Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (89 page)

The book is divided into two sections. ‘The Rise of the Elite’ is essentially an optimistic gloss on the way high-IQ people have been let loose in the corridors of power; the second section, ‘The Decline of the Lower Classes,’ is a gleeful picture of the way such social engineering is almost bound to backfire. Young doesn’t take sides; he merely fires both barrels of the argument as to what would happen if we really did espouse wholeheartedly the mantra ‘equality of opportunity.’ His chief point is that such an approach would be bound to lead to eugenic nonsenses and monstrosities, that the new lower classes – by definition stupid – would have no leadership worth the name, and that the new IQ-rich upper classes would soon devise ways to keep themselves in power. Here he ‘reveals’ that society in 2034 has discovered ways of predicting the IQ of an infant at three months; the result is predictable – a black market in babies in which the stupid children of high IQ parents are swapped, along with large ‘dowries,’ for high-IQ children of stupid parents.
⁸⁹
It is this practice that, when exposed in the newspapers, gives rise to the ‘disturbances,’ an incoherent rising by a leaderless, stupid mob, which has no chance of success.

Young’s argument overlaps with Bell’s, and others, insofar as he is saying that the new human condition risks being a passionless, cold, boring block of bureaucracy in which tyranny takes not the form of fascism or communism or socialism but benevolent bureaucratisation.
⁹⁰
Scientism is a factor here, too, he says. You can measure IQ, maybe, but you can never measure good parenting or put a numerical value on being an artist, say, or a corporate CEO. And maybe any attempt to try only creates more problems than it solves.

Young had pushed Bell’s and Riesman’s and Mills’s reasoning to its limits, its logical conclusion. Man’s identity was no longer politically determined; and he was no longer an existential being. His identity was psychological, biological, predetermined at birth. If we weren’t careful, the end of ideology meant the end of our humanity.

In November 1948 the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to T. S. Eliot. For him it was a year of awards – the previous January he had been given the Order of Merit by King George VI. Interviewed by a reporter in Princeton after the announcement from Stockholm, Eliot was asked for what the Nobel had been awarded. He said he assumed it was ‘for the entire
corpus.’
‘When did you publish
that
?’ replied the reporter.
¹

Between
The Waste Land
and the prize, Eliot had built an unequalled reputation for his hard, clear poetic voice, with its bleak vision of the emptiness and banality running through modern life. He had also written a number of carefully crafted and well-received plays peopled with mainly pessimistic characters, who had lost their way in a world that was exhausted. By 1948 Eliot was extremely conscious of the fact that his own work was, as his biographer Peter Ackroyd put it, ‘one of the more brightly chiselled achievements of a culture that was dying,’ and that partly explains why, in the same month that he travelled to Stockholm to meet the Swedish king and receive his prize, he also published his last substantial prose book.
²
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
is not his best book, but it interests us here because of its timing and the fact that it was the first of a small number of works on both sides of the Atlantic that, in the aftermath of war, formed the last attempt to define and preserve the traditional ‘high’ culture, which Eliot and others felt to be mortally threatened.
³

As we saw in chapter 11,
The Waste Land,
besides its grim vision of the post-World War I landscape, had been constructed in a form that was frankly high culture – fiercely elitist and deliberately difficult, with elaborate references to the classics of the past. In the post-World War II environment, Eliot clearly felt that a somewhat different form of attack, or defence, was needed – in effect, a balder statement of his views, plain speaking that did not risk being misunderstood or overlooked.
Notes
begins by sketching out various meanings of the term ‘culture’ – as in its anthropological sense (‘primitive culture’), its biological sense (bacterial culture, agriculture), and in its more usual sense of referring to someone who is learned, civil, familiar with the arts, who has an easy ability to manipulate abstract ideas.
⁴
He discusses the overlap between these ideas before concentrating on his preferred subject, by which he means
that, to him, culture is a way of life. Here he advances the paragraph that was to become famous: ‘The term
culture …
includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people; Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list.’
⁵

