Terry Eagleton in conversation with Roger Scruton

I should say that this is a really British version of the forthcoming American presidential debates although Roger Scruton is infinitely more intelligent and Mitt Romney and I am inverting more left-wing than Barack Obama neither of which is at all difficult and I want just to begin by very quickly sketching in for momentous developments in culture as I see it over about the last hundred years he won't take as long as that makes it sound yes but the first is in the early 20th century something very dramatic happens to culture namely it becomes for the first time really a full-blooded industry yes the so-called culture industry as people like Adorno later call it takes off that gets off the ground in other words culture really for the first time in a very big way becomes part of commodity production in general yep now second momentous development which is really in line with this and extends it several decades later perhaps in the 1970s the era of so-called post-modernism now not only is culture itself a huge industry enormous ly profitable but other industries other parts of society begin increasing ly to assimilate and integrate it become as it were culture alized or aestheticized in style design packaging advertising public relations and so on what happens then is an intensifying integration of culture and other kinds of social practice which has the advantage you might say that it brings culture down to earth from its rather rarefied status otherwise but has a distinct disadvantage that it means that culture gradually ceases to operate as critique but one of the great traditional humanistic functions of culture was as it were to open up some daylight between itself and the rest of our social practices and institutions so that it could actually operate the critique of them at that distance as increasingly narrows between culture and society if you like means that critique is is is increasingly muted and blunted and that happens just in our own period at the same time as another dramatic and a historic event which is that the universities finally more or less cease to be centers of humane critique and capitulate almost without a struggle to the priorities of late capitalism yes those two things the integration of culture the culture decision to be a critique and the universities increasingly capitulating these powers I think can be seen together I was about a year ago being shown around what I was told was the greatest the biggest anyway not greatest University in South Asia by the president who was proudly pointing out his business school and managerial courses and so on and I said um I don't seem to be anything critical here and he looked at me as I'd said you know where where are the PhDs on pole-dancing and he said your comment will be noted rather stiffly took out some small technological gadget spoke two words into it probably kill him Rosalie isn't what is way right the third momentous development which I think Roger in particular may want to engage with is when culture ceases to be an attempt a surrogate for religion yes you can write the history of modernity among other things in terms of a whole series of botched attempts by various things the nation the state culture and so to stand in for a feeling religion country was in a way a very plausible candidate both culture in the narrow artistic sense and culture in the broader way of life and to providing sense what happens over the 20th century I think is that this becomes less and less plausible the idea that the arts will save us which in some ways is the theme of modernism a theme of high modernism is is it as it were gradually discredited there is an excellent book actually not yet published about to be published on this theme full of brilliant insights called culture and the death of God written by me which looks at this whole sir that in a rather dramatic way culture made a bid for power a bid as it were to oust God to oust theology in religion and that you know wasn't a stupid idea because culture is concerned with deep fundamental values if you like the kind of transcendence as well as with everyday practices like religion it was in some ways a very plausible candidate to replace what if it didn't work for all kinds of reasons the fourth dramatic development over that century I think is this that at a certain let me put it this way at a certain point culture ceased to be part of the solution and became part of the problem what I mean by that is that one rather generous minded but somewhat hopelessly idealist version of culture had seen culture as the common ground on which we could all meet in our fundamental shared humanity regardless of our rather trivial differences of gender nationality ethnicity class and so on that is a rather abstract concept and you needed to concretize it you needed something you could as it will hold in your hand and say this crystallizes this distills those deep shared values and the name of that was literature literature was a marvelously portable ways to speak of carrying this deep consensus of values around you that was in many ways a very generous minded and progressive idea in its time what happens from the mid twentieth century onwards is that that tool becomes increasingly unviable and the reason for that I think is this the greatest the most wildly successful revolutionary movement of the modern period was a revolutionary nationalism which in the mid decades particularly of the 20th century transfigured the earth yes for revolutionary nationalism and for the various kinds of identity politics so-called that came after it culture was now as it were part of the problem not part of the solution culture in the sense of in the broad sense of identity language symbol daily practice kinship tradition affiliation community all of these things were now politically problematic yes they were the very language of conflict and contention whereas culture traditionally sometimes I think rather spurious lis have been an attempt to paper over those cracks and say well those those divisions are not really as important as our shared humanity it's what happened then was that culture became as it were the very language in which political demands were framed and articulated culture and politics became much closer together and that meant that culture could no longer as it were take the high ground in relation to a politics which it had always been rather rather to stain full or rather suspicious of in a word and forgive me if you heard me say this before culture was now and is for us today what people are ready to kill for or if you like to die for you know nobody as far as I know is prepared to kill the pre-raphaelite Brotherhood maybe a few seriously weird people hanging around in caves somewhere you know but they are most certainly prepared to kill for questions of religion identity community ethnicity lineage and so on yes that now I think is what has happened in the long trek from the beginning of the 20th century to the present culture is what people are better kill for and on that suitably somber note I will hand you over to Roger Scruton who'll probably depressed you even more well that was an extremely interesting survey of a particular view of what culture is and what it can do for us I want to slightly change the focus towards thinking about how we actually would try to teach culture in the age in which we find ourselves and why might still be important terry has said some very important things in fact about the history of the culture industry in ours and in the last century and I can't say that I disagree with everything that he says although I think there was one very important remark that he makes which I would fundamentally disagree with which is that his remark that the universities have capitulated to capitalism as a unique defender of capitalism in my university for which I was never rewarded I can only say that that the opposite of the truth where I taught in London University everybody in the humanities departments and social sciences had capitulated to socialism many of them under influence of Terry Eagleton so I'm but I was puttin me in mind of a very important question which is not only what is culture but why should we teach it now and how can we teach it and this is very important for people in the humanities because that's how we defined our subjects you know Terry taught and still teaches literature which is I guess a part of culture I teach philosophy and particularly those aspects of philosophy that border on the on the arts and there is no point in teaching them if I don't think that there is something to be learned here and what I think of there is to be learned is precisely that culture but what is it I think there are two contrasting views one which I defend and one which I think Terry has defended in his writings over the years I would say that culture as we teach it in universities is or in or aspires to be a form of wisdom that is to be imparted to people as to say