In Our Time - Modern Culture

Episode Date: January 28, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests debate the state of Modern Culture in the 20th century. Culture used to be a word we mocked, a concept too foreign for the stout empiricists of Britain, a species of foreign flummery. Now it is all around us. We have a ministry for it and a newspaper section boldly called Culture.Is contemporary culture evidence of a moral and aesthetic decline in our civilisation this century? Or does it show a society richer and more diverse than it has ever been?Will Self is one of the best known writers of his generation - celebrated as much for his erudite vocabulary as the shocking subject matter of some of his novels and short stories. Roger Scruton is one of the most celebrated philosophers of our age - known as much for his right -wing politics as for the passion with which he defends the past as a way of looking at the future. His latest book is An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, and he prefaces it by saying: “You don’t have to be familiar with the entire canon of western literature and full range of artistic masterpieces but you should have some familiarity with TS Eliot, Baudelaire, Mozart, Wagner, Monet, Poussin, Tennyson, Schoenberg, George Herbert, Goethe, Nietsche, and Marx.”With Will Self, writer and novelist; Roger Scruton, novelist, philosopher and Former Professor at Birkbeck College, London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in the week in which Charles Sarchie launches his new invention, a school of contemporary British artists he calls the Young Neurotics, and James Joyce's Ulysses has been voted this century's classic novel in a national poll.

I'm joined by the philosopher, Roger Scruton and the writer Will Self to debate the state of modern culture in the 20th century. Is contemporary culture evidence of a moral and aesthetic decline in our civilization this century, or does it show a society richer and more diverse than it's ever been? Will Self is a writer whose ability to provoke, whether through his use of language or his drug-taking past, has led him to being linked with the shock tactics of young Brits like his friend at Damien Hurst, his novels and short story collections like his latest. Tough, Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boies, A Dark Tough Boys,

are darkly realistic and sometimes horrific, dealing with the underbelly of modern culture. The philosopher Roger Scruton is also no stranger to controversy, heralded by some as the brightest intellect of his time, cruelly described by others as the unthinking man's thinker, his work has often been overshadowed by his self-confessed right-wing politics. Formerly, Professor at Birkbeck College London and the University of Boston, is written over 20 books on subjects ranging from architecture

and aesthetics to sexual desire and fox hunting. His latest book is An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture and he prefaces it by saying You don't have to be familiar with the entire canon of Western literature and full range of artistic masterpieces But you should have some familiarity With Tess Elliot, Baudelaire

Mozart Wagner, Monet Poussin, Tennyson Schernberg, George Herbert, Goethe, Nietzsche and Marx Well, doesn't that seem to you, Roger Scroodin as rather an exclusive European Great White Dead Male List? Well, I am talking about modern culture, which was created by dead white males on the whole, so I suppose it's inevitable. Had I begun the book saying that I presume some familiarity with Confucius and Laozi and such characters, then I think I would have had a completely different readership and certainly wouldn't have sold anything over here.

But if you're talking about modern culture, some slight genuflection to that period of modernity known as the 20th century might have been in order, about films, for instance? Yes, I'm aware that I'm not really as articulate about films as I ought to be. I haven't had the time required in the cinema to be able to speak with authority

about them. Can I butt in here and say it is quite important at the opening of the book, Roger, this list is not presented as simply an analogue of any possible range of cultural sources that we might have

in order to read the intelligent person's guide, it seems to be more or less essential in your view. That's the only way I can take it. The only alternative is that it's some sort of display of your own erudition, a sort of reminded me rather of the scene in the Rachel papers where the character leaves books open for his girlfriend so that she can see the spines of what he's putatively reading. Because it is a very precise list,

and I think that anybody, any cultured person could quite easily sit down and write down an analogue list that we would serve just as well. No, I agree with that. Somebody could produce a completely different list. I only put those names down because those are the people I talk about. I talk about a particular current

of self-definition in modern culture, if you like, which I think begins with Baudelaire and Wagner and comes to fruition in T.S. Eliot. So it will be very difficult for me to talk about that to people who hadn't any familiarity with those particular artists. I'm not criticizing the quality. of your list, goes without saying, nor the fact that in many ways your list is, it forms part of that which I admire and myself are fed on.

