The Vatican has recently approved of some considerable alterations of the Novus Ordo celebrated in the Mexican diocese of Chiapas. These alterations are put forward as springing from immemorial Mayan traditions. The controversy leads me to think again about what it means to have any kind of culture at all, especially as against the phenomena of the masses, which bid fair to make the world into one great Nowhere.

JOHNSTONE April 24: Bi... Foley, Timothy P Buy New $18.00 (as of 08:16 UTC - Details) How can you tell Nowhere from Somewhere? One sign is the stale whiff of the faculty lounge—an air of white wine and copier’s ink, left over from last week’s conference on traditional culture. You are then sure to find that what is left of tradition has been overtaken by scholars peddling the same nostrums in Scotland as in San Cristobal de las Casas. These nostrums they get not from close and reverent study of the past but from notions in the current air, such as a chirpy reporter reading from a cue card might pronounce on television.

That is why we would be shocked to find them recommending, precisely as a return to tradition, anything more warlike than our bland acceptance of safety first and last, more patriarchal than our sexual indifferentism, more ascetic than our assumption that happiness is a warm puppy, or more dynamically hierarchical than groups of complacent people sitting at a round table to discuss the feelings they imagine they have.

I do not like Nowhere. For the last twenty years, my family and I have spent much of our time in an outpost of Francophone Canada, on the Isle Madame, in Nova Scotia. The Acadians here have tried their hardest to preserve their language and their culture. I often hear people speaking French in the local grocery store or the hardware store. There is a French Mass every Sunday in one of the two churches remaining open, and an English Mass in the other, Notre-Dame de L’Assomption, at one time the cathedral church in the diocese. The windows and the Stations of the Cross in each of these churches are inscribed in French.

The province and the municipality fund a school wherein all classes are conducted in French; but a majority of children on the island attend the English school instead. Ethnically, the islanders are French, Irish, Scotch, Jerseyman, and Basque, in that order. That is not to mention the Micmac, the natives whom the French found when they arrived in the late sixteenth century. If you are French here, it’s as like as not that you have Micmac blood, because the French Catholics and the Micmac got along quite well after the centenarian sachem, Membertou, converted to the Catholic faith in 1610. The French and the Micmac had a common enemy, too, the British, and so did the Irish, of course, and the Scots, most of them from Catholic clans like the Campbells and the MacDonalds.

When we first came here, we expected French cuisine. But the Acadians have been here for a very long time and have developed their own cookery from what they could fish from the sea, shoot in the woods, and raise up on small farms. The first Acadian dinner I ever had on the island was moose pie, with a glass of yeasty moonshine made by our next-door neighbor. Woke: A Field Guide Fo... Johnstone, Caitlin Best Price: $20.37 Buy New $23.02 (as of 10:35 UTC - Details)

We also expected that the hymns sung at Mass would be not just in French, but genuinely French, from the past. No such thing. Nor were they Acadian, alas; no moose or moonshine in them. They were indistinguishable from the treacly stuff sung in English in almost every church in the United States. If anything, for a variety of reasons, the Church’s severance from centuries of Christian hymnody is more complete on the island than in America, so that, with the exception of Christmas carols and Eastertide hymns, it is unlikely that most of our French-speaking friends have, in many years, sung anything written before 1900, perhaps even before 1960.

I had thought, too, that the schools would introduce students to the riches of British or French literature, depending on the dominant language; but that also is not so. The Scots used to have a thriving culture mainly in the highlands and on the western side of Cape Breton; I have seen a substantial monthly magazine, printed in 1960, at least half of which was written in Gaelic, still the native language for some thousands of people. It is now no one’s native language. If you visit their old churches, you will see some inscriptions in Gaelic, but the only people who can read them will be those who have tried to learn the language, or a little of it, on their own.

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