Abstract
Daniel Bell’s writings are often cast as offering a contemporary jeremiad regarding the corrosive effects of culture upon the modern economic and social order. In this paper, I take the opposite approach and argue that Bell is a sensitive cultural analyst who is claiming that human experience ought not to be deprived of culture – understood as symbol and myth that tap into the felt need for human transcendence. Bell could therefore be seen as a strong advocate for the concept of culture, and for a cultural sociology. It is only that the modern (and postmodern) versions of culture do not realize the full potential of culture to move and inspire human actors. The conclusion is reached that what ails modern culture is neither rationalization nor secularization, but rather what Bell termed the ‘Great Profanization’. Rendering culture profane is much more serious, and deleterious, than any of the other specific dynamics sociologists have diagnosed regarding modern culture.
The 25th of January, 2011, marked the departure of one of the greats of 20th-century social science: Daniel Bell. Bell resists easy categorization, and was more ‘public intellectual’ than ‘academic specialist’. While he held positions at the University of Chicago and Columbia, before spending his last two decades as Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University, he also spent much of his intellectual working life associated with magazines such as The New Leader, Fortune and The Public Interest.
Like many Jewish-American intellectuals of his generation, he held complex political and social views. But what is the legacy of this complex figure? Should he be remembered for his evocative analyses of the zeitgeist through concepts such as ‘post-industrialism’, the ‘end of ideology’ or the famous formulation of capitalism as caught in ‘cultural contradictions’ between work and consumption? And how do we square the ‘grand’ or macro-sociological pronouncements with the fact that, stylistically, Bell was more essayist than systematic thinker; an author who, arguably, never relinquished the style of thinking and writing associated with intellectual magazines rather than academic publications?
One of the most sensitive readings of Bell’s contribution to sociology and cultural analysis comes from the Peruvian-born North American sociologist of literature and bohemia Cesar Graña (1989: 16), who described him as ‘a thinker, a thought-man, a penseur … a muller over things significant’ who could nonetheless capture ‘moods, tempers’ and the ‘spontaneous social artistry of history’. In short, Bell was an exemplary exponent of the sociological imagination. Graña (1989: 11) continues by saying that if a term needs to be deployed in order to do justice to the scholarly reach and stylistic prowess of Bell’s sociological writings, it would be theoria – the Greek word for theory, which, in its original meaning, denotes a ‘gaze’ or ‘look’ that is able to ‘garner the significance of things’ through careful and insightful ‘observation’. Another short-hand way of describing Bell’s corpus, suggests Graña (1989: 11), is to label what he was doing as ‘cultural sociology’.
Cultural sociology? This is a not a descriptor that readily comes to mind when thinking of those influential tomes for which Bell has, justifiably, become famous: texts such as The End of Ideology and The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Arguably, the description seems a little more applicable to The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, where aesthetic modernism and the ’60s counterculture are shown to have morphed into the hedonistic ‘anything goes mentality’ of mass consumerism. The latter is prone to being read as Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in reverse – a declinist sociology of what culture is doing to the remaining vestiges of the bourgeois worldview and economic order. Thus, current champions of aestheticized, post-Fordist capitalism, such as Richard Florida (2003: 197), have criticized Bell for seeing ‘the economy and the culture, as separate spheres with distinct value systems’. To paraphrase a student of Florida’s: we now live in the age of the ‘Warhol Economy’ (Currid 2007). From this vantage point, it seems unclear whether Bell, who is so scathing of postmodern cultural icons such as Andy Warhol or the popular music of the ’60s, has much to offer the analysis of contemporary culture.
However, in his review of The Winding Passage, Graña uncovers in Bell’s writings a model of cultural sociology that sees culture as much more than a corrosive influence on economy or polity (the other two famous ‘axial principles’ in Bell’s sociology). Graña (1989: 11) proposes that Bell offers the ‘momentous suggestion’ that culture is ‘a kind of demarcated play area’ upon which all human societies ‘stage a particular body of spiritual creation … and what might be called [that society’s] value gestures’. Once Bell’s conception of culture is put in these terms, his brand of sociology starts to look very different.
