Inoculating Culture

In one apologetic work by Jaime Balmes, the following grim, Ecclesiastes-like passage can be found:

Man advances in nothing without painful toil; he never reaches the point he desires without many wanderings, which fatige him; in everything it is realised that the earth, instead of fruit, gives him briars and thistles. Has he to discover a truth? He shall not come at it except after many extravagant errors. Has he to bring an art to perfection? Hundreds and hundreds of useless attempts will fatige those who occupy themselves with it, and it is fortunate if the grandchildren reap the fruit of what their grandfathers sowed. Has the social and political organisation of a State to be improved? Bloody revolutions precede the desired regeneration; and the unfortunate country, after prolonged sufferings, is frequently left in a worse state than it groaned in before. Has the civilisation and culture of one people to be communicated to another? The inoculation must be effected with fire and sword; entire generations are sacrificed to obtain a result which but very distant ones shall see.

I was struck by the use of the word "inoculation". It seems oddly... technical, clinical. Incongruous in its context. Mark Twain experienced a similar reaction to clerical language (chapter XXVIII of The Innocents Abroad) when a Capuchin monk gave him a tour of an ossuary, all the while explaining the sad stories behind such-and-such bone:

This business-like way of illustrating a touching story of the heart by laying the several fragments of the lover before us and naming them, was as grotesque a performance, and as ghastly, as any I ever witnessed. I hardly knew whether to smile or shudder. There are nerves and muscles in our frames whose functions and whose methods of working it seems a sort of sacrilege to describe by cold physiological names and surgical technicalities, and the monk's talk suggested to me something of this kind. Fancy a surgeon, with his nippers lifting tendons, muscles and such things into view, out of the complex machinery of a corpse, and observing, "Now this little nerve quivers--the vibration is imparted to this muscle--from here it is passed to this fibrous substance; here its ingredients are separated by the chemical action of the blood--one part goes to the heart and thrills it with what is popularly termed emotion, another part follows this nerve to the brain and communicates intelligence of a startling character--the third part glides along this passage and touches the spring connected with the fluid receptacles that lie in the rear of the eye. Thus, by this simple and beautiful process, the party is informed that his mother is dead, and he weeps." Horrible!

That passage by Twain reminds me in turn of Socrates' stated distaste in the Phaedo for Anaxagoras' philosophy, which he considers too mechanistic:

What hopes I had formed, and how grievously was I disappointed! As I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind or any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and water, and other eccentricities. I might compare him to a person who began by maintaining generally that mind is the cause of the actions of Socrates, but who, when he endeavored to explain the causes of my several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would say, are hard and have ligaments which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posture: that is what he would say, and he would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence

We resent when the coldness of scientific terminology intrudes in our lamentations. We dislike being reminded that we are but machines of flesh, sinew and bone.

(later) Apparently, inoculate also means "to imbue (a person), as with ideas". Maybe that's the meaning Balmes intended.

On the other hand, the book was written in the first half of the nineteenth century (couldn't find the exact date), and around that time there had already been vaccination campaigns against smallpox in Spain and the colonies. Perhaps the vaccination/conquest metaphor was suggested by the memory of the Balmis Expedition of 1803...