(Encounter, October 1980)

Note

An article with the title “The Politics of Oxymoron” appeared in the Summer 2003 issue of The New Criterion. A study of the linguistic damage done by anthropology to the concept of “culture” over the years, it suggests that Samuel D. Huntington’s plural use of “civilizations” could have much the same effect. The essay in which this general process was originally examined, linking the thought and usages of Herder, T. S. Eliot, and Raymond Williams, first appeared almost a quarter century ago. With minor changes here is the original text.

Anthropology’s semantic legacy

For more than a hundred years anthropology has been spreading sweetness and light. And now that the results are in—now that even the strangest customs from the remotest places have been recognized as truly human and entirely natural—it is plain that the popular verdict has been an enthusiastic assent. Its ethical understandings are widely regarded as benign. Its politics are as congenial to the liberal imagination as they are to the radical mind. Its broader implications have been sympathetically received by a wide range of people who have gladly melded its doctrines with their own. And if there is any one thing which explains this congeniality and appeal it is the persuasive conception of ‘culture’ which anthropology has bestowed upon the world.

No other notion has proved so irresistible. It beguiled T. S. Eliot thirty years ago, while the polemical advantages it offered soon drew the attention of Raymond Williams. It made its most explosive literary impact in Sir Charles Snow’s declaration that “the scientific culture really is a culture, not only in an intellectual but also in an anthropological sense”, and it received its most subtle literary interpretation in Lionel Trilling’s essay warning against the excesses of “the cultural mode of thought”. It provided a rationale for some of the arguments of Frantz Fanon, while the same cultural relativism which fortified Fanon encouraged Paul Feyerabend to claim that science and witchcraft are more similar than university men had previously dared suppose.1

For 62 years after its introduction into English in Sir Edward Burnett Tylor’s book Primitive Culture (1871), and for 40 years after the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the anthropological meaning of ‘culture’ was not admitted to the OED, and the narrower evaluative use once common in the humanities—the Arnoldian use which Raymond Williams declared “hostile” and “embarrassing” and which he was pleased to see eclipsed—was much more popular. But that is now a thing of the past. Today the anthropological conception of culture reigns supreme.

The proof is everywhere—as any regular reader of Encounter knows. Quite aside from the argument presented by C. P. Snow, the distinctively anthropological plural form in the very title of that celebrated piece twenty years ago, The Two Cultures, in itself announced a change, and since then both plurals and compounds have multiplied apace. Not long ago in these pages we saw what was once simply described as despotism appearing in a political discussion of despotic cultures, a phrasing which more adequately conveyed the enduring incorrigibility the author had in mind.2

From a different quarter, blindness and inertia have been proposed as ‘cultural’ features of our political life by Alasdair MacIntyre: he said recently that there are some things which “our political culture cannot allow us to admit.”3 Again, what we had become inured to as a treacherous waywardness endemic in intellectual life, “the alienation of the intelligentsia”, now receives, as adversary culture, a formulation more menacing and more fixed.4

These usages are generally pessimistic in tone. But the anthropological conception lends itself to more optimistic interpretations too. Business culture, for example, attractively glosses the cash nexus. An editorial in The Times for 22 Nov ember 1979 concerning the Cambridge Apostles tells us that “theirs was a largely homosexual culture, with necessary dependence on ties of friendship”, and one feels that in this case the word culture confers a fraternal benevolence and a sense of belonging which mere sexual idiosyncrasy lacks. After riots in Bristol in 1980 a 15-year-old girl offered the explanation that “the police don’t understand the way we live. They’ve got their culture, we’ve got ours”. In this analysis the ‘two cultures’ of the police and the rioters are treated as on a par. Each is incompatible, irreducible, and is somehow envisaged as having a legitimacy which transcends mere national law.

All of which should make one thing fairly clear. And this is that what has now passed into public understanding as the anthropological conception of culture is not quite the innocently ‘descriptive’ term its academic connections might suggest. If in even its most comical associations it can be used to legitimize and redeem (punk culture comes to mind); if its ideological ‘holism’ was as attractive to Eliot as it was useful to Raymond Williams; if a phrase like despotic culture can make despotism rather worse than it did before, and a revolution on behalf of culture can make revolution sound rather better (nobler, more deeply necessary than economic or political necessity itself)5; if it directly suggests a normative order which is self-sufficient, and which is proudly upheld by its members in terms of Mein Kultur right or wrong—then it’s fairly obvious that the anthropological conception of culture in general use is a lively verbal weapon which blames or praises just as much as it neutrally describes.6

Descriptive or normative?

Yet this is widely denied. In A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn’s Culture,7 the most authoritative professional survey of the term culture and its meanings carried out by anthropologists to date, it is implied throughout that whatever else it may be or do or mean (and some 130 possibilities are supplied) a characteristic which distinguishes the anthropological conception is that it is neutral, non-evaluative, and scientific. It is only the humanistic conception which commends, judges, and prescribes. And much the same distinction can be found in the most erudite and authoritative writings in both literature and the fine arts. Directly addressing this question in his In Search of Cultural History (1969), Sir Ernst Gombrich notes that

“the usage of anthropologists exemplified by Burnett Tylor . . . has spread to social scientists, especially on the other side of the Atlantic. In this sterilised meaning it has come into vogue again in such terms as ‘working-class culture’ or even C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ of unhappy memory. These are purely descriptive terms, stripped, it is often claimed, of any so-called ‘value judgement’ . . .” (Italics added)

One detects a certain hesitation. The deliberate “it is claimed” in the last sentence suggests, perhaps, that Gombrich is not entirely convinced by such arguments—and may even feel somewhat ambivalent about the matter. If this is so his ambivalence is fully justified. After all, it is precisely because Snow’s use of the anthropological concept was anything but “sterilised”, was in fact correctly seen to be a claim on behalf of the Sciences to an equal legitimacy and prestige in the affairs of the nation as a whole, that it provoked such a fiery response from F. R. Leavis.

Yet in setting down his opinion that the anthropological concept is somehow, despite everything, sterilised and value-free, Gombrich is expressing a view which is regularly found in literature and the arts. In the case of Eliot, G. H. Bantock found a continual wavering between descriptive and prescriptive usages.8 And when, in 1972, Bernard Bergonzi discussed the Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, he identified one of the main sources of confusion in similar terms.9 The troubles of Eliot’s arguments, he said, derived from his ambiguous use of two mutually exclusive meanings, the Anthropological-Descriptive and the Arnoldian-Evaluative:

T. S. Eliot falters

“In principle, he is concerned with culture in the broad or anthropological sense, rather than the narrow or Arnoldian sense: that is to say, the whole way of life of a society, all its inherited manners, customs, and styles of living; as opposed to ‘the best that has been tought and said’ and the cultivation of the fine arts. In practice, however, Eliot slides from one sense of culture to another in a quite disconcerting way. The anthropological use of the word is descriptive and value-free . . . “ (Italics added)

Close inspection of the Notes suggests that more than merely this may be involved. Yet a sliding from sense to sense is certainly part of the problem, and in the very passage where T. S. Eliot’s commitment to anthropology is most explicit10 (the second half of the paragraph below, starting at Now . . . ) there is a perfect example of what Bergonzi has in mind.

