The Graffiti in the Cathedral. A Very Victorian Stunt.

How bad ideas enabled the philistine supremacy.

Can there be a better example of the philistine supremacy than the graffiti in Canterbury Cathedral? Again and again we see that the people who are in charge impose their philistinism on the public sphere.

One hallmark of this is aesthetic relativism. The editor of the New York Times Book Review not only hasn’t read Middlemarch, but insists that we cannot say that reading Middlemarch is better than reading anything else.

By these lights, art is valued for the meaning we find (or create) within it, not for any inherent quality of the art. If you don’t think Middlemarch matters, so be it.

The graffiti has been defended along those lines. Those involved in the project have said: “Language is the people who speak it, and graffiti is the language of the unheard.” And: “This exhibition intentionally builds bridges between cultures, styles and genres.”

According to this perspective—in which we value the message, not the aesthetics—anything can be art. What matters is the message, not the aesthetics.

The Cathedral has raised hackles because it was not trying to meet aesthetic standards: their aim was sociological. One member of the Cathedral said, for example, that this graffiti made them think more seriously about prayer. They are trying to use modern styles to make ancient theological statements accessible to new audiences and fresh to familiar audiences.

Some people have compared this to Reformation iconoclasm. There is a great difference between the ideological whitewashing of walls because art is deemed to be immoral, and the replacement of one aesthetic for another because art is deemed to be socially constructed. Theocrats and philistines have some resemblances, but they are not the same thing.

What has happened is really too basic to merit any serious historical comparison, but if we must make one, it would be to the nineteenth century, when the Victorians began to impose their new Anglo Catholic aesthetic onto churches. Even Wren’s austere and plain Protestant St. Paul’s had gaudy mosaics pressed upon it.

In their rush to be relevant, the Cathedral authorities are making a Victorian statement of aesthetics: they feel able to impose unsuitable modes onto a historic building for the sake of the new theology and sociology.

There have always been philistines, but this is not iconoclasm, it is the triumph of bad ideas in a stale bureaucracy. Cromwell had to march in and shatter the icons with soldiers. We have allowed bad ideas to infiltrate national life so that the people in charge can calmly allow this nonsense to propagate itself.

And those ideas, very often, came from the academy.

You cannot spend two generations teaching undergraduates Literary and Critical Theory—undergraduates who, very often, lack any other serious philosophical education—and not expect such consequences. Those ideas were argued onto syllabuses for a reason. Once you stop requiring people to read Plato and Kant, but fill them up with Eagleton and Belsey, this is what follows.

Yes, of course, this is not exclusively true; and yes, yes, of course, there are other causes; and yes, yes, I know, there have always been philistines. And yes, the influence of these ideas has sometimes been direct, but has more often been diffuse.

But teaching thousands upon thousands of young people books like Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory has been a major contribution to the problem we now face.

That art requires us to understand it in context in no way necessitates or forces the conclusion that it has no inherent value. But that is what Eagleton asserts. His criticism is all axioms, no logic.

Eagleton writes:

John M. Ellis has argued that the term ‘literature’ operates rather like the word ‘weed’: weeds are not particular kinds of plant, but just any kind of plant which for some reason or another a gardener does not want around. Perhaps ‘literature’ means something like the opposite: any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly. As the philosophers might say, ‘literature’ and ‘weed’ are functional rather than ontological terms: they tell us about what we do, not about the fixed being of things.

This is not, in fact, how a good philosopher would talk about these ideas. Eagleton makes a descriptive claim (literature is what people value highly) but treats it as a normative claim (literature ought to be what people value highly). This is tautological axiomatic sociology pretending to be philosophy.

There is no such thing as a literary work or tradition which is valuable in itself, regardless of what anyone might have said or come to say about it. ‘Value’ is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given purposes.

One might expect that such a radical departure from the philosophical tradition that ran from Kant to Murdoch would involve a little more justification than saying “there is no possibility of a wholly disinterested statement”, — but as a Marxist, Eagleton claims the world is ideologically determined and moves on. Literature is literature because of ideology. If you object, you are being determined by your ideology.

Perhaps I am picking on Eagleton. Well, his books sold many copies. His ideas were highly influential. He is the mascot, the standard bearer, for a whole mass of thought and teaching. Curators, writers, publishers, all sorts of people in all sorts of positions of influence, were taught these ideas. They have filtered out into the mainstream. Eagleton and many others normalised ideological relativism. The axioms memed their way to success.

And so we arrive at the graffiti in the Cathedral which speaks to new audiences, which is not iconoclasm, not the forceful destruction and replacement of one order with another, but instead a diminished form of another set of ideas, a paltry ideological statement in garish colours, a stunt.

There is another side to the academy, one that still produces high-quality scholarship, and which knows the difference between philosophy and polemic. It is that side which needs to prevail. Until it does, we can expect the philistine supremacy to continue its gaudy reign.