Culture, Common Sense and Civilisation

BY A. VENKAPPA SASTRI, M.A.

INTRODUCTORY

A crisis like war affecting the foundations of the social order makes men humble, timorous and realistic. We realise, as normally we do not, the error of our ways and the need for candour and altruism governing the policy of statesmen at the helm if history should cease to be "a register of crimes and follies". Thinkers and idealists are taught by the experience of war to re-shuffle the elements of their Utopias where wars and rumours of wars do not thwart the lives of men, wealth being more justly shared and equality more freely recognized. In the atmosphere of war, catchwords like liberty, nationalism, rights, Empire, and democracy are put into the crucible and their root-ideas are sought after. This sifting of values and the readjustment of our perspectives are about the most precious lesson of our times.

Culture is one of those general concepts that the ferment of war as brought much to the surface. One hears from all quarters expressions of regret for culture, of the evil days on which it has fallen, of an arrest, a set-, and a possible collapse for good of all that is understood as culture under the malign operation of war. Men of culture themselves the world over living ordered lives share this feeling and confess to the impact of rude and anarchic elements making their lot uncomfortable indeed. They have, forsooth, no function to serve during war and so draw apart and spend obscure days irradiating the gloom with the play of their shocked and solitary fancies as well as they may. To have nursed the gleam at all, "the vision and the faculty divine" in the face of the elemental confusion is achievement enough, they consider, to merit the gratitude of succeeding generations. Indeed, when the murk clears, the man of culture will serenely step out of his isolation and claim social recognition; he will exhibit in his own person for the edification of distraught society a pattern of living that this fantasy has shaped in retirement,–a pattern that is at once pleasing and picturesque, if also a little pallid, exotic and unconvincing. Such is about the role traditionally ascribed to culture.

If war cuts across all our pet ideas and theories forcing us to build from the foundations anew, can culture complacently cling to its hot-house hybrid character? What is culture fundamentally? Is it at best an escapist activity? Has it no positive obligations to fulfil in the midst of a universe of change and commotion? Is ‘hard fibre’ organically out of harmony with the notion of culture? Is not culture connected at every point with life? When life heaves and boils, surges and foams, should culture keep frigid and cover its head for shelter? Not that culture too should become a seething phenomenon. But if it is a live thing it should be capable of a vital gesture in a time of stress like ours; it should expand, pour itself out and subdue the surrounding savagery or struggle manfully and perish nobly. What are the values culture takes upon itself to conserve? Is culture an intellectual pastime, a dilettante device having for its sole diversion

To sport with Amaryllis in the shade

Or with the tangles of Naeera’s hair?

Too long has culture been treading the primrose path. Culture is no culture unless it takes all life for its field of operation with its jars and jolts no less than its graces and gratitudes, unless it permeates the whole man and equips him to face any situation in life, gladly and eagerly accepting peace if it is honourable but not shirking conflict or battle when duty or occasion demands it. Culture being a complete and comprehensive chart of life, is not a comfortable doctrine merely, but has its element of iron, its grim resistances, ‘its faculty for storm, and turbulence though its master-bias leans to home felt pleasures and gentle scenes’. Flaccidity of nerve is not to be mistaken for culture which is a high heroic quality,–sensitive, supple and steel-hard as circumstances may require. It may be that culture at different levels adopts different techniques of resistance. Modes of fighting, strategy and maneuver will certainly vary depending on the culture evolved. Culture–essentially a growth in humanity and tenderness–may either altogether discard violence if it has achieved pure Sattwa, or it may partially acquiesce in the fact of force as an expedient in the present stage of human evolution, and humanise and ennoble even violent warfare of the traditional type suffusing it with an ethos all its own at every point of the operations–at the beginning, in the actual course or the war, and at the termination of hostilities and the ratification of peace terms–as was practically illustrated by Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War. But whatever the technique, fighting is a positive duty laid on the man of culture in certain situations where he is convinced of the equity, the inevitability and the righteousness of war. Heine asked for a sword alongside of a wreath to be put on his grave. What does it symbolise?

