Socialism And Culture

...I envisage a plural society as one where various cultures coexist without any special cachet or prestige attaching to one rather than another...

...It would have no value or use in a discussion of man in society...

...But I think it is fairly clear that he identifies the common culture of Socialism with the widespread acceptance of more substantive values...

...To my mind this contention is invalid, and it gains such plausibility as it possesses only from an ambiguity in its use of the notion of "culture...

...If he is to extricate himself from this tragic situation, if he is to regain the dignity of which industrialism deprived him, his hope lies in the restoration of community...

...1, for Four Shillings, Sixpence.—EDrroRs Should a Socialist society be a single, or a multi-cultural, society...

...Furthermore, they must have free access to the principal ideas evolved in the course of human history concerning the conduct of life: and in so far as these ideas do not satisfy their reasonable expectations of guidance, they should be free to make good the deficiency by what John Stuart Mill referred to as "experiments in living...

...And from this in turn a further consequence follows which is crucial to the present discussion...

...Now, in a very fundamental sense, it may not be absurd to postulate an underlying human nature of this generic kind...

...Personally I think that these arguments are inadequate...

...The first ideal does perhaps follow from his original conception of what culture is: the second certainly doesn't...

...Many Socialists will disagree with this...

...It is, of course, admitted that, in fact, modern conditions being what they are satisfaction is unobtainable: but this implies that there is, even today, a common condition of man, deriving from a common sense of frustration...

...For behind any such interpretation or characterization lies the assumption that basically all men are impelled by a common aim, that they seek satisfaction in a common objective, and that happiness or a satisfactory solution, if they could attain to it, would be identical for all...

...For why else should he insist upon the sense of community, of participation, that will inevitably flow from the new culture?—and what otherwise would lead him to think of the Aldermaston marches as an earnest of the new spirit...

...Such an assumption is plausible only on the further assumption of a common human nature, whose essence we can penetrate and thereby arrive at a notion of the optimum conditions for its survival and activity...

...There are, however, things that in a Socialist society we may reasonably hope for...

...THE PRAGMATIC OBJECTIONS to the idea of a common culture, on the grounds that it could not be adequate to the problems it is supposed to solve, that it could not bring about the regime of Fraternity and Equality, are reinforced by a consideration of the third great ideal of radicalism, Liberty...

...Socialism certainly does not make itself a more comfortable doctrine...

...The anger and the opposition of these great men is understandable if the Socialism of their day made any such stupid or philistine claim...

...Moreover, even if there was reason to believe that a common culture was, in principle, the proper solution to all our contemporary disorders, there is a further reason why it could never in fact be efficacious as a solution: namely, that it would have to be imposed...

...The burden of choice, whereby a man has to decide what meaning he will give to his life, can be hard to bear, and sometimes he will want to lay it down and return to a society which, either explicitly or implicitly, either by express rule or by tacit intimation, provides him with an answer to problems which he must otherwise answer himself...

...The hope, however, that it holds out is that in a society from which material insecurity and inequality have been removed, the chance of a man's attaining the degree of emotional maturity and integration necessary for the free ordering of his own life, will have been appreciably raised...

...It is difficult not to admire the serious concern for the quality of life in modern society that this argument reveals, but I am highly skeptical both about the analysis that it offers of our present situation and about what it proposes by way of a solution...

...If the ills of men in society are specific and particular, if they relate at least as much to private and personal, as to shared environmental, factors, then there seems no good reason to look for, or to believe that there exists, a universal or general solution to those ills...

...It is, however, a necessary condition of psychological cure that the solution offered to the patient should be accepted freely...

...We may hope that those whose infancy received a benign and enlightened supervision, will grow up to be human beings capable of making an adult choice...

...Moreover, this retrogressive move not merely denies us the chance of properly identifying the true sources of discontent and ill-health in society, but if persisted in, would ultimately prejudice our chances of accepting the assistance that psychiatry and psychoanalysis have to offer us...