Indeed, it is striking just how right Graña is about the manner in which Bell operationalizes the concept of culture. I have found at least five places in Bell’s corpus where he offers a definition of culture, and each offers more or less a paraphrase of the same formulation. As such, I cite from his 1977 essay – first delivered as the Hobhouse Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics – entitled ‘The Return of the Sacred? An Argument Regarding the Future of Religion’. Here, Bell writes: By culture, I mean less than the anthropological notion of the artifacts and patterned ways of life of a bounded group, and more than the ‘genteel’ notions of a Matthew Arnold as the cultivation of taste and judgment. I would define culture as the modalities of response by sentient men to the core questions that confront all human groups in the consciousness of existence: how one meets death, the meaning of tragedy, the nature of obligation, the character of love … recurrent questions which are, I believe, cultural universals, to be found in all societies where men have become conscious of the finiteness of existence. (Bell 1991: 333)
However, Bell’s tension-driven formulation, ‘less than the anthropological notion’ but ‘more than the “genteel” notions of a Matthew Arnold’, also suggests a dialectical understanding. Culture is both ‘less’ and ‘more’ than what it seems. Interestingly, ‘The Return of the Sacred?’ cites Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘On Translation’, which is seen as theorizing how ‘translation reproduces meaning not by literalness or even context, but by the relatedness of the response to existential questions to which the original meaning was addressed’ (Bell 1991: 333). Bell (1991: 333) adds that translation, as much as it tries, cannot ‘reproduce the “color” of culture – the exact syntax, the resourcefulness of its phonology, the particular metaphors, or the structure of associations and juxtapositions that the original tongue provides’. What translation is equipped to do is render meaning in terms of the recurring existential questions that human culture confronts. The individual languages, styles, motifs and other codes produced by specific cultures are the resources that humans have for engaging in this meaning-making process. As such, Bell (1991: 333) proposes that ‘variations in myth, philosophy, symbols, and styles’ constitute what we understand as the ‘history of human culture’. But irrespective of whether we are speaking of Shakespearean drama, Mediterranean cuisine, the South American penchant for soccer or death rituals in Australian society (e.g. the recent development of roadside memorials to mark a death from a traffic accident), what culture gives expression to is the common human predicament that we have all been ‘thrown into the world (who asked to be born?)’ and that, as human actors develop a ‘growing knowledge of that situation’, they become ‘aware of some answers’ that have stood the test of time – what Bell terms ‘the received residues of culture’.
Now there is a conservative edge to the notion that culture hardly ever involves starting from scratch; and an annoyance, on Bell’s part, that modernity (and hence postmodernity) suffers from the delusion of ‘self-infinitization’ – that is, the belief that human nature is infinitely flexible and able to be altered according to whim or circumstance. However, Bell is making a very substantive point: why assume that, if something is symbolic or expressive, it is able to be changed willy-nilly, through human volition, desire or fashion? Similarly, he thinks that modernity – especially in its more Romanticist incarnations – has produced ‘debased’ understandings of culture by linking expressive symbols to ‘self-expression’ and by casting the ‘imagination’ as the ‘touchstone’ of human satisfaction. Echoing the claim of social psychologists who study leisure and the arts, such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1992, 1996), Bell postulates not all cultural experiences are equally rewarding, satisfying or creative in character. He also lays his ‘cards on the table’ regarding the kinds of things that he thinks make for a vital and creative culture. I am quoting here from the 1978 ‘Foreword’ to The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism:
To have significance, a culture must transcend the present, because it is the recurrent confrontation with those root questions whose answers, through sets of symbols, provide a coherence to the meaning of culture. And since the appreciation of tradition in culture, and judgment in art … has to be learned, authority – in the form of scholarship, teaching and skilled exegesis – is a necessary guide for the perplexed. And such authority can be earned only by study, not by speaking in tongues. (Bell 1996: xv)
Thus, despite everything that sociologists of culture have written about ‘taste-makers’, whether a religion, a mode of doing of philosophy or style of popular song, feels new, vital or fresh is hardly ever explained through reductionist categories like cultural ‘gate-keeping’ or ‘taste-formations’. Bell (1991: xxi) is at pains to emphasize that cultural context does matter. Context, for him, implies sociological concepts don’t translate readily across different situations. Thus, he suggests that the kind of cultural sociology one is engaged in differs depending on whether the empirical unit of analysis is ‘civilizations’ or ‘cultural styles, such as Gothic, Baroque, Mannerist, and Modern’ (Bell 1991: xxi). But, as with the conceptual problem that a vital religious culture cannot be ‘manufactured’ out of thin air or the ‘chatter of intellectuals’, context does not imply simple causation. What makes social science a difficult enterprise is precisely that ‘there is no given “constitutive” order to the structure of societies’ (Bell 1991: xxi). Bell dismisses formulations such as ‘the inherent unity’ of historical periods, the ‘functional requisites of society’, and the Marxian notion of ‘modes of production’, as unsatisfactory ways of formulating the problem of culture (xx–xxi).