something which contains elements of knowledge which they wouldn't otherwise acquire and which is imparted in its own particular way not as the sciences are but in another way and it's that other way which is difficult to define but there is there are those who teach in universities in humanities departments who see culture as something quite different they see it as part of the ideology of the ruling class or the ideology of a particular social order and the purpose of teaching it is not to impart it but on the contrary to undermine it or to expose the the powers that secretly advance behind it and I think that's the second of that second approach is what started what I think of as the culture wars wars between those people who regarded their role as as teachers of culture in there as one of imparting a form of wisdom a form of of knowledge that would be a not only useful to the student but part of the continuity of the social order to which the steward belongs and those who see their primary duty as one of debunking deconstructing or or showing the structures of domination to use the Foucauldian idiom that lie behind our ways of thinking our ways of speaking and our ways of enjoying the art and and music and so on of our civilization the origin of that second view the debunking view is I think Marxists the Marxist theory of ideology which became prominent not at the time that Marx wrote but much later in the Frankfurt School in Germany and between the wars and of course in France of 1968 under the influence of people like Foucault and I see the Terry Eagleton's approach in his earlier writings at least as part of that a particularly I had a say a particularly intelligent manifestation of it I'm afraid so I can't easily triumph over it but nevertheless I do think that it's very important to reaffirm another vision of culture as something not only worth imparting but also as containing knowledge the kind of knowledge that it contains is not like scientific knowledge or collection of facts and theories and when people start thinking of culture in terms of theory it's largely because they're taking the the Marxist approach the debunking it through finding the explanation of it I think of culture as a for practical knowledge something which gives you a sense of what to do what to feel how to how to be towards other people in in a community in ways which will enhance your own social and and emotional competence I think this is what you learn from literature and I think in particular you learn it from music and if I've got just another minute or two I'd like to mention this aspect of culture because it's so often overlooked I the greatest achievement of our civilization if you leave religion and science to one side has been music a continuous tradition of a reflection through the articulate sound on what it is to be human I know the constant attempt to take that reflection further to build abstract structures in which nevertheless we see mirrored our own emotional nature as rational and social beings and I think is one of the this great achievement is something which I think can be imparted to the young and it changes their lives it changes their way not only of thinking about the world but of seeing each other that that no nothing can be done to enhance this acculturation by giving a Marxist theory of where it all came from here is something where you wish you impart by get by encouraging young people to love it to love it and to find reflected in it all that is best in themselves and that I think is what a real cultural education should be imparting that kind of self knowing reflective conception of why why one is the sort of thing one is and how to find it mirrored in the world around you that's it Terry would you like to come back to Roger on time yeah I don't sit somewhere where I could see him cause I saw her right yeah thank you um yes actually actually son some of that I surprisingly agree with I mean I think there was a period particularly how's the 1970s and 1980s when the left was to negative deconstructive in the bad in the negative sense and not socially affirmative about culture but I you see I think that there's also a very important leftist tradition of that affirmation you mentioned the Frankfurt School there Roger but if it were in connection surely with dismantling and structures of domination Frankfurt School of course also a very positive tradition of utopian thought about culture and so I think as the left had the left in general I mean Fred Jameson the greatest I think Marxist critic in the state certainly is very much concerned with that there was it and what part of the problem I think for me is to get those two approaches in some sort of reasonable alignment I don't I mean of course what I I don't I don't agree that that Marxism or the left has been debunking Norma actually do i I mean that that's the point of that is something to be it to be approved of nor actually do I think that deconstruction is purely negative that's a rather if I may say so cliched view of it and David I himself always insisted that there are as you to say you have to be a prism to say this deconstruction says yes and a man who actually on his deathbed left a note read by his son at his funeral saying that life must be affirmed and I think his friends to smile upon him as he was smiling upon them this is not this was not these were not the words were nihilist or a debunker as those who disgraceful II tried to refuse him an honorary degree at the University of Cambridge seem to think so I'm afraid I mean in a sense Roger I think that your own distinction between culture is a kind of wisdom and culture as an explanation of context is something that for me can be deconstructed and I don't think it's a lot I don't think it's an absolute polarity I believe in my own way that the culture kind of convey kind of wisdom and that's why people go to it but I don't think that wisdom is timeless and I don't think that wisdom is to be uncritical context and I think you can do all that without the worst kind of negativity and debunk curry that's it yes that there is truth in what you say I have to say though that term it leaving it to your deathbed to say that life should be affirmed is leaving it rather like he could have taken a bit of it earlier and was always like it especially if he'd rather to look at the effect he was having on others I think that my own my own sense of this did you're absolutely right that you know I can get into a whole world of cliches talking about deconstruction and what it meant but I still think one must hold on to this distinction between between culture as a form of knowledge and the theory of culture as a kind of scientific way of distancing oneself from that knowledge that and I think this relates to something you yourself said when you I think quite rightly said at a certain stage culture had been thought of as a religion surrogate and then gradually it it failed to fulfill that role and people therefore therefore it lost some of its credibility some of it the reason why we would be teaching it I think there is truth in that but nevertheless that culturing is leasing the forms in which we we're talking about it has this in common with religion that it is offering the ship in some way I think this is a very important feature of it science I don't think does offer membership offers the sort of factual knowledge about the world it doesn't say you belong with this where as part of of deconstructing what you say about the historical and context dependence of culture is to say yes it's like that because it's it's telling you something here is something that you can belong to and I think there us there are forms of knowledge that only come about through belonging that that's why I wanted to refer to music yes I'm a bit doubtful that scientists wouldn't see themselves as belonging right I mean I would speaking of the total outsider you know but observing them like some strange nocturnal creature noting that this I mean a scientist have a powerful sense I've often a rather mannish sense of community for example they work together in ways the people in the humanity often don't they practically physically work together I did some work in theater in my younger days and it seemed to me like a rather like the assume that the humanists equivalent of the laboratory it's practical its collective if it's changeable and so on and belonging is it is important and I think it not least because there's been a somewhat callow cult of the outsider and exile and migrant as though the truth or wisdom only lies with that some post-colonial in responsible for that everybody needs to belong and there's nothing wrong with with roots and nor in my view speaking as a leftist is there anything wrong with tradition one thing that we vitally belong to as you well know and have written is a tradition it's just that I think it's been rather arrogantly assumed that tradition you know is one thing but the left has its traditions you know the suffragettes the