Why the Cultured Life is Worth Pursuing

Oddly, no one ever asked what a cultured life was and why it was worth pursuing. This may have been just as well for, though I believed I was myself by then leading (or earnestly attempting to lead) such a life, I’m not sure I could have answered either question. I’m going to attempt to do so now.

In 1952, the anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn wrote a famous article, “Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions,” in which they specified no fewer than 164 definitions of culture. Culture can, of course, refer to whole civilizations, such as Western culture or Asian culture; it can refer to national, ethnic, or social-class cultures, such as Israeli culture or Irish-Catholic culture, or working-class culture. In all these senses it refers to the overarching aspirations and assumptions that underlay the ways that different peoples and groups have of understanding and dealing with the world.

Kroeber and Kluckhohn might today have to expand their number of definitions, for the so-called “culture” of corporations, professions, and athletic teams has become among the leading cant phrases of our time. Princeton University Press recently published a book with the title A Culture of Growth, and the movie star Gwyneth Paltrow not long ago noted that her civilized break with her husband contributed to “the culture of divorce.”

What I mean by the ideal of culture is high culture, as set out by Matthew Arnold in his 1869 book Culture and Anarchy. Arnold described this level of culture as “the best which has been thought and said,” but in our day it has been enlarged to include the best that has been composed and painted and sculpted and filmed. Arnold believed that high culture had its “origin in the love of perfection” and the “study of perfection,” and thought it an idea that the new democracy under the industrial revolution developing in his day needed “more than the idea of the blessedness of the franchise, or the wonderfulness of their own industrial performances.”

Behind Arnold’s notion of high culture was a program for the partial reform of human nature. Attaining the perfection of high culture, Arnold held, would bring about “an inward condition of the mind and spirit .  .  . at variance with the mechanical and material civilization in esteem with us.” Properly cultivated, this elevated culture would lead to “an expansion of human nature” and release us from our “inaptitude for seeing more than one side of a thing, with our intense energetic absorption in the particular pursuit we happen to be following.”

One might think Matthew Arnold’s idea of culture is restricted to the well-born. He saw it otherwise. “In each class,” he wrote,

Make no mistake: High culture, culture in the sense in which Arnold speaks of it as an ideal, is an elite activity—but one open to everyone with what Arnold calls a “bent” for it.

I should never have thought myself to have had this bent and might never have discovered it but for the somewhat fortuitous event of my having gone to the University of Chicago in the middle 1950s. Neither of my parents went to college, though both were highly intelligent and well-spoken. But anything remotely resembling high culture was simply not on their menu. My father was interested in politics and world events, my mother astute in her judgment of people; ours was a home with lots of newspapers and magazines but no books whatsoever—not even, as I recall, a dictionary. The only performing art of the least interest to my parents and their friends was musical comedy. They and their social set got on well enough without culture, preoccupied as they were with earning a living, raising families, maintaining friendships, and dealing with life’s manifold quotidian matters.

Doubtless I should have, too, but for my having gone to college where and when I did. The University of Chicago was an institution, unlike the Ivy League schools, without the least taint of social snobbery: At Chicago, wealth, birth, good looks counted for nothing. (In fact, I once heard two distinguished professors there, the social scientist Edward Shils and the historiographer Arnaldo Momigliano, in conversation all but disqualify a male graduate student for being much too handsome to do serious scholarship.) All that mattered at Chicago was knowledge and intellect: what one knew, and how deeply and subtly one knew it.

Many of the most distinguished members of the faculty at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s were European; several of these part of what one might call Adolf Hitler’s gift to American intellectual life: that is, European Jews who fled the Nazi and fascist Jewish genocide. Among them were the political philosopher Leo Strauss, the physicist Enrico Fermi, the historian Karl Weintraub, the historian-philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade. These people gave a tone to the place—and the tone was that not merely of extensive erudition (some merely) but of an impressive density of culture probably not available anywhere else. I don’t know about giants, but lots of highly cultured men and women walked the earth in those days.

From the deep abyss of my late-adolescent ignorance, I never for a moment thought I could hope to emulate such men and women. I nevertheless somehow sensed that there was something immensely impressive about them. The philosopher Eva Brann nicely captures my emotional reaction to the cultured men and women I glancingly encountered at the University of Chicago when, about her own students at St. John’s College in Annapolis, she writes:

At their best, these figures at the University of Chicago seemed above the fray, the everyday concerns of money-making, partisan politics, crude status gathering. (I would later learn that this was not always—in fact, was sometimes far from—the case.) The world might go about its business, but they were playing the game of life at another, a different and higher level. I yearned to play the game myself; I wondered, longingly, what it took to be allowed onto their court.

