NOTIONS OF CULTURE
305
CLEMENT GREENBERG
1. MR. ELIOT DECRIES the assumption that "clerical labor is
more dignified than manual labor," yet he identifies the elite with
culture. He admits that a new upper class means a new Culture; he
allows that our present upper class
i<>
in a state of decay; yet he
wishes to
pre.~erve
our present Culture. He pronounces the late stage
in the Culture at which skepticism begins to corrode the religious cult
to be "indeed a necessary one," yet he desires to suspend that stage–
without suggesting how. Mr. Eliot's article is rendered inconclusive
in the main by a conflict in himself between historical fatalism and
utilitarian hope. And given the familiar assumptions of its argument,
his article could have made a contribution only had it offered con–
crete proposals. But there are none.
2. One of Eliot's underlying premises seems to be that the
generic form, Culture,
qua
form and
qua
entelechy is immutable.
Both primitive and advanced Cultures obey the same basic laws
as regards their development and operation; they differ only in scale
and content. The emphasis put on religion as the activator of the
Culture excludes almost all perspectives of change in its generic
form. The schematic structure of the Culture in its various stages is
regarded as fixed . Here Mr. Eliot agrees more or less with Spengler.
Yet even Frobenius, who was almost as reactionary as Spengler but
knew a great deal more anthropology, held that the Culture as a
form has since the beginning of history been evolving in a more and
more secular direction; and that in the long run the central function
of religion has diminished. With this there has been a change in the
very structure of Cultures. Meanwhile religion itself has undergone
an evolution, its focus narrowing from the practical, the magical and
propitiatory to the ultimate and the metaphysical. Thus religion's
control over behavior shrinks, its place being taken, at least theo–
retically, by ethics. The Christian may appeal more frequently to
moral postulates but he does not negotiate with the supernatural as
constantly as did the Egyptian, ancient Jew, the Hindu, or even the
Fifth-Century Greek. And the typical personality produced by West–
ern Christianity is the least religious in history. But this has not made
our Culture necessarily inferior to any other in art, politics, economic
life, or morality.
A new ·or revived total Culture of the future is likely to diminish
still further the importance of religion. It may be that religion will
dissolve itself into. the ethical, discarding revelation and the envelope
