NOTES ON CULTURE
151
be the
outcom~
even without any sudden transfer of power to any
groups than those which now control our economic and political
navigation.
So far have we proceeded already in the direction of a cultureless
society that the foregoing considerations may seem to most readers
in these times to be of only trifling importance. I do not present them
therefore simply as what you may have taken them to be, another
faint plea for "recognition of the arts"-a plea for subsidizing activ–
ities no longer appreciated, useful or desired, or for the preservation
of wind-mills: the importance of culture in
this
sense lies in its vital
relation· to culture in the other sense, and consequently to problems
which we must sooner or later face whether we will or no.
If
I speak
of the diffusion of culture in England in the eighteenth or early
nineteentl1 century (indicated by the number of places in which books,
and serious books too, were printed and published); of the past im–
portance of such centers as Norwich and Bristol-to say nothing of
Edinburgh in the time of George IV-it is not from any sentimental
regionalism. These are world and imperial problems today: they con–
cern our relations with the Dominions; with India, where we early
endeavored to plant an English system of education to the detriment
of the cultivation of the Indian classical
languag~
by Indians, in the
West Indies, where several races have taken root without bringing
their original culture or forming a new one of their own. The causes
of friction in the modern world are not solely political or economic:
one of them is a widespread cultural dissatisfaction and unrest. And
the cultural problem, as I shall attempt to urge presently, is inseparable
from the religious problem.
III
One of the questions which is beginning to be discussed is that of
the formation of "elites" in democratic or mass society.* The analysis
by Karl Mannheim in
Man and Society
is particularly valuable, as
an account of what has happened and is happening. While it does
not give us much guidance as to what is to be done, it provides a
I
salutary reminder of the conditions under which a proper elite is
fomied, and the dangers latent in any state of society in which
the selection is on the basis of
achievement
alone. "It is possible," he
*
"The problem of a sociology of the intelligentsia is, in spite of the fact
that much energy has been devoted to it, still in a preliminary stage."-Mann–
heim,
Man and Society,
p. 82. I am not very happy with the word "elite," but
it seems to me preferable to the word "intelligentsia," which might be preserved
to denote intellectual groups in Russia during a particular period of change.
I
