I recently had a very interesting conversation with Wheaton art historian and First Things writer Mathew Milliner. Matt has been trying to think about how to understand artistic creativity in relation to cultural authority. T.S. Eliot is an obvious place to start. His famous essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” outlines a view in which the constraining authority of tradition provides the most fruitful context for genuine creativity. As Eliot later put it, we need an “orthodoxy” if we are to thrive.
While reading the literature on Eliot, Matt discovered that in recent decades Eliot’s legacy, both as a poet and critic, has been diminished by charges of anti-Semitism. For example, Anthony Julius argues that anti-Semitism wasn’t just a moral flaw in Eliot, but instead is “an inseparable part of his greater literary undertaking.”
This claim seems implausible on its face. Many, many influential writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries harbored anti-Semitic sentiments. But as we talked about the issue I suddenly saw what Julius was trying to say. Eliot believed that human beings flourish best when subject to the authority of a specific tradition. It’s an idea he gave the most forceful expression to in AFTER STRANGE GODS, a series of lectures he gave in 1933. In those lectures, “tradition” has blood and soil connotations, and in a passing comment Eliot expresses the concern that “free-thinking Jews” undermine organic communities and their authoritative traditions.
The charge that Eliot’s entire poetic and critical project is implicated in anti-Semitism reflects a much larger modern liberal syllogism. Commitments to authority leads to authoritarianism, which gets expressed politically in Fascism, and leads to the gas chambers. Put in less dire terms: a commitment to authority necessarily involves drawing lines. Some things are “orthodox,” to use Eliot’s term, and some “heretical.” This is inherently “discriminatory,” and reinforces our malign tendency toward ethnocentrism, and etc. In this way of thinking, the charge of anti-Semitism is meant as a synecdoche. It points to the authoritarian consequences of a larger commitment to authority. The same often holds for charges of patriarchy, colonialism, and homophobia. To assert a normative claim–this is good, that is evil–that’s the fundamental crime.
Put in these broad terms the modern liberal outlook seems crazy, because it denies any strong moral claims. It’s a denial we saw in literary studies when the very idea of a canon was criticized and rejected. But modern conservatism, which Eliot represented and tried to theorize, really does present a problem. Where does the “free-thinking Jew” (or for that matter any heterodox person) fit into a world organized around orthodoxy? There have been compelling answers given. One thinks of Jacques Maritain’s argument that it’s precisely Christian orthodoxy about the human person that provides the deepest foundations for political freedom and respect for human dignity in civil society. But when it comes to actual politics, from the Dreyfus Affair in France to Jim Crow in the South, the patrons of social authority in the modern era don’t have a shining record.
Thus a challenge we face. How can we articulate a conservative (in Eliot’s social sense of the term) commitment to civic pluralism? How can a cultural commitment to orthodoxy (again, in Eliot’s social sense of the term) respect the rights of heresy?
Hard questions.
August 9th, 2012 | 9:50 am
Anyone who is now encouraged to discover more about TS Eliot and his works is invited to visit the website of The TS Eliot Society UK, which contains a wealth of links and resources for enthusiasts and scholars.
August 9th, 2012 | 10:01 am
[...] and civic pluralism … a tension to resolve? My solution is empowering the local community to be different, with the caveat that the door [...]
August 9th, 2012 | 11:46 am
I think the answer lies in grounding human dignity in an anthropology that sees human beings as created in the image an likeness of God, and then takes seriously the command to love others as we have been loved.
The difficulty is that in the midst of struggles over the survival of things we value and believe are essential, it’s very difficult to keep these foundations in mind.
It’s good to be reminded that the deepest threat is not this or that political threat in a particular controversy, but even more essentially the danger of losing one’s soul. So yes, let’s keep arguing for religious liberty and the good of marriage and all important social goods. But not in a way that undermines the whole reason for defending these good things.
The truth is that our salvation does not turn on any political or social arrangement, but rather on our fidelity to the Gospel, come what may.
August 9th, 2012 | 12:37 pm
Denis Donoghue debunked the Eliot-As-Anti-Semite myth years ago (see his book “Words Alone http://www.amazon.com/Words-Alone-Poet-T-S-Eliot/dp/0300097190/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1344530140&sr=1-1&keywords=words+alone+donoghue). Others have similarly done so. This slander is a relative of the one about Pius XII.
