At the Start of the School Year — On the Margin of an Announcement

The following sentence in a school bulletin caught my attention: “We teach English and French because of our belief that the culture of Lebanon is Mediterranean.”

And I found myself moved to ask the writer what purpose he had in dragging Mediterranean culture into an announcement that applies to the majority of our schools.

Lebanon, like other countries passing through an era of cultural development, is trying to build for itself a culture drawn from its past and from the sciences and arts of the West. Does the writer mean Lebanon’s ancient culture or its modern one?

If he means the past, then our past culture is a mixture of the cultures of the conquering peoples who succeeded one another on the shores of the Mediterranean, and to which the antiquities of the museum in Beirut bear witness (Phoenician, Egyptian, Assyrian, Chaldean, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab remains) — and this mixture shows that our culture is not Mediterranean alone.

And if he means the present, then his phrase “French and English” itself undoes the Mediterranean idea. For English, or Anglo-Saxon, culture is not counted Mediterranean; it has a character that distinguishes it from the other cultures of Europe’s southern coast, however strong the interaction between the two blocs.

And if we suppose that our culture was Mediterranean in times past, must it remain so in our present age — an age whose most conspicuous feature is the blending of cultures and elements and the drawing together of peoples and civilizations, until the whole civilized world nearly comes to have a single culture, though the languages differ?

And are we the ones who choose our culture? Or do circumstances impose it upon us? This question leads us to the problem of freedom of choice among peoples, and makes us wonder how great that freedom really is.

French culture imposes itself upon us by force of proximity, history, propaganda, and the ease of travel, just as Anglo-American culture has begun to impose itself upon us too, for economic, political, and other reasons. Nor are we alone in this taking: these two cultures are, in the present age, the most widely spread of all cultures and the easiest to acquire. It is self-evident that they should seep easily — together with other, less widespread cultures, such as the Italian, the Spanish, the German, and perhaps the Russian — into our country, set at the crossroads of the continents.

A saying of Gandhi’s comes to me here: “I want the cultures of all nations to blow about my house as freely as possible, but I refuse to let any one of them sweep me off my feet.”

Every European could repeat this saying. For the culture of the Europeans has left no wellspring undrawn from — from the art of the Negroes and the Red Indians to the philosophy of India and the letters of China and Japan. But the distinction of the Europeans lies in their ability to melt down the elements they draw from others and dissolve them in a single crucible, until they merge completely with their culture and become part of it.

For the danger is not in taking and borrowing, nor in the multiplicity of the sources of culture. The danger is in a borrowing followed by no digestion and no assimilation. And the danger is in our becoming so infatuated with a single culture that it dominates us until it makes us lose our personality.