The wise Tagore has put in a nutshell the whole philosophy of the subject of war and peace and the ethical imperative in regard to the ‘form of war’:

"The principle of war and the principle of peace both together make truth. They are contradictory; they seem to hurt each other like the finger and the strings of a musical instrument. But this very contradiction produces music. When only one predominates then there is the sterility of silence.

"Our human problem is not whether we should only have war or peace, but how to harmonise them perfectly. So long as there is such a thing as force, we cannot say that we must not use force, but that we must not abuse it by making it the sole standard thus ignoring love. When love and force do not go together, then love is mere weakness and force is brutal. Peace becomes death when it is alone; war becomes a Demon when it kills its mate.

"Of course, we must not think that killing one another is the only form of war. Man is pre-eminently a moral being; his war instinct should be shifted to the moral plane and his weapons should be moral weapons. The Hindu inhabitants of Bali, while giving up their lives before the invaders, fought with their moral weapons against physical power. A day will come when men’s history will admit their victory. It was a war. Nevertheless it was in harmony with peace and therefore glorious."

The following article proposes to examine some of the stock notions regarding culture and pleads for its alliance with common sense, which is itself ill understood, and expresses the view that culture founded on common sense and ‘in widest commonalty spread’ is the only safety of civilisation in its parlous state to-day.

II

Culture is regarded as something specialized and exclusive. The common man can have no share of it. The source of culture is somewhere in the hinterlands of the mind. This subjective tinge is so far exaggerated that the individual claiming to be cultured becomes his own norm and his culture just a cult of egoism–a species of narcissism.

Intellectual conceit is added to this repertory,–learning of a sort that tends to take culture farther away from the common man. Intellectuality being claimed as the master mark, the test of behaviour does not apply to the cultured man; behaviour is something crude, too overt and emphatic for his shy, ethereal temper. His is the unfettered sphere of contemplation, romantic freedom of reverie, creating for himself delights of the mind that have no counterpart in actual existence. It is from this precious quality of mind, at once superior, secretive and fastidious that the man of culture disclaims community of make with the ordinary man and erects for himself a tower of pride and aloofness where he soothes himself with his fine-spun illusions. Subjective bias carried to eccentric lengths and intellectual pretension both narrow the society of men of culture to themselves. Culture becomes localised in art centres and esoteric clubs: Life at large being drab and recalcitrant to fine touch, let it alone, says the votary of culture, and live in the paradise of your own imaginings and watch the spectacle of the sweating crowd, the submerged tenth, with the superior irony of an unimpassioned God.

Culture for the sake of culture, divorced from the life of common humanity, intellectual snobbery, and then steep decadence–that is the brief chronicle of cultural degradation. Culture has ever been claimed to be aristocratic both in the sense of possession and patronage. All the elegance and refinement, characteristic of aristocracies, cling to culture. That brings us to the external aspect of etiquette and ceremony, the lavish display of fashion of costume and retinue. The culture of the aristocrat is sensuous and secular, but neither simple nor impassioned. Its perfect expression is the genial splendour of drawing room decorum, propriety touched with picturesqueness. Etiquette is not the soul of culture. Formalised manners, formalised modes of dress and speech, unctuous suavity, stylised courtesies, meticulous attention to furniture and bric-a-brac and the decoration of the walls with antique, bizarre or absolutely modish pictures and art exhibits are indications of a culture that has run to seed; they are but a trick of snobbery and are no evidence of a living vital culture. A crotchety individualism and studied externalisation mark spurious culture.

Culture indeed does stand for something selective and delicious, but it owes its all to contact with Nature, that is, not to the mechanical aids and appurtenances of so-called civilisation, expensive and external sources of gratification, hectic and demoralising, but simple springs of delight open to one and all. A cultured soul knows how to extract gold from dross, joy from the stalest experiences, sights and sounds. The shifting aspects of Nature, of the pageantry of cloud and sky and earth’s surfaces–"symbols of a high romance,"–the recurring phenomena of light and darkness, each morning a renewal and an exaltation, each sunset a sobering thought, and, each night "with its thousand eyes" at once an intimation of death and infinity, the wonder of bird and beast with their strange human gestures, the beauty of flower, leaf and plant

Rainbows;……..

