America's British Culture

Russell Kirk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351532204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

It is an incontestable fact of history that the United States, although a multiethnic nation, derives its language, mores, political purposes, and institutions from Great Britain. The two nations share a common history, religious heritage, pattern of law and politics, and a body of great literature. Yet, America cannot be wholly confident that this heritage will endure forever. Declining standards in education and the strident claims of multiculturalists threaten to sever the vital Anglo-American link that ensures cultural order and continuity. In "America's British Culture", now in paperback, Russell Kirk offers a brilliant summary account and spirited defense of the culture that the people of the United States have inherited from Great Britain. Kirk discerns four essential areas of influence. The language and literature of England carried with it a tradition of liberty and order as well as certain assumptions about the human condition and ethical conduct. American common and positive law, being derived from English law, gives fuller protection to the individual than does the legal system of any other country. The American form of representative government is patterned on the English parliamentary system. Finally, there is the body of mores - moral habits, beliefs, conventions, customs - that compose an ethical heritage. Elegantly written and deeply learned, "America's British Culture" is an insightful inquiry into history and a plea for cultural renewal and continuity. Adam De Vore in "The Michigan Review" said of the book: "A compact but stimulating tract...a contribution to an over-due cultural renewal and reinvigoration...Kirk evinces an increasingly uncommon reverence for historical accuracy, academic integrity and the understanding of one's cultural heritage, " and Merrie Cave in "The Salisbury Review" said of the author: "Russell Kirk has been one of the most important influences in the revival of American conservatism since the fifties. [Kirk] belongs to an

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The Necessity for a General Culture

What Does “Culture” Mean?

This slim book is a summary account of the culture that the people of the United States have inherited from Britain. Sometimes this is called the Anglo-Saxon culture—although it is not simply English, for much in British culture has had its origins in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. So dominant has British culture been in America, north of the Rio Grande, from the seventeenth century to the present, that if somehow the British elements could be eliminated from all the cultural patterns of the United States—why, Americans would be left with no coherent culture in public or in private life.

When we employ this word culture, what do we signify by it? Does “culture” mean refinement and learning, urbanity and good taste? Or does this “culture” mean the folkways of a people? Nowadays the word may be employed in either of the above significations; nor are these different meanings necessarily opposed one to the other.

Our English word culture is derived from the Latin word cultus, which to the Romans signified both tilling the soil and worshipping the divine. In the beginning, culture arises from the cult: that is, people are joined together in worship, and out of their religious association grows the organized human community. Common cultivation of crops, common defense, common laws, cooperation in much else—these are the rudiments of a people’s culture. If that culture succeeds, it may grow into a civilization.

During the past half-century, such eminent historians as Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, and Arnold Toynbee have described the close connections between religion and culture. As Dawson put it in his Gif ford Lectures of 1947,

A social culture is an organized way of life which is based on a common tradition and conditioned by a common environment. ... It is clear that a common way of life involves a common view of life, common standards of behavior and common standards of value, and consequently a culture is a spiritual community which owes its unity to common beliefs and common ways of thought far more than to any unanimity of physical type. . . . Therefore from the beginning the social way of life which is culture has been deliberately ordered and directed in accordance with the higher laws of life which are religion.¹

Dawson gives us here a quasi-anthropological definition of culture. At the beginning of the twentieth century, historians and men of letters would have raised their eyebrows at this sociological approach. The principal dictionaries of nine decades ago offered diverse definitions of the word—the agricultural meaning, the biological one, the bacteriological one, and others; but the common apprehension of culture ran much like this: “The result of mental cultivation, or the state of being cultivated; refinement or enlightenment; learning and taste; in a broad sense, civilization, as, a man of culture.”

This latter employment of the word, connoting personal achievement of high standards in manners, taste, and knowledge, conjuring up the image of the virtuoso, is not archaic today. But the prevailing anthropological understanding of the word signifies the many elements which a people develop in common. We may take as a working anthropological definition that offered by H. J. Rose, in a footnote to his Handbook of Latin Literature (1936).

