Modern Society Archives - Page 6 of 21

Is the Religious Right Really so Incomprehensible?

Sometimes it seems like discussions in this country are taking place in two isolated camps. Every now and then, that suspicion seems like a certainty.

As an example, I offer you Benjamin Friedman’s new book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.

Friedman, a Harvard economics professor, was faced with a seemingly incomprehensible phenomenon: “the puzzling behavior of many of our fellow citizens whose attitudes toward questions of economic policy seem sharply at odds with what would seem to be their own economic benefit.” The puzzle is why people oppose things like higher tax rates and inheritance taxes. Even more unsettling is that those with this aberrant voting behavior “disproportionately belong to the nation’s increasingly influential evangelical churches.”

Shocked to discover this link between economic conservatism and religious belief, Friedman sets off to explain. His research led him far and wide. The bibliography in this book runs to thirty-four pages. Yet, somehow Friedman missed George Nash’s book, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, which has a detailed explanation of how the unification of these two groups occurred. Nash should not feel slighted, however. There is also no mention of Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Russell Kirk is missing. So is Richard John Neuhaus. We could make a game of this, but it gets old pretty fast.

Instead of reading all those books, Friedman spins a historical tale showing how thinking about economics has always been heavily influenced by religious thought. Once again, that is a deeply interesting question. How did the Greek thought emerging from Athens and the religious thought emerging from Jerusalem combine to create Western Civilization? Many books have been written on this subject. Those books are also not in Friedman’s bibliography.

Read the rest at The University Bookman.

Hell’s Angels are Coming to Town

“On Labor Day 1966, I pushed my luck a little too far and got badly stomped by four or five Angels who seemed to feel I was taking advantage of them. A minor disagreement suddenly became very serious….I got in my car and sped off, spitting blood on the dashboard and weaving erratically across both lanes of the midnight highway until my one good eye finally came into focus….I was tired, swollen, and whipped. My face looked like it had been jammed into the spokes of a speeding Harley, and the only thing keeping me awake was the spastic pain of a broken rib.”

That is from the postscript to Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. It was really the only ending possible to the book. Thompson, a young journalist trying to make his name, wrote a story about the Hell’s Angels and then decided to spend even more time with them to churn out a whole book. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that he would get beat to a pulp in the parking lot of a bar.

But, let’s back up a bit. Seemingly overnight back in the mid-1960s, the Hell’s Angles became a national news sensation. Coast to coast, the newspapers and TV were filled with tales of the terrors of a rampaging army of motorcycle terrorists. It was as if we had the modern media in the age of Genghis Khan providing vivid descriptions of the Mongol Hordes descending upon idyllic villages in bucolic settings.

This horde rose motorcycles, though, and not just any old motorcycles: Souped-up Harley Davidsons; really big motorcycles; really loud motorcycles. Imagine a group of those motorcycles with drivers in leather and nasty snarls tearing down the highway on their way to your town. You can lock up your wife and kids all you want; it won’t matter. That is some seriously gripping news right there. Guaranteed to sell a paper or some commercial air time.

One problem with the narrative: there were never really all that many Hell’s Angels. A couple hundred, maybe, split up over clubs in different cities scattered across California. They weren’t the only motorcycle gang at the time, but the Gypsy Jokers, for example, just didn’t have a name that sounded as threatening. Hell’s Angels. Marketing genius right there.

Hunter Thompson bought a motorcycle and spent some time riding with and hanging out with the Angels. What does he find? Well, if you turn you this book expecting riveting accounts of mayhem, you’ll be pretty disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong. The Hell’s Angels were thugs who reveled in their image and happily engaged in many a bar fight. An attack on one Angel was an attack on all Angels, so if you ever got into a fight with one, the whole gang would pile on. If you were a California bar owner in the mid-1960s, and a group of Hell’s Angles rolled in, it was a race between whether the profits from beer sales or the inevitable damage to your bar would be bigger. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. If you were a young female and you decided to spend a couple hours drinking beer with the guys, well, you probably didn’t win that bet. Like I said, these are not the sort of people you want to invite over to your backyard barbecue.

