Lingua Franca/Canon/Universal Culture

12/09/2024

Is there such a thing as a “Universal Culture”? Why read “the classics”? And, why do I write in English?

Recently I’ve been really interested in the idea of a classical education, both for homeschooling my children, as well as to cultivate myself. I studied English Literature in university, so I’m not exactly starting from zero, but I still feel that I lack a lot of readings in the classics, or the “canon”. When I was younger I used to dismiss the idea, I was only interested in reading modern and contemporary literature, and maybe found a few medieval works interesting too; I felt that the curriculum had way too much “canonical” literature. Now I’m thinking it didn’t have enough. It’s funny how that has changed. I used to think “what can those dusty old books that no one reads anymore tell me about myself, about my time and my current condition?” Well, first, “no one reads them anymore?” maybe that’s a big part of the problem; and what they can tell us about our current times is actually a lot of things. The works of literature and art in general that have stood the test of time are still there precisely because they say something that is universal and timeless in some way or another, something that speaks about the themes and ideas, fears and passions, that have not changed in time but have stayed with us throughout the changes of History and culture. Permanence, in a word.

But is there a single comprehensive, authoritative list of all the things that one should read to consider themselves cultivated? Well, no, but… kinda. Does this list depend on where you were born, what is your native tongue, what is you culture? Well, yes, but actually, not entirely –at least if you consider yourself to be a part of the broader “Western” culture.

As a Mexican, I’ve been forced to think about this. The fact that, even though I’ve been taught –I might almost say indoctrinated with but that starts to sound political– a certain amount of nationalism and pride for how great my culture and my History are, in the real world, the world of the broad “West” and the current human civilization as a whole, the weight and influence of Mexican culture, even the whole hispanic culture, is very little, almost nill. If you look at some of the big compilations of “the classics” that have been published in English like The Great Books of the Western World or The Harvard Classics, it’s kind of amazing to see how little they include of works written in Spanish. Of course, they recognize that their collection is mainly targeted at readers from the US and Britain, but they nonetheless claim to be compiling a collection of the “classic” literary works that have in some way shaped the culture of the West.

In the years that have passed after leaving school and university I’ve mostly gotten over that nationalism (mostly), and I have no problem recognizing that that is just the way it is. It’s just something I ponder on sometimes.

Mortimer Addler, the creator of The Great Books of the Western World collection called it “joining the Great Conversation”, a conversation that spans not only across geography but also time. If you want to join the great conversation you have to have this cultural background that is shared in space and time. In the same way that if you want to communicate with people around the world, you need to speak and read a common language.

The concept of lingua franca is closely related to that of a universal cultural canon. It means a language, either alive or dead, that peoples of many different nations and cultures use to communicate with each other, even if this is not the native language of either of them. For example: if I, a Mexican, were to meet a person from, say, Germany, I don’t speak German, and odds are they don’t speak Spanish; most likely we would communicate in English.

This can also be a “dead language”; like in the Middle Ages, the lingua franca was Latin (there is some debate whether or not Latin in the Middle Ages should really be considered dead or not). During Roman times, it was actually Greek. Before the 20th century I guess it was French and also English. But nowadays, I think there is no dispute that English is the lingua franca of the western world.

This is most evident if you spend a lot of time reading on the Internet. I sometimes look for information in Spanish, but I have the enormous fortune of being functionally bilingual and I can see the great advantage it is being able to access all the content in English. The amount of content (yes, both trash and quality alike) produced in English compared to Spanish is probably 10 to 1. In spite of the fact that Spanish is something like the second most used language on the Internet and one of the most important per population in the world too. I can only imagine the difference it makes to anyone else who speaks natively any other language. The only reason Spanish is so spread out is because of the colonial past we share in Latin-America, but in terms of outward influence to the wider world, there is very little.

I used to feel a certain moral obligation to write in Spanish, to write for “my people”, as well as to actively look for content written in Spanish just for the sake of supporting the creators with my attention and my clicks, I suppose. But I’ve come to realize that I care more about being part of this great conversation of the Internet. Nationality is a fiction, really. It’s not that I dont care about my contry and fellow Mexicans, but you can love something or someone without necessarilly thinking they are objectively the most interesting or important thing in the world. I guess what I’m saying is I care less about what makes me Mexican than what makes me human. And also because I care about what makes me human, not just right now, in the present, but also atemporaly, in History, that’s why I’m interested in reading the classics and I think you should too.