August 10th, 2012 | 1:55 am
Civic pluralism is an oxymoron. The word “civic” indicates a City and City is defined by its Laws (written as well as unwritten customs and mores) and its vision of Good.
Pluralism means competing visions of Good. It is essentially a City full of Strangers, a non-City in fact.
That is the problem with the conservatives. They are floundering between two denials of the political nature of man that seeks to erase distinction between citizen and stranger.
This can be done either by making everyone a citizen (Progressivism) or by making everyone a stranger (libertarianism). These two tendencies are simultaneously acting and mutually reinforcing.
The commandment Love Thy Neighbor itself indicates the political nature of man whereby man lives in nations with their particular Laws and vision of Good.
August 10th, 2012 | 8:42 am
Mazzini, a liberal, if ever there was one, puts it very well. “They struggled, they still struggle, for country and liberty; for a word inscribed upon a banner, proclaiming to the world that they also live, think, love and labour for the benefit of all. They speak the same language, they bear about them the impress of consanguinity, they kneel beside the same tombs, they glory in the same tradition; and they demand to associate freely, without obstacles, without foreign domination, in order to elaborate and express their idea, to contribute their stone also to the great pyramid of history. It is something moral which they are seeking; and this moral something is in fact, politically speaking, the most important question in the present state of things. It is the organization of the European task. In principle, nationality ought to be to humanity that which division of labour is in a workshop—the recognized symbol of association; the assertion of the individuality of a human group called by its geographical position, its traditions and its language, to fulfil a special function in the European work of civilization.”
Nationality is the self-consciousness of a people and can only be secured by separation and exclusion of all that is alien.
August 10th, 2012 | 5:36 pm
Michael PS,
“Nationality is the self-consciousness of a people and can only be secured by separation and exclusion of all that is alien”
The conservative French perspective is so distant from most American conservative views that I can only be grateful. The American pluralist experiment is indeed exceptional and is closer to Christ’s vision. Jesus and his followers rejected for good reason the Jewish nationalism that resulted in the destruction of the Temple.
August 10th, 2012 | 11:00 pm
Alexander Hamilton once said that “city air is free air.” As someone who lived in New York for nearly 18 years, I no longer believe that is true. And news out of New York, Boston, and Chicago these days hasn’t changed that impression. It does seem to me that it is those who label themselves as progressives who have steadily eroded our liberties using words like freedom and privacy when they intend neither. See our northern neighbor and her human rights commissions aka tribunals which prosecute speech and thought. It may well have been that the Church in the old days sought to end conflict with a very heavy hand. But who brings down that morte main today? The great armies may clash but in the end it is the individual Christian who must engage the individual who doesn’t share that faith. I take people one at a time not one group at a time. But it has to be admitted that groups or cultures have characteristics and dispositions that mark and motivate them. Progressives also want to end conflict. And as usual it is to be ended the old fashioned way. First by namecalling then by law. Have none of the above commenters ever sat in a classroom or a workplace meeting during “training” on “diversity?” Oh religion is mentioned but without the specificity of race, sex, or sexual orientation. Good luck being an observant Catholic in those environments today. Or closer to home been admonished during a sermon at mass that “some are overreacting to the healthy care bill?” I’m not going to allow abstract ideological concerns or hypotheticals distract me from personal experience — an experience now of millions of Americans. Sadly the Archbishop of New York seems to believe he still lives in that “city on the hill” praised by Hamilton.
August 12th, 2012 | 6:45 pm
“Nationality is the self-consciousness of a people and can only be secured by separation and exclusion of all that is alien”
The conservative French perspective is so distant from most American conservative views that I can only be grateful.
A culture is unified when all live by the same rules and expectations.
A culture is divided every time one group lives by one set of rules and/or expectations, while another lives by some other, different set.
This is true for both conservatives and liberals, probably in all cultures – ever.
And it is a natural response for humans to exclude and shun that which is alien. That is why it matters so much how we define what is to be viewed as belonging vs. what is to be viewed as alien. We cannot get rid of the fact that we are “made” (whether via creation or evolution or both or neither) to reject Other. But what we can control is (a) how we define Other and (b) whether the form of our rejection is just or whether it is inhumane.
@Graham Combs:
Progressives also want to end conflict. And as usual it is to be ended the old fashioned way. First by namecalling then by law.
This cracked me up. I don’t know how I was expecting the sentence to end, but …
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