And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;

And flowers themselves, that sway through Sunny hours,

Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon,

the company of children, where we throw off all disguises and ourselves become children sharing their innocence and experience, the perennial appeal of the human face, its depths of intelligence, humour, stupidity, lust, renunciation, villainy, daring, love, kindliness, treachery and devotion, capacity to decipher these, a poetic capability of perceiving in the sordid and the common-place something novel and unfamiliar–that is Culture. Contrast with these the dull delights of epicureanism and hedonism, the unimaginative round of social banquets and gala programmes.

Apart from these artificial encrustation’s, culture today suffers from a shy reserve and a lackadaisical tenderness opposed to all expression of vigour or protest or positive course of action. Extremes of this trait manifest themselves as mute suffering, passive subjection to the will of tyrants and oppressors and cowardly retreat from all conflict professing it to be in the best interests of art and culture whose brave self-chosen custodians they are. Culture can become a constructive force only by giving up its despotic subjectivity, its intellectual hauteur, its flaunting externalities, by stepping down the pedestal it has long mounted, by accepting as part of its legitimate content doing as well as contemplation, in a word, making itself foursquare with life on a democratic foundation of Common Sense.

III

But what is common sense? It is supposed to be the virtue of the common man, i.e., of the man what has no claim to culture as generally accepted. Common sense is something not acquired and is contra-distinguished from culture which is a deliberate product of cultivation. Common sense, it is admitted, is necessary for the conduct of life but it is wholly of the work-a-day world. Nothing exalted, nothing ideal in it. Critics stamp upon common sense mediocrity, lack of reasoning, crass contentment and pitifully regard it as the single resource of the uneducated, unthinking man-in-the-street. Common sense is equated to instinct which guides the behaviour of lower animals. It has at best a biological value. The argument proceeds that instinct is an unsafe guide under modern conditions of life, which represent a confused medley of motives and interests, not amenable to straight comprehension nor easy solution. Hence common sense is discredited. The fabric of culture cannot be built on common sense so understood.

Common sense is basic sense, not the rudimentary sense of the great portions of men about us, but the instinct of the race, the deposit of the experience of Homo sapiens on earth. Common sense is nothing upstart and contemporary. It is not what the man-in-the-street says, not the counsel of the uninstructed, but what has been accepted through the ages, what is no longer a dubious hypothesis, what, by virtue of tradition, experiment and experience, has become a part of the heritage of the race. Culture is the further cultivation of this heritage, the leavening of conduct in the present, of life today with the aroma of yesterday and the day before, stepping from the local and the temporal into line with the historic and the hoary, into line with the intuitions and the funded wisdom of the race. Common sense in this perspective is an ultimate of human experience. Common sense is past the region of argument. We have but half learnt what we still argue about, what still intrigues our brain, whereas the dictates of common sense represent crystallised wisdom, the final proof of which is its effective blending into the warp and woof of our very human nature so that we walk about not warily, tumblingly as the infant does, who has still to learn his paces, nor yet as the old man who is conscious of every step of his because of failing energy, but all unconscious of our movement, which is transformed into a reflex process.

When we remark about someone that he lacks common sense, we imply not that he lacks learning, intelligence or reflective capacity but that he has not stepped into the heritage of the race, that he has not assimilated the common stock of human wisdom. Experience is knowledge made perfect. Common sense is the residue of the experience of the race. The details, the particular happenings, the hundred illustrative contexts recorded in history are all irrelevant, may all have slipped out of memory, but common sense embodies the moral of all those experiences by forging them into attitudes and philosophies, ‘a mass of dumb instincts and allegiances’ swaying our conduct. Common sense is not the negation of intellect. It is tacit reason, as Hazlitt says. It does not necessarily argue thinness of understanding or bluntness of sensibility or lack of logic or rationality. Common sense is the mellowed outcome of ages of racial history past all doubt and logic because it organically expresses itself in human nature which is the epitome of all evolution so far and which is so much life, superior to mere rationality.