“By ‘culture’, then, I mean first of all what the anthropologists mean: the way of life of a particular people living together in one place. That culture is made visible in their arts, in their social system, in their habits and customs, in their religion. But these things added together do not constitute the culture, though we often speak for convenience as if they did. These things are simply the parts into which a culture can be anatomised, as a human body can. But just as a man is something more than the assemblage of the various constituent parts of his body, so a culture is more than the assemblage of its arts, customs, and religious beliefs.

These things all act upon each other, and fully to understand one you have to understand all. Now there are of course higher cultures and lower cultures, and the higher cultures in general are distinguished by differentiation of function, so that you can speak of the less cultured and the more cultured strata of society, and finally, you can speak of individuals as being exceptionally cultured. The culture of an artist or a philosopher is distinct from that of a mine worker or field labourer . . . but in a healthy society these are all parts of this same culture; and the artist, the poet, the philosopher, the politician and the labourer will have a culture in common, which they do not share with other people of the same occupations in other countries.” (Italics added)

Where else have those little words now and so been used so ambitiously? Whatever may have been the case in 1910, when Eliot immersed himself in anthropology, it has been a very long time since any American member of the profession spoke of higher or lower cultures, though to speak of social evolution as involving differentiation of function was once a sociological commonplace; as for the non sequitur which immediately follows, this heralds even more vexatious problems:

“so that you can speak of the less cultured and the more cultured strata of society, and finally, you can speak of individuals as being exceptionally cultured.”

There is alas only a tenuous connection between what the old-time social evolutionists meant by their descriptive higher cultures and what the Arnoldians mean by various degrees of personal cultivation. The first is a necessary, but certainly not a sufficient condition, of the second. In fact the very suggestion that it could be anything more might have provoked from Ortega y Gasset a rather sinister laugh, for the differentiation which Eliot finds in the ‘higher cultures’ is only specialisation under another name; and such specialisation, Ortega argued long ago, was precisely what made impossible the “exceptional cultivation” of individuals which Eliot rightly admired.11

Description or prescription?

All of which clearly illustrates Eliot’s tendency to blur and blend the descriptive and prescriptive meanings. What is one to make of it all? For his part Bergonzi sees correctly that a crudely binary either/or (either Eliot is talking about Anthropological Description or he is talking about Arnoldian Prescription) does little to explain “holistic or organicist” views of this kind. But is there, he wonders, a third and different sense of culture which Eliot has all-too-vaguely in mind?

That seems to be the only possible conclusion. In Eliot’s anatomical passages about the social body, leading to an endorsement of organic social wholes, Bergonzi tells us that Eliot is “attempting to move toward a third sense of culture which will go beyond the other two.” Yet because it is “the other two” which are used to explain this mysterious third sense, and because this is something they plainly cannot do, it is Eliot who is said to be confused. He is, we are told, “aware of the ambiguity”—i.e., between description and prescription—“though the subtleties and circumlocutions of his prose do little to resolve it.”

Bergonzi adds that these ambiguities then reach some sort of climax in “an extraordinarily tortured paragraph” on the subject of the unity of culture and religion, “a passage [which] illustrates the frequent tendency in Eliot’s prose for meanings to collapse and merge into each other as a result of excessive qualification . . .” and which helps to demonstrate, at least for Bergonzi, that “Eliot’s notion of culture as the incarnation of religion is not wholly intelligible.”12

We must agree that it isn’t intelligible—or not in the terms supplied. But if we firmly set aside the either/or of the more neutral usages of science on the one hand, and the evaluative usage of Matthew Arnold on the other; if we concentrate instead upon the conception of culture which has come down so little changed from Johann Gottfried von Herder (and was lucidly expounded by Isaiah Berlin13); and if we bear in mind Herder’s highly evaluative notion that each distinctive culture is to be prized as a self-sufficient totality, a totality embodied in its language, its arts, and its religion, so that “in order to understand one you have to understand all”—then what Eliot is saying presents no difficulty. It may also help to listen to the voices of the mullahs in the Holy City of Qom, whose arguments on behalf of Islamic culture serve now to justify theocratic rule, not to mention examples from even further afield.

For instance, if one listens to the rhetoric of Black Ethnicity in places like Australia, then not only is “the notion of culture as the incarnation of religion” wholly intelligible, it becomes hard to distinguish from the notion of culture which has become one of the most persuasive political doctrines in the world today. Strange though it may seem, when the philo-European Eliot writes that “there is an aspect in which we can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people, from birth to grave, from morning to night and even in sleep, and that way of life is also its culture”, his sentiments would be warmly applauded along Australia’s Arnhem Land coast.

What is more, the word often now used by Aboriginal political leaders in these areas is the English word ‘culture’, and it is used with the political meanings deriving from German Romanticism. It serves to defend the uniqueness of tribal life against the assaults of civilization: culture is invoked against the mining engineers, the sacredness of rocks and lagoons is asserted against the jaws of the excavators and the bulldozer’s steel blades, by a people who have discovered both the terminology and the ideological force of the “cultural mode of thought”.

Eliot and ‘what the anthropologists mean’

This may seem surprising, but Kulturgeschichte is evidently full of surprises. And the juxtaposition of Eliot’s thinking with the political language of Aboriginal leaders in Australia will only seem strange to those who have never noticed a significant element in his thought.

“What the anthropologists mean” by culture led him to idealise the possibilities of tribal life. This is conspicuous in The Idea of a Christian Society, a book written in 1939 in direct response to what he saw as the totalitarian tribalism then threatening Europe. The solution he proposed embraced a kind of Christian primitivism, a ‘positive culture’ which would above all be unitary. “The unitary community should be religious-social … a state of affairs which is no longer wholly realised except in very primitive tribes indeed.” Again,

“without sentimentalising the life of the savage, we might practise the humility to observe, in some of the societies upon which we look down as primitive and backward, the operation of a social-religious-artistic complex which we should emulate upon a higher plane.”