Chartists our tradition whenever tradition gets talked about on the right it's as though it's basically about the House of Lords and the changing of the guard you know our traditions are pushed to the edge and you know somebody once said we leftist have always lived in tradition his name was Leon Trotsky yeah well yes it's easy to say that because you know if you say we leftists I've always done this or this is this is how we think on the left you know that you're all automatically asserting membership of a well-established community if I said we rightists immediately even if I didn't finish the sentence you know I'd be in trouble because I mean you know it's not a permissible form of of community so you're you're able to lean on this precisely because you've taken refuge in the kind of things a kind of community which I would think shouldn't exist in the first place but one what I mean I want to go back actually Rogers to your point that I really do want to take issue with which of the point about universities and I think that's perhaps the most important issue facing us this evening or or generally and now it's true it's true that a lot of people in universities have been valiantly resisting the kinds of directions they've been taken if that's what you mean by saying you find a lot of hairy left is in universities then yes and in my view quite a good thing but what they are is this but but you also are just because though you haven't seen the inside of universities the 1970s I don't know exactly I know you have and and will and therefore haven't experienced what or any not only junior but either even senior academic just the whole soul-destroying managerial ization you know yes I totally accept that yeah but I mean being managed II realized by socialists is even worse and being managed but if it's the left that stutters stood up for universities has a humane critique of social priorities it's the left that has try to keep those traditions alive well as against the cynicism of neo Kappa Tau let's assume that there's some truth in what you say I have to say I do have a conception that that universities have legitimate things that they should be doing one of it which is imparting culture and there are other things which they do do now more and more and more which they shouldn't be doing like teaching people Business Studies and other technological forms of Education and that is entirely true this entire truth that comes about because of the influence of the surrounding economic order I don't doubt that but the question is still what he's taught in those areas those areas where only a university can do it like the imparting of high culture there is what that's what I was really referring to that is where I have felt that my vision has been radically marginalized and the subject matter confiscated and I think it's important to say this and also to emphasize that your reference to tradition is absolutely right but tradition isn't just about changing the gardened and Scottish country dancing and the sort of things that Hobsbawm mocks it's it's about things like the the unbroken development of the common law down a thousand years all the rise of the Western Orchestra the history of tonality from plainsong to vogner etc these are huge things which have shaped us as the things that we are we're in danger of agreeing to it I know you didn't come along to see some you know this is what always happens when I talk people say to me I'm agreeing with you but I do think the area of agreement is very interesting isn't it because you just said I know that you believe this that you also don't feel very uncomfortable up about the printe preeminence of business schools and managerialism within and you have a traditional hue as it were humanistic conservative conception of universities with which that jars just as much as it jars with me there is a certain sense in which a certain kind of rightist like you not any old rightist yeah links arms in that respect with a certain kind of unreconstructed old leftist you know a thousand years from me and I didn't like Margaret Thatcher and neither did you oh there with all the alternative yes no she was yeah well he did you dismissed her as the market liberal which is true she didn't see her as a true Tory no that's true yeah well I've grown up since then but the but but she hasn't but but I think the given that kind of that given that there's a long tradition of a certain kind of a certain kind of conservatism and a certain kind of leftism both hitting as it were on mainstream bourgeois capitalist whatever you out call it establishment that the question that then arises for me is this this for me is a fundamental question in addressing people of your of your position given that you have that sort of distaste for those activities given that you equally have a distaste for the coarsening and cheapening of cultural life you nevertheless remain firmly committed to the very economic and political system which in my view is largely responsible for that cheapening and diluting and sensationalizing and vulgar izing of culture that's what I really don't understand well that's a very good point to make I would respond in the following way that this cheapening and commodification of culture that you rightly criticized is to be observed everywhere and was to be observed just as much in the so-called socialist states not that prevailed in Eastern Europe in my youth and in your youth it doesn't seem to have been resisted in anywhere anywhere by any political action partly because I think it isn't it in itself simply the result of any political decision is something that has come about it entirely because of prosperity because of the ways in which people can make easily available the cheaper forms of entertainment without there being any authority to criticize them and in your view I mean if you were in charge I suspect it would be a bit more it knew we'd go back a little bit more towards the Catholic Inquisition about all this actually examining cultural products and saying you know which should be a wish would be allowed everybody would have to read Brecht three times yes that sort of thing but no I guess you know I'm no defender of the cultural policies of the Soviet Union I spent most of my life fighting for Stalinism even the problems what is the alternative where we are we agreeing okay that probably we agree on the definition of the problem I spent most of my life fighting stands and in political terms and also in cultural ones but I don't agree that the problems of culture on the Stalinism not anything like the problems of culture under market society they're no better they may well be worse you know if you have an authoritarian state telling artists what to write otherwise they're carted away to prison sure that's actually worse than you know the dumbing down of culture underlying capitalism all I'm saying is no one has to diagnose two different conditions here and the condition and what I don't understand about your position is that the specific forms of organizational culture which exist under capitalism you rightly deplore and you support the very framework which generates them oh well I'm not known for for advocating economic theories I suspect that I would I would support whatever is necessary by way of economic activity for there to be universities in the first place but I would agree with your position that universities should be especially in the humanities critical visa vie the surrounding order that is that is the function of culture I think you said that this is ceased to be in somewhere but I think it seems to be largely because people in universities and in schools have neglected that that function of of culture that in it surely inject into the ordinary way of thinking that those critical ideas which enable people to distance themselves from the obvious temptations of economic life I think I think the distancing is part of the problem there the way culture and Humanities were actually set up historically the way we read if you like the origin the modern origin of the humanities rural culture was in that necessary distancing from themselves from an increasingly industrial society so that values which were really dysfunctional in that society were increasingly as it were expelled and had to be preserved somewhere else you had to have an nth actually preserve these values oh you call it the arts or the humanities or university or calculate as a matter the problem however and I think this is you see that side of it Roger and you applaud it and so do I do I see another side to that distance is also crippling that distance which is necessary as it were to preserve those values in some utopian or residual way also means it's impossible to bring them actively to bear how would you socialize the distance so without the the apparatus of census you and I both were at the same College in Cambridge and knew each other and knew Raymond Williams who was my who was my mentor if you like now when Williams talks about