People, Ideas, Machines XV: TS Eliot on culture, religion, class, elites, education, 'progressives'
Does 'progressive' politics + capitalism/technology doom high culture, destroy education standards & guarantee barbarism?
On the whole, it would appear to be for the best that the great majority of human beings should go on living in the place in which they were born. Family, class and local loyalty all support each other; and if one of these decays, the others will suffer also.
(p52)
Culture can never be wholly conscious — there is always more to it than we are conscious of; and it cannot be planned because it is also the unconscious background of all our planning. (p94)
The disintegration of class has induced the expansion of envy, which provides ample fuel for the flame of ‘equal opportunity’…
Instead of congratulating ourselves on our progress, whenever the school assumes another responsibility hitherto left to parents, we might do better to admit that we have reached a stage of civilisation at which the family is irresponsible, or incompetent, or helpless; at which parents cannot be expected to train their children properly; at which many parents cannot afford to feed them properly, and would not know how, even if they had the means; and that Education must step in and make the best of a bad job.
(p104)
The culture of Europe has deteriorated visibly within the memory of many who are by no means the oldest among us… There is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture … are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans.
(p108)
It is against the background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe would survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith… If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through centuries of barbarism…
The Western world has its unity in this heritage, in Christianity and in the ancient civilisations of Greece, Rome and Israel, from which, owing to two thousand years of Christianity, we trace our descent… This unity in the common elements of culture, throughout many centuries, is the true bond between us. No political and economic organisation, however much goodwill it commands, can supply what this culture unity gives. If we dissipate or throw away our common patrimony of culture, then all the organisation and planning of the most ingenious minds will not help us, or bring us closer together.
(p122-3)
The rich class did not hold the empire so long as the ancient hereditary nobility had held it. Their title to dominion was not of the same value. They had not the sacred character with which the ancient Eupatrid was clothed. They did not rule by virtue of a belief and by the will of the gods. They had no quality that had power over consciences, that compelled men to submit. Man is little inclined to bow, except before what he believes to be right, or before what his notions teach him is far above him. He had long been made to bend before the religious superiority of the Eupatrid, who repeated the prayers and possessed the gods. But wealth did not overawe him. In presence of wealth, the most ordinary sentiment is not respect; it is envy. The political inequality that resulted from the difference of fortunes soon appeared to be an iniquity, and men strove to abolish it.
The Ancient City, de Coulanges
Homo homini deus est.
Feuerbach
Kirilov: Then history will be divided into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God and from the annihilation of God to —
Narrator: To the gorilla?
Kirilov: To the physical transformation of the earth and man. Man will be god. He’ll be physically transformed. And the world too will be transformed… Everyone who desires supreme freedom must dare to kill himself… He who dares to kill himself is a god… All my life I think of one thing. God has tormented me all my life.
The Devils, Dostoyevsky
The nature of the breakdown of civilisations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.
Toynbee
This blog explores ideas about culture, religion, class, education and politics of the twentieth century’s most influential poet, T.S Eliot. In the 1940s he wrote some essays which were published in 1948 as Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.
Here is a link to a free internet PDF. It’s in the official Collected Works which also has some drafts.
Eliot was both the century’s most influential literary modernist and one of the most influential conservatives. He described himself as ‘classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion’. It’s fascinating to see such a combination analyse culture and politics. Walking down the street thinking about this book, into my head popped, as it often does, the scene in Spinal Tap where Nigel, looking at Elvis’ grave, says ‘It really puts perspective on things, doesn’t it?’, and David replies, ‘Yeah, too much perspective’.
Here are some of the big questions he addresses:
What do we and should we mean by ‘culture’?
What are the conditions for the development of culture? How has it evolved?
What is the relationship between ‘culture’ and religion? How important is Christianity in the growth of Europe’s civilisation? What are the implications of its disappearance? If Christianity perishes and the old European education is destroyed, what next — ‘centuries of barbarism’ until something new eventually grows?
To what extent can conscious human decisions ‘change culture’? How realistic are progressive-socialist-communist hopes they can ‘build a new better culture’? For example, central to any culture is the tension between centralised and decentralised power, and the tension between unity and diversity in religion. How much can these things be shaped by individual decisions? To what extent are even the most powerful individuals almost entirely a ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’, that is, most of their influence is unintended and unpredictable? (Modern political theory teaches its elites both that a) the future is inflexibly determined by ‘forces’ and b) we’re almost entirely free to shape history and human nature as we wish in accordance with our progressive emotions and ‘ideas’, so it’s not surprising these elites try to enact disastrous schemes — a point made by Eliot and Leo Strauss.)