I just think that when you talk of the list in terms of modern culture, you're talking about a sliver of modern culture, and your book deliberately sets itself against a great deal of what modern culture is. So maybe you define culture in a completely different way from the rest of us. I also think it rather jibes against what you say as your method, which you describe as being archaeological. I mean, for a start, you're now saying that the question, the list is, as it were, justified ex post facto by the use of them in the text. But you'll also say at the outset that you're going to perform an archaeological investigation of the culture, which suggests to me a very

careful removal of strata with a kind of psychic teaspoon. And this is not really what you're doing, is it? Because the book is in fact highly anecdotal and discursive in a way. Well, this is arguable. One of my purposes is to distinguish three concepts of culture, one being that which the anthropologists use to denote the force of cohesion, which keeps a community together, which I call common culture.

Another being that which literary critics refer to as culture, which I call high culture, that is say the exploration of the human spirit in its more pugnacious and refined variety varieties. And then there is this other thing, which you're talking about really, popular culture, which is available to anyone, regardless of a state of education, regardless of intelligence, regardless even of engagement, level of engagement with others. And, of course, on that third level, just about anything could be included and talked about.

And certainly you wouldn't have a book of 120 pages, which is what I was commissioned to write. You mean it would be much longer? much longer and also much less interesting. Well, that's your opinion. A lot of people would think that books about the culture which has grown more emphatic in the 20th century could be just as interesting. Yes, maybe they could.

I haven't come across any that are. I mean, in one area where you can argue this is a sort of redact you had absurdum that it's not necessary for you to examine the great panoply of popular culture because you merely wish to dismiss it. Yet within the book, there is in fact the unusual perspective spectacle of Roger Scruton doing line by line analyses of the lyrics of Nirvana and Oasis.

So, you know, you've made quite a partial selection of this popular culture which you wish to dismiss and you do discuss it in some depth rather leaving yourself open to the charge of not covering it at all adequately and covering it partially and prejudicially. Well, yeah, it's a charge. It's bound to be made. If as soon as people make

judgments in the modern world, they're dismissed as judgmental. Now, I don't mind being called judgmental. I didn't say that. but I do make distinctions between those things which are worth attending to those things which are not. But I also have another theme in this book, which is a kind of anthropological theme. I trace culture in its anthropological sense to the idea of membership and the rights of passage which make membership available to the newborn in the community and make the transition from youth to adulthood possible.

And I'm very interested in, especially modern pop music, because I want to try and diagnose what you're going to do it. is strange about this particular culture. I think it does offer a form of membership, but it's membership without that right of passage into the adult world. What I'm trying to establish is that there's stuff in popular culture,

which is qualities which you entirely dismiss because you think popular culture itself is dismissable. I think that's a pity. Yes, I don't think that. I think that there's a certain there are many parts of modern popular culture which are entirely degenerate. I don't think that therefore all of it is, and it is certainly

true that bits of the intellectual life, creep into radio and television, as in this program, which presumably ought to be worth listening to. Well, we hope we're worth listening to. I would say that, of course, you're not trying to utterly dismiss popular culture. I think you've got a problem, which is that there is no rigid distinction between high culture and popular culture, and particularly in the period we're living through. I think what you're trying to establish here is a cultural essay and to, you know, stake a claim to, to the virtues of high culture above those of popular culture. But the whole problem for me is that this is a cultural critique that is in a rearview mirror.

This is a mind looking in a rearview mirror and analysing what's behind the road. And the other thing, just while I have the mic, is that your analysis of popular culture and pop music in Britain seems to me very, very much concerned Pache, Nirvana and Oasis, with the white male guitar. band. Now, you know, one of the most exciting developments in

popular music in this country in the last 20 or 30 years has been the absorption of the Afro-Caribbean community into the fold of popular culture. And indeed, I'd argue that popular culture would be utterly exhausted without the kind of multiculturalism that we have at the moment. And this is not something that is prescriptive. You have a marvelous phrase in this where you say that a multicultural education can never teach true religion. Well, I may not be able to teach true religion, but it certainly can teach good rhythm and melody,

which are things that you would argue are devoid from popular music. On the contrary, I think there are some popular beat combos at the moment who are doing truly exciting things with this music, and this is from somebody who spends most of his time closeted with the OED. So I don't think it's quite possible for people to be passionate about popular culture and passionate about high culture, know where the difference between them lies, but it's a ragged fault line,

and also presumably have the NOS, not to believe that like some economist, you can take an essay of the whole culture at any one point and say anything meaningful about it. Surely culture is a praxis. Well, you've just said something meaningful about it. And I wouldn't disagree with you that the line that divides high culture from popular culture is a ragged one, and one which, of course, has no man's land, which is constantly being crossed by spectres. Wouldn't it be better to look at this, instead of looking at this high and low, and as exclusive and as elitist and as elitist and as elitist,

wouldn't it be better to look at this as good or bad? Why do you want it to be a club? Because I'm talking about... Which excludes? His primary purpose is to exclude, like all clubs. No, no. It's primary purpose, like all clubs, is to include and elevate, which you can only do by excluding.