the culture and society tradition he is indeed talking about figures who want to preserve certain kinds of value from the depredations of industrial capitalism all the way from almost birth to Lawrence but he's also talking not leasing the cut in the case of people like William Morris and to some extent wild about people the point where that tradition become as it were his heart sees that the only way forward is to try to link these values to a political movement that's where of course you will pull back because a typically conservative view is the culture is one thing and politics is another if that is the case I'm afraid there's no way of bringing these values to bear on everyday social practices that's my problem with this position well if you think that then you still have to say what kind of political order would enable these conservatives these these some cultural values to permeate once again the everyday life of ordinary people and you know all attempts to make this happen have come have come a cropper for some of the reasons that you say identity politics ends by vulgar izing and culture and making it impossible for it to to assume a critical stance one reason I have said this before forgive me you heard it one reason why I'm a Marxist quite apart from just enjoying annoying people it is that I don't like to do any work you know I don't really like working Marx is answer to the question you're posing Roger surely is that one of the reasons why people's lives are cultureless or filled with a phony a bogus kind of culture is because you know we extraordinarily at this late point in human history have to invest as much energy in labor no or in making profit because of the nature of our system that there are simply no energy is left you know Marx is all about leisure and culture and not of our labor but he thinks that we have to change the system which absorbs so much more energies there if we're too free those energies and that's a very respectable kind of William Morris Oscar Wilde Marx they all belief in that yes that's not a program that's not a program I agree but I would I would hesitate to accept that because it seems to me the degradation of of our culture that was at least we would agree is degraded has come about through increase in in ledger look at television I said leisure industry it's a leisure a product for everybody it says well they go and sit down in front of it and it has just declined consistently since it since the beginning partly because it doesn't have to make any effort and look at the decline in popular music from folk music of the 19th century down to today the folk music of the 19th century which inspired all the great composers of the early early 20th century was produced by people who really were working very hard didn't have any leisure but they did put their heart and their soul into their singing Roger again unfortunately one place where I think left and right can agree it is that fortunately for this meeting at me is that and what's important for a whole Marxist or socialist tradition about art is that it has no immediate obvious utilitarian function yes it doesn't get you anywhere well she start Julie Luther said that of course it wasn't no indeed it wasn't but Marx was a closet Aristotelian no and he goes yeah this certainly connections there and Marx loved art and literature and culture exactly because just by virtue of the kinds of useless things they were gloriously pointless things they were they formed a kind of living refuge our analogy here this of a society in which everything is dominated by exchange value instrumental rationality and so on the point the difference between I'm sure much of that you would accept wrong in the YouTube definitely but the difference is that Marx raises that he said how we then bring about a society you know in which it would be possible in which human energy is as far as possible could be expressed as ends in themselves and not be instrumentalized you may not agree with his answer my point is you have to raise the political question for that vision to become viable I am Not sure that in a broad sense of political that is there is a political question of course what kind of sin what kind of society do people understand their own lives and each other as ends in themselves and not as means to something some endless system of production that is that's a much older than Marx I mean that goes back to the old testament of us that that thought and in a broad sense it's political but there is then the question of how you secure when this is falling apart when people have adopted to everything an instrumental attitude how do you then work find your way back you know romantic conservatives like Burke were among the first to to raise this question and they Kay there the answer that he that Burke gave is one which i think is still important namely that this cannot be done from the top by political imposition or bio by any revolutionary program which simply forces humanity into an abstract geometry which it can't of conformed to it has to be done from below through the Association the free association of individuals who come to respect each other through their shared activities and that's where art perhaps can do something but of course Burke also thought that religion had to be there too or I think therefore there's a tiny rare class of things that are so to speak autotelic that have their ends in themselves yes they are or to pull you it exists just for the hell of it to use a technical theological term just for their own self delight first of course the I mean the greatest of all of is God you know God is purely an end in himself he has his reasons grounds ends motives etc itself second is a certain view of art which is always in danger of being hubristic in that respect of taking the place of God a certain amount of view of art which the whole point of art is it gloriously pointless thirdly is actually I think evil because I think and there's a remarkably cheap and extraordinary attractive book and you know who the author is on this which argues that the strange thing about evil it seems to be wickedness done just for the hell of it that's why so mysterious and third and fourthly but and this brings us to our debate human beings as they might be under transformed political conditions as far as possible and I think there is a radical romantic tradition in which marked is very key but is by no means the only one which tries to bring these insights to bear on politics and that's certainly a major reason why I'm a Marxist yes all I would say in response to that is that attempts to realize that the program have always led to a worse situation than the one that needed to be remedied and secondly that that this may be because it's not that human beings are created by political conditions but that political conditions are created by human beings and that we ought to be a bit more attentive to those basic truths about human nature that that seemed to get dropped from the marxist world well I've always been a great defender of the idea that Marx believed in a human nature and he was quite right to do so he actually called it species being which is a kind of like a materialist notion of human nature but Marx I think would would have rejected that kind of purely pragmatic or instrumental but this was why he thought that in the end there wasn't going to be a political program was not going to sort things out would be the natural evolution of the well human society maybe were getting into a little technical here marks that belief that it's strange why he was so concerned with political struggle there why here's why already wasn't confused doesn't I really think we should yes their Usher's with mics and please wait for the mic Stu come to you and if you're in the gallery there's a microphone up there um so first of all we'll take a question from the gentleman there and then the young man they're here it seems to be the in matters of economics it makes a lot of sense to be a Marxist a revolutionary in matters of politics may be a liberal may be a jazz mill liberal rather than a Nick Clegg liberal but nonetheless a liberal but when it comes to culture is it not necessarily demanding of a conservative attitude because there is a store of accumulated wisdom and products some of them are much more timeless than others there it seems to me it behooves us to look after may be established defend and clarify those values but not undermine them and that the fundamental attitude towards culture the cultural sphere has to be conservative especially in the context of a university there are of course people who are creating new cultural products who fight to get in to that great tradition and so they should and we can evaluate their success in doing so but the JA the university educating young people I think must necessarily should not have a conservative attitude to culture well it's I'm sorry but it's almost as though you didn't hear my first response to Roger yeah where I said I certainly