Page 38 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

CULT_C02.qxd 10/24/08 17:10 Page 22

22 Chapter 2 The ‘culture and civilization’ tradition

cultural elite. All that is required from the rest of us is to recognize our cultural differ-
ence and acknowledge our cultural deference. Arnold is clear on this point:

The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are;
very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them. On these inadequate ideas reposes,
and must repose, the general practice of the world. That is as much as saying that
whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small
circle; but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate
ideas will ever get current at all (364–5).

And again,

The highly instructed few, and not the scantily instructed many, will ever be the
organ to the human race of knowledge and truth. Knowledge and truth in the full
sense of the words, are not attainable by the great mass of the human race at all
(Arnold, 1960–77: 591).

These are very revealing statements. If the mass of humankind is to be always satis-
fied with inadequate ideas, never able to attain truth and knowledge, for whom are the
small circle working? And what of the adequate ideas they will make current – current
for whom? For other small circles of elites? Arnold’s small circle would appear to be little
more than a self-perpetuating intellectual elite. If they are never to engage in practical
politics, and never to have any real influence on the mass of humankind, what is the
purpose of all the grand humanistic claims to be found scattered throughout Arnold’s
work? It would appear that Arnold has been ensnared by his own elitism: and the
working class are destined to remain to wallow in ‘their beer, their gin, and their fun’
(1954: 591). However, Arnold does not so much reject practical politics, as leave them
in the safe hands of established authority. Therefore, the only politics that are being
rejected are the politics of protest, the politics of opposition. This is a very stale defence
of the dominant order. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, his influence has been
enormous in that the Arnoldian perspective virtually mapped out the way of thinking
about popular culture and cultural politics that dominated the field until the late l950s.

Leavisism

For Matthew Arnold it was in some ways less difficult. I am thinking of the so
much more desperate plight of culture today (Leavis, 2009: 12).

The influence of Arnold on F.R. Leavis is there for all to see. Leavis takes Arnold’s cul-
tural politics and applies them to the supposed ‘cultural crisis’ of the 1930s. According
to Leavis and the Leavisites, the twentieth century is marked by an increasing cultural