To Eliot, in 1939, the alternatives facing England were dire—totalitarianism; or a pitiful, apathetic decline. And to those repelled by such a prospect he said:

“one can only assert that the only possibility of control and balance is a religious control and balance; that the only hopeful course for a society which could thrive and continue its creative activity in the arts of civilisation, is to become Christian. That prospect involves, at least, discipline, inconvenience and discomfort: but here as hereafter the alternative to hell is purgatory.”14

Subtle minds may well object to all this. It will be said that several clearly distinguishable things are being hopelessly mixed: that the anthropological concept of culture is one thing, and the term which expresses it is quite another; that the varying concrete reference of the term must also be taken into account, and that whether or not anyone uses the term for this or that ideological purpose is something else again.15

To some extent I agree. The term culture is but a clue to the wider subject of the concept itself. Still, it’s the best clue we have. And what does seem remarkable is the stability of the concept and its ideological use over the past 200 years, so that what Herder was talking about would be instantly understood by political leaders today, and in some cases would not even need translation, whether they lived in northern Australia or the theocracy of Iran.

Others may also object to the suggestion that the ideological mode of culture theory owes anything to anthropology. It is of course true that professional usage is ordinarily neutral. When Clifford Geertz tells us that “the concept of culture I espouse … is essentially a semiotic one”, there is no reason to think that the attachment to his ‘spouse’ involves more than the conditional loyalty owed to any explanatory scheme.

And though it is also true that the minds of a whole generation of Americans who read anthropological popularisations were shaped and kneaded (or Benedict and Meaded) by relativistic theory, it might still be argued that this has nothing to do with the recent revelation of culture as faith and doctrine. According to this view the real origin of the ideological use of the term in the West was in another time, another place, and another country.

It was in Germany around the time of World War 1 that Kultur was being loudly promoted as the German alternative to ‘civilisation’—Kultur being warm, populist, and creative, both the prime source of identity and a linguistically unique possession of the chosen Volk; civilisation (on which the French and the English seemed to have a hold) being cold, arrogant, and paralysing, a universal misfortune propagated by rootless polyglots.

No doubt there is something to this argument. Yet an inquiry into the ideological use of the term culture—into culturism, so to speak— besides leading back to German Romanticism, tends to strengthen rather than weaken the anthropological connection. And it is surprising how shy Kroeber and Kluckhohn were about discussing such matters in 1952. Their tone and manner when they dealt with Kultur und Schrecklichkeit was itslf revealing. It was with an air almost of pained surprise that they found themselves having to admit that in the invectives of the dispute over Kultur and civilisation “the word culture had a popular meaning essentially identical to that with which anthropologists use it.”

What this points to is that the “sterilised, purely descriptive” meaning which is so widely regarded as the anthropological sense of the word par excellence, is in fact a somewhat insecure latecomer. Moreover, it is a latecomer precariously derived from a very powerful and active ideological conception which social science has tried—rather somnambulistically, one feels—to pacify, to neutralise, and to disarm. The success of this manoeuvre is constantly threatened, and the actively ideological potential of the term culture is ever ready to revive, whenever the neutral mode of usage is not stiffened by the professional discipline of anthropology, or sustained by the ideal of objectivity. And all too plainly, neither of these restraints are nearly as strong as they were.

As for the sources of culture theory as ideology, and their relevance today, it is impossible to overemphasise the importance of Alfred G. Meyer’s appendix to the Kroeber and Kluckhohn book, “Historical Notes on Ideological Aspects of the Concept of Culture in Germany and Russia.” Noting that “ for Kant and other representatives of 18th-century enlightenment in Germany, the enlightenment itself, the growth of rationalist and utilitarian philosophy . . . represented Kultur”, he went on to identify a second, opposing, and eventually dominating view of the matter:

“The other ideological strand tended to regard Kultur as a complex of qualities, achievements, and behaviour patterns which were local or national in origin and significance, unique, non-transferable, non-repetitive, and therefore irrelevant for the outsider. Herder’s relativism did much to pave the way for this conception of Kultur.

The stress on such unique culture patterns as against the economic, political, scientific, or philosophical achievements of Western civilisation can be regarded as an attempt to compensate for a deep-seated feeling of inferiority on the part of German intellectuals once they had come in contact with the advanced nations. Similarly, Russian cultural nationalism can easily be traced to such a feeling of inferiority; quite fittingly, Russian cultural nationalism developed in the measure as Russian contacts with the West intensified.”

These Kultur theories, then, are a typical ideological expression—though by no means the only one—of the rise of backward societies against the encroachments of the West on their traditional culture. They consist in asserting the reality of something which is just about to be destroyed.” (Italics in original)

[Note: The 24 years which have passed since I quoted this passage from Alfred G. Meyer (RS) have only made it more strikingly relevant to our present discontents. Ninety percent of the ideology of multiculturalism does indeed derive from a fear that certain ethnic realities “are just about to be destroyed”. What was not clear to Meyer, but is very clear to most of us today, is that this has seldom become a central issue in modern politics because of any genuine fear on the part of ethnic groups themselves. Whether we are talking about Indian untouchables in Calcutta, or farmers in Thailand, or peasants in Spain, all of these people want to enter the modern world and are usually quite happy to jettison the crippling cultural baggage which holds them back. Instead, the ideological defence of local and backward cultures—the promotion of the doctrine of “my culture, right or wrong”—has overwhelmingly been undertaken by radicalised western middle-classes, on behalf of an ethnic clientèle which may or may not approve their efforts, driven by a masochistic contempt for their Western heritage, and almost as often for the lands of their birth as well.]

Raymond Williams—destroyer

If culture as ideology is found at its most sympathetic among Australia’s Aboriginal political leaders, and at its most paradoxical in the speculative proposals of T. S. Eliot, it is found at its ugliest and most destructive in Raymond Williams. As anyone who has sampled his prose will concede, it has not always been easy to see what he was driving at. But a recent book16 helpfully clarifies a number of things. Forthrightly interrogated by his own followers, he was asked why, in Keywords (1976) and in Marxism and Literature (1977),

“the partisan aspect of what you are saying is largely concealed from the reader … You remarked that you have always tried to keep the mainstream of bourgeois culture in your sights—a combativity we very much admire. In Marxism and Literature you know whom you are aiming at—but do you tell your readers?”

It’s a good question. To which might be added “and if not, why not?” Certainly these are the questions which come forcefully to mind when one looks at the way Williams has used the anthropological conception of culture down through the years. In Keywords (p.82) he has this to say:

“It is interesting that the steadily extending social and anthropological use of culture and cultural … [has] … either by-passed or effectively diminished the hostility and [the] unease and embarrassment.”

What hostility and unease can this be? Evidently it is Williams’s personal response to any conception of culture entailing claims to superior knowledge by superior people. Certainly this itself is interesting, along with what he sees as the advantages of the anthropological sense of the word. But when we read of the anthropological usage “steadily extending” we seem to see an irresistible semantic tide; and the uninformed would never imagine that Williams had anything to do with the tide himself.