Depends half, bottles, half, full, half. No, no, but you should... My book is trying to develop an argument about what... culture is and I'm trying to explain it through the concept of membership. And, you know, all human beings, in my view, require membership. The tribal forms of membership, which the anthropologists explored so illuminatingly, are no longer available to us. The religious life is no longer widely available,

although the yearning for it is there in all modern people still. But there are other things that are offered which offer different kinds of membership. My distinction between the high and the popular in culture is that there are forms of membership which require education, expertise, critical analysis. Nobody disagrees that that's part of some parts of culture but not necessarily part of all parts of culture. I mean inside Bartock are folk songs

which actually make Bartok's music great and were presumably sung and uttered by people who perhaps never even learned to read and write, never mind had a big education and so on. But can I go to religion now because you are very impressed by that? that and you make it an important part of your thinking, and you talk about that the central idea of a common culture is religious, and it stems from that. You have an idea of the sacred

in culture, very similar to that of David Jones, the novelist and poet. So can you develop why the idea of religion is still so central to culture in your view, even though you yourself, as I take it, aren't wholly religious. But let's come back in a second. That's not so. But... What it's... The point that I talk about religion because in my view, the great enterprise of human social life

is to retain the image of human beings as somehow elevated above nature. And the common culture of a tribe presents this image in its own way, which I call it the image of the ethical life in which we're held to account before each other. Religion is obviously the easiest way of doing this. It presents us with a sense of being accountable before the divine or the supernatural and fills the world with the experience of the sacred,

the untouchable and all these. Isn't religion rather like pop culture that anybody can take part despite their education? This is why it's a interest to me, why I called it part of common culture. it's precisely that about it, which makes it the unifying force in society. Can I ask you a one left-field question? Have you ever experienced an oral hallucination? Yes, I think so. Why is this relevant? I think the opening sections of your book and the way in which you trace culture

from the religious experience at the tribal level put me very much in mind of Julian James' seminal work, the origin of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Indeed, it struck me almost as an inversion of James' thesis, which is that reflective self-consciousness came very, very late to humans. He puts it somewhere between the Odyssey and the Iliad. He sees the Odyssey as pre-conscious and the Iliad as post-conscious. I don't want to get into his theories generally,

but one thing that struck me about your argument is that you sort of subscribe to the Jamesian view of religion, the disembodied voice of God, as telling people what their identity is and telling them what to do. Now, James would have said that this was a literal voice in the mind. And it's an interesting correlation between people who are religiously inclined and who have experienced voices in the mind telling them what to do. So it's not a trivial or an off-beam question. I take these points quite seriously, but I see them, I see your attempt to found a. culture on essentially pre-conscious grounds as quite inimicable to the whole project of the Enlightenment, which he seemed distinctly equivocal about anyway.

Well, all this is all massively interesting what you were saying, but I don't know whether I agree with any of it. The kind of religion I'm talking about is that which consists in simply doing the done thing, dancing the right dances, attending the right rituals and so on, and through that, rehearsing one's identity with the community surrounding. I could say going out on Sunday night in Birmingham to a disco. satisfies that. Well, that's why I get in, take up the theme of youth culture later. You don't seem to take seriously the idea. I mean, you mentioned quite

controversially at the end of your book that there can be no account of the effect, any coherent account of youth culture which does not give a central place to drugs, but then you seem to completely fail to analyze drugs or give any, I mean, could it not be the drugs of the right of passage that you're seeking? Certainly a lot of young people do it. I argue that the opposite of that. I argue that their charm consists precisely. the fact that they make of youth itself into a dead end. I mean, this is in line with your division between fantasy and imagination, isn't it?

I mean, you seem to have quite a number of rather, I would say, for a philosopher, a rather crude dialectics running behind your analysis of things like drugs. It seems to be the impact of drugs and the synergy with popular culture is manifold, complex, cannot be reduced to a couple of syllogism. Well, it certainly is a book in itself, if that's what you mean. But if you're... I mean, I just don't think you can make this statement any coherent, account of youth culture which does not give a central place to drugs and then fail to substantiate it.

I mean, it's a bit sort of... Well, your books as an example, surely illustrate what I mean. The central place of drugs in the youth culture that you describe is manifest, isn't it? And that's true also of, I'd say, Irvine Welsh. I guess I would be interested to know whether you've read Trainspotting. Yes. You have read it through. Now, would you consider that an example of popular cultural or high culture?