But, were they a national menace? For example: the police in Ketchum, Idaho actually mounted a machine gun on the top of the downtown drugstore just in case the Hell’s Angels ever rolled into town. (That fact was particularly fascinating to me—my grandparents moved to Ketchum when I was a kid, so I went there every summer. Alas, I didn’t know about the machine gun.) A report that the Angles might be coming to town was an event at the local police station.

Curiously however, it was not just the local police who paid attention to reports on where the Angels were heading. Thompson has an extended account of the year the Hell’s Angels descended on Bass Lake for their Fourth of July rampage. When they got there, the roads were filled with…tourists. Yes, tourists hoping to see the Hell’s Angels in action. One convenience store owner hired some thugs of his own to ward off the Angles…so the Angels bought all their beer at a different store. A couple of days of alcohol and drugs down by the lake, and they all headed home. You spend the whole time reading this account, just waiting for the violence to erupt…and it never does.

What was going on? As Thompson’s account makes clear, the individuals in the Hell’s Angles fit a description. They were, in a word, losers. Guys without stable jobs, drifting from one thing to the next. No real family or friends. And suddenly with the Angels, they had a family. The joined Hell’s Angles to get that sense of belonging to something, to having something bigger than themselves of which they could feel like they were part. The reputation of terror was part of the thrill; people were scared of the Hell’s Angels and suddenly a bunch of guys who nobody would have ever noticed were the center of attention. Indeed, one of the things that the Angles loved the best was to roll into a place, see the looks of terror on the faces of everyone there and then proceed to…be really nice.

The most remarkable thing about Thompson’s book is that it was published before the Rolling Stones thought it would be a great idea to hire the Hell’s Angles to provide security at the Altamont concert. Reading this book, you know exactly how that story would end. Bring in the Angels, ply them with lots of beer in a rather crowded environment, and…what could possibly go wrong? Of course the Angels killed a guy. Of course they did.

That the Hell’s Angels were a thuggish gang in the mid-1960s is really obvious. That doesn’t explain, however, why they were national news, why everyone was afraid of them across the land. There simply were not enough of them to pose a large scale threat. Then it hits you. The media were not any different in the mid-1960s than they are today. Imagine a small group of people—a few hundred in a nation of hundreds of millions—whose behavior is beyond civilized norms. It isn’t a big group, so without media coverage, you would probably never know this group even exists. After all, you don’t actually know a million people, so if a group’s size is one per million, you’ve never met anyone in the group. But get a few camera shots and write a story about the most egregious activities and never quite mention how small the group is, and voila, instant story! The small group of disenfranchised losers is suddenly the biggest menace to the nation.

The story of this book is indeed a strange and terrible saga. It is impossible to read this and not lament the lives destroyed by this gang. But the book itself also raises some really interesting questions about media attention to violent fringe groups. Was anyone’s life actually improved when the New York Times and Hunter Thompson himself, made the Hell’s Angels a household name?

Does Education Have an Aim?

“Education is a subject on which we all feel that we have something to say. We have all been educated, more or less; and we have, most of us, complaints to make about the defects of our own education; and we all like to blame our educators, or the system within which they were compelled to work, for our failure to educate ourselves.”

That comes near the outset of T. S. Eliot’s essay “The Aims of Education,” included in the posthumously published collection To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings.

The essay was originally a set of lectures Eliot gave in 1950-51 at the University of Chicago. What is striking about the discussion is how little has changed since then in thinking about the aims of education. Think of the enormous advances in other fields of knowledge, all of which have shaped the content of the individual classes in an educational system. In what fields, for example, would a textbook from 1950 still be useable in a college classroom? Yet despite those massive changes what we can call the Education Question is still unresolved.