What it took to pass through the gates into the realm of high culture was years of thoughtful reading, listening, viewing, thinking. This would develop the critical sense needed to discern the difference between serious and ersatz culture, and a receptivity to the sublime in beauty. High culture critics, meanwhile, saw their job as that of gatekeepers, making certain that no inferior works were allowed to pass themselves off as the real thing. In the 1950s and early ’60s, there was much written about highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow art—a distinction first made by the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks and, a generation later, expanded by the Harper’s editor Russell Lynes—and the differences and distinctions among them.

The pursuit of high culture came with a price. Once hooked on it, one was no longer entirely at ease with popular culture—the culture, that is to say, most of us grew up with and that remains the mainstream culture. Once one is devoted to the pursuit of high culture, the bestseller, the Oscar-winning movie, the highest-rated television shows—all uncomplicatedly enjoyed by one’s contemporaries—are, if not of no interest, then thought somewhat out of bounds, with the enjoyment of them tending to fall under the category of guilty pleasures.

I had a friend, Samuel Lipman, a piano prodigy as a child, a student of the conductor and violinist Pierre Monteux, later a teacher at Juilliard, a powerful music critic, and publisher of the New Criterion, a magazine devoted to the arts. In the realm of culture, Sam was an immitigable, irretrievable highbrow. Once, after a meeting of the Council of the National Endowment for the Arts (of which we were both members), I said to Sam that I noted he rarely mentioned movies or television. “Oh, I consider movies and television,” he said, rather casually, “dog shit.” Dog shit, I thought at the time, lower in dignity even than the excrement of bulls and horses.

Another friend of mine, Hilton Kramer, kept a comparably high standard. Hilton was an immensely amusing and witty fellow, but not a man you asked whom he liked in the World Series or which he thought the best of the songs of The Doors. When art critic at the New York Times, he was the only writer on the paper whom, in his exile, the great Russian dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would allow to interview him. Solzhenitsyn agreed to do so because—a great tribute here—he respected Hilton’s seriousness.

Not everyone can live on the chaste cultural diets of Hilton Kramer and Sam Lipman. Two highly cultivated men of my acquaintance—the political thinker Irving Kristol and the historian of modern France Eugen Weber—were devoted to detective fiction; I only recently learned that Walter Benjamin, the metaphysician of language, was also addicted to detective fiction. And so was Gershom Scholem, the great authority on Jewish mysticism. William Phillips, the editor in its heyday of the intellectual quarterly Partisan Review, was an ardent New York Giants fan. I once saw the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel perform at the Ravinia Festival in what I took to be a Manchester United soccer jersey.

Sam Lipman and Hilton Kramer were the aesthetic and intellectual equivalent of vegans—extremely cautious about what they consumed. As critics, which both men were, they saw their job as separating the serious from the pretentious, the genuine from the meretricious, the life-enhancing from the amusingly and sometimes perniciously trivial. Whence did their authority derive? What gave them the right to sit in judgment on, and find unacceptable, works that others had sometimes put years into making and which many others innocently enjoyed? Their authority came from their having thought about art for decades, and their passionate devotion to it. They were able to impose their views by the force of the cogency of their arguments.

Culture is continuity with the past: A cultureless person knows only about, and lives exclusively in, the present. Few things are as pleasing—thrilling, really—as reading a classical author and discovering that he has had thoughts and emotions akin to your own. So I have felt, at times, reading Horace, Montaigne, William Hazlitt, and others who departed the planet centuries before my entrance upon it. Edmund Wilson writes splendidly on this point in a brief essay called “A Preface to Persius,” in which he offers his observations on reading a late-18th-century edition of Persius, the first-century-a.d. Latin poet and satirist. Wilson read the preface to this edition in an Italian restaurant and speakeasy in Greenwich Village in 1927, and felt himself “warmed by this sense of continuity with the past, with Persius and William Drummond [the book’s editor], by this spirit of stubborn endurance.” This cultural connection put him, Edmund Wilson, however briefly, outside the politics and noisiness of the present, and forcefully reminded him that for the man or woman of culture,

The edifice Wilson refers to is, of course, civilization.

