Culture Counts

Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged

Roger Scruton

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781594032783
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

What is culture? Why should we preserve it, and how? In this book renowned philosopher Roger Scruton defends Western culture against its internal critics and external enemies, and argues that rumours of its death are seriously exaggerated. He shows our culture to be a continuing source of moral knowledge, and rebuts the fashionable sarcasm which sees it as nothing more than the useless legacy of 'dead white European males'. He is robust in defence of traditional architecture and figurative painting, critical of the fashionable relativists and urgent in his plea for our civilization, which more than ever stands in need of the self-knowledge and self-confidence that are the gift of serious culture.

1

What Is Culture?

ANTHROPOLOGISTS WRITE OF the “culture” of the people they observe, meaning those customs and artifacts which are shared, and the sharing of which brings social cohesion. Ethnologists, on the one hand, define culture more widely, to include all intellectual, emotional, and behavioral features that are transmitted through learning and social interaction, rather than through genetic endowment. Sociologists, on the other hand, use the term more narrowly, to mean the thoughts and habits whereby people define their group identity, and stake out a claim for social territory. In all those uses, the term “culture” is associated with the human need for membership, and describes a shared asset of a social group. In this book I shall be defining “culture” in another way, to denote an acquisition that may not be shared by every member of a community, and which opens the hearts, minds, and senses of those who possess it to an intellectual and artistic patrimony. Culture, as I shall describe and defend it in this book, is the creation and creator of elites. This does not mean, however, that culture has nothing to do with membership or with the social need to define and conserve a shared way of life. Although an elite product, its meaning lies in emotions and aspirations that are common to all.

By “culture” I mean what has also been called “high culture”—the accumulation of art, literature, and humane reflection that has stood the “test of time” and established a continuing tradition of reference and allusion among educated people. That definition raises a question: whose accumulation, and which people? In response, it is useful to revisit a distinction, made in another way and for another purpose by Herder, and exploited for yet another purpose by Spengler, between culture and civilization. A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political, legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge. Thus, we can speak of Ancient Egyptian civilization, Roman civilization, Chinese civilization, and Western civilization. Civilizations can include each other, whether as contemporaneous or as successive parts. For example, Roman civilization includes that of Roman Gaul, and Islamic civilization that of the Abbasids.

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world. All civilizations have a culture, but not all cultures achieve equal heights. The stone-age civilization that produced the wall-paintings of the Lascaux caves has left a memorable icon of its world, but its one lasting cultural achievement pales beside the art and literature of Greece. Whether we can describe one culture as objectively superior to another is a question that I shall touch on later in this book. For the moment it is enough to recognize that cultures are the means through which civilizations become conscious of themselves, and are permeated by the strengths and weaknesses of their inherited form of life. There are as many cultures as there are civilizations, even though you can belong to a civilization and know little or nothing of its culture—which is the situation of most Westerners today.

WESTERN CULTURE

This book is about Western culture, which means the culture of Western civilization. To say as much is to set no clear limits to my topic. Civilizations grow out of and into each other, and often divide like amoebas so as to generate two contemporaneous offshoots; hence, it is very hard to set spatial or temporal boundaries on Western civilization. It grew from the fusion of Christianity with the law and government of Rome, became conscious of itself in the high Middle Ages, passed through a period of skepticism and Enlightenment, and was simultaneously spread around the globe by the trading and colonial interests of its more adventurous members. And throughout its most flourishing periods, Western civilization has produced a culture which happily absorbs and adapts the cultures of other places, other faiths, and other times. Its basic fund of stories, its moral precepts, and its religious imagery come from the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament. Onto those Judeo-Christian roots, however, has been grafted a tree of many branches, bearing many kinds of fruit. The Thousand and One Nights, which has a central place in Islamic culture, is equally part of the cultural heritage of the West, while the pagan literature of Greece and Rome has been taught for centuries as the fount of our literary tradition.

Those facts should not make for confusion. There is no paradox in the idea that two distinct cultures (belonging to two distinct civilizations) may nevertheless share parts of their heritage, and certainly no paradox in the idea that they can cross-fertilize each other, as Muslim, Christian, and Jewish cultures cross-fertilized each other in the great days of Averroës, Maimonides, and Peter Lombard. Indeed, it is important to understand, in the context of today’s “culture wars” and the widespread advocacy of “multiculturalism,” that Western culture has an unparalleled ability and willingness to assimilate other cultural traditions.

Still, it might be suggested that I have so far done very little to confine my subject matter. Are we really to consider all the art, literature, music, and philosophical reflection of the West as part of its culture, and does it all have a claim to our protection? Neither suggestion is plausible. Although new works are constantly being added to our inheritance, there is a distinction between those that “enter the canon” and those that remain on the periphery. Every culture is characterized by a central stream or tradition of works that have not merely “stood the test of time” but which continue to serve as models and inspirations for living practitioners. The process whereby an artistic, literary, or musical tradition develops and strengthens is a fascinating one, to which critics have devoted much thought. And theories of the “tradition” are invariably controversial, as critics fight to champion favorites of their own and to denigrate those of others. But this battle over the canon is itself part of the canon: a tradition is the residue of critical conflicts, that which remains when the sound and fury has dwindled to a schoolroom murmur.

