In his great valediction to Western culture – Doktor Faustus – Thomas Mann portrays a composer, last true representative of the art of our civilisation, as he wrestles with Satan. The culmination of Adrian Leverkühn’s creative work will be a ‘taking back of the Ninth Symphony’ – a negation of that great triumph of Enlightenment sentiment, in which the idea of universal brotherhood is invoked not in order to dismiss the old Christian culture, but in order to perpetuate its ethical ideal. The Devil, however, is a creature of the old religion. His work cannot be understood or defined, except in terms of the common culture which he aims to destroy. You can do the Devil’s work only where the religious motive survives. That is why the high culture of our civilisation is his only remaining target. He works in mysterious ways – and I have tried in the last chapter to outline one of them. But his work is also proof of the thesis that I have been defending in this book, which is that culture is rooted in religion, and that the true effort of a high culture is to perpetuate the common culture from which it grew – to perpetuate it not as religion, but as art, with the ethical life transfixed within the aesthetic gaze.
High culture and common culture can be acquired only by initiation. Neither can be learned by sociological study or historical analysis. You are inducted into a culture, and this process of induction is also an education of the heart. If high culture is to survive, therefore, it must retain its critical stance: it must offer a rite of passage to a higher world, teaching through example how to perceive and discard our fake emotions, and how to speak and feel with a cleaner and clearer insight into why it matters to speak and feel sincerely. Only if you retain some of the modernist belief in the intrinsic value of high culture, will you have the strength to impart it. Otherwise you can take one or other of the easy options: pretend to the students that pop culture is the same kind of thing, and join them in their blithe distractions; or show the students how to deconstruct their heritage, and reassure them that it is a burden that they have done well to discard. To do either of those things while receiving a state-funded salary is a great achievement, and one proof that our universities are not entirely devoid of intelligent people.
But how should culture be taught? Arnold enjoined us to recommend ‘the best that has been thought and said’, and to encourage a critical response to it. But who is to say what is best? The curriculum assumed by Arnold is now denounced as ‘mono-cultural’, ‘patriarchal’, an instrument of ideology and class oppression. In place of it we are urged to adopt a multicultural curriculum, which will remove the social and political prejudices that spoil the great works of the past.
That outlook is founded, however, in a confused conception of culture. If you mean by culture what I have called common culture, then such a thing cannot be imparted as a free choice among alternatives; it cannot be divorced from the social and political postures which define the life of the community. There is no such thing as a multicultural education when the goal is religious belief. If however you mean by culture what I have called high culture, then the complaints are without force. Our high culture is a culture of Enlightenment. It invokes an historical community of sentiment, while celebrating universal human values. It is based in the aesthetic imagination, and spontaneously opens itself to human possibilities other than those contained in its religious root. It draws from this root a wealth of human feeling that it spreads impartially over imagined worlds. From Orlando Furioso to Byron’s Don Juan, from Monteverdi’s Poppeia to Longfellow’s Hiawatha, from The Winter’s Tale to Madama Butterfly, our culture has continuously ventured into spiritual territory that has no place on the Christian map.
The humanities, as these emerged in the nineteenth-century university, were not designed to instil a common culture. On the contrary, they assumed the work of ‘acculturation’ to be already complete. Their purpose was to reflect on the human world, by providing images, stories, works of art, and expressions that would become part of the mental repertoire of those who absorbed them. The resulting curriculum was far from monocultural. Our ancestors studied – and I mean really studied – cultures that were entirely strange to them. They learned the languages and literature of Greece and Rome, came to understand, love and even in their own way to worship the pagan gods; translated from Hebrew, Sanskrit and Arabic, and roamed the world with an insatiable curiosity, believing on the best of grounds that nothing human would be alien to them. It was second nature to the nineteenth-century graduate to learn the language of a country to which he travelled, to study its literature, religion and customs – often to the extent of going native, like many of the British in India and many of the Indians in Britain.
The advocates of a multicultural curriculum ought to propose Anglo-Indian literature, from Kipling and Tagore to Paul Scott and Vikram Seth, as compulsory reading. But if you look at their schemes, you will find no mention of this literature, or of anything like it. A work like Kim is a work of high art, which speaks to the cultivated mind, and can be understood only by the reader who responds critically to aesthetic values. Instead of such works, a mish-mash of pop, soap-opera and pre-emptive kitsch is proposed as the curriculum that will do justice to the many cultures that live and thrive in a modern city. But of course, it does justice to none of them, for it imparts only the culture that young people would absorb in any case – a culture without judgement, which is therefore incapable of imparting the knowledge on which the ethical life depends. Only if we teach the young to criticise do we really offer them culture. Otherwise what we call culture is a collective mental indolence.
