Page 37 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

CULTURALISM

less so for the increasingly non-Christian society conjured into being
largely as an effect of industrialization.
Like Arnold, Eliot remains deeply critical of modern, mechanical
civilization; but unlike Arnold, he actually proceeds to the development
of a theory of cultural decline. In a much quoted essay on “The
Metaphysical Poets”, Eliot compared the early 17th century English
poets, Chapman, Donne and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, with the
poets of the 19th century, such as Tennyson and Browning. He argues
that in the Metaphysicals, and by implication in all previous poetry,
there had existed what he terms a “unified sensibility”, in which thought
and feeling retained an essential unity. During the 17th century, however,
and especially in the work of Milton and Dryden, a “dissociation of
sensibility” set in from which English culture has never recovered.
“The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets”,
he writes, “It is something which had happened to the mind of
England”. Elsewhere, Eliot stresses that this dissociation of sensibility
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had been “a consequence of the same causes which brought about the
Civil War”. Their eventual outcome will be capitalist industrialization
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itself, which will in turn press the logics of dissociation towards their
own terrible terminus: “more insidious than any censorship”, Eliot
argues, “is the steady influence which operates silently in any mass
society organized for profit, for the depression of standards of art
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and culture”. For all the obvious theoretical affinities between Eliot
and Arnold—an organicist conception of culture, the central antithesis
between culture and civilization—such pessimism as this remains quite
fundamentally incompatible with Arnold’s own reforming zeal. For
Eliot’s insistence on the priority of religion over culture leaves him
much more positively sympathetic to the feudal past, and
correspondingly much more fearful of an unlimitedly industrialized
future. Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism thus precludes the possibility of a
meliorist strategy such as had been readily available to Arnold.
There is an important sense in which Eliot’s social theory becomes
simply inoperable: if the good society is one modelled as closely as
possible on those of the European Middle Ages, then in truth the
good society is no longer attainable. For, whatever the deleterious
social and cultural consequences of the rise of capitalism (and there
can be little doubt that Eliot is here often very acute), industrialization
itself appears an essentially irreversible process, at least for so long as
the human race continues to abstain from the use of its nuclear

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