A recent arrival in the office of The New Criterion announced, via the cozy medium of a form letter, the birth of a new academic publication. Now being born by the University Museum of Archeology/Anthropology out of the University of Pennsylvania, Public Culture will be a journal devoted to reporting and reflecting “current research on the cultural transformations associated with cities, media, and consumption.” This reportage is to include “such cultural forms as cinema, video, television, sports, restaurants, domestic tourism, advertising, fiction, architecture, and museums.”

“Well—there it is,” as the Emperor of Austria wittily remarked in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus. The definition of culture, hitherto so circuitous, clumsy, and confused in the works of Coleridge, Arnold, Raskin, Pater, and Eliot, has now been provided for us in a very few word-processed lines. The road thus traversed has led from self-improvement to self-description, and in so doing has taken us from self-aspiration to self-congratulation.

It is tempting indeed to mock the present entombment of culture and civilization in anthropology and sociology. Unlike most temptations, this one should not be resisted. What is at stake here is not the preservation of upscale entertainment for upscale earners, or the unthinking museumification of all man-made things so blithely recommended by New York University President John Brademas some years ago in a speech to an international conference on art museums in (of all places) Italy. What is at stake is nothing less than the survival of the life of the mind, a life lived not by what Edward Shils has called “Fachidioten” (specialty-idiots) but by full participants in the daily routines of mankind—earning a living, providing for a family, and deciding the political organization of society.

One might have thought that the renascence of this life of the mind could be set in motion by an invocation of the reigning creator-deities of civilization: the poets, artists, musicians, and philosophers made permanent in great books, art, and institutions. Now, thanks to the work of the erstwhile protectors of civilization—among whom must now be counted the University of Pennsylvania—such invocations fall on deaf ears. And so a double work is necessary. First, a relentless criticism of the degradation of standards by those appointed (and self-appointed) to preserve art and learning; second, a painstaking attempt to unearth, explain, and clean what now seems very much like a lost canon. In this effort, the greenery that now grows on the University of Pennsylvania looks less like ivy than poison ivy.