What is an Education? Or as Eliot puts it in the first part of his essay “Can ‘Education’ be Defined?” As soon as you start to try to answer that question, you realize how many different ways we use the term. Which person is educated? The person who can read? The person who knows reading, writing and ‘rithmetic? The person who can read a newspaper? The person who knows algebra? Or calculus? The person who knows about Dante and Aquinas and Michelangelo? At what point can you say about yourself, “I am educated”?

Thinking through the question of definition is pretty interesting because it leads naturally into thinking about the aims of education. Eliot begins noting three quite distinct aims of education, however defined: training to earn a living, preparing for citizenship, the pursuit of perfection. The intriguing questions here is how those aims are related to one another and how they conflict with one another. It is a marvelous tangled mess.

The part that left me in deep reverie, however, comes at the midpoint of the essay, when Eliot describes the history of education:

We have already observed that the term “education” has become more difficult of definition as a result of social changes in the last three or four hundred years. We may distinguish four important phases. In the first, we were concerned only with the training of a small minority for certain learned professions. In the second, with the refinement of culture, we were concerned with the education of the gentleman, or of the honnête homme; and at the same time, with the supply of the rudiments of literacy to a humbler stratum of society. During the nineteenth century, the minds of educators were largely occupied with the problem of extending the benefits, or supposed benefits, of education as then understood, to an increasing number of the population. The problem was apparently simple: men still thought that they knew what education was—it was what a part of the community had been receiving; and so long as this education could be supplied to increasing numbers, educators felt that they were on the right road. But today we realize that we have come near enough to the end of expansion to be faced with a wholly new problem….In the nineteenth century, there seemed also to be only the problem of educating more of the members of society. But now we are at a stage at which we are not simply trying to educate more people—we are already committed to providing everybody with something called education. We are coming to the end of our educational frontier. Long ago we decided that everybody must be taught to read, write, and cipher; and so long as there were large numbers who could not read, write, or cipher, we did not need to look too closely into the question of what education meant.

A fascinating way to frame the question. We are still stuck in that fourth stage. Truly stuck. Once we have reached the point in a society where there is universal literacy and knowledge of basic mathematics and science, then what? The aims of education through 4^th grade are clear; there is relatively little debate about that any more. It is what comes after that where the questions loom large.

A student knows how to read; what do you have the student read? In a society with a cultural consensus on what things matter most, that is not a difficult question. But, what if there is no consensus? Who gets to decide what the student reads? Do we leave the matter up to “education experts”? But, in this case, what does it mean to have an expertise in education? Do the experts in educational theory automatically know the best aims for education? If you look at the content of a Master of Arts in Education program, you find a lot about technique, but very little about how to decide what content will make the best society.

Imagine we wanted to set up a program in which people will learn the best aim for the education in a country. Plato’s Republic had something like that. The Philosopher Kings decide. Can we agree on who should be our philosopher kings? Good luck even making a list of candidates for that job.

It doesn’t take long in ruminating about this to end up exactly where Eliot ended up at the close of his essay. “The Issue of Religion” cannot be avoided. We need a standard on which to evaluate different societal forms in order to decide on the best aims of education. A system of thought which provides an external standing place is a pretty good description of a religion. The religion is not a part of what we are examining when we think through the aims of education; the religion is the standard by which we evaluate those aims.

If this is right, then Eliot’s fourth stage of education is the most difficult even in a society in which there is a consensus about religion. Agreeing to teach a student to read is pretty simple compared to figuring out what educational content will prepare people to be good citizens or what careers an education should train people to do or what virtues will enable people to pursue perfection. In a society with a common religious foundation, those questions are hard, but they are at least potentially answerable.

What happens, however, when a society does not have a common religion? How do we decide on the best aims of education when we no longer share the same fundamental beliefs about what makes a good society?

The educational wars we see today fit so easily into this framework it is hard to see them in any other way. Think of all the candidates for the structure of public education today, and it is easy to see that this is a religious war being conducted under a different name. We have the Religion of America the Beautiful vs the Religion of Environmentalism vs the Religion of the Woke vs the Religion of Self-Esteem. All of these and more are vying for control of the curriculum.

