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"If only it were possible to combine hard work with
the life of the mind: and of course, the life of the mind
with hard work." -
Vershinin in Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
The European Enlightenment, according to the famous German
social theorist Max Weber and his followers, developed by
a process of splitting previously unified worldviews into
the fragments of science, art, morals and law, and making
each the domain of elite groups of specialists. ‘Modernity’ has
been handed down to us as a world of discrete segments of
a broken reality. If these segments are linked in any way,
it is not by the organic life of society, but the needs of
the elites to maintain a discourse with each other.
The theorists of classical liberalism called the fragmentary
nature of this world ‘freedom’ on the grounds
that it entrenched a complex reality as the basic condition
of society; where all the contending interests cancel each
other out and no one group can dominate the totality of all
others. The key to the enjoyment of liberty in this splintered
reality is the recognition of limits: to avoid extending
the rules which regulate life in one of the segments to other,
properly autonomous, regions.
The problem for the advocates of the liberty of these self-contained
units is that they often contain people who are less than
happy with the portion of the rules they have been lumbered
with, and who then aspire to a wider inquiry about the conditions
of life in general – including those bits of it which
take place in segments other than their own. Jonathan Rose*
has provided a splendid example of just such a phenomenon
in his huge study of the intellectual life of the working
class. His opening chapter records the ‘desire for
singularity’ on the part of subordinate social groups
over a period spanning three centuries.
For the early generations, radical forms of religion provided
a way of thinking about a whole-some way of life in which
a great purpose was revealed to all true believers. But the
onset of industrialization made things more complicated by
creating a new reverence for science and scepticism towards
simple faith and piety. The growing division of labour, described
so graphically by Adam Smith, marked a point of exponential
increase in the range of expertise now needed to run industry
and govern society. But more than that, the conditions of
life of the new working classes seemed in themselves to generate
barriers to the possibility of a comprehensive understanding
of the world which was emerging. Cobbett’s description
of the world that was being brought into existence by the
thundering machines of the new civilization, and the squalor
and spiritual poverty of the proletarian classes, suggest
that for a working man or woman ever to aspire to read a
book was a task of a Herculean nature.
This fact notwithstanding, they did read. Moreover, the
exceptional representatives of these thinking men and women
organised
a large part of their lives around the acquisition of knowledge,
and the resources needed for discussion and debate of its
consequences. ‘Mutual improvement’ emerged as
a social movement which evolved in different ways over two
centuries. In the early period, the autodidacts struggle
to assemble their own personal libraries, but from the mid-19th
century onwards the formation of institutions which aimed
to promote enquiry and rational debate became a major theme.
Rose draws on the surviving minute books of provincial groups
which met in the mill towns and mining villages to listen
to lectures, to debate politics, to sing and play musical
instruments, or to perform the plays of playwrights from
Shakespeare through to the Russian modernists.
In the Victorian years this work was not necessarily associated
with political radicalism, but as the century moved on, the
culture of the autodidact ranged from the contemplation of
philosophy and the meaning of religion, and increasingly
encompassed involvement in the trades union movement and
liberal and social democratic parties.
Rose asks whether this identification with left politics
was reflected in the books and studies undertaken by these
workers. By and large, the answer appears to be, no. The
favoured books were often of a distinctly conservative genre,
with Shakespeare, Chaucer, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury,
and the novels of Defoe, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith
and Bunyan being prominent. Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor
Resartus, a moral tale which restores religion and morality
as the one sure guide to action in a world of social injustice,
crops up as a constant reference for trade union activists
and the first generation of Labour MPs.
The apparent paradox of a conservative literary canon existing
alongside increasingly radical political aspirations is accounted
for by Rose in his assertion that working men and women sought
the means to overcome the sense of their lives as fragmentary
and marginal to the grand scheme of things. The view of a
world unified by morality, religion, and an evolutionary
growth towards a perfect state – the legacy of conservative
romanticism – held a natural appeal to people who had
every reason for wanting to know the ‘meaning’ of
their lives.