This could be sheer modesty—yet a decidedly uncandid way of putting things has marked his public relation to the anthropological conception of culture from the first. Twenty years ago we find the deliberate extension of meaning presented as a form of historical inevitability, as a force over which we have little control. F. R. Leavis’s concept of culture, he thought, was plainly to narrow. Musing on this problem Williams wrote that

“the difficulty about the idea of culture is that we are continually forced to extend it, until it becomes almost identical with our whole common life.17

But this so-called “difficulty” is his—not ours. The effect of the “we” is to compel the complicity of his readers in what is patently an uninvited extension of his own. When this practice of limitlessly pushing the holistic concept of culture as “a whole way of life” was pointed out by Ian Gregor in Essays in Criticism—where he noticed the oddity of regarding the Trades Union Congress as a form of creative art—Williams was quick to administer a rebuke.18 But now that he has been so fiercely interrogated by Perry Anderson et al (p. 155 in Politics and Letters) we find the following revelation:

“Q. What specific advantages did you see in the term culture for socialist theory?

A. There are two answers to that. The single most shocking thesis to established liberal opinion in Culture and Society, including people who liked the book in other ways, was that I did not define working-class culture as a few proletarian novels . . . but as the institutions of the labour movement. That was the gain of talking about culture as a whole way of life.” (Italics added)

And here we see the fatal outcome of Eliot’s initiative. What attracted Williams to the anthropological conception was its sheer political scope. What could possibly be larger than a whole way of life? That’s what the anthropologists said the term ‘culture’ really meant, according to Williams. And if this strategic terminological weapon in the class war were to be wrested from those at Cambridge who had misappropriated it for their own effete and exclusive uses, then the extension proposed by social science should be pushed to the limit. If T. S. Eliot was going to define culture as eating Wensleydale cheese at Henley to the sound of Elgar, then Raymond Williams was free to add a few amendments of his own: why not “mixed farming, the Stock Exchange, coal-mining, the London Transport”?19

On anthropological grounds there could be no objection whatever. The anthropological conception also suggested the possibility of a fruitful political marriage between cultural and historical relativism. As Williams saw it, the educational advantages of “The sense of ‘culture’ as ‘a whole way of life’ [which] has been most marked in twentieth-century anthropology and sociology” involved a most satisfactory merging of interests:

“There have been two main results in ordinary thinking. First, we have learned something new about change: not only that it need not terrify us, since alternative institutions and emphases of energy have been shown to be practicable and satisfying; but also that it cannot be piecemeal—one element of a complex system can hardly be changed without seriously affecting the whole.”

Two lessons, both useful for historical relativism, could be learnt from this. One need not bother to defend existing institutions when they are threatened or attacked, because others (unspecified, as usual in such prognoses) will prove just as “satisfying.” At the same time the holistic conclusion suggests that piecemeal reform is largely a waste of time. Ergo, in any programme of social change, the entire institutional complex must go.

The revelations of ‘Marxism and literature’

Today Raymond Williams tells us, in Marxism and Literature, that not only institutions will have to go. Literature must go too. With a zeal which makes even his most loyal sympathisers blench,20 the now insatiable desire for “a whole way of life” purged of the last remnants of exclusiveness, privilege, and superiority has led to the declared belief that literature itself may have to be “cleared away”.

In retrospect, what is poignant about this development is that when T. S. Eliot gloomily foresaw an epoch so debased that it would be “possible to say that it will have no culture”, Williams accused him of sliding away from the anthropological conception. After all, “no culture”, anthropologically speaking, would mean no life, no social forms, nothing at all. And this was clearly absurd and unthinkable. But what was yesterday treated as an absurdity in Eliot’s social thought is perilously close to what Raymond Williams today proposes as a likely outcome along the way ahead. Now that in Marxism and Literature he is far advanced into what his admirers call his “ultra-left radical” phase, even his interviewers can be seen drawing back in anxiety and alarm. As they tell him,

“One theme of the work is a frontal attack on the very idea of literature as such. In effect, you denounce it as an elitist elevation of certain forms of writing to a special status—the ‘literary’—a category which you say possesses the same kind of reactionary spell today as that of the ‘divine’ in feudal society … [You argue that] since all forms of writing are by definition creative, it is reactionary and exclusivist to privilege some as literary, thereby tacitly or explicitly devaluing others … Doesn’t your current position, if it were strictly maintained, lead to a complete relativism in which it becomes effectively impossible to discriminate between different forms of writing or types of work at all?

Williams: Well, this is difficult. What I would hope will happen is that after the ground has been cleared of the received idea of literature, it will be possible to find certain new concepts which would call for special emphases.”21

The ideologized conception of culture

So there it is. When the ground has been cleared—the usual cleansing preliminary—certain new concepts (unspecified) will be found. Then we can make a fresh start. First the deluge—after that, we’ll see.

What in fact we see, looking at the not inconsiderable range of societies which have been most systematically cleared in our time, is that when everything imaginable has been incorporated into the apparatus of the state, literature remains one of the only sources of independent opinion and ideas. Passed from hand to hand, often copied and circulated under the most trying conditions, steadfastly opposed to the single way of seeing required by “the cultural mode of thought”, it fulfils the critical destiny which the Arnoldian conception of culture once prescribed.

But these self-destructive Marxist literary manoeuvres are a side issue. It is in a larger context than this that the ideologized conception of culture belongs. When the legitimacy of institutionalised authority is everywhere in question, the prospect of a social order depending largely on a “shared sense of identity” bestowed by a common culture has strong appeal. Since it assumes that social harmony arises fundamentally from like-mindedness, it projects a vision of corporate life magically freed from the arrogance of power, the insolence of office, and the perplexities of legislation and revenue.

Externally, it legitimates extra-territorial yearnings. Thus Mr Bani-Sadr, now President of Iran, could argue (against the Soviet view) that Turks, Arabs, and Baluchis “have been living a common life for centuries and have a common culture” (Guardian, 18 January 1980). Internally, it legitimates secession. From the ‘counter-culture’ (on the one hand) to the Basques (on the other), it rejects the claims of the state. Its libertarian rhetoric is attractive, since in contrast to the ideal of individual liberty, the claims of cultures cannot so easily be reduced to personal selfishness.

It may be that the doctrine of “my culture, right or wrong” is to the morality of collective action what the doctrine of “authenticity” tried to be in the morality of the private life—an ultimate legitimation turned to when the institutionalised sources of authority have lost their power to persuade.

1 Lionel Trilling, “The Leavis-Snow Conroversy”, in Beyond Culture (1966). Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture”, in Toward the African Revolution (1970). Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975). In the second of last year’s Herbert Spencer Lectures, delivered at the university of oxford on 2 November 1979, Hilary Putnam of Harvard, alluding to Feyerabend and to T. S. Kuhn, described the relativistic ‘cultural norms’ approach derived from anthropology as one of the two most influential paradigms in contemporary philosophy of science.

