‘Notes Towards the Definition of Culture’: An Elegy for a Fading Order
A review of ‘Notes Towards the Definition of Culture’, by T. S. Eliot; Faber & Faber, 1948.
Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture is a modest little book. First published in 1948, the year Eliot won the Nobel Prize,it is well-argued, elegantly put, and coloured by a faint vexation with the state of things. Its author’s poetic instincts by this point had hardened—his last major work, the sublime ‘Four Quartets’, was published five years before—and was concerning himself chiefly with criticism and plays. Notes is more well-rounded than its name suggests, and it reads like a hundred-page effort to capture the meaning of a word. At bottom, however, it is a case for the perpetuation of the class system, without which, Eliot says, a truly high culture is impossible to have.
Eliot was a self-described conservative and Anglo-Catholic who at the time of writing Notes had long stopped caring what other people thought. What obsessed him was the preservation of a culture he saw as good and worth preserving, which was why he affirmed cultural continuity, tradition, hierarchy, and authority. We have the sense reading Notes that Eliot knows his England is slipping through his fingers like sand. Hence the tone is—in spite of what we must assume were Eliot’s intentions—anxious, if not doleful.
Eliot was a self-described conservative and Anglo-Catholic who at the time of writing Notes had long stopped caring what other people thought.
He opens with the claim that ‘culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living’. This is a lovely idea, if vague; though as Eliot shows us attempts to put one’s finger on the meaning of the word culture invariably end up seeming vague. Rather than defend his assertion or claim it as complete, Eliot proceeds to circle the question what culture is, growing closer and closer with every pass. As he does so, his inquiry expands: Can culture endure modernity? How does the mass media shape culture? Is democracy good or bad for culture?
Culture, Eliot says in the early chapters, is not just a collection of artistic achievements. It permeates everything: religion, family life, education, manners, the economy. It is, as it were, the water in which a people swim: it flows in and through everything. Setting it against politics, say, or commerce, is a mistake. And it is not one unvarying ‘thing’. There are élite and popular forms of culture which are interdependent, bound together by history, tradition and values. The aristocracy may not inspired admiration, but it as a class embodies continuity. Without it, Eliot thinks, cultural decay is certain, for cultural transmission and refinement require stability, education and leisure—as Aristotle argued.
Culture, Eliot says in the early chapters, is not just a collection of artistic achievements. It permeates everything: religion, family life, education, manners, the economy.
From here, we venture into more political territory. Eliot is wary of liberal democracy, which he sees as the great leveller, bound to iron out the creases in the social fabric and to weaken a people’s culture as the outcome. He is unimpressed by nationalism, which he views as a poor, destructive substitute for culture, and by cultural uniformity across nations. This he sees as dangerous and shallow. Indeed, all cultures, like all classes, needs rivals: both to look down on and look up to. Welsh culture depends on its English counterpart; English culture depends on the French. Contrast has a clarifying effect. Greek and Persian, Christian and pagan, Catholic and Protestant—cultures develop best in tension: when a culture has no rival, it becomes complacent, self-satisfied, and decadent. Eliot’s great worry here is the universalising tendency of the ruling ideas of his time, but also whether culture can survive in a culture of cheap pleasure.
In the final pages Eliot comes back to the idea that culture is a spiritual, social inheritance. Religion is its ‘essential foundation’; and though language and custom might shape culture, it cannot survive or flower without a shared religious worldview. Europe, for Eliot, is fundamentally Christian, and without Christianity, it will become sterile, ornamental or ideological. He urges the reader to see that culture—his culture—cannot be made or legislated into being. It is largely unconscious, and must grow slowly from the soil of religion, history and memory. A non-culture, or anti-culture or failing culture, would therefore include purely secular societies and societies that had successfully privatised religion. Insofar as religion could nourish and animate culture at all, it would be through the lives of individuals:
‘It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe — until recently — have been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all of our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning.’
Religion is its ‘essential foundation’; and though language and custom might shape culture, it cannot survive or flower without a shared religious worldview.