Is there a way out? Is there a way to craft an educational system and the content of that education which bypasses this problem of warring religions? I can’t think of one. Indeed, the longer I think about it, the more I realize that it is hard to come up with any aim of education for the literate student which does not immediately further the aim of one of the those warring religions. The curriculum wars are the ideological equivalent of the Reformation wars, with, let us hope, a lot less blood.

What happens if we cannot agree on the aims of education? Look around.

A Tale of Reading About Handmaids

Sometimes, you just have to ignore the hype. A book comes out and all the Beautiful People talk about how much they love it, but when you read why they love it, you think the book must just be awful, so you never read it. Then 35 years later you pick it up and discover not only is it a decent book, but all the hype about it was just wrong.

Example: The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood.

When the book was published in 1986, it was widely and very loudly praised as a giant hit piece on the religious right. As I learned back then, this was a description of what the world would become if those Christians who voted for Reagan got their way. Indeed, it was prophecy. Women were about to become second class citizens; powerful Men would have slaves called Handmaids on which they could indulge their wildest sexual fantasies. Clearly this is what Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and even Reagan really wanted.

I thought that was ridiculous, so I was never even tempted to read the book.

Then the book got a new lease of life when Hulu put out a miniseries which showed what was going to happen when Trump was elected. Curious how it morphed from Pat Robertson’s mid-1980s dream society to Donald Trump’s mid-2010s dream society, but of course the Beautiful People hated both and their view of the enemy has obviously not changed at all in the last three decades. I was still not tempted to read the book.

Then one of my rather bookish, really thoughtful former students told me that the book was actually worth reading; she has been a rather reliable guide to date, so I figured “Why Not?” and I tossed it on the reading list for one of my reading groups.

Verdict: It was actually not a bad book. I have no idea how all those people who thought it was the dream world of the religious right got that insane idea. The ruling group in this tiny little section of a country is battling Baptists and Quakers outside their borders, so it is really hard to see how this can be spun as a Southern Baptist fantasy world when Atwood herself has the Baptists out there as an enemy of this state.

Moreover, the Handmaids are not sexual toys at all but a desperate attempt to generate children in a society where some apocalypse has occurred and sterility has become the norm. Yes, the society is not some egalitarian paradise, and yes there is good reason for you not to want to live in this society, but it is hard to sell this society as some Christian Male Fantasy—all the men are miserable in this society too.

Setting aside all the hype, it is a nice dystopian novel, sort of like a poor man’s 1984 or Brave New World. Perfect beach book if you are looking for something to while away a few hours.

Can the book be taken more seriously? There are a few places where it makes nods in the direction of being something Great, but after your think about it for a bit, it falls short.

First, the story is of a rather improbable coup. The improbable part isn’t a failing for a work of fiction, but it is silly that people took the book seriously as prophecy. Stripped to its essence, the fundamental structure of this society is simply a development of the Division of Labor. It is thus much closer to Brave New World than to 1984—it raises a lot of the same questions as Brave New World in that respect. But, Brave New World is more chilling and thought-provoking in having the Division of Labor be imposed at birth through laboratory manipulation. Handmaid’s Tale gets the Division of Labor in more conventional totalitarian ways: Someone (it is never really clear who) lines people up and give them jobs, like a Giant Sorting Hat: you will be a Commander, you will be a chauffeur, you will be a sterile wife, you will be a cook, you will be impregnated and bear a child.

If the book wants to make a claim to being something really great, it has to be something about the argument of the book, not the structure of the society itself. That is where I also get a bit stuck. Some men don’t think women are equals? Some men think of women primarily as prostitutes or mothers? Hardly earth-shattering. But, what else is there?