It's got a huge following and it's a kind of membership-defining book. It's certainly not. I mean, it's so badly written, I think, that I wouldn't call it. It's an unsuccessful attempt, if you like, of elevating to the level of high culture. And presumably your statement is extremely badly written can stand so generous because you are the critic in that way. No, no, I'd have to argue that, but not my most programme. But I think if you just compare his scottifying dialogue with Sir Walter himself, you'll just see how second-rate it is. But it's not scottified dialogue. It's an attempt to transit-transiterate to Maltic.

Yeah, but it's a different thing altogether. Just a few minutes ago, I slightly deflected you from a defense you're putting up for religion as being the basis and the thatch of culture. Can you develop that just a touch more? Yes, what I would want to say about it is that, um, All forms of membership in the end involve submission to the collective identity, to a recognition that you are not alone and don't have the absolute right to define yourself for yourself. This is a hard thing for people to bear, but it's also something that people want. And religion is the easy and peaceful way of going about this.

You, as it were, joining the collective submission to a supernatural authority, higher than not only than me, but higher than you too. and you rejoice in the fact that in your common obedience which takes away all the obvious sources of conflict between you. I would imagine, given your views on that, you must have manifold reasons

for feeling depressed in contemporary culture because say you take the established church as a possible repository of this arena of imagining and of essentially spiritual imagining, it must depress you no end. I mean, the emasculation of the liturgy, something that you hold to. be extremely important. It does

depress me. Obviously I'm talking about something as you say, it's a rear mirror view because I'm talking about something which is vanishing and I admit that it is vanishing, but it's no reason why one shouldn't try to understand it and understand what was valuable in it. Can I just throw in towards, as we come into the end of this, one more thing, you miss out,

talking about modern culture, you admit cinema, you have no time for television and radio, newspapers and magazines don't come into modern culture. A lot of people would think that all those things are a huge part of modern culture for better, and for worse. But there's no mention of science. And I'd have thought today science is a massive part of modern culture. Why is that? I do try to uphold the thesis which you, which is associated

sometimes with people like Levis, that science and science is of its nature not part of culture. It deals in another kind of knowledge, theoretical as opposed to practical. The distinction is obviously an old one, but I think I would... Is it valid today? I think it is. Really? Of course, I was brought up, I had a scientific education, and it was quite familiar with that way of thinking, and it was, I suppose, my sense of its incompleteness which drove me in a philosophical direction.

And I would like to think that I make a case here and there in the book, although it isn't the central theme, for the view that scientific knowledge, however valuable it is and indispensable to us, is not of itself on the same level as the kind of knowledge that's contained in any kind of culture either popular or...

You make a very emphatic point which is that science is a mode of looking at the world which cannot explain any of the whatness of the world. It's as it were out of court but I again find this as with

your views on popular culture to be a etiulated desiccated essentially moribund sort of distinction. But you find etiolated, desiccated, moribund things everywhere you look. I mean, I myself

don't live in that way. Well, on the contrary, I'd say that the whiff that comes off this work is one of misanthropy. I was reminded on every page of Schopenhauer's dictum, the more I love mankind, the less I love men. And it seems to me that that's very

much your perspective. Obviously, this distinguishes it entirely from your novels and stories, in which love of the human species is the primary characteristic. My mark Norrisen stories are non-prescriptive in this sense. I mean I kept thinking who is this book aimed at. But you choose to describe only

unlovable things. Well I don't view that and again as I say I'm not writing prescriptively. As you say yourself the job of novel is to present states of mind which I would agree with. You on the other hand are writing a critical work of philosophy. I'm writing an argument and she's trying to understand the phenomenon. Can I come back

briefly to this modern culture notion and the way that you have you do you have elegantly tiptoed around it. But actually to all in terms and purposes, you do exclude science. And yet, a lot of writers, a lot of thinkers, a lot of people that now get the pleasures from science, which pleasures of stretching their imagination, tingling their intellect, setting them off excited in different directions,

extending their knowledge. Are you saying that this is outside what you get from reading a good book? No, I mean... A good novel, no. Well, it's a different kind of... pleasure. But is it not part of modern culture? Can you just tell us why? You're a very, very clever mind. You're bound to have thought this through. I've given up on you about cinema and television

radio. But what about science? Because I would say this, that scientific knowledge is not a form, doesn't offer a form of social membership. What do you mean by that? And why doesn't it? That's say, it doesn't put you in automatic relation with people with whom you say, to this I belong and this is part of me. Yes, it does.

