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T.S. Eliot, Populist

• deleted 8y ago
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• deleted 8y ago
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• charlesism 8y ago
  I'd love to read some comments explaining why we are upvoting this essay. All I gleaned is that the author thinks "old money" people should have more influence in society. Somehow that is what populism is about, and apparently it's good. Did I miss something?
  • coldtea 8y ago
    Yes, all the nuance, and several centuries of intelligent debates from either side. But don't let nuance get in the way of rooting for your preferences.
    • charlesism 8y ago
      I don't understand your comment. "Either side" of which debate?
      • coldtea 8y ago
        Of the debate between progressivism and conservatism, belief in the important role of maintaining tradition and hierarchies and belief in equalizing everything and a linear view of history as an inevitable march to progress, etc. A discussion that goes back to Plato, and includes tons of great thinking on either side, from the US "Founding Fathers", Tocqueville, Burke, to Enlightenment philosophers like Diderot and Voltaire, to people like Dewey, Elliot (the subject of the article and a huge intellectual force in the early 20th century), modern critics like Bloom and Lasch, all the way to todays cultural wars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism
        • charlesism 8y ago
          Okay, that makes a bit more sense. People will discuss philosophy forever. That doesn't stop society, rightly or wrongly, from forming consensus that some positions are dumb. So with my original comment, I am curious (a) if I understand the article correctly, and (b) why some HN readers support a position that, in my neck of the woods, people consider dumb.
          • coldtea 8y ago
            >People will discuss philosophy forever. That doesn't stop society, rightly or wrongly, from forming consensus that some positions are dumb. No, but it also doesn't stop society from forming dumb consensuses either. It's not like what's dumb is determined by popularity contest (even if one assumed that most of "society" is on the same page on such issues). >(b) why some HN readers support a position that, in my neck of the woods, people consider dumb. Because what people consider dumb and what is dumb is not the same thing. Some people believe that science and tech aside (where progress is cumulative), it's not at all clear that modern norms, culture, practices, art, laws, etc are better than older norms and practices. And it's a totally reasonable stance to have (and a lot of the counter-arguments are not really very deep, e.g. "You prefer the 50s society? But back then they had more racism". Well, it's not like we have to "take-or-leave" everything from today or from a past era. Plus, today we have more of other negatives that they didn't have at some other time -- e.g. the quality of modern politics, for one, the obesity and opioid epidemic, zero corporate loyalty, increased privacy erosion, pricier college education, and other such things...).
            • charlesism 8y ago
              It's not like what's dumb is determined by popularity contest Agreed. There's an amusing quote that goes: One thing is sure: all common knowledge, all traditional opinions, are foolish, for the very reason that the majority agrees with them. But we're still sort of talking at cross purposes here. My personal view is that it's dumb to use 'inherited wealth' as a gauge of a person's character or competence. For the past century, that view has also been the majority view in the West. If the views didn't agree, I would have had to position my original post differently. I probably would have gone with something like "I realize most of you believe inherited wealth is a sign of good genes, but I disagree because.." But then, I wouldn't likely be as interested, since - in such an alternate universe - I would already be aware of the popular reasoning. Eh. At this point, maybe we're off in the weeds
    • pjc50 8y ago
      Perhaps there's a nuanced debate to be had, but this article absolutely is not it. It's much more the modern style of defining sweeping generalizations and then trying to establish negative or positive associations by placing them next to descriptors, but without actually making the connection. Possibly it's just really aggressively summarized. > Levelers object to any kind of hierarchy, however ancient and venerable: parents over children, priests over parishes, the gentry over the lower classes. Well, yes. This is because this kind of arbitrary, unaccountable hierarchy facilitates abuse. I'd be surprised to see anyone defending this on HN. This all proceeds in a straightforward way from the Enlightenment. > Populists focus instead on liberating natural communities from those who rule in the name of reason, science, expertise, or competence—managers, bureaucrats, and academics—as well as from large-scale organizations (government agencies, universities, multinational corporations) that embody the same spirit of abstract knowledge and procedure. "The British public have had enough of experts"? Again, I would be very surprised to see people on HN agreeing that people should be "liberated" from "reason, science, expertise, or competence" and let free rein to live in unvaccinated chaos. > Levelers, including today’s liberals and cultural Marxists Generally one should stop reading at "cultural Marxists" since this is a very ill-defined phrase with anti-semitic origins, but we can carry on a bit. > levelers rely on an atomistic anthropology that ignores that human beings are formed by and within a social class. Class is essential to the individual, not merely adventitious and extrinsic to him. Modern theory very much believes that people are formed by their environment; it's crucial to discussions of "structural racism" etc. I'm not clear what the second sentence means unless he's arguing that class is somehow genetic? > Levelers argue that institutions that reward individual achievement, native talent, and moral character ensure long-term prosperity for all, while those that reward merely extrinsic characteristics, such as membership in a social class, do not. Standard HN argument for startups here. > In response, Eliot simply rejects the ideal of strict meritocracy and repeats the argument that a class hierarchy is indispensable for the creation and preservation of true culture. This is .. not an argument, just a restatement. > Eliot’s definition of culture as incarnate religion creates the possibility of anti-culture. A purely secular, nonreligious society would lack a culture in Eliot’s sense. So, too, would a society that had successfully privatized religion, so that its religion, insofar as it could be incarnate at all, was incarnate only at the level of individual lives. Finally, a society whose dominant religion is gnostic would also be anti-cultural. By “gnostic religion” I mean a religion or quasi-religion that rejects the very possibility of its being incarnate in this world and in this age. A philosophy such as Marxism or modern liberalism, which rejects existing social institutions and advocates their total replacement, is likewise anti-cultural, in Eliot’s sense (at least, until the eschaton is successfully immanentized). Ah, now we've brought out the theological heavy guns! If you're not a Christian this paragraph will make little sense to you. > We should fight for the abolition of inheritance and gift taxes, and for the exemption of family farms and businesses from capital gains taxes. The conclusion: since meritocracy is bad and class is good, argue for the retention of hereditary wealth.
