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{"id":17996,"date":"2016-03-25T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-25T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2808"},"modified":"2016-03-25T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-03-25T00:00:00","slug":"culture-problem-or-solution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/03\/culture-problem-or-solution\/","title":{"rendered":"Culture – Problem or Solution?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Terry Eagleton (Culture and the Death of God<\/a>) observes that culture was once considered the solution to the twentieth century\u2019s loss of religion. The ambiguity of \u201cculture\u201d \u2013 its \u201caesthetic\u201d elite meaning and its popular \u201canthropological\u201d meaning \u2013 was exploited to serve political ends. TS Eliot understood that religion could be both mythology (for the masses) and theology (for the elite), and culture followed this same bifurcation: \u201cThere is a distinction at work here between the conscious and the unconscious, as the truths articulated by the intelligentsia are lived out as spontaneous habit and unreflective custom by the common people. The same values are shared by both groups but at different levels of awareness. Spiritual hierarchy can thus be reconciled with a common culture\u201d (121).<\/p>\n

Eagleton sees a similar dual meaning in Matthew Arnold\u2019s Culture and Anarchy<\/em> (1869), which Eagleton claims is more aptly titled \u201cCulture or<\/em> Anarchy.\u201d Culture was to be a \u201cbulwark against social unrest.\u201d Arnold\u2019s essay \u201cseeks to bring the aesthetic version of culture to bear on the sociological one, at a moment when the class struggle in Victorian England is sharpening\u201d (124). For all the vacuity of Arnold\u2019s descriptions of culture (\u201csweetness and light\u201d), it has a \u201cpractical, corporate and reformative\u201d force: \u201cIf it is to replace religion, which is really Arnold\u2019s goal, it must descend from its ethereal heights to become a militant social mission\u201d (128). It has to moderate \u201cmiddle-class rapacity and working-class rancor\u201d (129). <\/p>\n

More recently, Eagleton points out, culture has become part of the problem. Despite the potential for the \u201cculture industry\u201d to fulfill the hope for mass mythology (think of the mass mythology of film), culture has failed to provide the unifying symbolic world once occupied by religion: \u201cIf the Enlightenment had failed to oust religious faith, and the Idealists and Romantics had failed to secularize it, the concept of culture proved too fraught and elusive to serve as a stopgap. It was clear that there could be no salvation in aesthetic culture alone. It was too minority a pursuit for that. Yet neither could one place any great hope for redemption in the idea of culture as a whole form of life. There are no whole forms of life. Human societies are manifold and contentious. Culture is more likely to reflect social divisions than to reconcile them. Once those contentions begin to infiltrate the concept of culture itself \u2013 once value, language, symbol, kinship, heritage, identity and community become politically charged \u2013 culture ceases to be part of the solution and instead becomes part of the problem. It can no longer present itself as a corporate alternative to one-sided interests. Instead, it shifts from a bogus transcendence to a militant particularism. This, in effect, has been the fate of culture under postmodernism\u201d (122).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"