I mean, I started to read about, say, well, not say, I've started to read about genetics over the last five or six years and people I meet who, like myself, have started late and started to read about it. I'm as much in contact with them as I am with people I know who, like as I do will self-spoken. I mean, it's a similar sort of club.

I'd say a comparable phenomenon, and I'd agree with Melbourne on this, is say, the rise of writing on artificial intelligence and on consciousness itself, which is very definitely a cultural phenomenon. the meeting of minds about minds. There's a cultural phenomenon which is interesting in this, but it itself is not a part of culture

in the way that say that novels of Dickens are. In entering the world of Dickens, you are actually schooling your own emotions and putting them into line with an imaginative world to which you are while reading belonging and which you take away with you. In the case of scientific knowledge, however valuable it is, however interesting,

it isn't interesting because of the community, that is being, as it were, limned and intamated through it. A community may arise out of it, like the community of computer nerds, if you can call it. Fair enough. But, I mean, why is it? You see, at the beginning of this book, I thought you were going to have to write something pretty solidly about national culture in this sense, because you go back to culture, you know, you go back to Khurda, you go back to culture, defined it within the tribal context. And then you flirt with the notion of discussing national culture.

And elsewhere in your Urvra, you've made statements on this. But there's nothing actually in this book. I mean, you want to stand out against sort of mish-mashy cultural relativism, but there's nowhere that says, you know, Britain's best, which I'm something expecting. Well, I don't think that. I much prefer French culture, if the truth were known. Except that you attack French culture in terms of attacking the French philosophers and their deconstructed. Well, I attack it's its own repudiation of itself in 1968 and then after.

But, I mean, if you could ride to hounds in France, would you move over? I'm not being flip, because this is important to you. I can, and I will, probably. But you do think that the deconstructionist philosophers are doing the devil's work, don't you? Well, I use that metaphor in order to understand what it is that's animating them. They're moved by animus against the European culture, which has been predominant since the Enlightenment, which is the thing that I am really defending as our high culture, because it's our intellectual tradition. There's a great deal of what you say with which I agree, but what seems to me to be.

the omissions, I think, are unforgivable. But there's another thing that worries me in is that you're always, and you're reaching back, for it, you always reach back for example, countering Will earlier, you reach back to Dickens, which is fine and true, we all love Charles Dickens. Me talking about signs, you reach, I do,

and Roger does, you reach back, and so that's two to three, a majority holds here, well, and you keep, the past is always not only honoured above the present, which is fair enough, because you're Confucian in that sense, but also use as a mallet to knock the little pegs of the present below ground. I'm not sure that I agree with that. Again, I'm not trying to seal off the possibility

of the re-emergence of these great currents of thought and feeling which I'm describing, but I am taking examples which are of interest to me. In particular, the book is, I suppose, primarily about T.S. Eliot and modernism and the enterprise such that represents. And I think of that as pointing to the past only in order to... rescue it for the present. It's not a kind of museum approach. Again, it's your harsh cut-offs on these things that make your thesis difficult to cope with. I mean, I think if you'd, I accept in some ways you seem to be pushing towards the idea, which I certainly would endorse that there's a diplopia between romanticism and modernism,

that the two movements exist in connection with one another. It seems to me you're far too keen to curtail modernism quite early on, and it seems to me that things like what you describe, as, I can't remember your term for it, Kitch, avant-garde and kitsch, or post-post-modernism, these seem to me highly epiphenominal, and indeed it seems to me, and it's a shame that you didn't examine film as an aspect of popular culture, because it seems to me that film, particularly in the post-war period, particularly in the

70s and early 80s, was an enormous gasp of romanticism, of high romanticism, and that high romanticism, or as it were, romanticism, or as it were, Entomodonism is still highly imminent in our culture. I'm sure you're right that I should have looked at film as well. I would have had to have two of my lives to know as much about film as I know about music. And why talk in a second-rate way about something you only half know about? I wish you'd acknowledge it rather than dispisive.

If you know nothing about it, I think it's fair enough to say, I know nothing, but there it is, instead of I know nothing, and so I'm going to boot it out and say it's dreadful. Well, I just don't mention it. Surely that's right. Quite an omission when you're talking about one. I don't mention cookery or baby clothes, all kinds of things which interest me enormously. Will, I can't think of a better note on which we're in the programme

than you being interested in baby clothes, Roger. And that's Roger Scruton, who's an intelligent person's guide to modern culture at art, and Will Self, who is scribbling, scribbling, scribbling, scribbling, Mr. Self, and I hope we see another book soon. You will. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science,

and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.