  • programmarchy 8y ago
    Elites who are out of touch with the native culture or even hostile towards it tend to cause populist reactions. Take SV elites for example. Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Dorsey seem out of touch in a way Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford did not.
    • charlesism 8y ago
      TS Eliot: a man from old money, who went to Harvard (which CW Eliot was president of, btw). His experience of slumming it was working as a banker. Then he went on to become a celebrated poet. Hard to think of anyone further out of touch.
      • programmarchy 8y ago
        That’s an ad hom, so not sure what your point is. I was responding to the content in the essay. edit: And based on what he wrote, he seems pretty in touch with American culture to me. Kind of proves his point on the distinction between class and elite.
        • charlesism 8y ago
          That’s an ad hom Pretty much. If Queen Elizabeth wrote an essay advocating a return to absolute monarchy, I'd do the same.
          • linksnapzz 8y ago
            QE2 is about as likely to start writing lurid romance novels as she is to write anything approaching that. The Mountbatten-Windsor-Saxe-Coberg-Gotha-Hanovers have been in the royal family business for 300 years precisely because they are disinclined to have exactly that opinion. The Price of Wales has stated that he'll stop having public opinions about health food and modern architecture when he accedes...nobody, least of all him, thinks he should have any thoughts at all about the Proper Role of the Monarch in Government, and if it should change.
  • AndyMcConachie 8y ago
    Old money good, new money bad! I don't think there's anything interesting here that could inform more modern viewpoints. He makes the typical argument for fascism that was popular in his age, but I think even contemporary fascists would have a hard time finding this article meaningful.
  • keiferski 8y ago
    Understanding Eliot's point requires a familiarity with the history of thought, modernity, the works of philosophers like Nietzsche, and a whole lot else that can't be easily summarized in a bite-sized internet article. Nonetheless, I will try to explain it in a few paragraphs: First Things: Eliot drew a fruitful distinction between the upper class and the elite. Class is inherited from one’s ancestors and is thus tied to family and to a place. Membership in the elite, in contrast, is acquired through the mastery of certain subjects and techniques, typically in selective cosmopolitan universities. His first point is that there is a difference between "cultural class" and "elite ability." This is not obvious to those of us in the Americanized western world, which is very technocratic. That is, in the American conception of upper class, wealth is a pre-requisite. We typically can't imagine someone being upper-class and poor or not-rich at the same time - which was a reality for a huge portion of the upper class for the vast majority of history. FT: As Eliot argues, class is inherently conservative and provides a rich soil for literary and artistic creativity, while a society dominated by elites loses the continuity of inherited tradition and suffers from a sterile obsession with artistic novelty. We can see this phenomenon playing itself out in contemporary art. The art world at the moment is essentially without an "inherited tradition" and consequently you'll see a lot of work which is shocking or novel for (arguably) no reason other than to be shocking and novel. See Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, etc. for some examples. FT: Corresponding to Eliot’s distinction of class and elite is a distinction between “levelers” and populists. Levelers seek to destroy the stratification of class, and with it the integral life of the nuclear family and local community. Populism, in contrast, can be a reasonable and wholesome reaction to the dominance of elites. It is often a natural ally of conservatism. Eliot's idea here is that "levelers" are trying to level-out differences and remove hierarchy. Whether the levelers are poor socialists, rich technocrats, or somewhere in between, they are seeking to remove the existence of different value systems and hierarchies in favor of a single one. In the capitalist west, this is typically a sort of bourgeois-middle-class sort of value system, but of course that's an over-generalization. FT: Unlike Marx, Eliot does not define class in terms of economic or political function. For him, classes are defined in terms of a shared way of life, acquired primarily through family and secondarily through education, clubs, forms of recreation, and other small-scale, face-to-face association. Entry into and out of class requires at least one generation, often several. Now, this is a problem for Eliot, because he sees the upper classes as culturally separate from the lower classes. That is, the difference between the lower class and the upper class is not money or wealth - it's an entire culture, one in which he is interested in preserving. He then goes on to explain why he thinks a culture created largely by lower-class values leads to a focus on commercialism, novelty and distraction. Populism, according to the author, is a sort of bulwark against this, as it prevents the technocratic elite from supplanting the historical upper-class culture. I don't think the thesis of "Eliot was a populist" is very fleshed out in this essay, though.
• throwaway080383 8y ago
  Are the upper class not simply the descendants of those who were once the upper echelon?