Page 36 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

T.S.ELIOT

writings include an intellectually very serious attempt to fashion a
specifically Christian social theory: strongly influenced by Hegelian
philosophy, Eliot was familiar with the work in the sociology of religion
of Emile Durkheim, the famous French anthropologist, and would
later collaborate, in “the Moot”, with Karl Mannheim, the distinguished
German-Hungarian sociologist.
For Eliot, as for Arnold, culture comes to be understood in essentially
totalistic and organicist a fashion: thus, a specifically “literary” culture
evolves, not as the creation of an aggregate of individual writers, but
rather as that of “the mind of Europe…which abandons nothing en
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rout”. Eliot’s most celebrated discussion of the concept of culture,
in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, draws on Arnold’s
insistence on the connectedness of the literary and the non-literary,
but expands upon it so as to develop a much more contemporary,
anthropological, sense of the term. “By ‘culture’”, Eliot writes, “I
mean first of all…the way of life of a particular people living together
in one place. That culture is made visible in their arts, in their social
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system, in their habits and customs, in their religion”. This last
reference to religion is especially significant: for Eliot, the culture of a
people is necessarily an “incarnation” of its religion. Hence, the gloomy
prognosis, outlined at some length in The Idea of a Christian Society,
that unlimited industrialization might generate a generalized
detachment from tradition, and an alienation from religion, and thereby,
in effect, the demise of culture. 19
A culture, in Eliot’s sense of the term, is only properly such insofar
as it is shared in common by a whole people. But a common culture is
not, however, one in which all participate equally: it will be consciously
understood only by the cultural élites of the society, but can nonetheless
be embodied in the unconscious texture of the everyday lives of the
non-élite groups. The model here is a somewhat idealized understanding
of medieval Christendom. In principle, Eliot’s cultural élite can be
much more happily reconciled to the dominant class than could Arnold’s
remnant to either the Barbarians or the Philistines: “An élite must…be
attached to some class…it is likely to be the dominant class that attracts
this élite to itself”. In principle, culture is not a minority resource to
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be disseminated through education, but is rather already (more or
less consciously) present in the lives of all classes, including both the
aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. But if this is so for a “healthy” society,
such as Eliot imagined medieval Europe to have been, then it is much

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