Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow--Part 4

So Snow held science to offer a this-worldly salvation, while Leavis in turn held to the humanities as the promise of salvation for the individual through culture. Is it possible for our students to partake of culture in a different way? Consider the following two areas of literary value: the nature of multicultural literature and the need for ecumenism in matters of taste. As to the first, I trust we are long past the canon wars of the 80's and 90's; however, one aspect of that later debate remains; namely, the question as to whether education in general, and the humanities in particular, function to free us from oppressive collectives or whether they must free us by acknowledging those communities of origin as essential to identity. Both, as we shall see, have their limitations. Charles Taylor in his famous essay, "The Politics of Recognition" notes that the politics of equal identity and dignity assume "universal human potential," as well as a concern with survival of the self. But increasingly this potential includes a politics of the equal recognition of one's identity group and of its survival. Survival policies seek to nurture--his word is "create"--continuing members (58).

Educational policies (such as canonical inclusion) work to protect collective identity from national structures that work against their continued importance. The difference-blind society, it can be charged, is actually highly discriminatory in its imposition of one kind of culture (43). Taylor notes, "The very idea of such a liberalism may be a kind of pragmatic contradiction, a particularism masquerading as the universal '" (44). We must face that even standards of worth are not transcultural (67). Taylor points out that by prejudging equal worth we already act on our Western standards as presupposing the correct ones. Ironically, our predisposition to finding all cultures of positive value actually flattens the actual horizons of encounter across cultures:

The peremptory demand for favorable judgments of worth is paradoxically -perhaps one should say tragically- homogenizing. For it implies that we already have the standards to make such judgments. The standards we have, however, are those of North Atlantic civilization. And so the judgments implicitly and unconsciously will cram the other into our categories. For instance, we will think if their "artists" as creating "works," which we then can include in our canon. By implicitly invoking our standards to judge all civilizations and cultures, the politics of difference can end up making everyone the same. (71)

I would contend that something like this happens in Arnold and Norton's treatment of culture as the religion of cultivation. Even if we bracket out the particular aspects of their life and thought that were highly prejudicial to non-Western societies, what remains is still a set of claims as to what constitutes cultivation and culture. They cannot step outside a particular judgment to what culture is, both in its pedagogical and purported descriptive summations. This phenomenon can be seen in the Snow-Leavis debate. Culture is judged by both authors in differing ways as salvific in that it imparts existential meaning (and or creature comfort) to help shore us up against a world "red in tooth and claw." One strand of history behind the discourse of salvation in Leavis and Snow is the creation of culture as a substitute for piety and the specialization of education into disciplines that undergirded, one could contend even helped create, science's disciplinary existence. They formed a subculture offering material salvation, of "more jam" as Leavis derided it. To judge faith as but one expression of the larger mythos of Kultur, indeed, perhaps even to accept "religion" as an ultimate sociological category, is to render it one humanism in the matrix of many.

As John Millbank has famously said, "The pathos of modern theology is its false humility. . . . once theology surrenders its claim to be a metadiscourse, it cannot any longer articulate the word of the creator God" (1). Either Kultur as anthropological culture or as incarnational history will function as the parameters for the others' meaning. Culture as a category of value already carries with it assumptions about the nature of humans, their purpose, happiness, morality, and so forth. Literary study defined as the study of cultural texts is not a neutral practice that is transferable from one social end to another.

This raises then the second issue: that of the possibility of an ecumenical view of beauty and art. If we do accept Christian faith as the point of functional discourse and not as an expression of Leavis, Trilling, and Norton's cultural salvation, can one avoid the trap Taylor has outlined above? Can a theological reading of a work of literature avoid flattening the work into a two-dimensional purpose? Can we remain open to the Other? Or as, Trilling admits in a sober moment, can we "no more escape from the cultural mode than we can escape from culture itself" (175).

Frank Burch Brown in his Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste has suggested that such an openness is indeed possible, though "even ecumenical and inclusive Christian taste must also be in some ways discriminating" (25). Art objects, Brown contends, do not entirely self-generate their own values. Religious texts, for example, are informed by theological readings and practices. More specifically, for our purposes, Christian taste has to be shaped by the virtues of generosity and of charity, of gratitude and being easily taught (193). Such taste begins with a set of community practices, humbles itself in learning a differing set of practices, and eventually reaches a point where the text in question may transcend those cultures of taste in unpredictable ways. Indeed, following Taylor, to attempt to predict how would be to already close down part of what can be learned. Such pedagogy does not preclude our own soteriology. Brown notes, "life typically finds various and surprising ways of turning religious" (251). However, Christian taste must be informed by the enculturation of certain capacities with certain ends in mind. Not any old culture will do. In his reflections on culture, T. S. Eliot warns that at the heart of both individualism and collectivism there is the temptation to idolatry, as well as demonization of opponents:

But for most people, to be able to simplify issues so as to see only the definite external enemy, is extremely exhilarating, and brings about the bright eye and the springy step that go so well with the political uniform. This is an exhilaration that the Christian must deny himself. It comes from an artificial stimulant bound to have bad after-effects. It causes pride, either individual or collective, and pride brings its own doom. For only in humility, charity and purity- and most of all perhaps humility- can we be prepared to receive the grace of God without which human operations are vain. (75)

And thus, literary culture and teaching of a Christian sort must have as its end a purpose other than simply freeing the individual from a parochial ghetto of the mind, more than empowering the individual by recognizing his or her cultural worth, or more than creating a socially useful literature that honors material matters of economic justice and of scientific invention. Each of these may have their place within a larger practice, but that caritas of taste must be cultivated with the end of loving God and neighbor.

As André Maurois has said, "In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others."