Eliot comes to us in Notes as neither prophet nor reformer. In fact there is something palpably detached about Eliot’s stance on culture: he will live as he lives, but the world in which he lives is changing and he is not going to try to change it back. He is like the man sweeping the floor of a chapel long after the congregation has left. On show here is a restrained, patrician kind of conservatism: quiet, regretful, and deeply rooted. His hope, it seems, is that others grasp what they are giving away. Hence he is not calling for a return to the past but a kind of reckoning with the present.
It may strike you as somewhat paradoxical that Eliot believes each class in society to be equally important, yet affirms class hierarchy. No culture can flower without popular participation; in this sense, the lowest class, with the greatest number of members, is the heart of any given culture. And yet it is the upper class which, with its members’ assumption of social superiority and abundance of leisure time, is chiefly responsible for refining the culture. High culture is the rearticulation and perfection of folk culture at a more conscious, reflective level. This calls to mind the ‘mixed constitution’ or ‘Aristopopulism’ of Patrick Deneen who argues for a society in which ‘the few’ affirm and advance the common-good conservatism that is instinctive to ‘the many’.
No culture can flower without popular participation; in this sense, the lowest class, with the greatest number of members, is the heart of any given culture.
But surely, you may claim, the ‘classless society’ imagined by Marx is preferable to this apparent ranking of society’s members? Eliot’s view is that a classless society, should one ever come about, would end up ‘dominated exclusively by élites’. He distinguishes between the aristocracy and the élite class. The latter consists of managers and scientific experts—what we might today called technocrats—who, in the absence of the former, have outsize influence over the direction of society in all respects, including religion, education and culture. This élite, Eliot writes, will not belong to a single class and so will have no culture in common. What they will share are only conscious, verbal, rational beliefs and commitments. Consequently, they ‘will consist solely of individuals whose only bonds will be their professional interest: with no social cohesion, with no social continuity.’ United only by the most conscious part of their personalities (culture being largely unconscious), they will ‘meet like committees’. James Burnham, in his The Managerial Revolution, also warned of the rise of a rootless élite with no real collective relationship with the surrounding order.
I will leave you, reader, to decide if these predictions were correct. Certainly there is a widespread feeling among the public—not just in England, but across continental Europe and the United States—that a small group of rootless, unaccountable, ‘Anywheres’ (to use David Goodhart’s term) have been making choices behind closed doors with little concern for the wants and needs the majority. If this is true, then it would go some way to proving Eliot and Burnham right; for they foresaw that managers and scientific experts would come to direct national matters, seeing all problems as technical problems. Unbound by shared class loyalty, they would be united only by their rationalism. What neither predicted, perhaps, was the effect of globalisation, which in the eyes of the demos has made the nation itself into a class of some larger region or supranational body. For one sympathetic to Reform UK, the Rassemblement National, or the Fratelli d’Italia, the problem is not that these élites aren’t part of the same class, but that they feel more loyalty towards a made-up global community than they do to their countries of origin. The ultimate expression of this élite member is what Peter S. Goodman dubbed ‘Davos man’, whose decisions have made him rich at the expense of—for instance—the American steelworker, or the Italian textile manufacturer.
There is a widespread feeling among the public that a small group of rootless, unaccountable, ‘Anywheres’ (to use David Goodhart’s term) have been making choices behind closed doors with little concern for the majority.
So goes the argument, in any case. My own view is that the surrounding symbolic order we inhabit—the order that consists of those pre-political, pre-rational commitments that lend legitimacy to institutions and solidity to our sense of self—is breaking down. Absent any kind of shared background of meaning, we find ourselves unable to settle our disputes, for at bottom they rest on completely different assumptions. Hence why our disagreements spill over into outright cultural warfare. Our very understanding of what constitutes identity is a point of frothy-mouthed dispute. The state, often through the legislature, steps in to resolve our fiercest differences of opinion and keep the peace. But the law, too, depends on this shared symbolic order for its aura of ‘rightness’. Hence we find people saying quite openly that they will simply ignore the law. Something has to give. It may well be the case that liberal democracy, hailed by Francis Fukuyama as the system at ‘the end of history’, will turn out only to have lasted about 70 years.
But I digress. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture is striking not because it offers answers but because it asks questions with uncommon precision. It shows us that culture is not the sum of its entertainments but complex and organic and fragile, as well as the container, as it were, for the symbolic order I have just discussed. It was out of its step with its time but, curiously enough, it is in some ways well-suited to ours.