“By ‘culture’ is meant simply a mode of communal life characteristically human, i.e., beyond the capacity of any beast,” Rose writes. “Refinement and civilization are not implied, although not excluded. Thus we may speak alike of the ‘culture’ of the Australian blacks and of the modern French, distinguishing them as lower and higher respectively.”²

To apprehend the relationships between “culture” as the word is employed by anthropologists and “culture” as that word is understood by the champions of high achievements in mind and art, we may turn to the chief poet of this century, T. S. Eliot. Since fairly early in the nineteenth century, reflective men and women have tended to regard this latter sort of culture as something to be sought after. Just what is it that the champions of culture seek? Why, “improvement of the human mind and spirit.”³

Eliot suggests that this high culture consists of a mingling of manners, aesthetic attainment, and intellectual attainment. He argues too that we should regard culture in three senses, that is, whether we have in mind the development of an individual, or the development of a group or class, or the development of a whole society.

As Eliot explains, the different types of culture are interdependent. The question is not really one of conflict between “democratic” and “aristocratic” modes of culture. A nation’s culture may be diverse, seemingly; yet the personal culture cannot long survive if cut off from the culture of a group or class. Nor may the high culture of a class endure if the popular culture is debased, or if the popular culture is at odds with personal and class cultures.

“Cultural disintegration is present when two or more strata so separate that these become in effect distinct cultures, and also when culture at the upper group level breaks into fragments each of which represents one cultural activity alone,” Eliot writes. “If I am not mistaken, some disintegration of the classes in which culture is, or should be, most highly developed, has already taken place in western society—as well as some cultural separation between one level of society and another. Religious thought and practice, philosophy and art, all tend to become isolated areas cultivated by groups in no communication with each other.”⁴

With increased speed, that lamentable process of disintegration and separation has continued since Eliot wrote those sentences four decades ago; it is especially conspicuous in American higher education. If the decay goes far enough, in the long run a society’s culture sinks to a low level; or the society may fall apart altogether. We Americans live, near the end of the twentieth century, in an era when the general outlines and institutions of our inherited culture still are recognizable; yet it does not follow that our children or our grandchildren, in the twenty-first century, will retain a great part of that old culture.

To resume T. S. Eliot’s argument, any healthy culture is represented at its higher levels by a class or body of persons of remarkable intelligence and taste, leaders in mind and conscience. Often such persons inherit their positions as guardians of culture; to borrow a phrase from Edmund Burke, these are the men and women who have been reared in “the unbought grace of life.”

Either within such a cultured class, or sometimes temporarily outside it, there should be found individuals of cultural attainments whose private talents may contribute much to the improvement of the human mind and spirit. Yet such persons cannot be expected to sustain culture on their own shoulders somehow. Atlas-like, if they lack the support of a class or group, or if the tendency of the great mass of people is in an opposite direction. As Eliot puts it, “People are always ready to consider themselves persons of culture, on the strengths of one proficiency, when they are not only lacking in others, but blind to those they lack.”⁵

Beyond the men and women of personal culture, beyond the high culture of class or group, lies the democratic culture of the folk—if we are to speak, like anthropologists, of cultural folkways. The popular culture ordinarily has had its origins, perhaps long ago, in the concepts and customs of a cultural aristocracy, much as the Children of Israel received their culture from Moses and Aaron. And yet once cultural beliefs, traits, conventions, and institutions have taken hold among a people, the most ardent and able adherents and defenders of an inherited culture may be obscure men and women, members of the democratic culture, who maintain the good old cause.

But if the mass culture, the democratic culture, becomes much alienated from the culture of the educated classes—why, presently the mass culture falls into decadence. That has been happening swiftly in recent decades, in America and elsewhere. Thomas Molnar, in his recent book Twin Powers, describes the consequences:

Culture has come to mean, of course, anything that happens to catch the fancy of a group: rock concerts, supposedly for the famished of the third world; the drug culture and other subcultures; sects and cults; sexual excess and aberration; blasphemy on stage and screen; frightening and obscene shapes; the plastic wrapping of the Pont-Neuf or the California coast; to smashing of the family and other institutions; the display of the queer, abject, the sick. These instant products, meant to provide instant satisfaction to a society itself unmoored from foundation and tradition, accordingly deny the work of mediation and maturation and favor the incoherent, the shapeless and the repulsive.⁶

Dr. Molnar adds that if this sort of culture “spreads out in movie-house, museum, festival, press, and university, the reason may be that it embodies society’s ideal.” Here Molnar is writing of what commonly is called the counterculture—an anticulture which may extend to the very people who are supposed to set high cultural standards. This revolt against inherited culture often hardens into a detestation of those classes and groups, and their standards, which once upon a time shaped the thought and the taste of the whole society. Eliot touches upon this ideological hostility toward any sort of superior culture.

