Debating ‘Culture’

Abstract

Once the matter of ‘saving civilization’ had been settled by war, the debate over ‘saving culture’ began. T. S. Eliot provoked it by asserting his reactionary Modernist post-war agenda in Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948). He makes a troubled plea to save culture by returning to the conservative social structure of a Victorian civilization based on the idea of a church-state lead by an intellectual-artistic-clerical élite. Writing in light of the 1945 election of the Labour government, Eliot fears that the rise of the ‘new civilization’ is at the expense of the old English ‘culture’, and he seeks to control social change with tradition, citing as the epigraph for his polemic a ‘rare’ definition of ‘culture’: ‘the setting of bounds; limitation’.¹ From this neo-classical perspective, he emphasizes the unifying importance of shared religious values, advocating a Christian church-state for England because ‘any religion, while it lasts, and on its own level, gives an apparent meaning to life, provides the frame-work for a culture, and protects the mass of humanity from boredom and despair’.² At the same time, fearing greater political democracy in the post-war era, Eliot cannot tolerate the idea of a classless society; he argues that for national leadership there must be a class of élite to insure that the ‘transmission of culture’ (Eliot’s emphasis) continues; moreover, he proposes that this class rely on heredity for its perpetuation, on ‘groups of families persisting, from generation to generation, each in the same way of life’.³

The daughters of Albion

arriving by underground at Central Station

eating hot ecclescakes at the Pierhead

writing ‘Billy Blake is fab’ on a wall in Mathew St

taking off their navyblue schooldrawers and

putting on nylon panties ready for the night

Adrian Henri,

‘Mrs. Albion You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter’ (1969)

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941)