I would like to suggest that these themes link Bell’s sociological thought to a different time and place to our own, one associated with so-called ‘classical sociology’. Despite his distaste for abstract theoretical formulations, Bell once described himself as a ‘specialist in generalizations’. His work retains the historical and comparative sweep that seems to have disappeared from the social sciences, as epochal terms such as modernity and postmodernity, industrialism and postindustrialism, Fordism and post-Fordism, and globalization, have become common currency. Is this really what the ‘classics’ foresaw as the future of the social sciences? Despite what the textbooks tell our students, were classical theorists really so focused on something called modernity?
You could argue that what scholars studying society and history became acutely conscious of, towards the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries, was the significance of ‘watershed’ moments and other historical turning points. Hence, the themes of much late-19th-century sociology, history, philology and art history were topics such as: the study of the Renaissance and renaissances; decline and disorder in empires and/or civilizations; political and other kinds of revolutions; religious revivals and spiritual transformations; and, their negative counterparts, secularization and disenchantment. Thus, the study of culture came to be seen, by the intellectual culture in question, as being about psychic and societal energies, and how they wane over time (Stuart Hughes 1979). We see this in the case of classical sociologists, for whom a central question was: can societies function in a state of disenchantment and rapid de-traditionalization? For Bell, in turn, the burning questions became: why was it that, at some point in the second half of the 20th century, bohemianism morphed into consumerism and fashion, artistic Modernism started to appear ‘exhausted’ and the political chants associated with Communism suddenly appeared ‘arid’ and ‘meaningless’? Of course, historical and societal energies also move in the other direction. The flip side of such questions, for Bell, would be: why was Renaissance Florence such an important site of artistic, philosophical, scientific and economic innovation? And why did a rationalist worldview flourish under these circumstances? (NB: Contra Weber, Bell thinks that the writings of Leon Battista Alberti probably tell us more about the origins of Western rationalism than those of Martin Luther or Benjamin Franklin.)
Cultures and civilizations rise and they fall. Bell (1996: 7) urges us to reject ‘seductive’ and ‘simple formulations’ and instead opt for those that offer ‘complex and empirically testable sociological argument[s]’. He further suggests that often the most ‘powerful literary conceptions – powerful because they dramatize the issues’ – have come not from social scientists but from literary, philosophical and religious sources, such as the writings of ‘Nietzsche and [Joseph] Conrad’, the ‘Revelation of St John’ and ‘Augustine’s reflections on the downfall of Rome’ (Bell 1996: 7). This fits with the arguments made about tradition being central to culture. For what are such texts, if not the literary and cultural memory of how societies have struggled with issues such as time, fate and causality? However, ever mindful of lapsing into mere metaphor (in particular prophetic ones), Bell qualifies his enthusiasm for literary and theological sources by stating that such perspectives sometimes need reminding that mundane reality never quite accords with literary, religious and artistic models. He says: ‘Despite our preoccupation with revelation, and later with revolution, the structures of society – modes of life, social relations, norms and values – are not reversed overnight … Societal structures change much more slowly, especially habits, customs, and established, traditional ways of life’ (Bell 1996: 7–8).
Thus, while culture provides us with the vocabulary for understanding how societies work, and why they change over time, a certain theoretical and historical literacy is required so that images of society are not confused with the real thing. Politics is full of redemptive narratives, but a solid knowledge of the history of redemptive theologies helps us to keep things in check. Like Weber, Bell found religious visions in art, politics and philosophy interesting and insightful but, like Weber, he also drew a sharp distinction between the way of the prophet and the way of the social scientist.
For much of its history, it has been proposed that sociology could function as a kind of ‘third culture’ between the sciences and the arts or humanities. Bell seems to have achieved this goal better than most. His message seems to be that good social science doesn’t have to choose between interpretation and explanation, or theoretical insight and empirical verification. Interestingly, the more he started to focus on questions of culture and mythos, the more intolerant Bell seemed to become of those who saw social science as an exercise in ‘debunking’, or who saw moral or political purity as an index of sociological prowess.
Whether or not everyone in my audience agrees with the argument that Bell is a cultural sociologist, attuned to the role of meaning in human affairs, I hope you will share the opinion that he set very high standards for doing social science. He seems to have genuinely believed that, by attaining a balance between technical skill and aesthetic or literary imagination, sociologists would be better placed to navigate between the ‘particularisms’ of culture and history, and the ‘universalisms’ of intellect and reason. Perhaps this is Bell’s true legacy – to have written in a way that reminds us of the promise contained within a meaningful yet robust social science. In short, a social science that matters.