How do political progressives think about culture, class, elites, education? What does the idea of a ‘classless society’ mean as an ideal and if pursued as a political project? Does the progressive dream of a classless society inherently mean the dominance of a new sort of elite? How will the elites of progressive politics, of communism, differ from the old elites of aristocracy and the upper middle class? What does government by elites, rather than class, mean for culture and education?
Does high culture — defined by art such as Antigone or Dante — need a class based society where culture is passed on via partly hereditary, though organic, classes? British culture evolved with the aristocracy playing a crucial role including in providing ideals and criteria for others — can high culture survive without such an aristocracy? What happens if this role is taken by elites selected by politics who then try to shape culture for politics?
Does a mass society — capitalist or socialist — inevitably destroy education standards?
Can high culture and/or a class system survive a capitalist society with technological change? Is a capitalist society inherently self-destructive because, inter alia, its incentives for individuals over time destroy families and classes needed to preserve and pass on critical elements of the culture on which it relies? Is the modern idea of ‘meritocracy’ (i.e society and incentives should allow each individual to ‘progress’ to whatever role ‘best suits their abilities’) — central to modern Anglo-American capitalism — actually long-term self-destructive? Might the instincts of the old aristocrats pre-1848 be right — that the great local mason should stay a local mason, and a society which puts him on the train to the university in the city, because ‘he’s intelligent and would benefit from education’, is a society killing itself in a few generations? Over 500 years, there has been a transition from aristocratic to bourgeois to democratic society and a transition in the importance of blood, money and achievement — but what if a shift to elites based on some definitions of achievement has (somewhat paradoxically?) led to a decline in creative elites?
What are the connections between the decline of European culture ~1850-1940 and the emergence of totalitarian politics? For example, Eliot thought that the rise of fascism and communism was accompanied by a growing isolation of Europe’s creative elites and a decline in sharing of ideas between them — both domestically, observable in England and elsewhere, and internationally — a decline partly responsible for Eliot closing Criterion in 1939. Is totalitarian politics attractive partly because the shift from primitive to advanced culture meant a shift from an unconscious identity between religion and culture to conscious exploration of the tensions, and this is a psychological burden — a burden which totalitarian politics promises to remove or relieve?
This relates directly to what I’ve described as elite fragmentation and polarisation. In one sense the internet makes it easier for creative elites in one area to see, appreciate, and interact with those in other areas. If you look at early optimistic internet predictions, you will see many hopes for what this would bring (and great naivety, cf. Eric Schmidt on politics and internet pre-2016). And with some unusual individuals this has happened and particularly some very young people seem to have developed internet superpowers in this regard. But overall the opposite has happened as I’ve explained. It is strikingly illustrated by how the majority of the old ‘mainstream’ political-pundit world, with its centre of gravity in the New York Times and FT etc, have made the Trump-supporting subculture of Silicon Valley into caricatured hate figures — fascist, selfish, lying and fake. The loathing is such that this ‘serious mainstream’ has had to convince itself that ‘AI is fake’, ‘like a crypto scam’ etc because it’s impossible to face that this subculture might be building things worthwhile. No, everything about them must be bad. The pundits extended their ‘everyone against us is an idiot’ to the people building the most advanced companies and technologies. The guy who figured out how to catch spaceships with chopsticks is, as AOC said — ‘this dude is not smart’. Far from creative elites sharing ideas more than in the past, they seem to be moving away from each other, faster than efforts to reverse the process can take effect. This is entangled with and compounded by the way in which different elites increasingly see each other as delusional and/or evil, therefore discussion between them has declined. (It’s also connected to the effects of the left’s cancel culture because the costs — to family, career, business, social network etc — of being seen to stray from acceptable opinions seemed so high that many withdrew from public debate and institutions swiftly radicalised, driving more out etc.) Instead of arguing, elite groups WhatsApp screenshots of each other’s tweets to like-minded WhatsApp groups and discuss the other’s disintegrating sense of reality and morality. So the process Eliot saw in the inter-war period, but which began before 1914, has accelerated with the internet even though the internet makes it possible for the opposite to happen. See below viz AI/Silicon Valley.
What are the connections between progressive politics and the relentless attacks on the family, the core unit of cultural transmission?
What are the connections between the development of western philosophy, including rationalism in all its forms, and the decline of religion and growth of progressive politics?
Rationalism, progressive politics, modernity
Reading Eliot’s book invokes many of the same fundamental issues described by Leo Strauss and Oakeshott. So this blog connects to the blog on Oakeshott and rationalism, the blog on Leo Strauss and philosophy, and the blog on Dostoyevsky. Much of what Eliot reflected on in the 1940s was predicted by Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche.
