A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
Interpretation
A new culture requires a cleansing or refinement of humanity's current state.
Johan Huizinga's quote suggests that for a new culture to emerge and thrive, there must first be a significant transformation or purification within humanity itself. This implies that existing values, beliefs, and social norms may need to be critically examined and changed to allow for the establishment of a more progressive or enlightened society. The notion is that cultural growth is intricately tied to the moral and ethical state of its people.
In practice
During a lecture on cultural evolution, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of personal and societal transformation.
If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's.
The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.
Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.
The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment.
Football is to Texas what religion is to a priest.
Celebrity life and media culture are probably the most overbearing pop-cultural conditions that we as young people have to deal with, because it forces us to judge ourselves.
Culture is public, because meaning is
Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?
I was raised in an Irish-American home in Detroit where assimilation was the uppermost priority. The price of assimilation and respectability was amnesia. Although my great-grandparents were victims of the Great Hunger of the 1840's, even though I was named Thomas Emmet Hayden IV after the radical Irish nationalist exile Thomas Emmet, my inheritance was to be disinherited. My parents knew nothing of this past, or nothing worth passing on.
Africa is our center of gravity, our cultural and spiritual mother and father, our beating heart, no matter where we live on the face of this earth.
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