And that is why the old curriculum has been discarded: not because it was burdensome, but because it was shaped by criticism. If interpretation is misinterpretation and there are no values, criticism makes no sense. The search for aesthetic value, and the ethical life that it celebrates, is a futile search. If that is so, how should culture be taught? The answer is evident: not by inducing it, but by observing it from a point of view outside. Criticism gives way to ‘theory’, and theory includes every device that might be used to undermine the authority of ‘Western culture’.
Hence, although nobody knows what the next burst of ‘theory’ will amount to, we know that it will be part of the culture of repudiation. Theory repeats, in opaque and solidified prose, the assault on bourgeois values, patriarchy and the ‘official’ culture that was led by the soixante-huitards. To encounter theory is to enter the literary equivalent of a socialist-realist museum, where concrete workers stand side by side with concrete intellectuals, punching their way into the future with clenched concrete fists. Deep within the lightless prose the old political message heaves and groans: culture is ideology, and ideology is the mask of power. Reduced now to a helpless tautology, this last vestige of belief, uttered in the world beyond belief, provides the core idea of ‘cultural studies’.
Rather than take the reader on a tour of this lugubrious museum I shall bring one of the exhibits into the light and dust it off for a critical inspection. Here is (the reader must take my word for it) an exemplary sentence of theory, which will illustrate the advances made by ‘cultural studies’ in the postmodern era:
If twentieth-century theory has valuably enforced the awareness of the excessiveness of value, the endless surpassing, in fact and possibility, of the values and thematics of value dominant in Western culture, then it is also necessary to constitute a political discourse which could secure and nurture the permanent possibility of this reflexive surpassing of value.
What is most curious about this sentence is not the muscle-bound political posturing, but the syntax in which it is enclosed. This syntax derives from an over-arching ‘if-then’ in which there is no relation whatsoever between antecedent and consequent, and no sense that the first is really hypothesised, rather than dogmatically asserted. The sentence illustrates a peculiar use of the word ‘if, not to put something in question, but to protect it from questioning. The sentence also lays claim to a sovereign authority over its subject – a comprehensive vision of the ‘twentieth-century’ and the ‘Western culture’ that shows their historical meaning. It reinforces itself with abstract notions, which it also ‘reifies’ into things and processes. The sentence is infected by a whirring factory-like dynamism: the abstract notions are doing things and changing things. Thus ‘twentieth-century theory’ becomes a kind of policeman, who ‘enforces’ an ‘awareness’ (though ‘valuably’); while ‘political discourse’ can ‘secure and nurture’ some other, equally abstract, result. At the same time we find a veering away from meaning. ‘Values’ are ‘surpassed’, and surpassed, moreover, in ‘fact and possibility’. Anyone who puzzles over that phrase will not be reassured to find that ‘values’ are at once edged out by ‘thematics of value’. The ‘surpassing of values’ which is first offered as a fact, and then as a possibility, finally becomes something to be ‘secured and nurtured’, as a possibility which is ‘permanent’. But it has now become a ‘reflexive’ surpassing – thereby implying that values are in the business of surpassing themselves. In which case, who is being exhorted to do what, in response to the phrase ‘necessary to try’?
Note too that the operative words are carefully concealed like the gun in the holster, and brought out only as the sentence rounds the corner towards its syntactical apotheosis. Whatever this gobbledegook means, the author implies, it is pointing towards ‘political discourse’ – and the Foucauldian jargon is sufficient to elicit the nod of easy assent from his intended readership.
Lest you should think that I have unfairly taken a sentence out of context, here is another, chosen more or less at random from the same work. You will see that the syntactical devices that I have remarked upon are inseparable from the writer’s thought:
If cultural modernism takes the form of an extreme differentiation of the value of culture and the arts, along with the gradually consolidated (and increasingly implausible) claim that artistic value is identical with value as such, then the academic study of cultural and artistic practices has provided an institutional embodiment of this differentiation.
Rather than puzzle over the meaning of such a sentence, one should respond instead to its style. The sentence reads as an ‘inspoken attack’ – a vehement whisper of disaffection, which is addressed, however, only to those who already share the writer’s viewpoint. The context tells us that the object of disaffection is the usual one – Western culture, and the habit of evaluation which created it. But this object is hidden: to expose it too evidently to view would be to invite refutation. And in the postmodern academy neither affirmation nor refutation have a place. Rational discussion, after all, is the prerogative of the old curriculum, the ideological mask of patriarchal power.
