The concept of culture leapt fully armed from the head of Johann Gottfried Herder in the mid-eighteenth century, and has been embroiled in battles ever since. Kultur, for Herder, is the life-blood of a people, the flow of moral energy that holds society intact. Zivilisation, by contrast, is the veneer of manners, law and technical know-how. Nations may share a civilisation; but they will always be distinct in their culture, since culture defines what they are.
This idea developed in two directions. The German romantics (Schelling, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Hölderlin) construed culture in Herder’s way, as the defining essence of a nation, a shared spiritual force which is manifest in all the customs, beliefs and practices of a people. Culture, they held, shapes language, art, religion and history, and leaves its stamp on the smallest event. No member of society, however ill-educated, is deprived of culture, since culture and social membership are the same idea.
Others, more classical than romantic, interpreted the word in its Latin meaning. For Wilhelm von Humboldt, founding father of the modern university, culture meant not untended growth but cultivation. Not everyone possesses it, since not everyone has the leisure, the inclination or the ability to learn what is needed. And among cultivated people, some are more cultivated than others. The purpose of a university is to preserve and enhance the cultural inheritance, and to impart it to the next generation.
The two ideas are still with us. The early anthropologists adopted Herder’s conception, and wrote of culture as the practices and beliefs which form the self-identity of a tribe. Every member of the tribe possesses the culture, since this is what membership requires. Matthew Arnold and the literary critics whom he influenced (including Eliot, Leavis and Pound) followed Humboldt, in treating culture as the property of an educated elite, an attainment which involves intellect and study.
To avoid confusion, I shall distinguish ‘common culture’, which is what the anthropologist describes, from ‘high culture’, which is a form of expertise. This purely negative distinction does not tell us what high culture is, whether it is one thing or many, or whether it is the great value that Arnold and his followers have assumed it to be. Obviously, therefore, I must return to such questions; and the necessity is all the greater in that, unlike most people I encounter, I agree with Matthew Arnold. It is my view that the high culture of our civilisation contains knowledge which is far more significant than anything that can be absorbed from the channels of popular communication. This is a hard belief to justify, and a harder one to live with; indeed, it has nothing to recommend it apart from its truth.
Those two concepts of culture have been embroiled in controversy throughout modern times. From the debris of their many battles has grown a third conception. The ‘common culture’ of a tribe is a sign of its inner cohesion. But tribes are vanishing from the modern world, as are all forms of traditional society. Customs, practices, festivals, rituals and beliefs have acquired a fluid and half-hearted quality which reflects our nomadic and rootless existence, predicated as we are on the global air-waves. Despite this, and despite all the conveniences and labour-saving devices that make other people more dispensable, modern city dwellers are as much social beings as were traditional tribesmen. They are unable to live in peace until furnished with a social identity, an outward garb which, by representing them to others, gives them confidence in themselves. This search for ‘identity’ pervades modern life. Although it is a fluid thing, and may change direction several times in a lifetime, or even twice in a year, it has much in common with the tribesman’s attachment to a common culture. The cultivation of ‘identity’ is a mode of ‘being-for-others’, to use the existentialist jargon, a way of claiming space in a public world. At the same time it is founded in choice, taste and leisure; it is fed on popular art and entertainment; in broadest terms, it is a work of the imagination. In those respects it resembles the high culture of a literary and artistic tradition.
This third conception of culture – popular culture, as I shall call it – has become a familiar theme of sociology. It defines the subject-matter of ‘cultural studies’ – an academic discipline founded by Raymond Williams with a view to replacing academic English. Williams was a literary critic; but his egalitarian sympathies caused him to rebel against the elitist tradition in literary scholarship. Alongside the elite culture of the upper classes, he argued, there has always been another, by no means inferior, culture of the people, through which they affirmed their solidarity in the face of oppression and through which they expressed their social identity and their sense of belonging. Williams’s anti-elitism struck a chord, and the concept of culture was extended to describe the forms of popular art and entertainment in modern conditions. As a result of this academic broadening, the concept began to lose its specificity. Any activity or artefact is considered cultural, if it is an identity-forming product of social interaction.
Popular culture is of two kinds: inherited and acquired. Globalisation has led to the extinction of the inherited (folk) cultures of Europe and America, and their replacement by the commercialised mish-mash that I discuss in later chapters. Some parts of folk culture – notably the music – became the raw material for high art, reappearing in transfigured form in Bartók, Vaughan Williams, and Copland. The rest changed its character from inherited tradition to commercialised ‘heritage’, and now stares from glass cases in the folk museum. Modern people may be charmed by folk costumes, folk dancing and folk festivals; but they do not find their identity through these things – which is another way of saying that folk culture is dead. ‘Folk’ is now a style within pop music, but one without roots in an inherited community.
Herder’s idea of culture is ‘particularist’. A culture is defined as something separate – an island of ‘we’ in the ocean of ‘they’. Humboldt’s conception is ‘universalist’: the cultivated person, for Humboldt, sees mankind as a whole, knows the art and literature of other peoples, and sympathises with human life in all its higher forms and aspirations. Why use the same word for two such conflicting ideas? Why write a book about culture, which treats ‘common culture’ and ‘high culture’ as though they were in some deep way connected? As an educated person I sympathise with Humboldt and Matthew Arnold. As an old-fashioned Englishman I lean towards Herder. One of my motives for writing this book is a sense that these two sympathies are fed from a common source.
Nevertheless, we must begin from the assumption that in discussing culture we are dealing with three or more distinct ideas. If you ask a simple question such as ‘is toothpaste part of culture?’ then Herder would say ‘definitely not, though maybe it is a part of civilisation’. Arnold would also say no, adding, however, that the toothpaste deployed by Pam Germ in her prize-winning ‘Portrait of a tape-worm’ is part, though perhaps a regrettable part, of the national culture. The professor of cultural studies will probably reply ‘of course tooth paste is a part of culture’, since after all toothpaste is a way in which people form and express their social identity and the decision to use or not to use it is a decision directed towards others. (Imagine America without toothpaste!)
My method in what follows might be called archaeological. I shall be exploring strata in the modern consciousness, some very ancient and geological, some more recently deposited and still fermenting. I shall begin by considering common culture, and its place in the life of a tribe. Maybe it is eccentric to begin from this point; but it is also eccentric to begin from any other. For those who typically write about culture seldom begin. In the literature that I have come across, writers tend to start in mediis rebus, fighting on one side or another in battles which are now so confused that hardly anyone understands their meaning. And this is not because they do not see the wood for the trees, but because they have not dug beneath the trees, to the life which secretly feeds them.