Culture Undefined

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 515, 6 May 1949, Page 16

Culture Undefined

NOTES TOWARDS THE DEFINITION OF CULTURE. By T. §S. Eliot. Faber and Faber. 10/6.

{Reviewed by

J. C.

Beaglehole

HERE can have been few books ever written as unreviewable as this. It is not a big book. It is not a good book. It is not an easily-read book. Yet it is not a book easily disposed of, for it has the interest wae attaches to the struggles of any | good mind with a large and important | subject. The difficulty

of disposing of it seems to have afflicted other reviewers: I read three columns about it in the Times Literary Suppile- | Ment, and I -was not | -much farther forward then, except that I knew the reviewer respected Mr. Eliot, and wanted to be polite to him, and had been thrown back on-his heels more than once; so that I finished up not much wiser than when I started. Obviously I could not merely make a précis of the Times Literary Supplement. My own copy of the book is treated as no book should be treated by a cultured

| person-it is a mass of underlinings, | marginal aueries, exclamation marks, comments long and short, potted argument, references back and forth to contradictory statements, accusations of bad reasoning, as well as occasional ticks of agreement. All that can’t go into a review. ‘For the book has this

merit, that it provokes argument, and could well be taken as a _ startingpoint, irrespective of its real merits, for a study-

course on the meaning of "culture." Anybody who reads it for this purpose would be well-advised to start with the three broadcast talks to Germany on the unity of European culture, printed as an appendix; here Mr. Eliot has something to say worth saying, and says it simply and well. The rest of the book is not written simply, and it is not written well; it gives no impression of lucidity of thought, nor of depth, but of laboriousness, of labour rather clumsily-the word must be used -employed to justify Mr. Eliot’s prejudices. "My purpose in writing the following chapters," he says, "is not as might appear from a casual inspection of the table of contents, to outline a social or political philosophy; nor is the book intended to be merely a vehicle for my ‘observations on a variety of topics. My aim is to help-to define a word, the word culture." But he can’t help himself; the social and political philosophy is there all the while, in bits; Mr. Eliot

can’t help it, any more than Burke could help the social and political philosophy of Reflections on the French Revolution. )NE keeps thinking, indeed, of Burke; this is the sort of thing that Burke might have written if Burke had been reading sociological anthropology, . as well as brooding over modern democracy -and had not been able to write. © Mr. Eliot has Burke’s reverence for tradition, his awe for religion, his veneration for aristocracy as the embodiment of some

aspects of culture; he also, like Burke, makes the wildest generalisations, is violently and gratuitously contradictory and " wrong-headed, indulges in some eppallingly bad ‘history, and displays once or twice what can only be called a measure of intellectual snobbery. For instance: "The writer himself is not without political convictions and prejudices; but the imposition of them is no + part of his present intention. What I try to say is this: here are what I believe to be essential conditions for the growth and for the survival of culture. If they conflict with any passionate faith of the reader-if, for instance, he finds it shocking that culture and equalitarianism should conflict, if it seems monstrous to him that anyone should have ‘advantages of birth’-I do not ask him to change his faith, I merely ask him to stop. paying lip-service to cuJture." Is that arrogance or mere pettishness? It is embedded in a series of scrupulously reasonable preliminary observations,

Again, "It follows that we shall be taking the religious point of view, if we are atheists whose thinking is based on the assumption that all religions are untrue ... no one can wholly escape the religious point of view, because in the end one either believes or disbelieves"; or "the tendency in some quarters to reduce theology to such principles as a child can understand .or a Socinian accept, is itself indicative of cultural debility." Or take the following: "Culture-conscioushess as a means of uniting a nation against other nations was first exploited by the late rulers of Germany." (page 90); "the increasing assertion of one dominant Muscovite culture ... the Russians have been the first modern people to practise the political direction of culture consciously." (page 93). AY ELL, what is the general theme?for the book is statement rather than enquiry, Disentangling it as well as one can, one finds something like this: Culture is everything that makes a society a society. There-is a culture of the individual and of the group and of the region as well as of the whole society. The cultures of groups or classes, on different levels, make up the culture of society. The appropriate culture of each stratum is of equal importance. The culture of the highest level is of particular importance. Culture is religion, culture depends upon religion, culture is an incarnation of religion, culture is inconceivable without religion, there is such a thing as a culture severed from religion. The highest culture would be the culture of a truly Christian society. Culture cannot be taught, it must be inherited: "We cannot directly set about to create of improve cujture." A desirable culture is a class culture; an élite may be useful for government or other specialised functions, but it must not be confused with an upper class. A uniform culture over the whole of society is impossible, and it is an error to aim at it by education. Education should help to preserve the class and to select the élite. Modern educational practice and philosophy are wrong, for they aim at equality of rights and opportunity, and imply a disintegrated society. The highest culture depends on inequality and privilege, and privilege should be inherited. There are "superior political grades" of society. Diversity of cultures, within the whole culture, and diversity of sect, is valuable. Christian re-union may tnder certain circumstances accelerate and con‘firm the general lowering of culture. Now I do not want to be taken as guying the book, for it is a sincere book and it does say a number of true things and some valuable things as well as a number of confused and contradictory things. But I do not think that, really, it has much to contribute to a valid contemporary theory of culture. The trouble is, that Mr. Eliot has set out to give strict definition to one of the loos-est-fitting of all words. He was not unaware of the dangers of trying to impose a classical austerity upon this uncertain, this embarrassing, this dubiously vagrant conception. His deliberately austere manner does not conceal the fact that the dangers have had their way with him. He has not succeeded in manoeuvring into even verbal reconciliation: anthropology and the older universities, the Church of England and the social service state. (And I am. quite certain that a study of the religious advertisements in the Saturday editions of our newpapers would convince. him of our own cultural deliquescence-

though not many of them are Socinian; for there surely we have a free and easy equalitarianism.) Let us, therefore, take the book as a progress report. It needs re-thinking and re-stating. The poet, animated by a sense of duty, has after all written a political tract. There is indeed something nostalgic about Mr. Eliot; he wishes to define permanent values, but somehow he has got mixed up in the 18th Century. True, that is not a century that we can afford to despise. Culture lies in assimilation rather than in contempt. The fact nevertheless is incontrovertible, the 18th Century is gone. To attempt to revive its hierarchical civilisation would be as unwise as it would be vain,