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High Culture, Low Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2017

Robert Grant
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Extract

My theme at its most general is the relation between culture and power; at its most specific, the relation between a particular type of culture, so-called high culture, and two types of power, namely governmental power, and the related but more diffuse power prevailing in society at large.

So-called ‘high’ politics are often (and better) called statesmanship, and are typically, though not invariably, international in scope. By the ‘low’ politics of my title I mean, not democracy specifically, but what politicians engage in at the domestic level, where popularity matters most. Democratic or not, most politics are perforce pretty low, and are justified only because they are preferable to despotism, which in its pure form signifies the absence of politics. Yet most real-life despotisms concede something to the political spirit, since they profit from their subjects' consent, endeavour to cultivate it, and are foolish if they think to dispense with it entirely. In politics proper, however, consent (like consensus) must be sought; in fact, wherever avowed and conflicting interests prefer to resolve matters through negotiation and agreement rather than through force, there we have something like politics. The conditions for consent will usually be ascertained through representative institutions. Their business is to transmit public opinion to the rulers, if those are separate from the representatives, or to act on it, where the representatives are themselves the rulers.

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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 58 , May 2006 , pp. 189 - 212
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2006

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References

1 See Crick, Bernard, In Defence of Politics, 1962 (London: Continuum, 2000).Google Scholar

2 Consent and consensus, though they overlap, are not identical. Consent means tacitly or overtly according to someone or something else a right of command, and thus acknowledging one's duty of obedience to a superior authority. Consensus, on the other hand, is sought and achieved (or not) between political equals. It involves tacit or overt agreement as to the tolerability of given political arrangements, or the desirability of a course of collective action from within them, and the recognition that agreement is preferable to unconditional self-assertion. It does not require one to dissemble or renounce one's interests, only to constrain one's pursuit of them, with the object (as often as not) of safeguarding the most important rather than staking all of them on the hazard of force. Each may consent to an authority individually; but he is more likely to do so, and the arrangement is more likely to hold, when the desirability of everyone's doing so is a matter of consensus. Consensus is typically arrived at by a less explicit process than consent, being more a matter of the ‘invisible hand’, the aggregate result of very many spontaneous acts of mutual accommodation. Cf. also note 4 below.

3 It goes without saying that very high intelligence and education may inhibit a person's political effectiveness, since the latter often requires a certain ethical and intellectual coarseness, unscrupulousness and even self-delusion. See Oakeshott, Michael, ‘The Claims of Politics’ (1939)Google Scholar in Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, Fuller, Timothy (ed.) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).Google Scholar Matthew Arnold, on the other hand, saw high culture as a positive brake on political crudity, one reinforced not only by its deliberate self-distancing from day-to-day politics, but also by its indirect link to them through the process of ‘establishment’. See my ‘Arnold's Cultural Polities’, in Grant, Robert, The Politics of Sex and Other Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 127–30.Google Scholar

4 ‘What maintains a great number of citizens under the same government is much less the reasoned will to live united than the instinctive and in a way involuntary accord resulting from similarity of sentiments and resemblance of opinions.’

‘I shall never agree that men form a society by the sole fact that they recognize the same head and obey the same laws; there is a society only when men consider a great number of objects under the same aspect; when on a great number of subjects they have the same opinions; when, finally, the same facts give rise in them to the same opinions and the same thoughts.’ (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, tr. and ed. H.C. Mansfield and D. Winthrop [Chicago UP: Chicago, 2000], 358 [I, 2, x].)

5 I mean on academic education. No one will deny that ethical competence (or goodness), whatever part nature plays in it, is also hugely dependent on moral education.

6 2nd edition, 1800.

7 From My Campaign in Ireland, quoted in Tristram, H. (ed.), The Idea of a Liberal Education: a Selection from the Works of Newman (London: Harrap, 1952), 32.Google Scholar (Full text: My Campaign in Ireland, Neville, W.P. (ed.) [Aberdeen: A. King & Co., 1896], 315.)Google Scholar

8 Under ‘Philistine’ the OED cites Quarterly Review, 04 1899, 438Google Scholar: ‘“Philistinism”, after all, stands for two great habits, decency and order.’ Yet this traditionalist Tory journal was anything but Philistine itself, being resolutely high-minded and intellectual.

9 It was for this reason that dissidents enjoyed a precarious, capricious semi-toleration (within limits) during the latter days of Eastern European communism. The authorities desperately needed the external critical perspective on current problems that the dissidents, but neither themselves nor Marxism (in which they had ceased to believe), could supply.

10 Sources are various and purely anecdotal, as a web search will confirm.

11 Bourdieu, , op. cit., tr. R. Nice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).Google Scholar

12 As there are almost bound to be, in an integrated politico-educational system as self-consciously, designedly and unapologetically elitist as the French.

13 New York: Basic Books, 1976.

14 The dying Cockney shipping magnate in Kipling's dramatic monologue ‘The Mary Gloster’—a preposterous piece, but perceptive for all that—has sent his son to ‘Harrer [Harrow] an' Trinity College’ (Cambridge, of course) more out of social ambition than for educational reasons. Unfortunately, whichever, education or class, is to blame, the poor boy, now 40, has been turned out a homosexual aesthete: ‘For you muddled with books and pictures, an' china an' etchin's and fans, / And your rooms at College was beastly—more like a whore's than a man's.’ The poem appeared in 1894, a year before before the Wilde scandal.