2 Robert Conquest, “The Role of the Intellectual in International Misunderstanding”, Encounter, August 1978.

3 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Alasdair MacIntyre claims that new dark ages are impending”, The London Review of Books, 20 December 1979.

4 Irving Kristol, “The Adversary Culture of the Intellectuals”, Encounter, October 1979.

5 “President Bani-Sadr of Iran yesterday proclaimed the start of a Cultural Revolution. He gave notice that he would mobilise the masses against anyone who threatened ‘the oneness and unity’ of the country after a night of violence between left-wing students and Muslim fundamentalists at Teheran University . . . Inside the now heavily guarded university, the President said the meaning of the Cultural Revolution was that he was able to ask the 36 million people of Iran to defend the unity of their country.” The Guardian, 23 April 1980, p.6.

6 A detailed sociological study of some of the matters mentioned here may be found in J. P. Merquior’s “Remarks on the Theory of Culture”, in his The Veil and The Mask (Routledge, 1979)

7 A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, Papers, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. 47, 1952. Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s assertion regarding the delayed entry of the anthropological meaning is not strictly true, as one may find in definition number 5 of the entry under culture in Vol. 2, Part 2 of The New English Dictionary (1893), later and more familiarly “the OED”:

“5. The training, development, and refinement of mind, tastes, and manners . . . “

This is appropriately illustrated by Arnold’s “the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world”, and the other examples all fit the definition. At this point, however, serious confusion begins. Under 5b we have a definition closely related to (5) above for which the examples given are strikingly unsuited, and which are in fact anthropological:

“5b (with a and pl.) 1867 Freeman Norm. Conq. (1876) I. Iv. 150 A language and culure which was wholly alien to them. 1891 Spectator 27 June, Speaking all languages, knowing all cultures, living among all races.”

It is surely clear that what both Freeman and the author of the piece in the Spectator meant had little or nothing to do with the refinement of mind, tastes, and manners, but instead denoted a social form. Somewhat surprisingly, this does not appear to have been recognised by those who wrote the original dictionary entry.

8 G. H. Bantock, T. S. Eliot and Education (1970)

9 Bernard Bergonzi, T. S. Eliot (1972), p. 156.

10 T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), p. 120.

11 Not that Eliot failed to notice this problem in other contexts. He gives much attention to it when criticising “the departmentalisation of elites.” T. S. Eliot, Notes . . ., p. 36.

12 Bernard Bergonzi, T. S. Eliot, pp. 157-159.

13 Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder (1976).

14 T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), pp. 29—30, 62, 23—24.

15 There is a loose correspondence between these distinctions and those made by Quentin Skinner in his “The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon”, Essays in Criticism, July 1979.

16 Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. By Raymond Williams. Interviews conducted by Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett and Francis Mulhern. New Left Books.

17 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958, Penguin Books, 1977), p. 229.

18 Ian Gregor, comments in Essays in Criticism, Vol. IX, No. 4, p. 425—430.

19 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, p. 230.

20 “This annihilating insight [that some day there will be no literature] is extraordinarily difficult for a literary critic, even a Marxist literary critic, to come to terms with.” From a review by John Sutherland of Marxism and Literature, New Statesman, 19 August 1977, pp. 248-249. See also Terry Eagleton’s similar insights as reported by Bernard Bergonzi:

“Given a profound enough historical shift there is no reason in principle why Shakespeare should not fall into the ranks of the unemployed.”

As Bergonzi notes, this is a prospect which Mr Eagleton evidently looks forward to with relish. See “Literature and politics Now”, Critical Quarterly (Vol. 20, No. 4) p. 53.

21 Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters, p. 325.

The cow bawled all night long. Well, from 1.00am to be exact, and since the distance from her yard to my bedroom window was less than 50 meters I didn’t get much sleep. In between the vigorous tromboning of the cow you could hear the piccolo woe of a calf half a kilometre away. First the cow, then the calf, over and over.

With a pillow on your head you hoped each bellow from the cow would be the last, but as soon as the calf answered, their dialog began again: the distant cry of distress far off in the night; the cow’s reassuring “I’m here” closer at hand. Eventually, at dawn, farmhand Hugh got on a quad-bike and brought the calf in and the noise and misery stopped.

A spontaneous feeling for the misery of others—a feeling of sympathy and concern—was the foundation of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, and by 6.00am I’d spent five hours listening to its bovine equivalent. Of course ruminants are more inclined to chew the cud than ponder moral rules. But if sympathetic emotions underlie moral sentiments, and maternal attachment is the basic social bond, then here was audible proof of Smith’s “sympathy”.

Normally the calf would have come skipping back through the fields to its mother as soon as she called. But it was four months old, and growing adventurous, and had wriggled its way through a fence and got stuck on the far side.

I suppose if the cow had been a bad mother it would have just yawned and gone on chewing its cud. But it was obviously a good mother—if it hadn’t been a good mother the calf would never have survived. How sensible though is it to use moral language about animals? Driven by the need for its mother the calf sung out. Driven by the need for its calf the cow responded. They did what they did because cows and calves can’t do anything else, and some would describe their world is simply amoral. In contrast, we say that human mothers “ought” to look after their children because they enjoy the freedom to think, and reason, and act—responsibly or irresponsibly as the case may be.

Primates and Philosophers

How we got from being supposedly amoral animals to moral beings with rights, duties, and responsibilities, is the subject of Frans de Waal’s new book Primates and Philosophers, How Morality Evolved. It irks him to be told that human morality is special, superior, and quite different from the rest of the animal kingdom—a cultural “veneer” laid over irredeemable selfishness. In de Waal’s view men like Hobbes, T. H. Huxley and Freud presented morality as

A thin crust underneath which boil antisocial, amoral, and egoistic passions. This view of morality as a veneer was best summarized by Ghiselin’s famous quip: “Scratch an ‘altruist’, and watch a ‘hypocrite’ bleed.”

Hobbes’ vision of Pre-Contract Man as permanently at “Warre”, Huxley’s view of amoral nature red in tooth and claw, Freud’s image of the superego as a citadel of order dominating a violent and unruly human psyche—all of these portray animal nature and moral man as deeply and unalterably opposed. For Robert Wright, author of the award-winning 1994 book The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, man is at best a hypocrite cultivating a self-flattering moral illusion:

The pretense of selflessness is about as much part of human nature as is its frequent absence. We dress ourselves up in tony moral language, denying base motives and stressing our at least minimal consideration for the greater good; and we fiercely and self-righteously decry selfishness in others.

Wright’s disdainful view of the matter in this passage reminds me a little of an anthropology seminar I attended in 2007 where the speaker had the temerity to describe the moral principles of old-time Aboriginal society. The first member of the audience to respond could barely contain his exasperation. Morality! In grinding tones evidently haunted by an early and unsatisfactory encounter with the Irish Church, this senior academic made the very notion of any kind of morality—Aboriginal, western, or whatever—seem abhorrent. To speak of morality was not merely hypocritical; it was in some way evil itself.