Does all this talk of high culture have a ring of snobbery? If so, I have badly misrepresented it. There is nothing snobbish about seeking out the best that has been thought and said. What it is, as noted earlier, is elitist, a word in our egalitarian age in even worse odor, perhaps, than snobbery. Cultural elitists, as do connoisseurs generally, like only the best and seek it out. But how do they determine what is best? From tradition, from the tastes of their culturally elitist forebears, from their own refined aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities. Along with Longinus, they identify as high culture those works of art and intellect that elevate the soul, stay in the memory, and appeal across different cultures. Elitist the cultural ideal certainly is, but with the difference, as noted by Matthew Arnold, that it is open to anyone who wishes to make the effort to attain that ideal.

Those opposed to the elitist impulse in art make the mistake of confusing the realms of culture and politics. To be a cultural elitist does not eliminate the possibility of one’s simultaneously being a democrat in one’s views politically, or even a man or woman determinedly on the left. The Australian art critic Robert Hughes claimed to be split in this way. Proof that the highbrow and the left-wing radical can live comfortably enough in the same person is illustrated—in fact, highlighted—in the last lines of Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution. Trotsky wrote that it was his dream that, under communism, “man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.” In other words, the end of the class struggle, as envisioned by the Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, would be the acquisition of high culture by all.

How, then, does one attain culture? Superior intelligence isn’t the key. I have known high-level physicists and mathematicians—people whose IQs are doubtless stratospheric—who were, so to say, culture-proof. Even the most adroit teachers cannot hope to bestow culture on their students; the best they can do, if they are themselves cultivated, is provide a glimmer of what the real thing looks like. A university education is never sufficient in itself, though it can give its interested students useful guidance about where culture is available. In the realm of culture, as in all non-vocational education generally, we are all autodidacts—all, that is, on our own. No approved method for acquiring culture is available: There is no useful list of the 100 most important books, 200 essential musical compositions, 300 significant paintings, 400 hundred best films. So far as I have been able to determine, no Culture for Dummies has yet been published, though one may well be on the way. No guides, no lists, no shortcuts to attaining culture exist; nor will they ever.

The sad truth, the bad news, is that one never really attains culture in the way one attains, say, a plumber’s license or a CPA. If anyone says he is cultured, or even thinks himself cultured, which no truly cultured person ever would, he or she, like those who think themselves charming, probably is not. In striving after the attainment of culture, one invariably falls short. Other people are soon enough discovered who have it in greater depth and make one’s own cultural attainments seem paltry.

One discovers, straightaway, that earlier eras had a higher standard for culture than our own. In the 19th century, without competence in ancient Greek and Latin, for example, no one could hope to be considered cultured. In the 18th century, George Washington was embarrassed to travel to France because he had no French. One is too clearly aware of the lacunae of one’s own cultural shortcomings, the vast gaps in knowledge of the kind a person claiming to be cultured ought to possess: knowledge of the history of the Byzantine Empire, of Gregorian chant, of the influence of Bauhaus, and so much more. To be cultured implies a certain roundedness of knowledge and interests. No one, of course, has all these things. No one is fully rounded—which is why no one is fully cultured and why culture itself remains an ideal and, like so many ideals, may well be ultimately out of reach, though still worth pursuing.

Let me pause here to mention a few of the people I have known who have come closest to this ideal. The first is Jacques Barzun, who was the figure one immediately thought of when thinking of Columbia University during its great days in mid-20th-century America. Born in France in 1907 into a family with serious artistic interests—among his parents’ friends were Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp, and Edgard Varèse—Barzun came to America in early adolescence and later returned to remain for the rest of his life. He was a cultural historian, who wrote with equal authority on Marx, William James, Hector Berlioz, Darwin, American university education, French prosody, English grammar and usage, and more. In his nineties he produced a cultural synthesis called From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present. In a dip into popular culture, he also knew baseball and edited anthologies about detective fiction. Jacques was formidable without being stuffy. He taught much of his adult life, yet seemed—in his cosmopolitan culture, his metropolitan spirit—so much more than an academic.

I met Arnaldo Momigliano, long deemed to be the leading figure in the historiography of the ancient world, through my friend Edward Shils, who arranged to have him teach half the year at the University of Chicago. He was at All Souls College, Oxford, the other half. Mussolini’s fascist government caused him to flee to England from Turin, where he was born. I don’t know how many languages Arnaldo had, but I once noticed, on the desk in his room at the University of Chicago faculty club, a Dostoyevsky novel—in Russian. He seemed to know everything.

I was having breakfast one morning with Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James, at that same faculty club when Arnaldo came into the room. I introduced him to Edel, who, I told Arnaldo, was currently writing a book about Bloomsbury. Had you joined us at that breakfast table you would have thought Arnaldo had already written the definitive book on Bloomsbury—”The linchpin figure,” he said in his Piedmontese accent, “was of course Duncan Grant”—so complete and penetrating was his knowledge of the subject, even though it was one that didn’t remotely touch on what is called his “field.” I once wrote that if there had been a game called not Trivial but Serious Pursuit, Arnaldo would have been its champion.

