“Downton Abbey”, a “Crisis in Culture”?

Everyone, so I am told, is watching and talking about "Downton Abbey." It is a TV show, for those living under a bigger rock than I am. So the other day I asked the person charged with keeping me alive to the real world why the show was so compelling.

The answer arrived in my email later that morning in the form of an article: "The Philistine's Guide to Downton Abbey: Why Everyone in the Universe Should Watch Downton Abbey."

Cast of "Downton Abbey"

A philistine, let us recall, originally named a biblical enemy, a part of a host so large and superior in numbers that it would overrun Judeo-Christian civilization. In its modern usage, a philistine is part of mass society, those who judge all things in relation to their material or utilitarian values.

So what does a philistine want from "Downton Abbey"? First and foremost, it seems, he wants to be educated. Here I quote from the article on Gawker:

The first season of the show dealt with the sinking of the Titanic, Marxism, and the burgeoning women's rights movement thanks to the Earl's progressive youngest daughter, Sybil. This season is all about the Great War, as the Brits call it. It's teaching history! There are also all those damn costumes and beautiful interiors and characters with complex motivations being penned in by a restrictive society. It's all the best parts of Middlemarch without having to lug around a thousand page novel all the damn time.

For those who aren't afraid to lug around Middlemarch as well, the New York Times offered a front-page story Wednesday with book recommendations for those following the series. According to the paper of record, Julian Fellowes, the show's creator, "has been deliberate about dropping open-ended references into the scripts" that are designed to send viewers to their libraries (or at least their IPads). The show clearly plays into the long-standing cultural demand for entertainment that doubles as education. It seems we are desperate to sugarcoat our need for distraction with the promise that we are actually making productive use of our downtime.

The New York Times article comes complete with recommendations for books of history and poetry, and even other works of historical fiction, each designed to occupy the hours between the episodes of the show. But one essay recommendation was conspicuously absent from the list.

The current mania for "Downton Abbey" calls to mind Hannah Arendt's essay "The Crisis in Culture," Arendt's most powerful explorations of the role of art and the artist in contemporary life. The essay is actually in two parts. Part One addresses the relation between culture and society. Part Two concerns the connection between culture and politics. So this week's weekend read is Part One of "The Crisis in Culture." Next week I'll discuss Part Two. I hope you enjoy it in-between episodes.

In raising the question of the crisis of culture, Arendt is not assuming the mantle of culture warrior. She explicitly refuses to condemn low-brow culture—we all need entertainment. Nor is critical of the masses. The problem she is concerned with has its origins not in mass society but in good society. She is not criticizing those who enjoy their sitcoms. No, her critical eye is focused on the elite PBS viewers of "Downton Abbey."

Arendt's essay begins with a distinction between culture and society. Simply put, artists, intellectuals, and defenders of culture accuse society of "philistinism." The philistine concerns himself only with utility while the cultural artist aims at truth and beauty.

The problem emerges when the philistines come to find that culture is useful. Then the "educated philistine" emerges, someone who seeks to advance his own social standing by monopolizing culture. The educated philistine embraces culture. He collects art, sits on the boards of universities and symphonies, and displays his "contempt for the vulgarity of sheer moneymaking."  The educated philistine despises entertainment and amusement, because no "value" can be derived from it. It is the educated philistine, not the artist, who is the snobbish culture warrior committed to demeaning pure entertainment.

As Arendt tells it, culture comes increasingly to be valuable as a currency that guarantees and advances social standing. But as culture becomes valuable, it loses its distinction from the other values of society. Cultural objects lose their distinction—that they can arrest our attention and move us. Arendt offers the example of Gothic cathedrals, which were built for the glory of God. Of course the cathedrals were useful too, but their immense and extraordinary beauty cannot be explained by their usefulness. Their beauty, she writes, "transcends needs and functions."

The beauty of cathedrals lasts through the ages. The cathedrals become part of our world, as do mosques and temples, paintings and sculptures, and all the public buildings and political structures that give form and meaning to our otherwise transient mortal lives. Yes, human beings can live without a culture; many have. But when they do, they live simply to live. For Arendt, that is not a distinctly human life in a human world.

We only live in a human world when "the totality of fabricated things is so organized that it can resist the consuming life process of the people dwelling in it, and thus outlast them."  Lasting works of art make our world a human world, they give the world its distinction and its humanity. It is this worldliness that makes the world human. And this worldliness and humanity are born from the work of artists (visual, poetic, and political) who create the lasting institutions and things that give the world meaning as our world. Because culture concerns the lasting and immortal architecture of our human world, it is concerned with art—things made for no other purpose than to be beautiful and true.

The challenge posed by the mania around a show like Downton Abbey is that it is part and parcel of a cultural moment when art abandons its transcendent and protected realm and appeals to the needs of overly busy "educated philistines" who want their entertainment also to be useful. Arendt's examples are rewritten versions of classics like Shakespeare that are made as entertaining as My Fair Lady. There is nothing wrong with My Fair Lady. But the demand to make Hamlet entertaining—or to make entertainment educational—means, Arendt writes, that "culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment." Hamlet as a great work that can stop us and make us think and re-think our lives and our world can survive neglect; but it cannot survive being repackaged into entertainment. And this raises the true specter haunting Arendt's essay: that all the cultural goods that make up our world will be repackaged as entertainment, thus loosening the immortal bonds that tie us together as members of a common world.  This means, for Arendt, the threatened loss of culture and with it of the specifically human world. As she writes:

The point is that a consumer's society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all object, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches.

I hope you enjoy "Downton Abbey." But I also suggest you take the time to read "The Crisis of Culture."

-RB