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CULTURE AND JUDGMENT

Another way of putting that point is to say that culture issues from judgment. A culture is supplied with its monuments and its durable styles by unceasing comparisons and choices, from which a canon of masterpieces emerges not as the object of a single collective choice, not even a choice that must be made anew by each generation, but as the byproduct of myriad choices over centuries. Just as customs emerge over time, from the countless efforts of human beings to coordinate their conduct, so do cultural traditions emerge from the discussions, allusions, and comparisons, with which people fill their leisure hours.

Many people will be unhappy with that idea, believing either that there is no such thing as this “judgment” to which I refer or that, if there is such a thing, it is irremediably “subjective,” with no inherent ability either to stand up to skeptical examination or to guarantee the survival of a culture in times of doubt. This response is expressed in a variety of ways and for a variety of purposes, and it is one aim of this book to rebut it. In all its forms, however, it rests on a confusion, long ago pointed out by Kant.² It is true that our judgments of works of art are subjective in the sense that they issue from our personal experience, impressions, and tastes. But it does not follow that they are subjective in the sense of admitting no argument in their favor, or connecting with no important experiences and emotions which might be tested by life.

Still, it might be wondered, what kind of judgment is intended? In considering this question, eighteenth-century writers referred to “taste,” by which they meant a distinct rational faculty, through which we choose what is worthy of our attention. But what kind of attention? And worthy in what respect? During the course of their discussions, thinkers of the Enlightenment began to write of “aesthetic” judgment, making use of a term introduced by Kant’s mentor Baumgarten, though often disagreeing radically over what they meant by it. The term stuck, and today it is a commonplace to speak of aesthetic judgment as the thing that distinguishes the realm of culture from the realms of science, religion, and morality. We are, however, no nearer to a definition today than were those philosophers of the Enlightenment who, whether they stuck, like Hume and Addison, to the old idea of taste, or whether they adopted, like Kant and Schiller, the new jargon of aesthetics, were never able to satisfy one another that they were referring to a single thing.

JUDGMENT AND LAUGHTER

Rather than tie myself in that knot, therefore, I propose to cut through it by considering one of the raw materials from which culture is built, namely laughter. All rational beings laugh—and maybe only rational beings laugh. And all rational beings benefit from laughing. As a result there has emerged a peculiar human institution—that of the joke, the repeatable performance in words or gestures that is designed as an object of laughter. Now there is a great difficulty in saying exactly what laughter is. It is not just a sound—not even a sound, since it can be silent. Nor is it just a thought, like the thought of some object as incongruous. It is a response to something, which also involves a judgment of that thing. Moreover, it is not an individual peculiarity, like a nervous tic or a sneeze. Laughter is an expression of amusement, and amusement is an outwardly directed, socially pregnant state of mind.³ Laughter begins as a collective condition, as when children giggle together over some absurdity. And in adulthood amusement remains one of the ways in which human beings enjoy each other’s company, become reconciled to their differences, and accept their common lot. Laughter helps us to overcome our isolation and fortifies us against despair.

That does not mean that laughter is subjective in the sense that “anything goes,” or that it is uncritical of its object. On the contrary, jokes are the object of fierce disputes, and many are dismissed as “not funny,” “in bad taste,” “offensive,” and so on. The habit of laughing at things is not detachable from the habit of judging things to be worthy of laughter. Indeed, amusement, although a spontaneous outflow of social emotion, is also the most frequently practiced form of judgment. To laugh at something is already to judge it, and when we refrain from laughing at what someone nevertheless believes to be funny, we may thereby show our disapproval of that person’s stance. A joke in “bad taste” is not just a failure: it is an offence, and one of the most important aspects of moral education is to teach children not to commit that offense. Think about this, and you will quickly see that, however difficult it may be to define such notions as “judgment” and “taste,” they are absolutely indispensable to us.

Shakespeare provides us with a telling example of what I mean in the involved subplot to Twelfth Night. The drunken Sir Toby Belch and his disorderly companions decide to play a practical joke on Malvolio, steward to Sir Toby’s beautiful cousin Olivia, in revenge for Malvolio’s justified but stuck-up disapproval of their ways. The practical joke involves persuading Malvolio that Olivia loves him and will love him yet more if he obeys various absurd recommendations concerning his costume and conduct. As a result of this prank, Malvolio is at first humiliated, then wounded, and finally locked up as mad, to be rescued at last only by the twists and turns of the somewhat farcical plot. Remorse, of a shallow kind, visits the pranksters. But the audience, which had begun by laughing with them, finds itself now looking on them with cold disdain and on Malvolio with uneasy pity. A cloud of discomfiture surrounds the play’s conclusion, as the laughter which had propelled it is suddenly brought to judgment and condemned.

