(1)

(K.L.) ...With the birth of culture, something totally new comes into the world: the potential immortality of thought, of truth, of knowledge (comparable to the potential immortality which is transmitted by heredity to youth) to the extent that it perpetuates itself indefinitely. A whole people, a whole race, could now perish and yet its culture could subsist in libraries... such that another people, or even (beings from) another planet, might find it and know of and make use of the thought. There, indeed is the real immortality of the mind.

But, conversely, a culture can die even as its own people live on, and this is the danger today because the growth of, the expansion of, this immense accumulation of knowledge requires brains, requires books, requires traditions. Culture is not an idea which exists as if on some free-floating plane above man; It is man himself. I think a philosopher such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who enjoys a large popular audience today, can cause enormous damage to human thought.

(F. de T.) : Jean-Jacques Rousseau? Today? Why?

(K.L.): His idea according to which man, deprived of culture, would be a noble savage in paradise is absolutely crazy. Such a man would be a brute, would not be able to speak, would possess only a few rudiments of social behavior and would have taken a leap of two hundred thousand years backward. The youth of today sees very well that there are things which are obsolete. But what it doesn't see is that you can't build up an enormous mass of knowledge in a single generation. The danger is that many want to throw everything out and start over from scratch in the illusion that you can reconstruct the equivalent of all that. We could start over from scratch, but then, I repeat, we go backward, about two hundred thousand years before Cro-Magnon man, because the Cro-Magnon paintings are the culmination of a long tradition and the consequence of an enormous accumulation of knowledge. ...

(p. 61-63)

(2)

(K.L.): ...In my conferences in London, in New York, Stockholm, in Paris, in Chicago, I related all that and I found in return an enormous response. ...

(F. de T.) : What did you say to your student audiences?

(K.L.): I told them: "Beware! If you wipe the slate clean, you go back--you return--not to the Stone Age, because you are already there, but to a time well before the Stone Age." I would begin my lecture by explaining to the audience that I hoped to irritate not just the young but the elderly, too--- that my objective was to make myself detested by everyone.

(p. 64 )