Hugh Lloyd-Jones was Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford and married to Mary Lefkowitz, a professor of classics at Wellesley and herself an estimable writer on classical subjects. Hugh was a charming man, witty, with a good laugh. Their love for each other, the joyousness of their relationship generally, made it pleasing to be in his and Mary’s company. Hugh once told me that when Mary ironed his shirts, he, to relieve the tedium of the task, read Henry James or Marcel Proust to her—a high-culture version of American Gothic.

My candidate for the most cultured American novelist of the past century is Willa Cather. Modern American writers have not been notably cultured. Hemingway wasn’t, nor was Fitzgerald, nor Faulkner. Talented though all were, none could write beyond his immediate ken or milieu. Cather, born in 1873 in Virginia, grew up in the small town of Red Cloud, Nebraska, and through self-cultivation became a citizen of a much larger world. As a writer, she was above nationality, above politics and gender, androgynous as all the greatest artists are. Willa Cather, in effect, Europeanized herself: She admired the novels of Flaubert, the poetry of Housman, everything of Henry James, himself an American who had earlier acquired cosmopolitan culture and had (as T. S. Eliot noted) “turned himself into a European but of no known country.” Cather’s personal culture allowed her to write not only about the Scandinavian immigrants she grew up with and knew so well, but about the life of the artist (The Song of the Lark), about late-17th-century European settlers in Quebec (Shadow on the Rock), about the lives of two 19th-century French priests, Fathers Latour and Vaillant, establishing a diocese in the newly formed territory of New Mexico (Death Comes for the Archbishop). Culture cannot make a writer, of course; but as in Cather’s case, by expanding her horizons, it can vastly enlarge her reach.

A small detail from Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop: Father (now Bishop) Latour is served a soup made by his companion Father Vaillant, an onion soup with croutons, upon which, after tasting it, Latour remarks: “I am not deprecating your talent, Joseph, but, when one thinks of it, a soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.” A soup with a thousand-year history—only a writer of deep culture could have written such a passage. Culture itself, one might add, is a soup thousands of years in the making.

For a century and more, the seat of culture for Americans was Europe. Europe had all the great writers, painters, composers, conductors, musical performers, the most magnificent museums and libraries and churches. Americans with cultural interests went to Europe as pilgrims to Mecca, and some with ample financial resources stayed on as expatriates. To be an American was, culturally, to feel oneself a yokel; and at 20 years old or so, even I, a true yokel, sensed that genuine culture lay on the other side of the Atlantic.

For a period of a few decades in the past century, however, this looked to be changing. In New York, the school of Abstract Expressionism became central in the realm of visual art. The important painters were Americans; so, too, earlier, in poetry, where the generation of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, the American-born T. S. Eliot rivaled if not surpassed in importance the poetry of Yeats, Housman, and Hardy. The Englishman W. H. Auden, the leading poet of the following generation, chose to spend the years of his literary prime in the United States. European conductors led the Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago symphony orchestras. Was culture itself crossing the ocean en masse? Was America to be the new Rome to Europe’s Greece? Alas, the hope now seems altogether too short-lived.

Today, high culture in America is in serious decline. (Nor is it doing much better in Europe, let me add, details on request.) Contemporary visual art, for example, scarcely exists—that is, it seems to be more about financial investment than about ideas or significant aesthetic experience. Poetry, once central to high culture, has become degraded to an intramural sport. Although the audience for poetry in America was never large, today even that audience has diminished, and the only people who seem to read contemporary poetry are those who write it or write about it. Are there substantial numbers of people awaiting the next novels of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, or Jonathan Safran Foer as they once eagerly anticipated the next novels of Bellow, Malamud, Katherine Anne Porter, and others? I don’t believe there are.

In 1959, the novelist John O’Hara predicted that “the novel will be dead or moribund in less than a hundred years.” This is beginning to look like a sound prediction. Contemporary American serious music has produced no Aaron Coplands, Virgil Thomsons, Samuel Barbers. The audiences for traditional classical music performance dwindle. The promise of American theater, the theater of Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams, now seems moribund, if not flat-out deceased. Contemporary philosophy, which I have seen described as attempting to discover where the flame of a candle went after it burned out, appears more and more (in the words of Michael Oakeshott) devoted to “making riddles out of solutions.” ­Theodor Mommsen, writing of culture during the reigns of the emperors Claudius, Nero, and Vespasian, noted that “the mark of [the] age is its tedium.” Might this also be true of the culture of the age we are now living in?

