The culture of any age consists of the feelings, habits, customs,
activities, thoughts, ambitions and dreams of a people. It is a
composite picture of their homes, their work, their arts, their
pleasures and the other channels of their life-expression.
The culture of each age has two aspects. On the one hand there is the
established or accepted culture of those who dominate and
control,--the culture of the leisure or ruling class. This culture is
respected, admired, applauded, and sometimes even worshipped by those
who benefit from it most directly. Civilization--even life itself
seems bound up with its continuance. When the advocates of the
established culture cry "Long live the King!" they are really shouting
approval of royalty, aristocracy, landlordism, vassalage, exploitation
and of all the other attributes of divine right. The world as it is
becomes in their minds, synonymous with the world as it should be. For
them the old culture is the best culture.
On the other hand there is the new culture, comprising the hopes,
beliefs, ideas and ideals of those who feel that the present is but a
transition-stage, leading from the past into the future--a future that
they see radiant with the best that is in man, developing soundly
against the bounties that are supplied by the hand of nature. These
forward looking ones, impatient with the mistakes and injustices of
to-day, preach wisdom and justice for the morrow. So imperfect does
the present seem to them, and so obvious are the possibilities of the
future, that they look forward confidently to the overthrow of the old
social forms, and the establishment, in their places, of a new
society, the embryo of which is already germinating within the old
social shell.
The old culture relies on tradition, custom, and the normal
conservatism of the masses of mankind, The new culture relies on
concepts of justice, truth, liberty, love, brotherhood. Eighteenth
century, Feudal France was filled with the prophecies of a form of
society that would supplant Feudalism. Nineteenth century Russia, in
the grip of a capitalist bureaucracy, proved to be the centre for the
revolutions of the early twentieth century. The new culture, growing
at first under the shadow of the old, gradually assumes larger and
larger proportions until it takes all of the sunlight for itself,
throwing the old culture into the shadow of oblivion.
Each ruling class knows these facts,--knows that the old must give
place to the new; knows that the living, ruling culture of to-day will
be the history of the day after tomorrow, yet because of the vested
interests which they rely upon for their power, and because they are
satisfied to have the deluge come after them, they oppose each
manifestation of the new culture and strain every nerve to make the
temporary organization of the world permanent. The more vigorously the
new culture thrives, the more eagerly do the representatives of the
old order strive to destroy it.