THE CONCEPT OF ART

Those remarks do not amount to a theory of humor, or of the “judgment of taste” on which it depends. But they point to the fact that there is nothing obscure about this judgment, which is a familiar part of everybody’s life, with a vital role to play in cementing human society. Maybe amusement is a species of, a cousin to, or a prelude to, aesthetic appreciation. But we don’t have to determine whether that is so, in order to see that there really is a kind of judgment at the heart of culture, and that we are engaged in it all the time. Furthermore, this judgment can be educated, is in all forms morally relevant, and involves many of our deepest and most important social instincts. Reflecting on amusement and humor, and their place in our lives, you get a very clear intimation of a more general truth, about the nature and meaning of culture—namely that culture is judgment, and that judgment matters.

The example also helps us to deflect what has come to be a routine dismissal of culture and the pursuit of it—a dismissal that begins from skepticism about the concept of art. A century ago Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal, entitled it “La Fontaine,” and then exhibited it as a work of art. This famous gesture has since been repeated ad nauseam, and insofar as students now learn anything in art schools, it consists in the ability to perform this gesture while believing it to be original—an epistemological achievement comparable to that of the White Queen who, in her youth, could believe six impossible propositions before breakfast. One immediate result of Duchamp’s joke was to precipitate an intellectual industry devoted to answering the question “What is art?” The literature of this industry is as tedious and pointless as are the imitations of Duchamp’s gesture, and not even the wit and intellect of Arthur Danto has served to enliven it.⁴ Nevertheless, it has left a residue of skepticism that has fueled the attack on culture. If anything can count as art, then art ceases to have a point. All that is left is the curious but unfounded fact that some people like looking at some things, others like looking at others. As for the suggestion that there is an enterprise of criticism, which searches for objective values and lasting monuments to the human spirit, this is dismissed out of hand as depending on a conception of the artwork that was washed down the drain of Duchamp’s “fountain.”

The argument has been rehearsed with malicious wit by John Carey,⁵ and is fast becoming orthodoxy, not least because it seems to emancipate people from the burden of culture, telling them that all those venerable masterpieces can be ignored with impunity, that reality TV is “as good as” Shakespeare and techno-rock the equal of Brahms, since nothing is better than anything else and all claims to aesthetic value are void. The argument, however, is based on the elementary mistake of thinking of art as what Mill called a “natural kind,” like water, calcium carbonate, or the tiger—in other words, a kind whose essence is fixed not by human interests, but by the way things are.⁶ If, in defining art, we were attempting to isolate some feature of the natural order, then our definition would certainly have failed if we could set no limits to the concept. “Art,” however, is not the name of a natural kind, but of a functional kind, like “table.” Anything is a table if it can be used as tables are used —to support things at which we sit to work or eat. A packing case can be a table; an old urinal can be a table; a human slave can be a table. This does not make the concept arbitrary, nor does it prevent us from distinguishing good tables from bad.

Return now to the example of jokes. It is as hard to circumscribe the class of jokes as it is the class of artworks. Anything is a joke if somebody says so. For “joke” names a functional kind. A joke is an artifact made to be laughed at. It may fail to perform its function, in which case it is a joke that “falls flat.” Or it may perform its function, but offensively, in which case it is a joke “in bad taste.” But none of this implies that the category of jokes is arbitrary, or that there is no such thing as a distinction between good jokes and bad. Nor does it in any way suggest that there is no place for the criticism of jokes, or for the kind of moral education that has a dignified and decorous sense of humor as its goal. Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is that Marcel Duchamp’s urinal was one—quite a good one the first time around, corny by mid-twentieth century, and downright stupid today.

ART AND AESTHETIC INTEREST

What I have said about jokes can be readily transferred to artworks too. Anything is art if somebody sincerely says so, for art is a functional kind. A work of art is something put forward as an object of aesthetic interest. It may fail to perform its function, in which case it is aesthetically empty. Or it may perform its function, but offensively, in which case it is brash, vulgar, disturbing, or whatever. But none of this implies that the category of art is arbitrary, or that there is no such thing as a distinction between good and bad art. Still less does it suggest that there is no place for the criticism of art, or for the kind of aesthetic education that has a decorous and humane aesthetic understanding as its goal.

It is hardly surprising that jokes and artworks are so similar. For some artworks consist entirely of jokes: not only cheeky gestures like Duchamp’s urinal, but also extended works of literature, like Tristram Shandy and Through the Looking Glass. Comedies and jokes appeal to the same emotional repertoire. And jokes, like works of art, can be endlessly repeatable. Still, in defining art as a functional kind I have introduced a new idea—that of “aesthetic interest.” And the reader will want to know what kind of interest this is, and whether it is central to culture in general, or specialized to works of art. This is another knot which I propose to cut through. Aesthetic interest, I suggest, is simply the kind of interest that we take in works of art. We are all familiar wit...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• 1 - What Is Culture?
• 2 - Leisure, Cult, and Culture
• 3 - Knowledge and Feeling
• 4 - The Uses of Criticism
• 5 - Teaching Culture
• 6 - Culture Wars
• 7 - Rays of Hope
• NOTES
• INDEX
• Copyright Page