...For if we regard culture as primarily a system of communication— and this, I think, is not so evident, because not so clear, as Williams would have us believe—then cultural progress does perhaps mean the institution of a common culture, but, it must be noted, where this in turn means something like the institution of a common language...

...Now if a hierarchy here means simply a qualitative ordering, this can scarcely be regarded as something objectionable: for the alternative would be relativism, which is clearly undesirable...

...For as soon as we occupy ourselves with human beings at the point at which they enter society and make demands upon their fellow human beings and their environment, we are dealing with human nature as substantially modified by experience and upbringing: we are dealing, that is to say, with formed character...

...Is there an entity called Socialist culture which is the proper culture of a Socialist society, or, on the other hand, is it a mark of a Socialist society that it offers its members a cultural multiplicity from which to choose...

...But it must be pointed out that this hope will not be attained directly through the institution of Socialist sociey...

...Socialism properly understood has no easy remedy for anxiety or unhappiness or for the various disorders of the mind...

...Since the coming of industrialism and the break-up of the old order, Man has suffered from a certain indefinable sense of loss: a sense that life under modern conditions has become deracinate and disinherited, and that whatever might give meaning to existence is beyond his reach...

...THOSE WHO ARGUE for a common culture on the ground of Fraternity maintain that it is only within a close-knit and integrated society that relief can be obtained from the inhumanity and the fragmentation of modern life...

...For to begin with, I find it implausible to suggest a unitary over-all explanation of all our contemporary disorders, of everything that has been fundamentally wrong with society since, say, 1760, and unilluminating to characterize the whole of our present social predicament in terms of some highly general, highly abstract concept like "alienation," which is supposed to describe in some essential way the condition of us all...

...For the only alternatives for society are a hierarchy or else total uniformity...

...For it cannot plausibly be maintained that what was good enough for the young Marx is good enough for us...

...Now, in advocating a plurality of cultures I certainly am not arguing for a hierarchy in this pejorative sense, and I see no reason for thinking that support of the one commits one to the other...

...I therefore take the assumption to be that once any differentiation of culture exists within a society, the differentia are bound to attract and draw to themselves distinctions of a purely social kind...

...And if it is then claimed that this is impossible, and that different cultures will always provide occasion for social discrimination, I can see no reason for this...

...It should be the ultimate boast of socialism that it decreases the possibility of bad upbringing, that it increases the possibility of good education, and that, having in this way realized the conditions upon which free choice depends, it further offers a man reasonable security that as he chooses, so in fact he will be able to live...

...It seems to me, in this connection, a curious fact that in the midtwentieth century, just when the positive science of mind seems to offer us a real insight into and understanding of the vast multiplicity and variety of human disturbance, there should be a regression on the part of supposedly advanced thinkers, to a priori psychology and the antiquated metaphysical categories like "alienation" or "estrangement" in terms of which it is expressed...

...Copies of the entire pamphlet may be purchased from the Fabian Society, 11 Dartmouth St., London, S.W...

...From this it directly follows that it is impossible to give a general diagnosis of the disorders of modern man in society or to indicate in a universal way the source of his frustration...

...But such a conception would be of purely theoretical interest...

...And the essence of character lies in the different ways in which different people are disposed to react to, or behave in, similar circumstances: character exists when people have different aims and consequently find satisfaction or frustration in different situations...

...My own answer is that a Socialist society should be a culturally plural society...

...Indeed I think that the historical mission of Socialism is to introduce to the world a form of society where the individual may realize himself by drawing at will upon the whole range of human culture which is offered up for his choice freely and in its full profusion...

...Now, either the notion of a common culture is empty, or else it fails to satisfay this stipulation...

...Of course it is just possible that when Williams talks of "shared values," he has in mind merely what might be called the "permissive" values: values like toleration and rationality which are the preconditions of any common system of inter-communication, not something to be expressed in it...