There are many reasons why people seeking tenure in an academic institution should cloak their writings in a mantle of pseudo-science. But there is more to ‘theory’ than half-naked ambition. Theory is the theology of repudiation. Like other theological enterprises, it conceals its most vulnerable assumptions behind mind-numbing disputes, whose meaninglessness can be discovered only by the kind of diligent study which outsiders have no time for. In the new academy, as in the medieval university, there are tenets which are not to be questioned since they define the community – the community of the unfaithful. Feminism, gay liberation, the belief in the equality of cultures, and the relativity of values: these community-forming assumptions are carefully protected from criticism by embedding them in the very syntax of debate.
This is not the place to question those assumptions. But it is worth pointing out that it is futile to defend Western culture by attacking feminism, gay liberation and the other movements which have captured the curriculum. For these movements are the effect and not the cause of cultural uncertainty. And this uncertainty occurs not at the level of the curriculum, but at the level of social reproduction. The loss of the transition from youth to adulthood means the loss of sexual restraint, and therefore the loss of trust between the sexes. The sexes cease to be partners and become rivals. By repudiating the old culture the feminist forestalls the grief of losing it. And from the personal point of view, this strategy is the right one.
Why are rites of passage important? Why should we strive so hard to forbid the easy avenues and the fake emotions? Why should we teach the young to match their emotions to the examples given by art and religion, and to compare worldly experience with its idealised completion? Why not let humanity float along the air-waves in peace, and take our place in the community of unbelievers, burying our hopes, like theirs, in some monument of solidified ‘theory’?
Perhaps an answer is suggested by this book. We have abundant scientific knowledge of our world and technical mastery over it. But its meaning is hidden from us. We have knowledge of the facts, and knowledge of the means, but no knowledge of the end. My purpose in this book has been to illustrate this peculiar ignorance – not ignorance that, or ignorance how but ignorance what. We no longer know what to do or what to feel; the meaninglessness of our world is a projection of our numbness towards it. Culture supplies what is missing – the knowledge what to feel which comes with the invocation of our true community. The community may vanish in fact, but live on in imagination. And that is the point of high culture: neither to ‘do dirt on life’, nor to emphasise its senselessness, but to recuperate by imaginative means the old experience of home.
Social reproduction is not guaranteed by the species. Of course, men and women will always produce children. But they may not always make a home for them. Many young people enter the world without any real commitment from their parents. They have no religious beliefs but only blind superstitions; no adult role models but only the experience of strangers, who play at mum or dad for a while and then leave as they came, without an explanation. Their social aspirations are derived from adverts and pop, and no gratification is forbidden or postponed for long enough to offer a vision of the higher life – the life of sacrifice, in which the sacred has a place. Only a rite of passage, offering the transition to difficult and previously forbidden things, can lift human beings from this predicament. Without it, they remain savage, incapable of receiving or passing on the inherited capital of moral knowledge. It is precisely the experience of passage, from emotional isolation to full and answerable membership, that a high culture strives to perpetuate.
Published just after the First World War, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West presents a ‘comparative morphology’ of cultures. ‘The West’, Spengler argued, has come to its end, as every culture must. We have now entered the period of mere ‘civilisation’, when administration and technology take over from the flowering of the spirit in its summer forms. That is Spengler’s account of the Enlightenment, phrased once again in terms of Herder’s distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation. Our culture rose to its self-conscious height in the time of Goethe, who captured its spirit in Faust. Thereafter, Spengler believed, it rapidly died, to be replaced by the cold routines of a civilisation destined, at last, to crumble to nothingness, as its structure rots away.
I have had nothing positive to say about popular culture, and nothing positive to say about the cultural establishment. My conclusions, however, are not so grim as Spengler’s. We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work. Popular culture contains pockets of gentleness and melody. Architects, writers and composers produce works which are neither kitsch nor ‘kitsch’. Prayer and penitence have been interrupted, but not forgotten. To those who wish for it, the ethical life may still be retrieved. Ours is a catacomb culture, a flame kept alive by undaunted monks. And what the monks of Europe achieved in a former dark age, they might achieve again.