agree that a culture is a form of wisdom or can be and it's not a form of wisdom you can teach scientifically and but that doesn't mean that it's timeless that doesn't mean it's non historical that doesn't mean it's non contextual and that doesn't mean that all traditions are as it were pick and in amber and all we do is faithfully and rather passively transmit them there is a conservative understanding of tradition but my point against Roger was there's also a radical understanding of tradition when Trotsky says we mark this always live in tradition he's not speaking conservatively because it has a different conception of tradition as something which is constantly remade which constantly tries to open itself to the participation of more and more people and so on which looks different in the light of different circumstances so I would reject the idea that culture and education are somehow it's so facto conservative if by cancer that if you mean they pass something on sure of course they do but what leftist is going to disagree in support of the question or rather the statement I would say there is a work of conservation which you mustn't overlook but even if you are on the Left there are things that don't make sense if you haven't got the that complete historical context and it's possible to lose cultural knowledge much more easily than it is to gain it I think you know this is one of the important things that has been happening in our time you know loss of of knowledge is not an easy thing to describe but it does happen unlike the site the site in the sciences you can put the knowledge in a book and someone will come and refer to it later and recapture it but to recapture for instance the emotional content of the Shakespeare plays when that when the traditional performance is lost well let me say for a third time I agree with conserve acknowledge but I don't think that's the only functional yeah of Education by any means and I think there are legitimate arguments about what you mean by conservation because just as the left quite properly shouldn't forget about that function the right shouldn't insist that shouldn't see conservation in a static and authoritarian way as itself offering stuff but you're right the writer so often said here are the timeless cultural values you know take them or not right and that autocratic attitude has been quite as damaging to education and culture in my view as those on the Left who have ignored the constantly respect exam you mention Shakespeare ah gee I mean I've spent all my life as a left it's writing on and teaching Shakespeare so have many other people on the left it's just that we don't you know I mean we see Shakespeare as or rather more living and changing reality than a museum piece which is the way some conservationist theories see him yes but I do you should notice the extent to which you'll keep referring to yourself as on the left as part of a group some things as as it were defined the issue for its own purposes and you saying that the people on the right insist on this and insist on this but you know people on the right don't insist very much at all and hardly ever identify themselves with that word you know we don't belong to a group we're not trying to take things over we're just holding on to what we love let's think all the Salisbury review that you used to be yes so it has a readership of about a thousand people famous Socialist Worker the essence of my idea is that it's time to open up the ivory tower because six years ago there were bombs in London and buses and the Underground and why is it that eminent people eminent writers like yourselves I might have not read everything you've written but why is it that you can't address issues like for instance in France and Germany it's not allowed to be disparaging about the Holocaust history but it's allowed to print with cartoons or again since alarm because there's no particular context a particular history behind or any reasons why we shouldn't not print cartoons against Islam but that this is leading to the question is it possible for people like you to talk to religious fundamentalists that end up bombing our city and don't have any means to interpret a very abstract idea of listening to vogner or reading Shakespeare that they're not a part of our universe but they do place bombs in our cities and they have a view of the world which is completely commendable with our view of the world is there anything we can say to them first of all I I'm very you talked about you began by talking about the ivory tower right very suspicious of that phrase not not only because today that's the last thing universities are you know transnational corporations maybe but either ivory towers and I haven't been for a very long time nor has culture been part of an ivory tower sequestered from reality for a very long time if you really if ever and I said I think that's a misleading metaphor all I would say about the well let me say two things about the point about fundamentalism one of course is that that's a form of culture that fits into what I was saying about culture nowadays is something you will kill for something for some people culture it's something you will kill for it's it's not simply else that can Beethoven and if you confine your view of culture to a largely aesthetic one you're not going to be able to understand and engage with that lethal situation right second thing I just wanna say very quickly is this when when Prospero turns to Caliban at the end of The Tempest and says this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine he's making a very old if you like partly religious partly ritual gesture of accepting the dark and misshapen and monstrous thing that covers terroristic Li at your gate as part of your own responsibility the either post standing at Colonus blind broken beggarly monstrous and that is taken in I'm not saying that we should take terrorists in I'm saying this that we must not the West can't do anything about this problem it may well be too late to do anything about it anyway let's be realistic you know it may be too late for justice there was no doubt a time when justice properly dispensed might have prevented that terrorism it may be too late now but even so what happened it's a long story I'm sorry I don't want to bore anybody and I can't tell all of it what happened in the mid decade of the 20th century in my view was that the West for its own purposes systematically rolled back and crushed leftist nationalist left nationalist and revolutionary forces in the Arab world including a massacre of some half-million communists in the Indonesia cia-backed okay and created a vacuum into which the ugly language of Islamism could then move yeah it was judged by the Middle East he was judged by Muslims and Arabs in many places quite understandably that the Left had been a failure yeah it hadn't defended them against the imperialist depredation all right say this is all a caricature against it against the right you can come into the moment Roger I've got about I don't think I don't if this goes on because of a sentence and but you see you see how often is this how often is the said you know let me give me my little moment on my little soapbox yes because you won't hear it on Sky News you won't hear it from him you won't hear it from the BBC you won't hear a history of that of that situation in which a political vacuum was created into which those forces were able to move supported in Afghanistan the Islamic fundamentalism supported by the United States half just a small point going back to the question what is it that we in universities should be doing to confront this sort of thing I think it's quite important to recognize the the nature of the Enlightenment the way in which it did transform our way of teaching culture to to people in our civilization and it's appropriate to lament the fact that that enlightenment has not in any way taken root in the Islamic world and I think it is quite important to compare the the the history of those great universities in the time that since the Enlightenment in Europe what exactly happened to the Arab universities and why was it that they didn't take on this critical attitude towards their own religion and at the attempt to put it into context of that we in the Christian world did and I think you know you you're right that lots of things have been done wrong by the Western powers but it wasn't the Western powers that that invented a lab you know or send him off to to Saudi Arabia to do what he did and it was his history nup of all that which which has led to so much of what is being said today to the Western powers back Saudi Arabia today their voice who knows a compatibility - and I just said Roger and you're very correct defense of the Enlightenment I take what I said to be part of the Enlightenment to say that unless that it's a staple of enlightenment of Western enlightenment that unless you try to understand the historical context or the political context all the things that