NOTIONS OF CULTURE
307
industrial capitalism is in the process of establishing a global economy
with coordinated methods of production on all continents, the possi–
bility of a global Culture appears. Only socialism can realize such a
Culture, and it could do so only by accepting and even encouraging
regional variations. Meanwhile our deteriorating Western Culture du–
plicates--and will do so increasingly-the imperialist and exploitative
role of Western capitalism. The colonial Cultures, most of them de–
crepit in any case, are being done to death by mass-produced, ready–
made commodities exported from New York and California. There
will soon be little diversity of Cultures for Mr. Eliot's common re–
ligious faith to unify. There will be just greater and lesser degrees of
backwardness; and the unifying agents will be movies, comic books,
Tin Pan Alley, the Luce publications (with editions in
all
languages),
Coca Cola, rayon stockings, class interests, and a common boss. These
are
all
quite compatible, incidentally, with religion, but not at all
with socialism.
WILLIAM PHI LLIPS
MR. ELIOT'S ARGUMENT SEEMS to be as much a symptom as
an analysis of the present state of "culture"-a symptom of the des–
perate lethargy now prevailing, as society is stalled, with none of its
problems solved and many forgotten. In this stalemated situation, in
which the most advanced positions are defensive and repetitive, Mr.
Eliot's stand appears to be typically regressive and all too general
in a kind of timeless discontent.
Not that anyone can disagree with Mr. Eliot's familiar obser–
vations on the alienation of culture from society and from itself. But
they are largely a description rather than a diagnosis of the cultural
malady. And his prescription of religion as a remedy for the atomiza–
tion of culture strikes me as but an elaborate metaphor of unity,
though, to be sure, it is not without far-reaching political implica–
tions, for it could be realized on a world scale only through some form
of clerical fascism.
The divorce of "high culture" from the folk, and its schizoid
division into the respectable and the unrespectable, the academic and
avantgardist, is, of course, a product of the middle-class mind, with
its mercantilism, its snobbery, its secular energy and its sense of cultu–
ral property. And it is only its mythology of free enterprise that has
so far permitted a semi-independent elite to flourish in the crevices of
society.
As
a result, this appropriation-of "culture" by a priestly caste,
