by K. R. Bolton
For Eliot, economics and politics must be subjected first to moral and spiritual foundations. From these foundations economic and political problems are resolved. Writing in 1933, Eliot disputes the notion that political and economic reform must arrive first, followed by the moral question. A new economic system must be related to “a moral system.” “Moralists and philosophers must supply the foundations of statesmanship, though they never appear in the forum.”191 This also alludes to the purpose of The Criterion, in forming a metapolitical school of moralists and philosophers who could reshape the social and moral order (and consequently the political and economic order), not just of Britain, but of Europe, whose culture Eliot regarded as unitary.
Articles on Social Credit published during 1935 dealt specifically with the economic question. The Criterion of July 1935 carried reviews by well-known commentator on economics, R. McNair Wilson, dealing with six books about Social Credit. Wilson stated that European civilization came into being on the basis of an economic system that repudiated usury, giving rise to the flowering of medieval culture, when, with an abundance of leisure (100 holy days plus the 52 Sundays) “small villages” were able to build magnificent cathedrals which endure to the present. Indeed, it is a fundamental principle of Social Credit that its system of economics would again provide an abundance both of general prosperity and of leisure, enabling culture to flourish again. What eventuated in the modern world has not been increased leisure and wider prosperity, despite the prospects held out by mechanization. Rather, there has been an increase in both working hours and in the retirement age. The same problems have only been exacerbated in the present day.
The final issue of The Criterion carried these parting words from Eliot, in summation of his outlook: “For myself, a right political philosophy came more and more to imply a right theology—and right economics to depend upon right ethics: leading to emphases which somewhat stretched the original framework of a literary review.”192 This was the predicament of Pound, Yeats, Lawrence, Campbell, and all the other literati who saw culture as endangered by mass society engendered alike by Bolshevism, capitalism, and democracy. Men such as Pound saw the answer in a counter-modern doctrine, Fascism; while most, like Eliot, Yeats, and Campbell saw the answer in reaction and looked on Fascism suspiciously as yet another revolt of the masses.
AFTER STRANGE GODS
Industrialism and the concomitant phenomena of cosmopolitanism and alien immigration undermine the tradition upon which culture is based by breaking the chain which transmits culture through generations. In a lecture at the University of Virginia in 1933 (published the following year as After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy), Eliot stated that the USA had not, and probably would not, recover from the Civil War, which was a victory of plutocracy and industrialism against tradition and agrarianism. He said to his Virginia audience that “the chances for the re-establishment of a native culture are perhaps better here than in New England. You are farther away from New York; you have been less industrialized and less invaded by foreign races; and you have a more opulent soil.”193
The reference to New York can be seen as an allusion to the negative impact of cosmopolitanism on culture. Eliot proceeded to comment that the destruction of the soil also brought the destruction of the native qualities of a people, given that there is a two-way influence between race and soil. He referred to his native New England as “the half-dead mill towns of southern New Hampshire and Massachusetts”:
It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favoured in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both; in which the landscape has been moulded by numerous generations of one race, and in which the landscape in turn has modified the race to its own character.194
Eliot commended those who wished for a revived agrarian South who, despite being ridiculed as nurturing an impossible dream, were nonetheless embarking on a worthy cause against “the whole current of economic determinism,” “a god before whom we fall down and worship with all kinds of music.” However, Eliot stated:
I believe that these matters may ultimately be determined by what people want; that when anything is generally accepted as desirable, economic laws can be upset in order to achieve it; that it does not so much matter at present whether any measures put forward are practical, as whether the aim is a good aim, and the alternatives intolerable. There are, at the present stage, more serious difficulties in the revival or establishment of a tradition and a way of life, which require immediate consideration.195
In conflict with economic determinism, “What I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits, and customs, from the most significant religious rite to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of the same people living in the same place.”196
This conception of tradition repudiates the notion of multiculturalism, which is a manifestation of economic determinism, whether in its capitalistic or socialistic forms. Eliot stated that where more than one culture exists in a locality the formation and transmission of a culture is subverted. Eliot was not advocating racial supremacy, which he viewed as clinging “to traditions as a way of asserting our superiority over less favoured peoples.” What is required for a tradition to become established is a sense of place and permanence. “The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate.”197
Eliot’s recommendation has, of course, become ever more impossible, as capitalism has developed until we have what is today called “globalization.” There are no settled or homogenous communities, and a new form of economic nomadism has formed a cosmopolitan class devoid of any attachments to locality, custom or tradition. This condition has been lauded by G. Pascal Zachary in The Global Me as virtually a new human species at the service of global capitalism198
Against what is today championed by men like Zachary as the unlimited possibilities of economic advance offered by the global village and the global market place, Eliot contends: “We must also remember that in spite of every means of transport that can be devised the local community must always be the most permanent.” This concept of the local community for Eliot even took precedence over the nation, which was only useful insofar as it allowed for the stability of the community, which in turn was a grouping of families, rooted to place through generations. A nation’s “strength and its geographical size depend upon the comprehensiveness of a way of life which can harmonise parts with distinct local characters of their own.”199 Hence, regionalism, or separatism, will arise when the nation-state becomes centralized and intrudes upon local tradition, for “It is only a law of nature, that local patriotism, when it represents a distinct tradition and culture, takes precedence over a more abstract national patriotism.”200
For those who interpret the Right as synonymous with nationalism and loyalty to the nation-state, this repudiation of nationalistic and statist sanctity will appear confusing. However, the Right is a manifestation of tradition rather than of nation-states, which destroyed the traditional principalities, regions, and city-states that comprised the high culture of Western civilization. Eliot points out that “the consciousness of ‘the nation’ as the social unit is a very recent and contingent experience. It belongs to a limited historical period and is bound up with certain specific happenings.”201 Rather, “genuine patriotism” only has depth when there is a society “in which people have local attachments to their small domain and small community, and remain, generation after generation, in the same place.” 202
This is a call to reject cosmopolitanism, universalism, and urbanization: all the symptoms of the modern epoch of decay, and to return to the land, to the village, to the produce markets and church; all that which seems evoked by the word parish. One is reminded of the nostalgia for the organic society, s
table and transmitting a fixed culture generation after generation, evoked by Knut Hamsun in such novels as Growth of the Soil.
THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
The Criterion ceased publication as the Second World War approached. Eliot saw the rise of fascism and of nationalistic impulses as a disappearance of the “European Mind,” which he had sought to revivify. Fascism and nationalism represent variants of modernity, and indeed spring from the same Enlightenment milieu as rationalism and liberalism, despite the traditionalism found in most varieties of fascism.
Not unlike Eliot, reactionaries such as Yeats and Julius Evola rejected fascism and statist nationalism for the same reasons: they represented mass mobilization; they were plebeian and modern; they were championed by Futurists under Marinetti in Italy, rejecting all tradition; they were intrinsically republican and centralist.
On the other hand, Eliot, as a reactionary in the most positive sense of the word, was a royalist and decentralist. He looked to a Europe of faith, to the gentry and the nobility, rather than the bureaucrat and the technocrat. He preferred farm, cottage, and church to steel and mechanization. Eliot’s Europe, like that of Yeats and others, was dealt the death blow by the Second World War, as it had been dealt an earlier, almost lethal blow by the First World War, from which it had been nowhere near recovery.
Eliot even expressed his reservations about fascism in a now little-known play that was performed at Saddlers Wells Theatre, London, which depicted with equal disquiet contending Redshirts and Blackshirts. Nevertheless, it should not be thought that Eliot had become some sort of liberal who had repudiated earlier views under the pressure of anti-fascist conformity, a position that some have well-meaningly attempted in Eliot’s defense against attacks from Leftist critics.203
Eliot’s answer was, as ever, a return to Christianity as the social ethos. Eliot expounded this view in The Idea of a Christian Society, a work published shortly after the demise of The Criterion, in 1939. A society founded on the Christian ethos would “compel changes in our organization of industry and commerce and financial credit,” and it would facilitate rather than (as it does at present) impede a life of devotion for those capable of it.204
On the eve of war with the totalitarian states, Eliot did not shrink from castigating the nebulousness of the political terms that had assumed sanctity in the Western world: “liberalism” and “democracy.” In particular, “democracy” has attained the height of popularity, and even those who sympathized with the Hitler regime used the word in a positive sense, while legitimately claiming (in agreement with Eliot) that what governs the “democratic” states is “financial oligarchy.” The doctrine that continued to animate democracy is “liberalism,” and here Eliot maintained his critical attitude, stating that liberalism “still permeates our minds and affects our attitude towards much of life . . . [and] tends to release energy rather than to accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify.”
It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite; and the destination is likely to present a very different picture when arrived at, from the vaguer image formed in imagination. By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanized or brutalized control, which is a desperate remedy for its chaos. 205
It is here that the fascist can justly interject that “Liberalism is the handmaiden of Bolshevism,” but the reactionary can also point out that liberalism paved the way for both capitalism, with its focus on property relations enshrined as sacrosanct in the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the American Revolutionary Bill of Rights, and even fascism which arose from the concepts of the nation-state against thrones and altars, of the Revolutions of 1776 and 1789, and those of Europe in 1848.
The most acute forms of liberal dissolution are in states that have become most industrialized. Hence, men and women of all classes are “detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words, a mob. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.”206 Here we see cogently expressed the concerns that took some of Eliot’s contemporaries (Pound, Lawrence, Yeats, et al.) to the Right. The rise of the mob was concomitant with that of liberalism and democracy, and such a society was not conducive to high culture, but rather to barbarity. Today it seems superfluous to make any comment on the accuracy of the predictions of Eliot and company on the results of liberalism on the social and cultural body.