But if this list seems ecumenical, Eliot soon makes it clear that he distinguishes many
levels
in such a culture. He is not blind to the fact that producers of culture – artists, say – need not necessarily have high intellectual gifts themselves.
⁶
But for him, culture can only thrive with an elite, a cultural elite, and cannot exist without religion, his point being that religion brings with it a shared set of beliefs to hold a way of life together – Eliot is convinced therefore that democracy and egalitarianism invariably threaten culture. Although he often refers to ‘mass society,’ his main target is the breakdown of the family and family life. For it is through the family, he says, that culture is transmitted.
⁷
He ends by discussing the unity of European culture and the relation of culture to politics.
⁸
The overall unity of European culture, he argues, is important because – like religion – it offers a shared context, a way for the individual cultures within Europe to keep themselves alive, taking in what is new and recognising what is familiar. He quotes Alfred North Whitehead from
Science and the Modern World
(1925): ‘Men require from their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration.’
⁹
But perhaps the most important point of culture, Eliot says, lies in its impact on politics. The power elite needs a cultural elite, he argues, because the cultural elite is the best antidote, provides the best critics for the power brokers in any society, and that criticism pushes the culture forward, prevents it stagnating and decaying.
¹⁰
He therefore thinks that there are bound to be classes in society, that class is a good thing, though he wants there to be plenty of movement between classes, and he recognises that the chief barrier to the ideal situation is the family, which quite naturally tries to buy privilege for its offspring. He views it as obvious that cultures have evolved, that some cultures are higher than others, but does not see this as cause for concern or, be it said, as an excuse for racism (though he himself was later to be accused of anti-Semitism).
¹¹
For Eliot, within any one culture, the higher, more evolved levels positively influence the lower levels by their greater knowledge of, and use of,
scepticism.
For Eliot, that is what knowledge is for, and its chief contribution to happiness and the common good.

In Britain Eliot was joined by F. R. Leavis. Much influenced by Eliot, Leavis, it will be recalled from chapter 18, was born and educated in Cambridge. Being a conscientious objector, he spent World War I as a stretcher bearer. Afterward he returned to Cambridge as an academic. On his arrival he found no separate English faculty, but he, his wife Queenie, and a small number of critics (rather than novelists or poets or dramatists) set about transforming English studies into what Leavis was later to call ‘the centre of human consciousness. ‘All his life Leavis evinced a high moral seriousness because he believed, quite simply, that that was the best way to realise ‘the possibilities of life.’ He thought that writers – poets
especially but novelists too – were ‘more alive’ than anyone else, and that it was the responsibility of the university teacher and critic to show why some writers were greater than others. ‘English was the route to other disciplines.’
¹²

Early in his career, in the 1930s, Leavis extended the English syllabus to include assessments of advertisements, journalism, and commercial fiction, ‘in order to help people resist conditioning by what we now call the “media.” ‘However, in 1948 he published
The Great Tradition
and in 1952
The Common Pursuit.
¹³
Note the words ‘Tradition’ and ‘Common,’ meaning shared. Leavis believed passionately that there is a common human nature but that we each have to discover it for ourselves – as had the authors he concentrated on in his two books: Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens. No less important, he felt that in judging serious literature there was the golden – the transcendent – opportunity to exercise judgement ‘which is both “personal” and yet more than personal.
¹⁴
This transcendental experience was what literature, and criticism, were for, and why literature is the central point of human consciousness, the poet ‘the point at which the growth of the mind shows itself.’ Leavis’s literary criticism was the most visible example of Eliot’s high-level scepticism at work.
¹⁵

