Modern Culture
In Our Time
BBC
4.6 • 9.9K Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 1999
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Melvyn Bragg and guests debate the state of Modern Culture in the 20th century. Culture used to be a word we mocked, a concept too foreign for the stout empiricists of Britain, a species of foreign flummery. Now it is all around us. We have a ministry for it and a newspaper section boldly called Culture.Is contemporary culture evidence of a moral and aesthetic decline in our civilisation this century? Or does it show a society richer and more diverse than it has ever been?Will Self is one of the best known writers of his generation - celebrated as much for his erudite vocabulary as the shocking subject matter of some of his novels and short stories. Roger Scruton is one of the most celebrated philosophers of our age - known as much for his right -wing politics as for the passion with which he defends the past as a way of looking at the future. His latest book is An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, and he prefaces it by saying: “You don’t have to be familiar with the entire canon of western literature and full range of artistic masterpieces but you should have some familiarity with TS Eliot, Baudelaire, Mozart, Wagner, Monet, Poussin, Tennyson, Schoenberg, George Herbert, Goethe, Nietsche, and Marx.”With Will Self, writer and novelist; Roger Scruton, novelist, philosopher and Former Professor at Birkbeck College, London.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
| 0:18.0 | What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | Thanks for downloading the In Our Time Podcast. |
| 0:39.0 | For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co. UK forward slash radio for. I hope you enjoy |
| 0:46.5 | the program. Hello in the week in which Charles Saatchi launches his new invention, a school of contemporary British |
| 0:53.8 | artists he calls the young aerotics, and James Joyce's Ulysses has been |
| 0:58.1 | voted this century's classic novel in a national poll. I'm joined by the philosopher |
| 1:02.3 | Roger Scrutin and the writer |
| 1:03.4 | will self to debate the state of modern culture in the 20th century. Is |
| 1:07.7 | contemporary culture evidence of a moral and aesthetic decline in our civilization |
| 1:11.6 | this century or does it show a society richer and more diverse |
| 1:15.8 | than it's ever been. |
| 1:16.8 | Will Self is a writer whose ability to provoke, whether through his use of language or his |
| 1:21.1 | drug-taking past, has led him to being linked with the shock tactics of |
| 1:25.1 | young Brits like his friend at Damien Hurst. |
| 1:27.2 | His novels and short story collections like his latest. |
| 1:30.1 | Tough toys for tough-dough boys are darkly realistic and sometimes horrific, dealing with |
| 1:35.1 | the underbelly of modern culture. |
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