HUBRIS
OF CULTURE
The author of novels,
poems and a screenplay as well as a couple of dozen books of criticism – his
Literary Criticism: an introduction is a standard student text the world over –
Terry Eagleton is unchallenged as
Britain’s leading left-wing literary critic. A brilliant scholarship boy from a
working-class Salford family of Irish extraction, he might no longer be a
Catholic of the church-going kind but he rails with Ratzinger-like ferocity
against cultural indifferentism. There is no sharper critic of the sophisticated
vacuity of post-modernism and here he returns to the attack with a dismissal of
the “cant” of “diversity”. There are times, he says tartly, when what is needed
is “not diversity but solidarity” and he is good at laying bare the narcissism
of those who think that talking about cultural diversity is more important than
defending the material conditions of people in actual cultures: “in some
quarters culture has become a way of not talking about capitalism”.
He returns to this in the concluding chapter on “The Hubris of Culture”, where
multiculturalism and identity politics, whatever positive contributions they
might make, are seen as part of an illusory belief that everything is just
cultural and any attempt to deal with hard, intractable political issues can be
dismissed as “essentialist”. In fact, he argues, “the central questions that
confront a humanity moving into the new millennium are not cultural ones at all
…War, hunger, drugs, arms, genocide, disease, ecological disaster” have their
cultural aspects “but culture is not the core of them”.
Eagleton prefers a notion of culture as “the social unconscious”, which is
defined as “that vast repository of instincts, prejudices, pieties, sentiments,
half-formed opinions and spontaneous assumptions which underpins our everyday
activity, and which we rarely call into question”. He is drawn to two thinkers
in particular who articulate this deeper sense of the term: Edmund Burke and
the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. Eagleton’s rehabilitations of
Burke and Herder as lost keys to the culture debate are amongst the most
valuable passages in the book.
He is less successful with Matthew Arnold. While he is right to describe
Culture and Anarchy as “the most celebrated cultural document of Victorian
England”, he trots out the received view that Arnold’s idea of culture was
merely “a way of defusing popular disaffection”. He ignores the egalitarian
strand in Arnold, who by arguing that inequality is bad for those on the top of
the heap as well as those on the bottom anticipated Richard Wilkinson and Kate
Pickett’s The Spirit Level by a century. On the other hand, Eagleton is right
to recognise that culture is no longer seen as the thing that can cement people
together, nor does he see it as “absolute and transcendent”, something that can
fill the God-shaped hole in modern societies.
Although disinclined to re-tread the argument he put forward in Culture and the
Death of God , which he published last year, Eagleton reiterates that he does
not see how culture can take the place of religion. “Religion”, he says, “is
the most powerful, persistent, universal, tenacious, deep-seated form of
popular culture that history has ever witnessed, one which offers to bridge the
gulf between mass and minority, laity and priesthood, everyday behaviour and
absolute truth, culture as spiritual and culture as anthropological.”
Culture cannot match this ambition because it has proved collusive with power
rather than opposing it and is altogether too full of itself. “Rather than
being what might save us,” Eagleton concludes, “it might need to be put firmly
back in its place”.
He returns to this in the concluding chapter on “The Hubris of Culture”, where multiculturalism and identity politics, whatever positive contributions they might make, are seen as part of an illusory belief that everything is just cultural and any attempt to deal with hard, intractable political issues can be dismissed as “essentialist”. In fact, he argues, “the central questions that confront a humanity moving into the new millennium are not cultural ones at all …War, hunger, drugs, arms, genocide, disease, ecological disaster” have their cultural aspects “but culture is not the core of them”.
Eagleton prefers a notion of culture as “the social unconscious”, which is defined as “that vast repository of instincts, prejudices, pieties, sentiments, half-formed opinions and spontaneous assumptions which underpins our everyday activity, and which we rarely call into question”. He is drawn to two thinkers in particular who articulate this deeper sense of the term: Edmund Burke and the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. Eagleton’s rehabilitations of Burke and Herder as lost keys to the culture debate are amongst the most valuable passages in the book.
He is less successful with Matthew Arnold. While he is right to describe Culture and Anarchy as “the most celebrated cultural document of Victorian England”, he trots out the received view that Arnold’s idea of culture was merely “a way of defusing popular disaffection”. He ignores the egalitarian strand in Arnold, who by arguing that inequality is bad for those on the top of the heap as well as those on the bottom anticipated Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level by a century. On the other hand, Eagleton is right to recognise that culture is no longer seen as the thing that can cement people together, nor does he see it as “absolute and transcendent”, something that can fill the God-shaped hole in modern societies.
Although disinclined to re-tread the argument he put forward in Culture and the Death of God , which he published last year, Eagleton reiterates that he does not see how culture can take the place of religion. “Religion”, he says, “is the most powerful, persistent, universal, tenacious, deep-seated form of popular culture that history has ever witnessed, one which offers to bridge the gulf between mass and minority, laity and priesthood, everyday behaviour and absolute truth, culture as spiritual and culture as anthropological.”
Culture cannot match this ambition because it has proved collusive with power rather than opposing it and is altogether too full of itself. “Rather than being what might save us,” Eagleton concludes, “it might need to be put firmly back in its place”.
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