Culture As Cop

“Culture, then, is the outward discipline in which inherited meanings and morality, beliefs and ways of behaving are preserved . . . It is what tells us what owning a Cadillac means, what significance being gay has, how we can measure someone whom we learn is a doctor, an engineer, a street artist, or homeless. It is what gives us our inner coordinates, the markers beside the trail that, from infancy onward, slowly leads us to civilized life. Culture never manages to mow down the verdant undergrowth of human lawlessness, of course; it simply forces it out of sight. It sublimates what is dark and wanton, or, if it cannot manage to do that, it exacts penalties for unwanted public displays.” [David Wells, No Place for Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 167.]