My former student was fascinated by the appendix where we discover that the text was a bunch of tapes they found in a locker somewhere. The idea of this being tapes and the historians don’t really know what order the tapes go could have been great. But, if you rearrange the episodes of the novel, the fundamental story is totally unaffected. (There is also not really all that much leeway in rearranging the tapes. Jezebel’s has to come after the visits to the Commander’s office, for example; Nick has to come after the doctor’s office and Jezebel’s; and so on.) Moreover, according to the appendix, there were 30 tapes. That does not correspond to the number of chapters or sections. This just compounds my problem with thinking about the book through the lens of the appendix. To be interesting, there would have to be some way of rearranging the material that changed the way the story would be interpreted. I just can’t find a new interpretation. Arranging it all chronologically, for example, would change the reading experience, but not really the story.

The fact that it is tapes also creates a bit of havoc with the verb tenses. The narrator uses present tense to describe events as they are happening and past tense to talk about her previous life. But, there was no way she could have been making the tapes in real time if she is accurately describing the society. It is weird if she makes the tapes using present tense after the end of the novel. So either we have an unreliable narrator making the tapes in real time or we have some sort of insane person making the tapes later on. This again, could have been really interesting, but I can’t see any way to make these theories generate new ideas.

Like I said, I didn’t think the book was bad; but the structural problems are real. My reading group discussion on the book was fascinating. Most of the students enjoyed reading the book, but nobody thought it made a serious or realistic argument. The most sympathetic reading of the argument is that old white women might like it. (Ouch!…students can be cruel…) I got zero traction trying to talk about the implications of the appendix. Nobody cared about the tenses. I tried, I really did. But, in the end, they thought it was just a silly bit of overblown rhetoric about the threat to women. They enjoyed it; a few of them thought it was one of the most enjoyable books they have read. But none of them sounded like all those people praising it to the skies back in 1986. (The times, they are a-changin…)

The biggest question the book raises for me is where to shelve it. The fiction in my library is separated into two sections based on whether the book has literary merit. This book is truly on the edge of whether it belongs between Matthew Arnold and W.H. Auden, or over on the non-alphabetized shelves with Agatha Christie and George Martin.

When Honor is at Stake

Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake.

Think about Hamlet’s observation there for a moment. To be great is to quarrel over nothing when honor is at stake. Is honor that important? Does Greatness hinge on honor?

James Bowman’s Honor: A History is one of those remarkable books which make you notice the world in a new light. I read it shortly after it was published in 2006; I just reread it with a reading group. Once you see the argument, it all seems so obvious that understanding the modern age requires understanding the nature and history of honor.

First, what is honor? “At its simplest, honor is the good opinion of the people who matter to us, and who matter because we regard them as a society of equals who have the power to judge our behavior.” You have an honor group, a set of people in front of whom you would never want to act dishonorably. One of the remarkable things about honor is that even as the notion of honor has collapsed in the West, its vestigial remains are still there, influencing how you act.

In its original form in the West (and in the form in which it still exists in much of the world), honor meant bravery for men and chastity for women. (Even in our post-honor world, men are insulted if called a wimp and women are insulted if called sexually promiscuous, which given the way we normally talk about displays of strength and the idea of chastity is rather remarkable.) In an honor culture, if you insult me, I am honor bound to reply, in a forceful and violent manner. The failure to reply to an insult is dishonorable; my peers would think I am a wimp. The basic features of honor have some effects on other character traits: “A man who is brave in battle and willing to fight for his honor will also, it is generally assumed, keep his word and behave generously to his subordinates and inferiors.”

Honor cultures are the norm in human history. What happened in the West? The first step in the demise of honor came with the spread of Christianity. “Turn the other cheek” is not exactly the same as “punch back harder.”

Where honor was local, Christianity was universal; where honor was elitist, Christianity was catholic and inclusive; where honor was warlike, Christianity was pacifist; where honor treated women only as property, Christianity treated them as human beings, if not yet as the equals of men. Though the two traditions continued to exist side by side for centuries, rarely (we should say, perhaps, too rarely) interfering with each other, honor could hardly fail to be influenced by the existence of Christianity in such close proximity.