Only, common sense has nothing to do with exaggerated erudition, accretion of mere book-learning, recondite and curious. Such far-fetched intellectual stuff and minute processes of research are as much the antithesis of common sense as of all culture, rightly understood.

A sovereign sense of proportion, utter freedom from affectation, simplicity, and the absence of sophistication are the common insignia of culture and common sense both. Woman is the supreme embodiment of this quality of common sense. Her response to life is the response of the child–the response of the whole being, and not a part thereof, a perfect unison of good sense, emotion and right relationship. The woman, like the child, mocks the pedant, the arid scholar, the misanthrope, the hardened cynic, the crabbed ascetic and the mere dreamer. She typifies Pravritti, the way of acceptance, of attunement to the facts of life and their magical transformation by such spontaneous gesture. The advent of woman will mean the salvaging of civilisation, the return of common sense and the gladness of the morning.

Common sense has a direct intuition of the fundamentals of a situation. James Bryce asks, "What is common sense but the power of seeing the fundamentals of any practical question and of disengaging them from the accidental and transient features that may overlie these–the power, to use a familiar expression, of getting down to bedrock?" This is not a matter of learning. The finest specimens of culture may not be learned in the academic sense. Academic learning pushed beyond a degree detracts from real culture and betrays a warped, ponderous mentality. Lincoln was possessed of this supreme common sense, having read few books but read them thoroughly. To deny culture to one like Lincoln or Shakespeare because he knew small Latin and less Greek and was not half so scholarly as his contemporary Ben or the other University wits, to refuse the virtue to a living exemplar like Gandhiji because his reading or scholastic acquirements may not compare with those of a college Don or many a globe-trotter is to attenuate the conception of culture itself, invite ridicule upon it and affect its prime philosophical validity.

The supreme sense of a Shakespeare, a Lincoln and Gandhi, to bring together the most dissimilar categories, is nothing else but common sense in the high acceptation of the word, ‘the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge’ not derived from books in the main but distilled direct from observation and grounded in humanity which is the source of all their leadership, their divination of the popular mind and their extraordinary hold on large masses of men. When culture is founded on common sense it will be possible for the temple of Humanity to be raised irrespective of the creeds of different people. Common sense emphasises the essential solidarity of men whatever their political and economic policies and apparent clash of interests. Intellectually society may be heterogeneous but there is no bar to understanding in the realm of the spirit.

Culture needs to be made level with the understanding of the meanest, divested of its exclusiveness, intellectual superiority and be permeated with common sense reflected in the daily modes of life, at once elevating the tone of individual perfection and contributing to the advancement of social ends. It is time that we recognised the heart for the great fountain of all culture. Sympathy, a native root of benevolence, are the source of all disinterested service. In the final estimate the man culture is one who so far identifies himself with his kind through primary affections that he will regard the least social injury as a violation of culture and accept a Buddha-like charity and forgiveness as the great law of life. Newman has it "It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain." The idea is repeated by John Cowper Powys: "Where our true sophisticated culture shows itself is in our attitude to the unimportant, the negligible, the weak, the mean spirited the pig-headed. In relation to ‘one’s fellows, culture implies an earth-deep humility. Like that charity defined by St. Paul, it is not puffed up." (290, The Meaning of Culture.)

The man of culture is indeed the very genius of pity, first and last. Once the exaggerated intellectual standards are disclaimed, it will be easy enough to recognise our moral kinship with the humblest in the land, widen the sphere of our beneficence, and, ignoring the artificial and historical accidents of race and creed and country, shape the contours of the Religion of Man crystallising the poet’s faith: "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!" The language of the heart needs no interpreter but directly communicates itself and communicates itself to good purpose. Culture is the triumph of common sense and this sensus communis,–lucid perception coupled with sincere accomplishment–is the only hope of our civilisation at bay.