Before attempting an answer, perhaps it is worth reminding ourselves of the promise of high culture. What it offered was an escape from the tyranny of the present. Cicero wrote that not to remember your past—by which he meant “the past”—is to remain a child. High culture, even though it often traveled under the banner of the avant-garde, was always about tradition. A cultured person has a standard, a recollection, through literature and history and philosophy—if not necessarily through personal experience—of greatness. Without such a recollection, rising above mediocrity is difficult, if not impossible.

At the death of Winston Churchill in 1965, Leo Strauss spoke to his class at the University of Chicago:

If ours is, culturally, an age of tedium, if the very notion of culture as an ideal is in doubt, how did this come about? Some would say that a digital age cannot be a rich age for culture. In the battle between pixels and print, pixels now seem well ahead. The smartphone, the iPad, the computer, for all their manifold benefits, do not encourage contemplation. They feature information over knowledge, and information is distinctly not knowledge. The skim, the scan, the tweet, the Wikipedia entry—they cater to, if they do not in fact breed, the shortened attention span. If I were to pass out a list of names and events of the kind I mentioned earlier to students today, they would wonder what the hell I was talking about: “The Spanish Civil War, the 1913 Armory Show—hey, no problem, I’ll Google it.” Google it up, gobble it up, we are in any case no longer talking about acquiring the necessary context, the delight in the power of making connections, that is the first step in acquiring culture.

The politics of the contemporary university, at least in its humanities and social sciences divisions, has not helped the nurturing of high culture. Quite the reverse. Academic feminists and multiculturalists, early in their rise to prominence, declared their impatience and boredom with (and anger at) the dominance of “dead white European males” in the curriculum. They might as well have declared war on high culture itself, for apart from a small number of notable examples—Sappho, Jane Austen, Madame de Staël, George Eliot—dead white European males were, and remain, the substance and pretty much the sum of high culture. In its striving for equality of interest for every culture and ethnic subgroup, the contemporary university has become an intellectual equal-opportunity institution, whereas the realm of art and intellect has little or nothing to do with equality. The result is that the American university, with a few notable exceptions, is less and less likely to purvey cogent samples of high culture, and provides fewer models of its benefits among its faculty.

In the early 1990s, I wrote an essay with the title “An Extremely Well-Informed SOB.” In it I made the distinction among those who knew about the Now, such as the pundit on television, required to be au courant on everything in the news; the knowledgeable, which included people who knew both about the Now and a fair amount about the Then; the with-it, who prided themselves on knowing about the Next Big Thing and those myriad other things the rest of us are still in the dark about; and finally, the cultured, who, insofar as possible, restrict themselves to knowing what is genuinely worth knowing.

Most people today prefer to spend their lives gathering more and more information. This plethora, this plague of information, now available to all—to what, precisely, does it lead? The best I can see, it leads to two things: the illusion that one understands the world, and the formation of opinions, countless opinions, opinions on everything. Opinions are well enough, sometimes even required; but I have never quite been able to shake the capping remark made by V. S. Naipaul on a character in his novel Guerrillas: “She had a great many opinions, but taken together they did not add up to a point of view.” Culture, true culture, helps form complex points of view.

Some years ago, the English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott was asked what he thought of England’s entering the European Union. “I don’t see,” he answered, “why I should be required to have an opinion about that.” An extraordinary thing for a contemporary political philosopher to say, or so I thought at the time. But later, reading Oakeshott’s Notebooks, I came across two interesting passages that made clear the grounds on which he said it: First, “To be educated is to know how much one wishes to know & to have the courage not to be tempted beyond this limit.” And second, that culture “teaches that there is much one does not want to know.” I wonder if, in the current age, our so-called Information Age, recognizing “what one doesn’t want to know” isn’t among the greatest gifts that the acquisition of culture can bestow.

To return to Matthew Arnold’s supposition that culture holds out the promise of a change in human nature, one has to concede that the results, up to the moment, are not especially encouraging. But then, some people, quite without the aid of culture, have naturally good hearts; others have been brought to a high standard of goodness through religion. As for culture conferring virtue on those who possess it, it is impossible to forget that the Nazis played Beethoven at Auschwitz. Still, by removing oneself from the noise and vulgarities of the present, and lending oneself the perspective of the past, an engagement with high culture makes life richer—and thereby immensely more interesting. And that, with apologies to Matthew Arnold, seems to me reward enough. ¨

Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is the author, most recently, of Frozen in Time: Twenty Stories.