15 This, according to Mandeville, is as true of bad intentions as of good. The subtitle of his The Fable of the Bees (1723)Google Scholar is ‘Private Vices, Publick Benefits’. Whether bad motives produce good outcomes or ‘good’ motives bad ones, either way the virtuous cannot but be outraged. Mandeville was indicted for immorality in 1725 by a Grand Jury of Middlesex, while in France, in 1740, his book was burnt by the public hangman.

16 Distinction, 270.Google Scholar

17 Nietzsche, , Untimely Meditation, I, 2.Google Scholar

18 In his The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar, Terry Eagleton suggests, Bourdieu-fashion, that the supposed intrinsic value of aesthetic experience, high culture, etc., to one who finds such things valuable is precisely their instrumental value in advertising to himself and others that he is socio-economically able to afford disinterestedness. But reasoning this tortuous (exemplifying Ricoeur's ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, whereby nothing can ever be what it appears to be, let alone innocent) either leads to the madhouse, or, as here, itself invites suspicion, in that it too clearly has an instrumental value for its author (that is, both advertises his perspicacity and serves his prior agenda), and is thus far from disinterested (tu quoque, in short). See my ‘Fetishizing the Unseen’, on Marxism as itself a specimen of ‘false consciousness’, in Grant, Robert, Imagined Meanings: Essays on Politics, Ideology and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 100–102.Google Scholar

19 Although Kant actually says that aesthetic judgment does involve ‘pleasure’, that this is pleasure only in a highly abstract, formalist and attenuated sense (a kind of rational satisfaction) can be seen from the following, from The Critique of Judgment, I, §§ 12–13Google Scholar:

‘The consciousness of mere formal finality in the play of the cognitive faculties of the Subject attending a representation whereby an object is given, is the pleasure itself, because it involves a determining ground of the Subject's activity in respect of the quickening of its cognitive powers ….This pleasure is also in no way practical, neither resembling that from the pathological ground of agreeableness nor that from the intellectual ground of the represented good …’

‘Every interest vitiates the judgment of taste and robs it of its impartiality. This is especially so where instead of, like the interest of reason, making finality take the lead of the feeling of pleasure, it grounds it upon this feeling ….Taste that requires an added element of charm and emotion for its delight, not to speak of adopting this as the measure of its approval, has not yet emerged from barbarism …’

‘A judgment of taste which is uninfluenced by charm or emotion (though these may be associated with the delight in the beautiful), and whose determining ground, therefore, is simply finality of form, is a pure judgment of taste.’ (Kant, , op. cit., tr. J.C. Meredith [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952], 64–5).Google Scholar

It is not obvious how the Subject's pleasure in ‘the quickening of its cognitive powers’ in the act of aesthetic judgment is necessarily any more ‘disinterested’ or less ‘pathological’ than the pleasures afforded by ‘charm’ and ‘emotion’.

20 In Britain, at the time of writing, it seems that high culture and liberal education, or the outward appearance of them, are actually socially disadvantageous, being perceived, at least in ‘official’ spheres, as too ‘posh’. To exaggerate only slightly, the only way a young person who (say) uses Received Pronunciation is nowadays likely to gain employment as a TV news reporter is by being black or brown, his supposed ‘ethnic’ disadvantage evidently being deemed to outweigh or atone for his ‘poshness’.

21 ‘The new art … helps the elite to recognize themselves and one another in the drab mass of society and to learn their mission which consists in being few and holding their own against the many.’ Jos' Gasset, Ortega y, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968), 7.Google Scholar

22 Deliberate ugliness, notably in architecture (e.g. that of the Brutalist movement), is an act of symbolic coercion. It is an assertion of power and will, not of legitimacy; intended not to flatter, seduce, or secure spontaneous consent, but to threaten. And it is not so much a political phenomenon (in the sense previously employed here), as the collective self-expression of a politically unaccountable bureaucratic and/or corporate élite. Here, as so often throughout history, the artist puts himself willingly into the service of despotism, because his masters give him a freer hand than the public would. (So long, that is, as he does not abuse his freedom by producing things that the public might actually like.)

23 Unlike his surly brother Fafner, the giant Fasolt in Das Rheingold is moved by the goddess Freia's youthful beauty, and genuinely appreciates the gods' world of aesthetic delight which he and Freia jointly sustain, by their physical labour and immortality-conferring apples respectively. In part-contrast, the demigod Loge sarcastically consoles the Rhinemaidens for the loss of their gold—his sarcasm being aimed not at them, but at the gods—by telling them to rejoice vicariously instead in the splendour of the gods' new fortress Valhalla, whose construction (by the giants) the gold has paid for. One need not be Marxist to agree with G.B. Shaw's view that the giants, at least in part, ‘represent’ the working class and the gods the bourgeoisie. At all events, the point is that aesthetic value does not have to be narrowly class-bound or relativistic, and that if it were, it could not function as Bourdieu claims it does. (Which is not necessarily to agree with Bourdieu that it does so function.)

24 ‘Snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated’, (‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, 1944Google Scholar, final sentence).

23 Philippians 4, 8 (Authorized Version).