your version of culture has been rejecting the seasoning you won't win you won't you know I mean you have to understand what you're up against and you have to employ an Enlightenment rationality to understand that and I certainly agree with your point we have to understand the decline of that great tradition of Arab culture and but what I began the evening by saying also was something about the decline of the Great Western tradition I think that were less and less in a position where we can as it were look disdainfully on that when we have moved ourselves from the great medieval institutions of Paris or Bologna or Oxford this is where we need ivory tower using their to knowledge factors and if the only alternatives we have our knowledge factory or ivory tower were finished more questions as to Terry your observation about the importance of culture and nation states now as I understand it we're in an age which is no longer the age of empires as Eric Hobsbawm as I understand referred to them as being all that age as being and that surely before that time before the empires were as they as they were you had this relationship between culture and national consciousness it's part of the human condition it's not something new I would suggest and so it's really the question you raised about the significance of it to me resonates as something fundamental about the human condition which is not something that's happened in the 20th or the 21st century very so what is it you feel fundamental about is this relation between national consciousness and a nation state or a group of people of a separate identity who have a particular religion and their culture because what it's telling you about those people or those states is that they have a particular consciousness which is based on their culture well you see I think the very concept of the nation-state was an attempt as it were to hyphenate together you know nation culture a people's way of life and state you know to enshrine this to institutionalize this if you like and that of course was for a whole period an enormous leap our full force in the world I think part of the problem today is not that the nation-state has vanished by by no means but that its power is limited in various respects we live course in a global capitalist world and the question then is what does culture make of that yes culture which has been narrowly nationalistic or chauvinistic isn't really able to make very much that yes on the other hand a purely rootless postmodern cosmopolitan culture doesn't seem able to speak to certain deep demands and needs in people where they are yes we're living in other words I think in a kind of misalignment of the global on the one hand and the local on the other and the problem is that these two things form a kind of stalled dialectic because the more ruthlessly global and brutally cosmopolitan people become the more other people are going to retreat to their mountain hideouts and say this is my patch yeah this is my nation or my region keep off each of these realities which is already back to the question of fundamentalism in the sense keeps bringing the other into birth yeah I think I would just add to that one thought which is that the high culture that we've been talking about in in our civilization has not really been national nationalistic when I I had an education which I'm sure it's very similar to terriers in which I was brought up on the the sacred books of the ancient Hebrews the the Greek New Testament that the literature of Latin and the Latin literature of Rome and you know the Greek epic and 1001 nights etc there is just nowhere in this that you can really pin it down to a particular national inheritance and that's part of the great achievement of Europe that it has erected this hyah culture as a critical apparatus which enables us to put our national history in question if we need to um yes hello gentlemen um you one of the things that disappointed me was that in your your mr. Eagleton run through culture you know it's evolved and not so much Roger Scruton Zygon was that you didn't seem to you presented it from a very elitist position you know we despite obviously your Marxist leanings and things though is that you know that is a political elitist position to some extent and I think there was this I felt that I just wanted it to be narrowed down a bit into this idea of culture as a meme which historically has been controlled by the elite be they the political elite or just the elite and in the 20th century what you've seen is the fact that instead of being to use a capital expression supply push so that I the mean that has been controlled by the elite has been controlled how the public the majority get hold of it we've switched in an information world where the elite no longer control all the information channels to demand-pull which is the sort of burke position and the sad fact is that however romantic your position may be mister Eagleton that that the demand is quite a low common denominator that people are not that interested in using their brains that they prefer pictures of things to interesting books or Beethoven and that is how it is so cushy of being elitist I am well first of all those well I don't actually see what I said what was latest in what I said secondly elitist elitism is a complex notion which I think shouldn't just be banded around as a kind of swear word you know for example quite a lotta to to revert Rogers point about high culture quite a lot of high culture is politically to the left of very much commercial media culture yeah there's no there's no similarity of access between high and low and radical and conservative I mean it's it's traditionally part of the socialist position that culture must be more and more accessible to people I thought I that was part of what I was what I was arguing I don't but we can we can argue about that I have to argue about the quality of culture some popular culture once again the axis of high and low is not coexistent with the axis of good and bad there is some wonderful popular culture think of the history of film okay and there is some to my mind extremely third-rate so-called high culture many of the poems of Wordsworth who wrote more lousy poetry than any other major poet and absolutely stereotypical thinking that as this as it were elite and mass and the question is which do you back know is the elite good or it's a mass it's popular culture good it's the elite radical or as popular it is this meat cutter simplification popular culture is an extraordinarily complex and divided field which includes the most abysmal works as well as some works or the enduring quality and just the same in my view is true so-called high culture now you can Roger as it were can evade that conclusion by saying well I don't call that high culture if you want to identify high culture merely with works of great quality fire well that's not how it's been identified high culture is canonical culture institutionalized as the Canon and much in the Canon is far far worse than Seinfeld or Family Guy or the earlier Simpsons or the best episodes of The Office yeah the true elitist are those like Roger himself who thinks that all of high culture is affirmative and the rest is coming to where you've got that particular view from I think of higher culture in something like the spirit that you seem to be expressing that it's a realm of critical reflection from which there emerges over time a canon sometimes they're things in the Canon that shouldn't be there but for the most part the things are there because they have stood the test of time have spoken to people talking to what is real and deep and lasting in people down the ages and you only get that because of the critical reflection which leads to people throwing things out you know and think of what's happened to all the contemporaries a bohemian contemporaries of Mozart you don't even know their names because they didn't do anything that could remotely compare with Don Giovanni gentlemen here seems to me you're not really facing up to the point that the gentleman to my right was making which is that you both agree that the the culture that you're talking about the quality culture I know that isn't the phrase you use that's my phrase but the quality culture whether it's Shakespeare or Mozart or or even Fillmore or some of the things that Terry mentioned in his last answer that that those forms of culture are confined to a relatively small number of people and I think what the gentleman was trying to say it certainly in my view is that the issue is to what extent it is realistically possible to spread that form of culture much much more widely that was certainly a very strong aspiration at the time when I was at university I'm afraid at exactly the same place as both of you and people I Arnold Wesker talked very very fervently about the desirability of cheapening the price of theater tickets so that the masses could come to the theater and so on in the last forty or fifty years that really hasn't