But what is wrong with modern culture? Most readings of Bell tend to highlight his account of Modernism and hedonism. They rightly point to the declinist or nostalgic tone of his tomes. But what I would like to suggest here is that rather than being a mere critic of mass or popular culture, or of the excesses of avant-gardism, that Bell’s real target is a situation where culture loses its capacity to enchant.
Bell tapped into the insight that all human culture has a religious or sacred quality if it is to have that quality we term cultural. This places his sociology within a distinguished lineage of social science figures whom – to borrow a self-description of Bell’s – were ‘specialists in generalizations’. And thus, whether Protestant, Catholic or Jew, secular or practising, these social scientific ‘generalizers’ studied religion and ritual because they felt that these aspects of human society put them in touch with how humans made sense of cosmos and symbol, myth and the felt need for transcendence.
Secularization has often been seen as a debate within the sociology of religion to do with whether or not societies are quantitatively more or less secular than preceding social formations. An associated problem has been that sociology has tended to conflate ‘secularization’ with a host of other narrative tropes devised for thinking about modernity: rationalization, disenchantment, industrialization, urbanization, democratization, increased levels of education, technological progress and economic growth.
However, none of these is strictly speaking the same as secularization; nor are processes of growth or decay in one area of civilizational or cultural development necessarily ‘homologous’ to processes occurring in other domains. If history is hardly ever movement in one direction, with a single destination point, then cause-and-effect between culture and economy, or polity and religion, is also seldom ever neat or straightforward. It therefore pays to be analytically precise about what ‘secularization’ means with respect to the history of Western culture and, furthermore, to pinpoint the dimensions of human existence religion most clearly addresses. I will argue that religion can wax and wane but is unlikely to disappear as a cultural dynamic. Religion and the sacred are human universals and ought to be theorized as such.
So what of secularization? In church and political history, the concept of secularization had an original meaning that Bell thinks is worth restoring: It was originally employed, in the wake of the Wars of Religion, to denote the removal of territory or property from the control of ecclesiastical authorities. In this sense, secularization means the disengagement of religion from political life – the classic instance is the separation of Church and State – and the sundering of religion from aesthetics so that art need no longer bend to moral norms, but can follow its own impulses, wherever they may lead. (Bell 1982: 503)
But the argument I wish to make in this paper is that when it comes to the role of religion in human culture, rather than ‘secular’ and ‘non-secular’ or ‘post-secular’, the appropriate index is the degree to which a symbol, story, myth or other cultural form is ‘sacred’ or ‘profane’. Why sacred and profane? This duality captures something about culture that the secularization thesis cannot; namely, whether culture is able to make us feel spiritually and psychically refreshed. The pertinent empirical question here is: after I visit the Blake Prize exhibition, do I feel that I have been put in touch with beauty and a consciousness that is larger than myself (God rather than the artist as agent of transcendence), or have I simply witnessed what I would more or less see at any other gallery of contemporary art – artists jostling for publicity; irony and parody trumping meaningful connection and communication; and skilled technique sacrificed to theoreticism-cum-obtuse art world self-referencing? If the latter, one has had a ‘profane’ rather than ‘secular’ experience. Whenever art or any other symbolic form leaves us feeling flat, bored or more anxious than we already were, you could argue that we have been deprived of a sacred experience.
The sociologist Max Weber detected, at the turn of the last century, that what ailed the modern soul was precisely its incapacity to transcend present empirical and psychological realities. I quote from the magisterial, if bleak, conclusion to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:
No one knows who will live in this [iron] cage in the future, or whether … new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification … For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well truly be said: ‘Specialists without spirit; sensualists without heart’. (Weber 1976: 182)
In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim bases much of his sociological argument upon data derived from anthropological sources related to so-called ‘primitive societies’. But his arguments are at odds with much 19th-century evolutionary thinking about religion (e.g. E.B. Tylor’s discussion of ‘animism’ and Sir James Frazer’s overwrought distinction between ‘magic’ and ‘religion’), and he also refuses to see religion as a type of ‘proto’ science or philosophy. Religion is a type of knowledge that all humans have felt necessary to cultivate – whether they are primitive or technologically advanced, scientifically rational or deeply mystical in orientation. Thus, rather than seeing religion as something primitive to be superseded by science or reason, the ‘elementary’ in Durkheim’s title should be taken to refer to the simplest or most pure forms of the religious life – those forms where we see precisely the religious nature of all human life. We might therefore suggest that The Elementary Forms, irrespective of the specific arguments advanced in relation to totems, rites and the role of magic, espouses a more general hypothesis regarding religion as one of the fundamental building blocks of the human construction of reality: ‘Men owe to religion not only the content of their knowledge … but also the form in which that knowledge is elaborated’ (1965: 8).