The example of T.A. Jackson, the foremost of the Communist
Party’s intellectuals to have emerged from a working
class background, illustrates this point. Jackson’s
early reading took him through Scott’s Waverley novels,
in which he encountered an aristocracy properly entitled,
in the author’s view, to rely upon their noble birth
as the source of privilege and rights. But Scott also required
that they fulfill a part of the bargain intended by the Universal
Architect, and meet their responsibilities to the rest of
society, by promoting order and justice for the benefit of
all. A bad aristocrat, and Scott’s work is replete
with examples of these, was an affront to all and worthy
of the utmost condemnation.
Scott’s proletarian readers took his essentially conservative
views in a direction which had not been intended, in that
condemnation of individual bad apples developed into a critical
sense of the wrongness of a society which allowed them to
rule. When read by people living in the slums of East London,
or working in West Yorkshire textile mills, or South Wales
mining villages, such moral tales of good versus evil, when
written with skill and imagination, could waken hopes of
their own lives being transformed and being made meaningful.
Jackson is quoted as an example of the effect of reading
the Greek myths.
“…
they fed my appetite for wonders insofar as they enable me
to see the possibilities of an infinitude of happenings and
combinations hidden beneath the exterior aspect of even the
most ordinary things.”
In some ways Rose is reiterating points made nearly fifty
years ago by Richard Hoggart in his vivid account of working
class lives and literature, The Uses of Literacy. In his
study, Hoggart explicitly repudiated an interest in the ‘exceptional’ representatives
of the working classes, the readers and thinkers who applied
themselves to works other than the popular dailies and weekly
pictorials. Hoggart’s interest was in the ordinary
people, with their mass readership daily papers, pulp novels
and flickering cinema screens. But what was always present
in their encounters with what passed for culture, and in
this they resonate with Rose’s intellectuals, was the
sense of a distinct world which was being affirmed as true;
one not necessarily the same as that intended by the editor
of the News of the World, or the author of Robinson Crusoe.
At its most basic level it was a world of community, of
various solidarities, of a sensual engagement in the lives
of family,
friends and neighbours, and the expectation that throughout
all the world, ‘sincerity’ and’ good intentions’ would
be valued, even if they did not always result in appropriately
happy outcomes.
It is not clear that Rose sees the organic connection between
the subjects of his study, those intellectually inclined
working class men and women, and the communities in which
their outlooks had been formed. His account includes a fascinating
history of the institutions the autodidacts forged to pursue
their interests – the mutual improvement societies,
mechanics institutes, reading rooms and libraries, and the
Workers Educational Association – but the sense is
throughout of their exceptionalness and unrepresentiveness
of the class they came from.
The outcome of the journey they embarked upon is, in Rose’s
account, bleak. Having struggled to master the culture of
their masters in order that they might be the masters of
their own fate, what the autodidacts found was that this
culture itself had moved on as the forces of modernity broke
aesthetic values down into the smaller, ever more separate,
fragments of abstract modern art. The 20th century – with
its concept of ‘high art’ – appeared to
remove these exotic blooms from a public space where they
could be gazed upon by ordinary citizens. But then a partial
reintegration became possible in the form of the ‘Cool
Britannia’ proclaimed by the Blairite coterie. For
Rose, this was not the most unpalatable of outcomes: “the
boutique economy they have constructed involves a process
of class formation, where the accoutrements of the avant-garde
are used to distance and distinguish cultural workers from
more traditional manual workers.”
Other conclusions are possible. Must this process of division
and re-division truly be endless? And anyway, just what is
really divided about our modern world? And why, to return
to Chekhov’s question posed at the onset of this comment,
is it so hard to combine the life of the mind with hard work?
One of the heroes of the autodidacts, who also moved from
conservative meditations to radical conclusions - the artist
and historian John Ruskin – also declaimed on exactly
this issue:
“We have much studied and much perfected, of late,
the great civilized invention of the division of labour;
only we have
given it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour
that is divided; but the men: - Divided into mere segments
of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of
life … It is verily this degradation of the operative
into a machine, which more than any other evil of the times,
is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain,
incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom which
they cannot explain the nature to themselves.”
Rose’s pessimism seems on a par with Ruskin’s:
but yet the struggle appears to go on. Men and women must
be free. They will turn again to art, and music, and morality
and religion to try and explain to themselves what this freedom
is that they must have. And they will turn to politics too;
for hard work to co-exist with the life of the mind, they
must turn to politics.
*The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Yale
University Press, 2001
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