The moral continuum

Frans de Waal, by contrast, “views morality as a direct outgrowth of the social instincts that we share with other animals… Morality is neither unique to us nor a conscious decision taken at a specific point in time: it is the product of evolution.” Mankind along with many other mammals is anatomically, neurologically, and ethically continuous with the rest of creation—more evolved, but evolved from the same stuff. As for the primates, when we climbed up from the apes certain moral sentiments came with us, and these provided a foundation for social life. In arguing this case de Waal aligns himself firmly with Adam Smith, David Hume, and Charles Darwin.

Smith’s observations on animal behavior in his treatise are few, but at one point he remarks that resentment in animals prompts justifiable retaliation. (We might express this by adapting the French witticism as follows: “Cet animal n’est pas méchant, quand on l’attaque, il se défend.”) For his part Hume was consistently uniformitarian—we’re all animals together. Though our four-legged friends may not alas speak English, from external resemblances we deduce internal similarities: “When any hypothesis, therefore, is advanc’d to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both,” adding that “no truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as men.”

As for Charles Darwin, de Waal strongly argues—in this agreeing with Ernst Mayr—that T. H. Huxley wholly misrepresented Darwin’s view of the evolution of morality and its relation to animal behavior. Darwin allowed for the development of both altruistic and sympathetic tendencies, explaining them by a form of group selection, and emphasized continuity with animals in the moral as well as the anatomical domain. He wrote in The Descent of Man (1871):

Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man.

Edward Westermarck

But in de Waal’s view, even more important to understanding the role of sentiment in matters moral was the Swedish Finn Edward Westermarck (1862-1939), author of The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1908) who provides an epigraph at the start of Chapter One:

We approve and we disapprove because we cannot do otherwise. Can we help feeling pain when the fire burns us? Can we help sympathizing with our friends?

Though Westermarck’s thoughts on the origins of the family are well-known in social anthropology, de Waal believes that he was under-appreciated during his lifetime, and this because his ideas “flew in the face of the Western dualistic tradition that pits body against mind and culture against instinct.” Emotion and sentiment had a central place in Westermarck’s ethical thinking, where he distinguished moral from non-moral emotions. Gratitude and resentment, for example, directly concern one’s own interests and how one wants to be treated, and in themselves are too egocentric to be more than a starting point in moral evolution.

The moral sentiments of the more evolved ethical systems of human society, in Westermarck’s words, “differ from kindred non-moral emotions by their disinterestedness, apparent impartiality, and flavour of generality.” They embody Adam Smith’s idea of the “impartial spectator” who represents and endorses principles of fairness and justice that can be applied to all. One might say they aspire to the detached condition of universally applicable golden rules.

Nevertheless emotions of gratitude and resentment, prompted by deep intuitions of what is an appropriate reward for help or an appropriate retaliation for injury, are at the foundation of much moral psychology—as any reader of Adam Smith will quickly find. Whole chapters of The Theory of Moral Sentiments discuss resentment in various ways, and though he regards it as “the most odious, perhaps, of all the passions” (V.II.I) he considers that for anyone not to respond with justifiable anger to abuse and injury is a fault in itself. If God himself could be justifiably enraged, why shouldn’t Man?

We sometimes complain that a particular person shows too little spirit, and has too little sense of the injuries that have been done to him; and we are as ready to despise him for the defect, as to hate him for the excess of this passion.

The inspired writers would not surely have talked so frequently or so strongly of the wrath and anger of God, if they had regarded every degree of those passions as vicious and evil, even in so weak and imperfect a creature as man. (V.II.I)

Forgiveness, dogs, and Roger Scruton

In the December 14 2007 issue of the Times Literary Supplement Roger Scruton reviewed Forgiveness—A Philosophical Exploration by Charles Griswold. In the course of discussing resentment Scruton takes a stick to the evolutionary biologists who “are producing one phoney account (of human nature) after another, designed to show that human societies are constructed from the same ingredients as the tribes of apes”, a view he disapproves. Unlike dogs, he writes, man can forgive because he is a “free and accountable being.”

Dogs don’t forgive, because dogs don’t resent. Forgiveness is unique to rational beings, and is a gift of metaphysical freedom.

I admire Roger Scruton as a cultural sage but I wonder if he isn’t overstating the case? And while he knows all about metaphysics does he know about cats and dogs? Only this morning I aroused in our cat the strong expectation of being promptly fed—an expectation frustrated as I absent-mindedly made myself a cup of tea—and received a sharp nip on the heel. That is how he regularly reminds me of my duty.

Deepening my research into these matters over coffee at a Bondi latté bar, I asked a friend if dogs feel both anger and the lingering memory of injury resentment implies. He mentioned an amiable pooch of his acquaintance named Cosmo that was struck by a misdirected skateboard some months ago. The dog’s disposition had once been entirely sunny, but this changed his life. Cosmo has fiercely attacked skateboarders ever since.

Resentment is described in my Shorter Oxford Dictionary as “a strong feeling of ill-will or anger against the author or authors of a wrong or affront; the manifestation of such feeling against the cause of it.” It seems to me that corresponds pretty well to Cosmo’s feeling about skateboards, and de Waal’s discussion of similar matters reinforces this view. He writes that there are numerous stories regarding “delayed retaliation” in the zoo world, especially about apes and elephants, and goes on to relate Westermarck’s tale about a fourteen-year-old who viciously beat his camel whenever it loitered or turned the wrong way.

The camel passively took its punishment; but some days later “seized the unlucky boy’s head in its monstrous mouth, and lifting him up in the air flung him down again on the earth with the upper part of the skull completely torn off, and his brains scattered on the ground.”

Camels normally show remarkable forbearance: events of this kind are probably rare. It seems they are not rare however among chimpanzees, whose “revenge systems” for punishing those who inflict injury de Waal has written about elsewhere. Scruton’s dogmatic assertion about forgiveness is also a bit suspect. According to de Waal, Westermarck describes “turning the other cheek” as a universally appreciated gesture. Chimpanzees kiss and embrace after fights, says de Waal,

And these so-called reconciliations serve to preserve peace within the community. A growing literature exists on conflict resolution in primates and other mammals. Reconciliation may not be the same as forgiveness, but the two are obviously related.

David Hume and Adam Smith

Philosophers are over-inclined to take the meanings of words as a starting point, rather than reality itself, and it would be a mistake to get etymologically hung up on the mere words resentment and forgiveness. Neurologically, the reality is that the memory of injury persists somewhere in the brain as a disposition, an inclination to retaliate if and when opportunity offers. It may be just a niggle. It may be more. It may in the true paranoid become an all-consuming obsession.

