‘Culture Counts’ Asks: What Is Culture — and Why Does It Matter?
‘Culture Counts’, by Sir Roger Scruton, reviewed.
Sir Roger Scruton died in early 2020, his standing as a thinker largely restored. He had been the victim of a hit-job by The New Statesman, his former employer, which cost him his role as co-chair of the Building Better, Building Beautiful commission, which promoted the use of traditional design for homes and neighbourhoods. The loss of his position was regrettable, for Sir Roger gave much of his life to architecture. He defended traditional building in debates (with Alain de Botton, Stephen Bayley and others) in books, (such as The Aesthetics of Architecture and The Classical Vernacular) and in films (such as Why Beauty Matters). His arguments were part of a wider mission to ‘re-enchant the world’, as he put it: to give life back its transcendental gloss which he believed had, with the advent of modernity, been stripped from it.
We find another expression of this mission in Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged. Sir Roger advances an argument for the protection and promotion of the concept of ‘high’ culture, as well as the promotion as such of that form of culture. In lucid and methodical fashion, he strives to define culture and its role in our lives; to defend cultural criticism; and to highlight what he sees as the poverty of modern cultural expression, from pop music to abstract art. In doing so, he plays up and affirms what he perceives as the rare richness of Western culture, shown in figurative painting, traditional building, and the works that comprise the literary canon. All of this may have fallen out of fashion; but for Sir Roger, rumours of its death have been exaggerated.
In doing this, he points to and affirms what he perceives to be the unusual richness of Western Culture, as expressed in figurative painting, for instance.
The central theme of Culture Counts is there in the title: that culture is not unimportant, and not reducible to what we do to distract ourselves from work. Rather, Sir Roger argues, culture is knowledge: but a knowledge of what to feel, and how to feel it. When reading Dante or Thomas Mann, watching Shakespeare or Sophocles, or listening to Bach or Mozart, we rehearse emotion, and thus become more emotionally intelligent. And we are given a means of exercising feelings without reference to self-centred interests. We learn therefore to see the world as containing intrinsic values — ones detached from our wants and needs. To preserve a cultural tradition for those who come after us is to pass on a reference point, and a tool for learning. But it is also to pass on the wisdom that we ourselves have gained from the works of which that culture consists.
The intellectual problems posed by such a project as Sir Roger’s are obvious: How to disprove the claims of relativism? How to explain the ‘cultured psychopath’ trope (put to good use in the Hannibal series and satirised by Ellis in American Psycho)? And how to explain its opposite: the ‘philistine philanthropist’? Sir Roger expects and addresses these problems and others in a more or less persuasive way, often (in answering the first) returning to the analogy of laughter. We agree that jokes are in good or bad taste, says Sir Roger, and this illustrates the role that cultural judgment plays in our lives.
Ostensibly in spite of his self-professed elitism, he writes always for the curious ordinary reader.
As others have pointed out, the very way in which Sir Roger expresses and develops his argument gives weight to his thesis. Ostensibly in spite of his self-professed elitism, he writes always for the curious ordinary reader, setting forth his point of view with a discipline and clarity that puts him at odds with so many academic writers, whose jargon-riddled writing seems been designed to cause a maximum of confusion. If Orwell is right in saying the enemy of clear writing is insincerity, then perhaps we ought to cultivate suspicion for those who lean too heavily on specialised language, or who retreat into a linguistic fog when challenged.
At just over a hundred pages, Culture Counts is a slim book, but one worth reading slowly. We may or may not agree with the author’s conclusions, but there is much to glean nonetheless from his explanation of culture, and his defence of the role it can and ought to play in our lives. If nothing else, Culture Counts may encourage those who find themselves lost for words when asked, having disclosed that they are studying, say, English literature, or another ‘liberal art’, ‘What are you going to do with that then?’ As Sir Roger elegantly sets out, the cultivated person sees meaning where others see facts; understands the limits of ‘relevant’ knowledge; and experiences a life of depth and richness, rather than one lived according to a practical calculus.