The alternative to the dissolutive impact of liberalism is the basic social unit that Eliot identified in England as the parish, a “unitary community” of a “religious-social” character, which has been undermined by industrialism and urbanization.207 The parish is:
a small and mostly self-contained group attached to the soil and having its interests centred in a particular place, with a kind of unity which may be designed, but which also has to grow through generations. It is the idea, or ideal, of a community small enough to consist of a nexus of direct personal relationships, in which all iniquities and turpitudes will take the simple and easily appreciable form of wrong relations between one persona and another.208
A Christian society would be based on what would be habit and custom rather than law.209 Alienation from the land caused by the Industrial Revolution, which started in England and then infected the entirety of Western civilization, led to urban drift and both to what Marx referred to as “the proletarianization of the yeomanry,” and to the creation of the mercantile class in place of the gentry. Eliot saw urbanization as ruinous to culture, as did contemporaries such as New Zealand poet Fairburn, Norwegian writer Hamsun, and English writer Henry Williamson. Eliot returned to the question of the rural basis of culture and demographic health, and the ruinous character of urbanization in The Criterion several years after discussing the problem in his Virginia address:
To understand thoroughly what is wrong with agriculture is to understand what is wrong with nearly everything else: with the domination of Finance, with our ideals and system of Education, indeed with our whole philosophy of life. . . . What is fundamentally wrong is the urbanization of mind of which I have previously spoken, and which is increasingly prevalent as those who rule, those who speak, those who write, and developed in increasing numbers from an urban background. To have the right frame of mind . . . it is necessary that the greater part of the population, of all classes (so long as we have classes) should be settled in the country and be dependent upon it. One sees no hope whether in the Labour Party or in the equally unimaginative dominant section of the Conservative Party. There seems no hope in contemporary politics at all.210
Again, Eliot is looking to a bygone age, and toward the medieval, where the social organism was cohesive, society was predominantly rural, vocations were organized into guilds, and not only was there no “domination of Finance,” usury was sin.
POST-WAR YEARS
Since Eliot had never endorsed fascism his support for Britain against the Axis during the Second World War was consistent with his view prior to the war, rather than a matter of conformity. However, Eliot saw the war as having ruined the unity of European culture, with a world now dominated by the USSR and the USA.211
Eliot was not blinded by American blandishments. He disliked Roosevelt and held the USA accountable for both the Yalta accord, which delivered half of Europe to the USSR, and for the disintegration of the British Empire, which was one of several factors leading to what Eliot regarded as an impending Dark Age.212
In 1947 Eliot’s first wife Vivien
died, and he was in declining health. He went to the US that year and also continued with religious retreats and observances. In 1948 he was awarded the Order of Merit.213 That year he returned to America, where he continued writing a new play, The One-Eyed Riley, having been granted a visiting fellowship with Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study. This was interrupted when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which required attending the Stockholm ceremony. Also that year, the first of three volumes were published in his honor, T. S. Eliot: A Symposium.214 Notes Towards a Definition of Culture was also published in 1948.215
Eliot had not been compromised by the mania for liberalism, internationalism, and egalitarianism in the aftermath of the war. Writing in 1961 for a new edition of Notes Towards a Definition of Culture published in 1962, he stated that, on re-reading the book, he found nothing to retract.216 His conception of society continued to be of classes as purveyors of the cultural legacy from generation to generation, rather than specialized “elites” confined to limited functions. This class-based culture was not, however, the property of a single class but of the social organism as a totality, the health and continuation of a culture being reliant “on the health of the culture of the people.”217 The whole of the population should be active in cultural activities, albeit “not all in the same activities or on the same level,” but on the basis of what he called “group culture.”218 The social order should allow for the best—whether in politics or the arts—to “rise to the top” and influence taste.219 Eliot did not view the elimination of class, including the “upper class” in the name of equality, as something desirable. While it might have little effect in a state of lower development, elsewhere, it can be “a disaster.”220 The danger of elites replacing classes is that such elites have no common bond other than as what we might call professional functionaries who, states Eliot, lack “social continuity.” A class-structured society, on the other hand, is a “natural society.” Therefore, Eliot championed the aristocracy but not an “aristocratic society” per se. The difference is that Eliot’s vision was of a cohesive social structure in which aristocracy played its role, which was as essential and valuable as all the others.221 This we might identify as an organic society: a social organism based on “a continuous gradation of cultural levels” in which the “upper levels” are distinguished as possessing the highest degrees of cultural consciousness. Each class would have different responsibilities suited to it, rather than the egalitarianism of democracy that becomes “oppressive for the conscientious and licentious for the rest.” The social organism is founded on family, which is the means by which culture is transmitted over generations.222 I suggest that the way of looking at how such a society worked was via the guilds of medieval Europe, and we might recall here that Eliot had started his vocation as a close associate of Orage, a prominent advocate for both Social Credit and guild socialism, and that Eliot opened the pages of The Criterion with such views.