Roger Scruton has a valid point about the uniquely detached ratiocination of the free intellect, but when David Hume tells us that “no truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as men”, he has a point too.

It is also worth bearing in mind that although moral reasoning of the more advanced kind may be the exclusive prerogative of homo sapiens, and of moral teachers from Christ to Kant who were able to put their thoughts into words, the neurological pattern of injury, anger, and retaliation (and reconciliation too) must long antedate any human reasoning about the matter.

The brains of many social animals would have been hardwired to act in this way defensively, instinctively, spontaneously, long before language was ever heard of—let alone the language of philosophers. The following passage, written in 1759, concentrates Adam Smith’s thoughts on instinct, the animal need for self-preservation, and the limited role of reason in the earliest formation of moral rules and behavior:

Self-preservation, and the propagation of the species, are the great ends which nature seems to have proposed in the formation of all animals. Mankind are endowed with a desire of those ends, and an aversion to the contrary; with a love of life, and a dread of dissolution; with a desire of the continuance and perpetuity of the species, and with an aversion to the thoughts of its entire extinction.

But though we are in this manner endowed with a very strong desire of those ends, it has not been entrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason, to find out the proper means of bringing them about. Nature has directed us to the greater part of these by original and immediate instincts.

Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, the love of pleasure, and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them. (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, V.II.I)

Words, words, words; speech, speech. George Steiner is the embodied speech act, a class act, a man, in his own phrase, “linguistically well-endowed”. Now, mindful of mortality, he has written seven books at one blow: exquisite little chapter-sized septuplets rather than just one big one.

Yet it appears he has always felt mortified by the proximity of original genius and would mortgage his intellectual kingdom for just one immortal line. Singular men endure such singular sufferings. His self-presentation emphasizes being bookish and Jewish, and therefore the perennial outsider.

Yet the CV he recites at length shows him haplessly condemned to wander from one élite university of the Western world to another, and bowed low with honours. He also lays proleptic claim to being an octogenarian, as though even Time’s winged chariot did not run fast enough for him.

---

So many academic books are articles long drawn out, and a little library in short order, such as we have here, invites reflection on the nature of the academic exercise. One academic strategy is to mine intensively in a specialized field, say the music of Thomas Crecquillon or scattered tablets recording property relations in ancient Babylon, and acquire en route the necessary penumbra of linguistic, historical and technical skills.

George Steiner works in the reverse direction, though notionally focused on comparative literature and the interface of poetics and philosophy from Plato to Heidegger. He sprang fully armed into the world from a trilingual background, though the role of universal swordsman regularly incites other roving cavaliers to beat him over the head for insouciant sallies into their territory.

---

Steiner is a kind of busy junction, a cortex or vortex of the academic mind. Book the Second, entitled “Invidia”, begins characteristically, “Not many today, I presume, read the words of Francesco degli Stabili, better known as Cerco D’Ascoli”. This particular Renaissance man was professor of astrology at Bologna, and in true Renaissance fashion dispensed and attracted poisonous envy.

Among other indiscretions, he may have gone so far as to cast Christ’s horoscope, so raising questions about God, freedom and determinism. He was also credited, or discredited, with having been lacerated by envy of Dante’s supremacy, and it is this theme of invidious comparison that Steiner might have treated at book length, had it not come “too near the bone”.

He is fascinated and horrified by the high-flyer incinerated by the intellectual sun. Of course, academics can always find satisfaction in “my station and its duties”, but George Steiner seeks out encounters where, as in mathematics or chess or artistic ability, one person decisively bests another.

---

Some pages of his “book” on Zion are surprising in tone and content, given the acute treatments of religion in Steiner’s previous writing… There is so much dubious imputation here one is spoilt for choice, but I would have thought setting St Paul in the context of Jewish self-hatred not only anachronistic but flat contrary to the kind of authoritative analysis of Paul found in the work of E. P. Sanders.

But Steiner’s ex cathedra style, without notes, holds at bay any scrutiny of an evidential base, even if that were possible with this kind of speculation. I revert to my initial comment about Steiner as a junction of ideas, constantly stimulating connections and mapping terrain.

A junction of ideas is not the same as a coherent government of them, and such government as Steiner exercises often occludes the nature of the terrain, especially when it falls within the unglamorous remit of the social sciences.

Perhaps the angle of his lens is too wide for proper focus. The darting aperçu comes all too easily, as do psychologistic insinuations operating slyly in the middle ground between analysis and taking the very high moral ground.

The above extracts are from David Martin’s review of George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008. Martin’s own books include Does Christianity Cause War?, 1997.

In the interesting first chapter of The Transformations of Man (1957)—a chapter titled ‘Animal Into Human’—Lewis Mumford considers the early development of human language. He is less concerned with its origin, per se, and more with its cognitive effect. He makes the following observation:

Language, the most important agent of directed thought, has the special trick of inhibiting autonomous images. Once language is achieved words may indeed summon events or images into consciousness: but when they function actively they may also, as the busy, efficient agents of directed thought, halt the self-induced hypnosis of sleep.

This fact is well known to those who have been sleepless. If primitive man was at first almost a neurotic victim of his own excessive image-making power, the invention and elaboration of language may have acted as a helpful inhibiting agent, which kept him from being overwhelmed.

By displacing autonomous images that welled up from the unconscious with verbal symbols attached to conscious processes, he may have brought his whole life under greater control.

Much primitive thinking would still remain dreamlike, infantile, magical. But by the very nature of the word, thinking itself would become centrally directed, and in time, by its very detachment from the unconscious, it would serve to enlarge the realm of the rational, the intelligible, the practical. (My emphasis here and elsewhere, RS)

Now the thing to notice here is the thesis that language ‘inhibits’ free-floating imagery and thereby assists in making the flood of sensory experience manageable. The use of the word ‘inhibits’ is in itself striking: we normally think of language as facilitating or enabling, as adding rather than reducing. But if Heraclitean flux is to be reduced to Parmenidean stasis, and held steady for contemplation, then at the level of human consciousness something like this has to happen.

We could use other expressions to make the same essential point. We could say that language excludes everything not explicitly denoted; that a primary task for the organism is to create for itself a closed environment wherein its own life purposes can be attended to; that linguistic stability is of Darwinian significance. Exclusion, closure, and stability all seek to manage and control the sensory flood.

Raymond Tallis

Tallis makes a number of comments in The Human Animal that bear on this question. He too is concerned with the emergence of the distinctively human and the origins of language. At 1.1 : “…mental images are unstable and private (or uncommunicable), whereas the meanings of words have to be stable and public…” That meanings are made public is part of Tallis’s argument about the nature of knowledge. But that mental imagery is dangerously unstable is what concerns us here. In contrast, verbal stability reduces sensory excess.