The uneasy coexistence of an honor culture and a Christian culture fell apart in the early 20^th century. Bowman traces the collapse to three things which hit simultaneously. Trench warfare in World War I made it the first war in which there was little honor to be found in battle. The rise of psychotherapy changed the focus of attention from external acts to internal states of mind. Feminism undermined the idea of separate honor codes for men and women. The honor culture could not survive, but that does not mean the notion of honor evaporated. Instead, honor went underground and has cropped up in all sorts of was.

Consider warfare. The collapse of the public acknowledgement of honor as a motive has had two dramatic effects on the ways that wars are conducted since World War 1. First, the explanation of why a country is going to war can no longer be that honor is at stake. Instead, the justification for going war must be framed as a moral crusade:

This idea of war-making as a matter of morality rather than honor had the effect of raising the bar for the justification of any future war. Henceforth, it was already beginning to be plain, it would be necessary to paint all enemies as Hitlers or would-be Hitlers. The state of affairs later helped to create the sense of betrayal and deception that grew up during the rhetorical battles over the Vietnam War

Hitler, the communist threat, weapons of mass destruction—in none of these cases was it acceptable to simply state that the nation has been insulted and will now punch back even harder.

The conduct of war has also been altered. As Douglas MacArthur, one of the last great generals from the age in which honor was paramount, once said, a nation at war has three options: “Either pursue it to victory; to surrender to the enemy and end it on his terms; or what I would think is the worst of all choices—to go on indefinitely and indefinitely, neither to win or lose, in that stalemate; because what we are doing is sacrificing thousands of men while we are doing it.”

We have obviously decided to take that third route. We simply do not talk about military victory anymore. Imagine a President who said simply, “Our goal is to utterly crush our opponents on the battlefield.” Nothing else. Just that. No nation building or spreading democracy or ending injustice. Our goal is to win the war. Period.

An interesting way to see the effect of this collapse of honor on the modern mind is nicely illustrated in an anecdote Bowman tells in which I think he misses the point.

When I was a teacher, I once asked my pupils to choose a hero of theirs to talk about in class. One boy insisted on taking Captain James Kirk of the Starship Enterprise as his only confessed hero—as a protest, I took it, against the idea that there could be, or perhaps should be, any heroism at all in the real world. Heroes were becoming by definition fantasy figures.

Now obviously I don’t know what motivated the student being described, but I do know my own mind. My childhood hero was also Captain Kirk, but not because I thought heroes were fantasy figures. Bowman’s book explains my Kirk fascination perfectly. In the 1970s when I was growing up in California, nobody celebrated honor. If asked for a real life hero, I could not have named a soul; I never learned the idea of a hero. Then I started watching Star Trek and here was this guy who embodied bravery and fearlessness and cleverness and did all these amazing things with an omnipresent smirk. Where else in my life did I see people like that? Is it any wonder he was my hero? Rightly to be great is to find quarrel in a straw when honor is at stake. My childhood self admired honor even though I was never told that such a thing existed.

Where does the collapse of honor leave us? On this, Bowman’s book, I am sad to say, does not give a lot of room for optimism. Residual honor is not going away, but the lack of a language in which to talk about honor does not make it obvious how we can rebuild a culture in which honor is channeled in productive ways.

Preserving a Culture

As I have rather frequently noted, when asked about the learning goals for my classes, I always reply, “To help students learn to read Shakespeare for Pleasure.”

Since most of my classes are in the Economics department, this answer always strikes people as a bit, well, odd. But, I am not joking when I say that.

To say that we learn economics in order to learn to read Shakespeare for pleasure is making a cultural argument. The study of economics is part of a larger intellectual culture, one in which we build models of the world in order to understand the world. The cultural argument is that Newton, Austen, and Smith were all building models, that thinking about those models is both enjoyable and illuminating, and that when you can learn from both Dickens and Ricardo, then you can enjoy learning from Shakespeare.

A vital part of this argument is that there is something about this culture which is worth preserving, worth handing down to the next generation. To see why it is worth preserving culture, we first need to think about what it means to have a culture. Enter T.S. Eliot.