happened has it and it seems to me that that put in probably much cruder terms than you have done is what you're really complaining about both of you what you're really expressing anxiety about which which raises the purely practical question assuming that people agree that that's what's wrong how do we change it how do we how do we redress the concerns which admittedly in very different ways you're both expressing kind of just sorry well I I think it is very important to raise this question but and connect to go back to the previous questioner though the answer it has been looked in one of two places do we change the habit of supply or do we change the habit of demand if if it is all motivated by the suppliers you're you're in trouble well the suppliers of say film of the television programs and so on if the people if the people who supply in the culture are simply doing whatever achieves the largest market the biggest possible sales of widest audience then you have the whole problem that we are living through of pornography and so on where you you know we seem to be in a complete free-for-all of a sleeve valueless and perhaps morally destructive things but if on the other hand do you think that it's the demand that should be motivating the production of culture then you must address the question of how you educate that demand how you get into people's heads something of the the old sense of taste that this you know that this is bad and this is really you know I don't want to pollute myself with that but I were I'm going to concentrate on getting kind of mind and the kind of interest it will enable me to go away from my cultural experiences with a sense of being in some sense raised up by them that well there is a question of what happens to universities when half the people in them can't read um gentlemen their women with questions to ask lady there so yeah actually I think the BBC should give both these gentlemen a series would be interesting to see them comment on all sorts of things every year but my question is said partly sooth cultural criticism and partly to of Education I think part and I stress part of the reason why perhaps there are many leftist ideologies and theories dominating academia have done for a very long while is there hasn't been a rival scientific or a scientific group materialists the theory of cultural criticism as it were from the right are just wondering professor Scruton if you thought there could be as it were a conservative idea of cultural criticism theory that did look at economic structures perhaps identifying unjust ideologies that might exist etcetera etcetera etcetera would that fit within a culture conservative ideological mindset but by the same token I've Terry Eagleton accepts that culture can carry good tradition but it's your paradox is you know wisdom as opposed to me a custom like changing of the guards by what means do you discern what we may rightly regard as wisdom and the education part the question was just simply as a means of countering the negative aspects of contemporary academia that you both identify what do you think of the development of new liberal arts colleges like the new idea of Benedictus College and Catholic liberal arts college which would teach humane studies at the a inhumane Studies that is that the whole rounded education that used to be taught in London well that's some three huge questions the I would say that just on that last little question I'm all in favor of new initiatives especially when institutions are failing to produce what we are looking to add them to produce then what our alternative is there we don't want to dictate from above some some utopian scheme we but we do I think what we should do is allow people to develop things and see where how far they get and I'm all in favor of Benedictus college and also Tony Grayling's enterprise which is obviously much more secular I think both I just hope both succeed under and everything is multiplied on the question of whether there can be a conservative critique of culture I would say this that that if there were such a thing it wouldn't have the form that that cultural theory has tended to have as they wouldn't be an attempt to trace culture to its economic roots sort of the power structures the structures of domination etc the class structure of society that allegedly produces it and requires it and that I think one could leave that to the Marxists and they make the usual mess of it and I would say that that there should be something which is a kind of internal study of culture according to the the norms that culture itself produces the norms of human understanding this is something we haven't touched on but I think that probably Terry might agree with this that there are forms of human understanding but the Germans call for staiin which are not reducible to these scientific categories and that is perhaps what culture primarily should be teaching us the trouble with the right so clear if they and he doesn't have wasn't see he won't even accept the word right the other sense I do telling to the right is that they have a lot of theories they just don't like calling some theories see because they are so deeply invested in intuition feeling common sense what traditions spontaneously tells you what you carry in your bones without a need to argue that the very notion of theory as a relatively systematized way of thinking is distasteful and offensive to them so you know they're in the grip of certain theories to be sure but they just don't call them theories that point relates perhaps the point the speaker was making you know how do all that how does one judge this wisdom that the culture is supposed to distill well the only thing you can say surely is you've got to argue about it what you can't do is accept passively certain values which you are handed by certain cultural autocrats you're told that these are the values to take and either you take them or you don't that has been a very traditional conservative way of thinking and this is as it were partly mall so my answer the question that you are raising there Raven Williams said that pointed out very wisely I think that you never simply extend a value to whole new groups of people without it being open to being changed by them and being actively remade that's a good old socialist case and that's what the right is very nervous of why they see transmission essentially in terms of passively taking over values which have been determined from elsewhere that's the true kind of elitism if I were you believe as Raymond Williams believed in accessibility that you're going to have to risk these values being argued with debated contested transformed may be rejected let's return to your question which I think was very valuable one and Williams said he would have expected that any he was talking about the athlete's government any Labour government that was serious about it's about as it were culture would have established institutions of popular and adult culture and education which we still have marginally and residually in the embattled and very brave adult education movement and so on and well so well you would say I think this is wise and I'd say no it isn't and then you say something and then I'd say something and you never look have you never listened to people arguing I mean you know we don't need some transcendental criteria that we have both to subscribe to in order to argue no there are all kinds of right answers Roger will certainly agrees of Lassa which are not based upon which are not foundational or transcendental in any way I mean you know their judgments last question the lady there wait for the mind I wanted to ask about one of the things that has come up frequently in your discussion today you know the idea of belonging but whether it's belonging there is exclusion and we you know when we say that high culture or good culture valuable culture allows us to get to know ourselves in us our surroundings people around us we may run the risk of implying that there is a universal human self that we can all discover through culture and and I ask this because one of the things that has been conspicuously absent this evening is a mention of non-western cultures and what happens so the question is really what happens when there is a clash of high cultures of different words and I think this is where tell your point is extremely valid about the the political power structures that that cultures are mired in and and colonialism is a very good example of that so you know the debate between high culture low culture valuable culture invaluable culture might be easier if you're talking about Shakespeare and Justin Bieber but if you're talking about Hindustani Carnatic music or Shakespeare then the debate is is much more complicated and this is precisely where the politics of the world comes to play because it's not one seriously good culture rubbishing the other it is one very good culture rubbishing a very good culture I would like to say something in response to this