Eliot on Culture

Extract

During the nineteen-thirties T. S. Eliot steadily extended his interests as a literary critic to larger social and cultural questions; the process can be traced in After Strange Gods, The Idea of a Christian Society, and his editorials in The Criterion. This interest culminated in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, published in 1948. It is one of his strangest books, where profound insights are interwoven with the most superficial observations, and where seemingly firm statements are then qualified out of existence within a paragraph or so. The book’s excessively tentative title is characteristic; Eliot says many interesting things about culture but he never succeeds in defining it. In principle, he is concerned with culture in the broad or anthropological sense, rather than the narrow or Arnoldian sense: that is to say, the whole way of life of a society, all its inherited manners, customs and styles of living, as opposed to ‘the best that has been thought and said’ and the cultivation of the fine arts. In practice, however, Eliot slides from one sense of culture to another in a quite disconcerting way. The anthropological use of the word is descriptive and value-free; any discernible form of social organization above the merely biological level will have its accompanying cultural modes, however odd they may seem to the observer. And as anthropologists have shown, seemingly primitive peoples can often produce very complicated cultural forms. So that when Eliot laments the decline of culture in the twentieth century and contemplates a possible future ‘of which it will be possible to say that it will have no culture’ he cannot be using the word in the anthropological sense, since if organized human life persists at all it is bound to have its accompanying cultural forms. Clearly, Eliot is here using the word in a more particular, value-bearing sense, which is closer to the Arnoldian usage.