“It is commonly assumed,” Eliot puts it, “that there is culture, but that it is the property of a small section of society; and from this assumption it is usual to proceed to one of two conclusions: either that culture can only be the concern of a small minority, and that therefore there is no place for it in the society of the future; or that in the society of the future the culture which has been the possession of the few must be put at the disposal of everybody.”⁷

The preferences, mores, and customs that make up the democratic culture used to find their sanction in the judgment of individuals of remarkable talents, or in the manners and attitudes of a class or group of arbiters of culture. For instance, if Chaucer still is taught in some degree in America’s public schools, that is not because the Common Teacher or the Common Pupil instinctively recognizes Chaucer’s merits; rather, it is because, a good while ago, the people who make up school curricula and publish school textbooks decided that Chaucer ought to be studied, being a great author of historical importance; and so Chaucer has lingered on, as of “cultural value,” despite large changes in the schools. If directors of curricula and publishers of textbooks should decide tomorrow to delete Geoffrey Chaucer, the democratic culture of the Representative Parent would not restore poor Chaucer; indeed, the Representative Parent might sigh with relief at the expulsion of the funny old fellow who couldn’t write real English.

The culture of the crowd, then, is dependent in the long run upon the culture of the man of genius and the culture of the educated classes. It is equally true that the cultured individual and the cultured class cannot prevail—indeed, cannot survive—if a great wall of separation should be erected between them and the mass of people. What happens to a talented musicologist, say, when ninety-five percent of the rising generation have been subjected in their formative years to acid rock, and have paid no attention whatsoever to the music of elevation and order? What happens to the class of professors of literature, say, when the accustomed reading of most of their male students has been Playboy and Penthouse?

A received culture may be betrayed by the talented individual or the culturally schooled class of men and women, quite as fatally as by the crowd. A musicologist who casts aside the great composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries out of his enthusiasm for electronic dissonance; a professor of humane letters who lectures obsessively on the perverse in literature—such persons are false to their duty of upholding certain norms of culture. And any hungry sheep of the democratic culture who happen to look up at these mentors—why, if they are fed, it is upon the inedible or the putrescent.

It will not suffice for us who enjoy the old received culture to seek refuge in the embrace of Common, or Popular, Culture. For the Common Culture commonly decides to do tomorrow what the Uncommon Culture does today; or, worse, the Common Culture, bewildered, converts itself into the Common Counterculture. The defense of inherited culture must be conducted here and now, with what weapons may be snatched from the walls—here on. this darkling plain at the end of the twentieth century. With Eliot, we conduct

. . . a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating . . .

A nation’s traditional culture can endure only if the several elements that compose it admit an underlying unity or fidelity to a common cause. The high culture and the common culture, of necessity, are interdependent; so are the national culture and the regional culture. What American culture urgently requires just now is solidarity: that is, a common front against the operations of Chaos and old Night.

The Enemies of Inherited Culture

“Down with Euroculture!” During the past several years, strident voices have been crying that commination in many states of the Union. The adversaries of the dominant culture in the United States demand that in American schooling, and in American life generally, Eurocentric assumptions must be supplanted by a “multiculture” emphasizing the cultural achievements of “African Americans, Asian Americans, Puerto Ricans/Latinos, and Native Americans.” (This list of “minorities” is found in an official report of a task force appointed by the educational commissioner of the State of New York.) The culture of women also is incorporated in some demands for a cultural revolution in America—despite the fact that America’s dominant higher culture already, in considerable part, is sustained by intelligent and conscientious women.

Of course it is true that into the culture, the British culture, of North America have entered large elements, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of other major cultures, chiefly from Europe—but also, and increasingly, from China, Japan, the Levant, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and (quite recently) Korea and Indochina. But these and other cultures from abroad have been peacefully incorporated into the dominant British culture of North America. Even Mexican culture, which soon may be the biggest minority ethnic bloc in the United States, commonly is woven into the fabric of American society—after the passage of a single generation.

Now American society is imperfect, as is everything else here below. Yet the transplanted culture of Britain in America has been one of humankind’s more successful achievements. The United States today is flooded with immigrants, lawful or unlawful, eager to enjoy the security, prosperity, freedom, and cultural opportunities of America. America’s successes, substantially, have been made possible by the vigor of the British culture that most Americans now take for granted. Who, then, are the people desiring to pull down this do...