because I think it is a very important issue which is bears on what we mean by cultural when we discuss it in the way that we've been discussing it looking at the case of India which is obviously in the back of your mind you know they you have to think of what happened when the Asiatic Society of Bengal was founded in something like 1785 that was founded by the first sort of group of British civil servants were working for the East India Company who were really amazed by what they found around themselves and wanted to learn it you know they came with their enlightenment attitudes that this is culture too and did a lot to save the the Sanskrit texts and Sir William Jones in particular did his own bit to save the tradition of Indian classical music which was being lost at the time and this kind of you know universal education that people had them enabled them to see India at least that class of people to see India as another high culture which they had to not only respect but try and immortalize you know get get it into print even where it hadn't been in print before and more recent scholars have always looked back on colonialism as some some kind of threat so I'm kind of webber pressing or wiping out the native culture and it's just not true in the case of the of the British in India because of that Enlightenment view of of culture as a universal thing but it's you're not going to agree but I'm telling you this nevertheless tsu'tey yeah of course I stopped you've burning widows and so on I agree okay yeah but no I mean you know we can go on and on about the history of the British Empire and and and believe you me that there will be more examples of the Enlightenment culture being lost on a great many number of 7/7 in British India so I wouldn't go that far but but I think one of the important questions that you know I would like you know to hear your thoughts on is is what do we do about the political establishment today in a globalized world which seems to be democratic in its embrace of morality and multiculturalism and so on and so forth but there is still a hierarchy and and how do we square that circle now we still live in a divided and hegemonic world in some ways I think this is Terry's question because he has solutions to these problems and he knows exactly who should be taken away and put where where is there something super where is there something superior in not having solutions I think that they're owning some problems are unsalted soluble it is a Rodgers example is outrageously tendentious it's not untrue of the big awliya it's just outrageously their debtors if implicitly you're using that as a paradigm of the relation between Western and colonized cultures the fact is that not only did the West destroy local cultures in clearly those Roger knows full well but one reason one very important historical function of so called Western high culture that Roger defends is that it was a way in which you could as it were packaged your values very conveniently show them to the natives yes and impress them it culture traveled literature the arts particularly right it was a way than which is it were you could encapsulate those values and use them in colonial situations so much so that you know as I was saying before there's no correlation between high and popular culture and good and bad culture or left and right culture equally your point is there are there is high culture all over the place just as you know the media are over the place so is so-called high culture but it's been part of the arrogance of a certain Western cultural imperialism that high culture itself is identified with the West yes actually I don't agree with that at all if you look at what happened to Western high culture under the influence of the East okay you're going to say that but something like Rudyard Kipling's Kipling's Kim is is simply Western high culture taken into India I don't think it's true at all it was an attempt actually to to to bring to life that extraordinary society an extraordinary a mixture of of cultures that that surrounded him think of you know thinkers of things like porcinis madamebutterfly or or Benjamin Britten's prince of the pagodas or curlew River you know the way in which throughout our in the in fact of the of the Eastern cultures in the 20th century P artists and writers and and composers have tried to absorb it and and create gestures of respect which show that that they have at least tried to understand that there is something there which is a difference and not just as an assimilation I think we're starting to run out of time now so um Roger would you like to make this as a closing statement summing up your that sounds good closing statement Darion would you like to come back at all literally either I mean I did I'd rather use the time just one final question that's absolutely fine yes one more question lady there in the green dress um hi my question is directed mostly a Roger I'd like to talk because so much conversation has been about the kind of cultural analysis and interrogation that goes on within universities I would like to like very quickly make the point that that kind of deconstructed vein that you associate with Marxist criticism hasn't just been about what through out of the can and it's also been about what to include in it I have recently had a lecture in eighteenth-century history which didn't mention slavery at all and I kind of think a good Marxist critic would be like nice single-biggest econnect economic activity we should include that honesty of 18th century literature and in terms of your point about the decline of pop music I think good Marxist criticism I try and look at things like hip hop jazz and include them within your canon of high culture that and high culture that you associate predominantly with and western music do you agree that there's a great deal of critical interrogation of culture and cultural expression which occurs with that outside of universities and that has that can encode the kind of tensions that been thrown about between the two of you much better than anything that has been taught in universities which kind of comes up with you know hegemonic blocks of knowledge and received wisdom it's a huge question I'm I'm of the view that that in the end a healthy culture can't just be confined to universities and there we desperately need all those that that that tradition of discussion through reviews and through ordinary interaction of people which actually makes the cultural products into a part of their lives if we thought that it was just in universities that we talked about art or music or something then of course the whole thing would would atrophy it wouldn't have the place in people's lives that it should have on the question of you know popular music it is interesting that the only serious attempt to to say it to include popular music into the music illogical theories that were that have been propagated in universities was made by Marxists in particular by Adorno the Frankfurt School by way of condemning the whole damn thing as rubbish you know it was a very and it was a very distressing episode which actually set musicology back a long way because what his targets were precisely they they were jazz Gershwin Cole Porter and son all that moment in American popular culture where it actually seemed to justify itself as making a real contribution and and it's had a very bad effect of course the question ought to do now though how to bring into the curriculum things like hip hop and so on with that while retaining one's respect for all the things that it disrespects is another problem they're not sure how much hip hop you listen to it sounded like you only listen to music made by dead white men from yes well that's what you've been taught to say but that's a total cliche Adorno indeed was disastrously wrong about jazz as Roger so rightly says what Roger doesn't say and I think in a symptomatic silence is Adorno also was extraordinary acute about how musical values were degraded and debased by a cynical capitalist Hollywood manipulation of them and that I think is an enduring value in the study of popular culture let me just finish by saying if I judge this one thing on say just reverting to the theme of religion and religion one of the reasons why culture didn't take over from religion there are thousands of them is that religion is far and away the most pervasive persistent tenacious enduring form of popular culture and I think Roger will agree here that history has ever witnessed you won't find it on a single cultural studies course on that note I think we're going to have to end we run out of time Terry and Roger will be signing books out on the landing but please show your appreciation with a very

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 248,174

Rating: 4.8643165 out of 5

Keywords: Terry Eagleton, Roger Scruton, Intelligence Squared, IQ2, Cultural criticism

Id: qOdMBDOj4ec

Length: 86min 58sec (5218 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 19 2012