“Notes Toward the Definition of Culture” is one of the essays in Eliot’s Christianity and Culture. The essay has seemingly modest aim: to define the word “culture.” Being by Eliot, the essay roams widely into all sorts of obscure nooks and crannies, but if you have ever read any of Eliot’s poems, you would expect nothing else.

The crisp definition of culture is:

Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living. And it is what justifies other people and other generations in saying, when they contemplate the remains and the influence of an extinct civilization, that is was worth while for that civilization to have existed.

That is a marvelous description of a culture in two ways. First, it is a rather accurate way of distinguishing our culture from the other aspects of our lives. Second, it gives a means to categorize a culture as a good culture or a bad culture by letting the future be the jury.

Culture comes in at many levels. There are the historical relics (Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby); the European imports (Hamlet, War and Peace, the Mona Lisa); the modern blockbusters (Marvel, Harry Potter); streaming TV (The Queen’s Gambit, Real Housewives); music (Bach, John Williams, Lana Del Rey and Dr. Dre); the holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, July 4);and the mighty trio (NFL, NBA, MLB). High culture, low culture, and maybe even something in between.

What is important is a structure of society in which there will be, from “top” to “bottom,” a continuous gradation of cultural levels: it is important to remember that we should not consider the upper levels as possessing more culture than the lowest, but as representing a more conscious culture and a greater specialisation of culture. I incline to believe that no true democracy can maintain itself unless it contains these different levels of culture.

The challenge for the modern age is thus not to ensure the existence of culture. The Kardashians will always be with us. Neither the NFL nor Marvel is on the verge of vanishing. The challenge for our age is to preserve high culture, to remind people that just because you like J.K Rowling, you shouldn’t skip discovering the joys of Dante.

There is a popular misperception that high culture is some sort of church demanding strict obedience; Thou shalt not speak ill of Shakespeare. While there is inevitably a relationship between the religion and the culture of a society, in both cases there is an acute need for debate and discussion within the hallowed inner chambers. Eliot’s comments on Christianity and culture apply equally to the discussion about the Great Books and music and painting.

Christendom should be one: the form of organisation and the locus of powers in that unity are questions upon which we cannot pronounce. But within that unity there should be an endless conflict between ideas—for it is only by the struggle against constantly appearing false ideas that the truth is enlarged and clarified, and in the conflict with heresy that orthodoxy is developed to meet the needs of the times; an endless effort also on the part of each region to shape its Christianity to suit itself, an effort which should neither be wholly suppressed nor left wholly unchecked. The local temperament must express its particularity in its form of Christianity, and so must the social stratum, so that the culture proper to each area and each class may flourish; but there must also be a force holding these areas and these classes together. If this corrective force in the direction of uniformity of belief and practice is lacking, then the culture of each part will suffer.

Another way of framing the challenge of our age is making sure there are enough people in the next generation to carry on that endless conflict between ideas in the sanctums of higher culture, to carry on the battles against heresy and work out the orthodoxy of the age.

High culture is ever at risk because the forces of low culture are like the sea eternally crashing upon the rocks. No matter how strong the rocks are, the sea will never stop crashing against them; but there is no guarantee the rocks will persevere against the forces of the sea. Sometimes a culture will crack under the strain; and the question for future generation is whether the culture produced anything still worthy of veneration.

Teaching people about the glories of high culture is not (or at least should not be) saying that mass culture is unworthy of attention. I, for one, thoroughly enjoy superheroes and the NFL. Mass culture does indeed fit Eliot’s description of being part of the thing that makes life worth living. But nether WandaVision nor the 2021 NFL Draft will be the thing that future generations look back on and say “It is good that such a civilization existed.” The legislation passed by Congress in 1885 is not what we remember about that year; we remember Huckleberry Finn, and we remember it because it is worth remembering. The challenge for education is now what it has always been, to hand down that culture so that Huckleberry Finn will never be forgotten.