Athenian View

When ex-Foreign Minister Carlos Lozano y Lozano, 43, recently returned from a visit to U.S. universities, a reporter asked him for his opinion on culture in the north. His views, printed last week in the tabloid Sabado, and later amplified in a Bogota lecture:

The Americans are the Romans of today. Material greatness, technical perfection, millionaires and beautiful women combine to divert the eyes [from] a soul essentially young and simple.

University education is mediocre, due first to overemphasis on sports, second to lack of a scale of values. The practical-minded American law schools turn out lawyers but no jurists. Medical schools emphasize laboratory and Xray, not European clinical methods of study.

After Franklin, American culture fell back, except for Whitman and Poe, while the Americans invaded the west. Right now Americans are trying culture once more. American music, buildings and books lack the refinement of older civilizations, but it is because the people are immature and it is impossible to demand intellectual penetration as yet. We are older than the North Americans, much older. . . . [But] culture comes after wealth. . . . Although there is no Goethe, no Shakespeare, no Kant, no Velasquez on the American scene, thousands of people are working hard, trying.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.