a symbol of the clever and Isaac as a symbol of
the pious? Will people still look at “Guernica” and say, “Yes, Picasso.”
And what about Mean Joe Greene, Joe Isuzu and Mrs. Olsen? Will they still make people think of soda pop, automobiles and coffee in a thousand years? Will they have been reduced to their emotional essence and symbolize friendship, oily rascality and neighborliness? Or will they be as forgotten as Queen Blanche, Bertha of the Big Foot and the other ladies of times past whom the 16th century French poet Francois Villon compared to the snows of yesteryear?
And what about Mean Joe Greene, Joe Isuzu and Mrs. Olsen? Will they still make people think of soda pop, automobiles and coffee in a thousand years? Will they have been reduced to their emotional essence and symbolize friendship, oily rascality and neighborliness? Or will they be as forgotten as Queen Blanche, Bertha of the Big Foot and the other ladies of times past whom the 16th century French poet Francois Villon compared to the snows of yesteryear?
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