Eliot, Strauss and Oakeshott all trace the rise of Rationalism in the West, its effects on philosophy, on politics, and on culture. All trace the rise of the individual from 13th century Italy and the counter-forces. All examine Nietzsche’s view on the story of the West and his predictions of how European rationalism was poisoning itself and would end in ‘immense wars of the spirit’, in anti-rationalist movements, cults, and politics. All consider how else we might respond to the fundamental problems of modernity and technology. Survival requires technology. Developing technology imposes restrictions on politics, and, Strauss agreed, made it impossible to return to living like the ancients, even if we want to reject aspects of modern philosophy.
All three are trying to consider the interaction of ideas (e.g rationalism and its opponents such as Rousseau, of Descartes versus Pascal, of Machiavelli against Plato), of material forces (e.g industrialisation), of the relationship between culture and politics including the development of ‘mass society’ and democratic politics, of the effects of modernity on education. All three examine how these things came together in the catastrophe of world wars and totalitarian politics — and how we might escape repeating the nightmares of the 20th century.
Strauss wanted us to revive classical rationalism, take seriously the ancient perspective on philosophy and reject aspects of modern philosophy, not because we can reject modernity — technology makes that impossible — but because we must find a way through it other than repeating the horrors of the 20th century. Eliot wanted Christianity and other aspects of old Europe’s culture to revive and warned that without them we would not resist barbarism. Eliot agreed with Nietzsche’s prediction that the liberals who thought they could ditch Christianity but keep Christian morality would be proved wrong, and the effects would be quite different and very much worse than they expected if those deluded liberals prevailed politically.
Eliot takes it for granted that most people will continue living where they were born and this is good. What are the implications for our culture if our political regime comes to believe that importing millions from the Third World who believe in other gods is good in every way (for culture as well as the economy), while increasingly seeing the original population, and its resistance to being replaced physically and culturally, as a problem to be managed in similar ways to how the old imperial administrations viewed native populations? What if governing elites in the West come to define its own moral hierarchy — because of mutant strains of rationalism — in terms of replacing, rather than nurturing, its own culture? What if ancient churches echo with the chants of Islam, as the rainbow flag of LGBTQH+ hangs behind? Eliot’s perspective on ‘diversity is our strength’ is ‘fascism’, according to the output of the median MP, and PM, of the last 20 years. The gentle old conservatism he represents is long dead, killed by the mutant rationalism he deplored. Is he right that to overcome this mutant rationalism, we must restore parts of Europe’s pre-democratic culture, and if so, how could this happen? Any revival will be a long slog over generations, so what are the first tasks…?
The series on People, Ideas, Machines
XIV: Lessons from preparing for government in 1979 & how No10 worked in the Thatcher regime. Hoskyns’ Just In Time.
XIII: The origins and evolution of the Cabinet Office, the heart of darkness in the permanent government. How was the CO set up? How did it evolve? What critical lessons and questions for the next regime? E.g to ‘reform’ the CO or close the CO? (Close.)
XII: Theories of regime change and civil war. Notes on Turchin’s book. And on Timur Kuran, preference falsification/cascades, how sparks start prairie fires.
XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change — and an update 20/5: Notes on: On Classical Political Philosophy
X: Freedom’s Forge — the story of American business and industrial production in World War II. Incredible contrast between the America of WWII and now viz building things. Highly relevant to current debates on tariffs, supply chains, AI/drones/robotics etc.
IX: A) Britain’s ‘Organization of Victory’ under Pit 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community. How Whitehall-1795 was more like SpaceX-2025 than Whitehall-2025 is. Real meetings. R&D taken seriously. Procurement and infrastructure taken seriously. Over 230 years Whitehall has gone backwards.
VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, ‘a wilderness of mirrors’, covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them.
VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.
VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.
V: Colin Gray and defence planning. What’s the difference between ends, ways, means? What’s the difference between strategy, tactics, operations? Why such confusion? What is defence planning, how does it fit with strategy?
IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horrors, new technologies, planning for war with PRC.
III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.
II: Thinking about nuclear weapons
I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.
Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). [Me, 3/2022]
Other related stuff…
On rationalism and politics (2022).
On Lee Kuan Yew’s brilliant, fascinating, extremely valuable Memoirs.
On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)
On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019)
On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)
On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)
And obviously I think that if you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.
‘Italics inside quotes’ is Eliot, all bold is me.
There is a summary if you don’t want to read it all, click to the bottom then scroll up.
Reading Eliot’s ideas while also watching the unfolding AI/agents developments naturally makes one think about artificial cultures the agents will create, how Silicon Valley is thinking about politics and culture etc. A few thoughts at the end.
If you feed Eliot below into any models and get interesting outputs, please post in Comments or WhatsApp me.
I’ll post shortly about developments with yookay politics, Farage’s very clear decision on Reform’s direction, Iran etc.