From New York Eliot and Leavis found kindred spirits in Lionel Trilling and Henry Commager. In
The Liberal Imagination
Trilling, a Jewish professor at Columbia University, was concerned, like Eliot, with the ‘atomising’ effects of mass society, or with what David Riesman was to call ‘The Lonely Crowd.
¹⁶
But Trilling’s main point was to warn against a new danger to intellectual life that he perceived. In the preface to his book he concentrated on ‘liberalism’ which, he said, was not just the dominant intellectual tradition in the postwar world but, in effect, the only one: ‘For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.’ Leaving aside whether this particular claim was true (and Eliot, for one, would have disagreed), Trilling’s main interest was the effect of this new situation on literature. In particular, he foresaw a coarsening of experience. This came about, he said, because in liberal democracies certain dominant ideas spring up, find popular approval, and in consequence put ideas about human nature into a series of straitjackets. He drew his readers’ attention to some of these straitjackets – Freudian psychoanalysis was one, sociology another, and Sartrean philosophy a third.
¹⁷
He wasn’t against these ideas – in fact, he was very positive about Freud and psychoanalysis in general. But he insisted that it was – and is – the job of great literature to go beyond any one vision, to point up the shortcomings of each attempt to provide an all-enveloping account of human experience, and he clearly thought that in an atomised, democratised mass society, this view of literature is apt to get lost. As mass society moves toward consensus and conformity (as was happening at that time, especially in America with the McCarthy hearings), it is the job of literature, Trilling wrote, to be something else entirely. He dwelt in particular on the fact that some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century – he quoted Pound, Yeats, Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, and Gide – were far from being liberal democrats, that their very strength was drawn from being in the opposing camp. That, for Trilling, was at the root of
the matter. For him, the job of the critic was to identify the consensus in order that artists might know what to kick
against.
¹⁸

Henry Steele Commager’s
American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s
was also published in 1950, the same year as Trilling’s book.
¹⁹
Ostensibly, Commager took a different line, in that he tried to pin down what it was that separated American thought from its European counterpart. The organisation of Commager’s book was itself a guide to his thinking. It concentrated neither on the ‘great men’ of the period, in the sense of monarchs (which of course America did not have), nor on politicians (politics occupy chapters 15 and 16 out of a total of 20), nor on the vast mass of people and their lives (the Lynds’
Middletown
is mentioned, but their statistical approach is eschewed entirely). Instead, Commager concentrated his fire on the great individuals who had shone during the period – in philosophy, religion, literature, history, law, and what he saw as the new sciences of economics and sociology.
²⁰
Running through his entire argument, however, and clarifying his approach, was an account of how Darwin and the theory of evolution had affected American intellectual life. After the more literal applications of the late nineteenth century, as exercised through the influence of Herbert Spencer (and discussed in chapter 3 of this book), Commager thought Darwinism had been taken on board by the American mind in the form of a pragmatic individualism. Americans, he implied, accepted that society moved forward through the achievements of outstanding individuals, that recognition of these individuals and their achievements was the responsibility of historians such as himself, that it was the role of literature to make the case both for tradition and for change, to help the debate along, and that it was also the writer’s, or the academic’s, job to recognise that individualism had its pathological side, which had to be kept in check and recognised for what it was.
²¹
He thought, for instance, that a number of writers (Jack London and Theodore Dreiser are discussed) took Darwinian determinism too far, and that the proliferation of religious sects in America was in some senses a pathological turning away from individualism (Reinhold Niebuhr was to make much the same point), as was the more general ‘cult of the irrational,’ which he saw as a revolt against scientific determinism. For him, the greatest success in America was the pragmatic evolution of the law, which recognised that society was not, and could not be, a static system but should change, and be made to change.
²²
In other words, whereas Eliot saw the scepticism of the higher cultural elite as the chief antidote to the would-be excesses of politicians, Commager thought that the American legal system was the most considerable achievement of a post-Darwinian pragmatic society.

These four views shared a belief in reason, in the idea of progress, and in the role of serious literature to help cultures explain themselves to themselves. They even agreed, broadly, on what serious literature – high culture –
was.

Barely was the ink dry on the pages of these books, however, than they were challenged.
Challenged
is perhaps too weak a word, for the view they represented was in fact assaulted and attacked and bombarded from all sides at once. The attack came from anthropology, from history, and from other literatures; the
bombardment was mounted by sociology, science, music, and television; the assault was launched even from inside Leavis’s own English department at Cambridge. The campaign is still going on and forms one of the main intellectual arteries of the last half of the twentieth century. It is one of the background factors that helps account for the rise of the individual. The initial and underlying motor for this change was powered by the advent of mass society, in particularly the psychological and sociological changes foreseen and described by David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Daniel Bell. But a motor provides energy, not direction. Although Riesman and the others helped to explain the way people were changing in general, as a result of mass society, specific direction for that change still had to be provided. The rest of this chapter introduces the main figures responsible for change, beginning with the neatest example.