At 1.1 he quotes John Searle to the effect that “In speaking, I attempt to communicate certain things to a hearer by getting him to recognize my intention to communicate just those things.” We might add that it is the rules of grammar that enable us to communicate just those things: predication and tense add further definition, excluding unstable and unwanted areas of ambiguity and (in informational terms) ‘noise’.

At 3.1 Tallis tells us that knowledge is shadowed by a sense of ignorance. “Knowledge knows that it is underdetermined: it is haunted by incompleteness… we are aware that what we know is a small island in an infinite sea of the unknown.”

The ‘haunting’ might be seen as a by-product of verbal and grammatical stabilization and inhibition: the vast superfetation of unstabilized flux which is necessarily left out as both superfluous and unmanageable is felt to be vaguely threatening, and returns in dreams… The island metaphor may be applied to words, to grammar, to knowledge, and even to the origin of life itself.

Paul Davies

The cosmologist Paul Davies recently had something to say about stabilization and the value of slower relatively inert “islands in the stream” considered as evolutionary phenomena. He was speculating about the origins of life. (Sydney Morning Herald, 22.12.05):

“How, then, did life arise? We can gain a clue from modern computers. Quantum systems may be fast, but they are very fragile. Computers routinely transfer important data for safekeeping from speedy yet vulnerable microchips to slow and bulky hard disks or CDs.”

“Perhaps quantum life began using large organic molecules for more stable data storage. At some stage these complex molecules took on a life of their own, trading speed for robustness and versatility. (RS: It might be noticed that a Darwinian assumption has been smuggled into the preceding sentence. ‘Trading’ means robustness and stability trumped speed as a survival mechanism.) The way then lay open for hardy chemical life to go forth and inherit the earth.”

J. G. Roederer

Davies’ unacknowledged source for these speculations appears to be a book by J. G. Roederer (which Davies had earlier reviewed), Information and Its Role in Nature. (Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2005) A physicist, Roederer writes about “The Genesis of Complexity and Information.” I here draw out from his discussion relevant statements about stabilization, structure, and the formation of “islands of stability”.

3.1 Although our book does not deal with cosmology, we must examine some relevant aspects of physical and chemical evolution… They are: fluctuations and change (and) formations of ‘islands’ of stability.

After a discussion of kinds of fluctuations in the universe, some of which are transient, and others that surpass some critical size and “trigger instabilities which grow and lead to macroscopic consequences”, he writes in a Darwinian fashion of

The selective advantage of certain structures vi-à-vis others… (author’s emphasis) Recall that we mentioned the great fragility of any artificial quantum system prepared in the laboratory… There are, however, states that are robust and immune to tenuous external influences… Thus, in the primordial subatomic world stable configurations emerged as the ‘survivors’ in a sea of chaotic fluctuations: first the elementary particles, then atoms and later molecules. (83)

Thanks to peculiar physicochemical properties of the molecules involved, one particular class of carbon compounds takes off on a development of its own, not just recently on Earth but long before on the surface of icy comets and planetary moons.

Indeed, there is a ubiquity of simple organic molecules such as HCN, light hydrocarbons, even simple amino acids and polymers, which in the favourable environment of Earth have developed the capacity of information-driven interactions and given rise to living organisms — membrane-encapsulated ‘islands’ of self-organization with reproductive capacity, able to maintain a low entry state in metastable equilibrium with the environment. (85)

On page 90 Roederer concludes section 3.1 in a longish paragraph (here broken up and lightly edited) bringing together the concept of spontaneously organized ‘islands’ in the flux, with the different concept of organization brought about by intelligent human intervention:

We mentioned above the selective advantage of some particular component structures in terms of their stability or ‘survivability’ in an evolving Universe. Other structures are possible and may have formed during the course of evolution, but if they did, they were evanescent and did not lead to any stable ‘islands’ of increasing organization.

Today, however, we can produce new isotopes, new organic molecules, new nanostructures, new chemicals, new breeds and clones, even new virus-like or cell-like entities that have not undergone any natural, selective evolution.

These actions have all been planned and designed with a premeditated goal—a very different process, requiring the intervention of a human brain. Here, indeed, we must appeal to the concept of information and its intervention in the physical world!

It is human intention and action that is now generating and preserving these new products—structures that emerge not from physical laws alone but from brain information processing which causes deliberate, planned changes in the initial conditions that enter into the laws governing the systems under consideration.

Summary

We began by looking at a little-noted aspect of language and suggesting that what Lewis Mumford called its “inhibiting” function is another way of describing a way of achieving, cognitively, an ‘island’ of order in the sensory storm.

We next saw each evolutionary development of language—labelling, comparing, fixing in time and space—as removing ambiguity and strengthening cognitive control. The haunting “shadow of ignorance” is seen as a lingering apprehensive awareness of how little of the world is securely grasped.

Roederer, a physicist, then provides historical depth by describing analogous cosmological processes. Putting our comments on language into this framework we see (a) an initial stage of self-organizing complexity arising from nothing more than fluctuations in the early Universe, (b) a later stage of complexity arising from as yet unidentified causes leading to the membrane-encapsulated ‘islands’ of living organisms, and (c) a more-or-less unconscious development by which language itself imitates an aspect of the process of physical self-organization.

Each word, phrase, sentence, helps define a part of the sensory flux, eliminating the distractions of the surrounding sea, forming an island of stable meaning, and holding it cognitively steady for examination.

“‘Look at them, sir’, he said, with a motion of his hand towards the wallowing swine. ‘Rightly is they called pigs.’”

“‘Rightly indeed’, Mr Wimbush agreed.”

Now, is Rowley a realist or a nominalist? One might argue that it is out of the long experience of his yeoman forefathers that the whole semantic cluster surrounding pigs and piggishness has grown slowly up, that out of real smells and real mud and real grunting has gradually coalesced a sense, then a conception, then a term, and now a deep conviction, that pigs and piggishness are what they universally are. In which case he’s a realist.

The only problem is that word called—they are called pigs—with its tremor of linguistic self-consciousness and the tiresome possibility that Rowley’s mind is more interested in names and naming than in things; or that if you took a promising and ambitious example of porcus domesticus out of his sty and cleaned him up and put a ribbon round his neck and taught him how to behave in mixed company, his new particularity would make him something else—something requiring a new name for a new identity, names being arbitrary and conventional things—in which case he might be forced to say “wrongly is they called pigs.” And he’d be a nominalist.

Anyway this figure in Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow is a worthy man regardless. I wish Rowley well, with his grey side-whiskers and weighty manner and splendid respectability, and one is not surprised by Mr Scogan’s admiration:

“‘I am abashed by that man. What wisdom, what judgment, what a sense of values! ‘Rightly are they called swine.’ Yes. And I wish I could, with as much justice, say ‘Rightly are we called men.’”