...The exit from this situation lies • Published in the United States by Columbia University Press...

...For it is surely inconsistent with the idea of Liberty that men should have their lives limited in any way that is not practically necessary...

...It is reprinted here by the kind permission of the Society...

...By appropriating to itself the old liberal ideal of autononly...

...And I think that there are other, and perfectly adequate, arguments drawn from the third great ideal of progressive politics, Liberty, which make the case for the plural society irresistible...

...Those who were born into it would have to accept it...

...THE CASE FOR A COMMON CULTURE, based upon the very nature of culture, has recently received a very powerful and articulated formulation in Raymond Williams's The Long Revolution,* and it would be as well to consider the argument as it is there developed...

...Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Socialism has often drawn upon itself the scorn of great artists and thinkers, of men marked out by their singular awareness, their prodigious understanding of human nature, just because they thought it to be the claim of Socialism that human unhappiness and misery, that personal suffering and the sense of loss, could be expunged from the earth by means of the proper reconstruction of the forms of social life...

...One culture will be regarded as socially superior to another, and membership of it will serve as a badge of class or status...

...The liberalized society is one where men fulfill themselves according to thir own view or conception of life—provided, of course, that in doing so they do not interfere with, or impose upon, the self-fulfill ment of others...

...If, however, it is felt necessary to guard against the mere possibility of this happening, then we are immediately committed to a doctrine of social pessimism...

...Williams sometimes tries to explicate his ideal by means of the expression "common meanings, common values...

...And we may further hope that, not merely in childhood but throughout their lives, the finest efforts of the society will be expended in presenting everything that culture and civilization have produced that that could relate to or affect or enrich their choice...

...But this of course is not what Williams and those who argue with him mean when they talk of a common culture: they mean something much more like a situation in which everyone is animated by the same purposes and ideals...

...We may hope that the absence of certain kinds of conflict and certain kinds of privation will aid the study of fundamental conflict and fundamental privation...

...It is, in other words, Williams's contention that any genuine desire for cultural improvement must be a desire for a common culture...

...The cultural impasse in which we find ourselves today arises from the fact that our society has become fragmented into different groups between which it is no longer possible to commune freely...

...We have already seen the error in assuming that there exists a satisfactory form of work which would satisfy all alike: it is exactly the same error, though on a larger scale, that is involved in assuming that a common culture would ensure the end of frustration and general social contentment...

...that this is so follows rigorously from the nature of culture as a system of communication...

...If it is only these permissive values that Williams thinks should be shared, then his ideal is perfectly compatible with a diversity of positive values, and what I would call cultural pluralism...

...through the "common culture" of Socialism: for with the inauguration of this system the barriers to intercourse will be down and man once again will be able to talk to man...

...It would be no service to the ideal of Liberty to disguise the fact that its pursuit is often exacting...

...The starting-point of Williams's argument is a conception of culture as fundamentally a system of communication, a system by means of which one individual citizen transmits his experience to others...

...It may be claimed that any form of diversity can become a means of social distinction: but it does not follow from this that any particular form of diversity must become a means of social distinction...

...THOSE WHO WOULD ARGUE for an integrated society on the ground of Equality assume that a plurality of cultures is bound to involve a hierarchy of cultures...

...For them the attractions of Socialism are essentially connected with the benefits to be derived from an integrated and cohesive society, and they employ arguments drawn either from the nature of culture or from the great radical ideals of Equality and Fraternity to support this connection...

...But what he fails to see is that he has compressed into this expression two quite different ideals: the modest ideal of a society in which people speak the same language, and the more comprehensive ideal of a society in which people say roughly the same things...

...To achieve this end, they must be free both of the dictates of established authority and of the subtler but no less effective power of social pressure...

...The following article forms the concluding section of a pamphlet, "Socialism and Culture," recently issued in England by the Fabian Society...

...We may hope that in a society of universal prosperity and literacy these findings will be widely diffused and acted upon...