Bell published this short book in 1928, though he says in the (effusive) dedication to his sister-in-law, Virginia Woolf, that he had been thinking about it for decades. It is in seven chapters, and although I did not always agree with him, I could at least follow him through the first six. And then it takes quite a turn.
Like “culture”, “civilization” is one of those words not easily explained. When I was a boy I watched Kenneth Clark’s program Civilization on television, and he found it hard to define as well, though I thought there was something to what he said. Referring to the Norse invaders of Britain and Ireland, Clark wrote:
Civilization means something more than energy and will and creative power: something the early Norsemen hadn’t got, but which, even in their time, was beginning to appear in Western Europe. How can I define it? Well, very shortly, a sense of permanence. The wanderers and the invaders were in a continual state of flux. They didn’t feel the need to look forward beyond the next March or the next voyage or the next battle. And for that reason it didn’t occur to them to build stone houses, or to write books. ... Civilized man, or so it seems to me, must feel that he belongs somewhere in space and time; that he consciously looks forward and looks back.
Bell is after something different. He claims there have only been three “highly civilized” societies: Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, and Eighteenth-Century France (until 1789). A somewhat civilized society can still produce great creativity, a Shakespeare or a Mozart, but that’s not his definition of highly civilized. Nor is it advances in material wealth, or social conditions, or political institutions.
For Bell, a highly civilized society requires a critical mass of highly civilized individuals, a mass large enough to influence the character of the whole of society, even if not every member of that society is literate. These highly civilized individuals are cosmopolitan, possess a healthy sense of humor, and care little for material comforts beyond the basics. They have two main characteristics: a respect for reason (and a liberalism that is skeptical of what we can know, willing to entertain all questions as open); and a sense of values, caring about the right things.
The right things are what was considered right at Cambridge University circa 1900 in the lectures given by G.E. Moore: love and friendship, the creation and deep appreciation of beauty, and a disinterested search for knowledge and understanding, all as intrinsic goods. Bell’s son Quentin recalls that when Virginia Woolf read the book that had been dedicated to her, she found interesting the sections on what civilization was not, but in the end she found what civilization was consisted of “a lunch party at No. 50 Gordon Square.”
The subject of Bell’s final chapter is how a highly civilized society might be created.
Now I have always agreed with pluralism as articulated by Isaiah Berlin: there are many good things we might want for a society, but for the most part achieving any more of one of them typically brings a cost in the form of another good. I would like to have high average standards of living, extensive personal freedoms, and a commitment to greater equality across people (whether in resources or welfare or capabilities or some combination of these). But the pursuit of greater achievements in any one of these often (not always) involves costs in terms of the other two. Politics is how we work these questions out.
Bell wants to add “highly civilized” to that list of goods, realizes there will be tradeoffs (as he is right to do), but then stakes his claim:
No one can become highly civilized – and henceforth I use the term ‘highly civilized’ to distinguish the civilizers from the simply ‘civilized’ who take colour from them – no one, I say, can become highly civilized without a fair measure of material security. ...to live a highly civilized life a man must be free from material cares: he must have food, warmth, shelter, elbow-room, leisure, and liberty. ...How are the civilizing few to be supplied with the necessary security and leisure save at the expense of the many?
The answer is that nohow else can they be supplied: their fellows must support them as they have always done. Civilization requires the existence of a leisured class, and a leisured class requires the existence of slaves – of people, I mean, who give some part of their surplus time and energy to the support of others. If you feel that such inequality is intolerable, have the courage to admit that you can dispense with civilization and that equality, not good, is what you want. Complete human equality is compatible only with complete savagery.
But … can we not try to spread the sweetness and light of civilization more widely? When Keynes only two years later published “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” did he not envision the benefits of leisure more widely spread?
Bell goes on:
A man who is educated to make a living cannot well be educated to make the most of life. To put a youth in the way of experiencing the best a liberal and elaborate education to the age of twenty-four or twenty-five is essential; at the end of which the need for leisure remains as great as ever, seeing that only in free and spacious circumstances can delicate and highly trained sensibilities survive. How many thousands of barristers, civil servants, and men of business, who left Oxford or Cambridge equipped to relish the best, have become, after thirty years of steady success, incapable of enjoying anything better than a little tipsy lust or sentimental friendship, cheap novels, cheaper pictures, vulgar music, the movies, golf, smoking-room stories, and laying down the law. As for physical labour; if anyone pretends that after a good day’s digging or plumbing, hunting or shooting, he is in a mood to savour the subtler manifestations of the spirit, he is talking nonsense. ...
On inequality all civilizations have stood. The Athenians had their slaves; the class that gave Florence her culture was maintained by a voteless proletariat; only the Esquimaux and their like enjoy the blessings of social justice.
His three examples of highly civilized societies were all highly unequal, therefore inequality is a necessary condition?
Will people not revolt at all this? Bell wonders in his final chapter whether Russia or Italy might eventually, though not at first, develop as highly civilized, since it is impossible in a democracy, but Lenin or Mussolini might be the ones to usher in something new.
In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams wrote:
[Moore’s] theory was so attractive to the Bloomsbury group: it managed to reject at once the stuffiness of duty and the vulgarity of utilitarianism.
I don’t think we can blame Moore for this - as Keynes wrote in his posthumously-published “My Early Beliefs”, the students were rather selective in the parts of Moore’s ethical theories they drew from the whole. But it certainly is a good description of Bell, whose ideal of a civilization so closely matches what he and a select few want to enjoy, leaving the toil of the world to others.
I would love in some sense to revive the idea of "civilization" as a compliment rather than a very dull bit of teleological circle-jerking. E.g., what defines a refined, wealthy, successful society, and make that something *contingent*, a result of effort, rather than just "oh dear, my watch is showing 'advanced'". I am with Paul and you on this--what's all this for if not to make beautiful things, care very well for everyone, look after values and ideals even if they're expensive, and so on? Did we run this race in order to be governed by billionaires who insist that everyone must eat gruel and suffer because otherwise there might not be enough money for at least four lazy rivers in the apocalypse shelter they're building?
This is scintillating and chastening--scintillating in the sense that anyone's aesthetics could really be this refined (and I am loathe to add to that, but I'd plead for Edo), chasening in the sense that my own personal aesthetic leisure has degenerated to IP pap. I should give the Idagio subscription another go.
More seriously, what is all this leisure for if we are not creating something? It seems like civilization is made by homo faber to provide a resplendent plinth for the Eloi.