Let us return for a moment to Wagner. By living the life of heroic passion, the composer tells us, we incarnate the divine. It is not we who seek redemption through the gods, but the gods who seek redemption in us, achieving the only reality of which they are capable – their momentary presence in the human sacrifice which summons and destroys them. The gods are bound in the knot which the myth has woven. We are free – free, however, only to renounce our freedom in the vow of love, and then to renounce life itself, when love demands it.
The artistic goal is to make us recognise that we can live as if that higher life – the ethical life in extremis – were ours. But, as I argued earlier, there is a flaw in the Wagnerian ethic. The intensification of passion at which Wagner aims situates love outside the cycle of reproduction; love announces the death of the lover and the extinction of the moral force that lives in him. We need the Wagnerian ‘as if’; we need the vision of ourselves as ennobled by our aims and passions, existing in ethical relation with our kind. But we must free ourselves of those last romantic illusions – including the illusion that love is the answer. Love is not the answer, but the question, the thing which sets us searching for meaning in a world from which meaning has retreated. How then, should we live, when we live beyond belief? ‘What remains when disbelief is gone?’
Light comes from the East. The Chinese sage Confucius, who lived five centuries before Christ, left no writings of his own, and is known to us, as Christ is, from the words and deeds recorded by his apostles. Unlike Christ, however, Confucius was not a religious reformer, but an ardent conformist in all matters both temporal and spiritual, and his counsels and maxims, recorded in the Analects, are concerned with the orderly conduct of life in this world, rather than with hopes and fears for the next. Confucius lived through the collapse of feudal civilisation in ancient China, and wandered the land in search of a prince who would listen to his counsels. He loved life, was fond of horses and hunting, and was both a practical and a respectable man, distinguished from his contemporaries largely by his propensity both to utter uncomfortable truths, and to live by them.
Confucius deplored innovation, scorned the idea of human progress, and hoped for a race of human beings who would place learning, study and ceremony before pleasure, profit and power. His was a profoundly backward-looking philosophy, which honoured the past above the present, and traditional authority above usurping power. Immemorial custom meant more to him than exciting new ideas: indeed, the newer and more exciting an idea the more suspicious he was of it; and his emphasis on filial piety and punctilious obedience was tempered by no phoney compassion for those who could not or would not conform.
In the delightful and unfussy footnotes to his translation of the Analects, Simon Leys compares Confucius’s situation to ours. We too are living ‘at the end of things’, witnessing the collapse of moral order, and a loss of piety among the young. We too need the Confucian virtues of humanity, obedience, and respect for custom and ceremony. The Master feared that people would acquire a taste for the ‘music of Zheng’, that they might become ‘dishevelled savages who fold their clothes on the wrong side’, that they might spend less than three years in ritual mourning for their parents. How lucky we should be, if we feared nothing worse than that. Nevertheless, Confucius was right to connect the disrespect for parents with the downfall of empires. His summary of the matter is inimitable:
The Master said: “I detest purple replacing vermilion; I detest popular music corrupting classical music; I detest glib tongues overturning kingdoms and clans”.
For ‘vermilion’ read the old uniforms of office, for ‘purple’ read baseball caps, for ‘glib tongues’ read the media. But what was the Master’s answer? He did not, like Kierkegaard, summon us to the leap of faith:
Someone asked for an explanation of the Ancestral Sacrifice. The Master said: “I do not know. Anyone who knew the explanation could deal with all things under Heaven as easily as I lay this here”; and he laid his fingers upon the palm of his hand.
Confucius did not offer any metaphysical system or religious creed. Instead he enjoined us to live as if it matters eternally what we do: to obey the rites, the ceremonies and the customs that lend dignity to our actions and which lift them above the natural sphere; to cultivate the heart and the tongue so that beauty is always in and around us; and to live in the condition which Wordsworth called ‘natural piety’, acknowledging the greatness of creation, and the imponderable mystery of time. In this way, even if we have no religious beliefs, we acknowledge the existence of sacred things, and endow our gestures with a nimbus of the supernatural. Living thus we peer serenely into the eternal. And if you ask what it is like to live thus, then listen to the closing bars of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde – a setting of an old Chinese poem, imbued with the spirit of Confucius, and incidentally a beautiful proof that Western culture, unlike Chinese culture, is radically multicultural.
Confucius was unable to find his Philosopher King, and died without hope for the future of civilisation. Subsequent history, however, confounded his predictions, and showed that a philosopher ought to say what he thinks, especially at a time when no-one who is anyone agrees with him. For Confucianism became the official outlook of the greatest Empire that the world has known. Confucius did not give us faith; but he gives us hope.