As is well known, Durkheim’s view of religion is based on a sharp distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’. Although religion is everywhere that cosmological and intellectual speculation upon the nature of the divine is evidenced, only a certain category of belief, symbolism and rite is properly speaking ‘religious’. The reason that religion is able to play the role of what Durkheim terms the ‘serious life’ of a society is that religion is not just beliefs and ideas but also ‘sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden’ (1965: 44). The boundary between sacred and profane also explains why some symbols are more powerful than others. Durkheim detected that whether conducted through the media of speech, chanting, singing, dancing or other forms of incantation, what made ritual powerful was its capacity to engender a sense of ‘collective’ or joint ‘effervescence’. I quote at length from The Elementary Forms:
Feeling possessed and led on by some external power that makes him think and act differently than he normally does, [man] feels he is no longer himself. It seems to him that he has become a new being … as if he was in reality transported into a special world inhabited by exceptionally intense forces that invade and transform him. Especially when repeated for weeks, day after day, how would experiences like these not leave him with the conviction that two heterogeneous and incommensurable worlds exist in fact? In one world he languidly carries on his daily life; the other is one that he cannot enter without abruptly entering into relations with extraordinary powers that excite him to the point of frenzy. The first is the profane world and the second, the world of sacred things. (1965: 22)
Bell emphasizes that the modern cult of ‘infinitely’ remaking the human being is a debased understanding of what religious cultures have understood as the need for transcendence. Indeed, the modern obsession with fashion and constant desire for experimentation is seen by Bell as a type of social amnesia that disconnects us from the sacred. Here then is Bell’s sociological hypothesis about the sacred in a nutshell: religion is the cultural system that, across time and space, has done the best job of giving symbolic expression to the human confrontation with finitude. It is best able to imbue individual symbols and artefacts with larger significance. Without the connection to the sacred, culture is unlikely to retain what Weber termed ‘enchantment’ and Durkheim termed ‘effervescence’. And everywhere there is the potential for culture to lose its sacred qualities; that is, for culture to be deprived of its animating spirit or to become ‘profane’.
This is precisely Bell’s diagnosis of modern culture and how it has transformed art, religion and leisure into a series of lifestyle-choices or consumer ‘tastes’. He argues that rather than secularization, what has happened in the West, as religious symbols have lost their hold upon the human psyche, is a cultural process he describes as the ‘Great Profanization’. Bell proposes that profanation has been at work in modern culture for a number of centuries but that each type of cultural profanation has had its own dynamic or dialectic. What unites all profanations is that rather than offering a constructive or life-affirming ethos they are usually defined by ‘negations’ that leave adherents feeling spiritually impoverished. I quote here from ‘The Return of the Sacred?’ essay:
The profanation of Modernism is that the great works created by wrestling with the demonic (as Jacob wrestled with the angel and became Israel) become trivialized by the culturait; what has been art becomes trendy life-style and what has been incorporation (as in transubstantiation) becomes consumption. And the profanation of Marxism is the debasement of socialism, not just in the Great Political Religions but in the grotesque totemic forms of African socialism, Arab socialism, Baath socialism, and the hundred different socialisms that have erupted like weeds in the wastelands of Marxism. (1991: 346n)
However, on the whole, Bell feels that anyone reflecting on the fate of modern culture ought to be optimistic. Writing in 1978, he suggests: ‘We stand, I believe, with a clearing ahead of us. The exhaustion of Modernism, the aridity of Communist life, the tedium of unrestrained self and the meaninglessness of the monolithic political chants all indicate that a long era is coming to a close’ (1996: xxix). He adds elsewhere: ‘What will come out of that clearing, I do not wholly know, but since I believe that the existential questions of culture are inescapable, I feel that some new efforts to regain a sense of the sacred point to the direction in which our culture – or its most sentient representatives – will move’ (1982: 523).
Echoing Bell, my claim in this paper has been that, when it comes to culture, we have more to fear from profanation than secularization. Whether or not our universities, art institutions, organs of mass communication, and other sources of everyday metaphysics are able to provide us with something meaningful and long lasting is, in many respects, predicated on the need to intellectually and culturally digest the implications of the sacred. Religions don’t necessarily monopolize the sacred, but understanding religion helps us to understand how the sacred works and why we need it in our lives. That Daniel Bell reached such a conclusion late in his career should come as no surprise. Rather than being a pessimistic analysis of the contemporary human condition, arguably, Bell’s cultural sociology suggests that snuffing out the human desire for transcendence is not easily achieved. Recognizing the link between culture and the sacred also provides a means for keeping check on the false idols that cultures seem capable of generating.