Back to the Waste Land

NOTES TOWARDS THE DEFINITION OF CULTURE (128 pp.)--T. S. Eliot--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

"My aim is to help to define a word, the word culture ... to rescue this word is the extreme of my ambition." So says Poet-Critic Thomas Stearns Eliot, 1948 Nobel Prizewinner, in the opening pages of his new book. But the reader who thinks this modest pronouncement means that dignified Poet Eliot is going to settle down to a donnish little tussle with Noah Webster had better brace himself for a shock. In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture Eliot advances a view of present-day western civilization that is as pessimistic as his famed post-World War I opus, The Waste Land. What's in a Word? U.S.-born T.S. Eliot migrated to England in 1914, and quickly became what he is today, the English-speaking world's most distinguished poet and literary critic, one of England's most conservative conservatives, and its most brilliant spokesman for Anglo-Catholicism, which he adopted in 1927. His finest critical works (Selected Essays; The Idea of a Christian Society) were addressed exclusively to literary and religious intellectuals.

But his new book is so simply written that any reader may grasp its hopeless message; and even those who furiously reject Eliot's thoroughly reactionary and dogmatic conclusions will be bound to agree that he has forced them into the healthy exercise of having to think furiously, too. Eliot's Notes starts by challenging people who use the word "culture" without ever pausing to think of what it means. To the average citizen, culture is a handy catchall into which to dump the arts, education, plumbing, science and any other pursuits that seem to be elements of modern civilization. To some philosophers it plainly represents "an interest in, and some ability to manipulate, abstract ideas." Peers of the realm tend instinctively to see culture as "urbanity and civility"; the grubbing archeologist sees it in the shape of the potsherds and tibias that he digs up in Papua and the Tigris valley.

No Gaiters, No Nietzsche.

Thus, says Eliot, is the grand total of the word culture smashed into bits and pieces of semitruths. To reassemble it and grasp its full significance, he insists, the western world must first realize that all aspects of culture are not only related to each other but must overlap and interlock in such a way that they form a living whole.

The mixture may look higgledy-piggledy at first glance: in England, for example, Eliot believes that culture includes "Derby Day . . . dog races . . . the dart board . . . boiled cabbage cut into sections . . . the music of Elgar." It also includes the English bishop's characteristic gaiters--in fact, religion and culture tend to become so intertwined that bishops appear to be "a part of English culture, and horses and dogs ... a part of English religion."

Eliot believes that there is a very good reason for linking horses and bishops. "No culture," he argues, "can appear or develop except in relation to a religion"; nor can any religion survive without the "maintenance of culture." And yet, religion and culture are not identical. A close observer can see both the bond that unites them and the element that separates them in, for instance, the writings of such men as Voltaire and Nietzsche--who contribute to culture by assaulting, and thus recognizing, the presence of the religion that makes their culture cohere.

Put Those Fences Back. What other factors are essential to a state of culture? With a bluntness never shown by the everyday old-Tory apologist, Eliot flatly demands a society that is divided into classes--and stays divided. Like Bernard Shaw, we may argue for a classless society in which aristocrats are replaced by "elites"; a society in which the way up is open to all, but in which we will recognize and pay and properly honor "superior individuals."

This view, says Eliot, is not much help to culture. Hand-picked "elites" (who is going to pick them? he asks) inevitably become specialists--one-track groups who only get together "like committees." Even if they could be chosen and made to shake down together, how would they carry out the important duty of passing on their cultural values to a succeeding generation?

Culture, Eliot holds, can be passed on by men primarily through their children, because only through the family can people grasp another important element of culture--"Piety towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn, however remote." So, in Eliot's opinion, if an "elite" does not become a rooted upper class, it cannot have any real cultural value; to enemies of aristocracy Eliot says that though in a class system many aristocrats fail to live up to their ancestors' high calling, a precious handful may be relied upon to fulfill the obligations of their class.

Dps & Downs. What about the lower classes in such a society? Eliot answers that culture recognizes no such thing as "lower" classes, it draws sustenance from all It is right and proper for certain ambitious men to fight their way up into the peerage, but the majority are better off sticking to their respective birthrights, each class contributing its special way of life to the culture whole.

"No true democracy," Eliot asserts stoutly, "can maintain itself unless it contains these different levels . . . Complete equality means universal irresponsibility . . . oppressive for the conscientious and licentious for the rest." Mass education looks fine on paper, but in practice it only means "half-education," and encourages the half-baked notion "that superiority is always superiority of intellect." In Eliot's Victorian view of things, the true superiority is the superiority of any class passing on its culture for generation after generation.

Culture's next essential, concludes Eliot, is for "the great majority of human beings [to] go on living in the place in which they were born." Regional habits, dialects, loyalties, eccentricities and faiths all contribute to a national culture by ensuring vital "friction between its parts." In the same way, different national cultures help towards the unity of international culture; men of good will who dream of nothing but ideological and international unanimity are, Eliot warns, culture's worst enemies. In the Eliotian western world, Catholic must continue to debate with Protestant, theist with atheist, class with class, creating a "Christendom . . . within [whose] unity there should be an f endless conflict between ideas."

Come, Sweet Death. All this is said with such politeness that many people may put down this little book without fully realizing what a deadly kick in the teeth of western culture it is meant to be. If culture is what Eliot says it is, and can be nothing else, then it is plucking at the coverlet in Britain and virtually dead everywhere else, including the U.S. But this is exactly what Eliot's Notes says--that another Dark Ages is just around the corner.

Culture, as he defines it, is being destroyed not by the atom bomb but by the fact that religious faith is declining more rapidly than ever before, that government planning and nursery schools are smashing the family group, that social barriers are being hurled down everywhere, and the last islands of regional diversity corrupted by mass communications and the passion for mass education.

Few Americans will be prepared to accept Expatriate Eliot's dismal conclusions in which the sole ray of light is the grudging admission that Britain (which in Eliot's opinion is rapidly forgetting Christianity) may yet re-create a degree of culture by adopting "some inferior or materialistic religion."

What makes this book so valuable is the fact that there is enough meat in it to keep thoughtful readers growling over it indefinitely. The critic may well argue that Eliot's definition of culture is too personal and too narrow. He may insist that few aristocrats contribute as much to culture as they drain from it--and that the same may be said of poverty, illiteracy, class friction and bigotry. He may even insist, as most people do, that the flexible human race can always be relied on to re-create a new culture even while it is scrapping an old one. But he will get no encouragement from the author of The Waste Land, who has rescued his vision of culture simply to give it an impressive funeral.

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