A Summary of F.R Leavis: "Mass Civilization and Minority Culture"

In "Mass Civilization and Minority Culture", F.R.Leavis says that culture belongs to the minority of society, in where the appreciation of art and literature depends. and that "Culture is only for a few who are capable of unprompted, first hand judgment".

Cultural conservatism then is still kept with a few small minority, who are capable of endorsing and appreciating such first hand judgment by genuine personal response. To this Minority of people, is where culture lies within, and to this view, Leavis agrees with what Matthew Arnold argued in his book "Culture and Anarchy" which he asserted that culture only belongs to the elite of people who appreciate all forms of beauty and art. 

In another part, Leavis stated that this minority which preserve the best-quality of culture, are capable not only of appreciating great figures in literature and art such as "Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Baudelaire, Hardy...etc" but of recognizing their latest successors constitute the consciousness of the race "or of a branch of it" at a given time. He adds on that: "For such capacity does not belong merely to an isolated aesthetic realm: it implies responsiveness to theory as well as to art, to science and philosophy in so far as these may affect the sense of the human situation and of the nature of life." 

Leavis claims that only upon this minority, where the power of experiencing and profiting by the finest human experience of the past is where it can be achieved, they conserve the most perishable parts of tradition, as well as they are the only whom we can depend on to interpret all that was hidden in the history and the picturesque beauty of humankind.

Later on, Leavis warns that Culture is at crisis today, where all commonplace is more widely accepted than understood, and the realization of what the crisis portends does not seem to be common. He included a work of anthropology called "Middletown" where there is in detail how the automobile (to take one instance) has, in a few years, radically affected religion, broken up the family, and revolutionized social custom. He adds: "Change has been so catastrophic that the generations find it hard to adjust themselves to each other, and parents are helpless to deal with their children". Which means that this example of Middletown refers to America and not to England, and that it's been recognized that such a rapid change has taken place in America in the last decades, and that its effects had been increased by the acceptance of its peoples. Yet, Leaves warns  that the same process is taking place in England too, and that the Western world generally is at an acceleration. He adds that: "We are being Americanized", in which he later says that the effect applies even more disastrously to the films, because it has so much power and potent influence on the masses. And that the films provide the main form of recreation in the civilized world, in which they involve surrender, under conditions of hypnotic receptivity, to the cheapest emotional appeals, appeals the more insidious because they are associated with "a compellingly vivid illusion of actual life". Leavis argues that the result may come as a serious damage to the "standard of living".

He later mentioned that in today's world, where distractions have come to beset the life of the mind, and that there seems every reason to believe that the average cultivated person of a century ago was a very much competent reader than his modern representative. He says that today: "the boundaries are gone, and the arts and literatures of different countries and periods have flowed together". Later on, Leavis lightened us with a quote by Mr T.S Eliot where he describes the intellectual situation: "When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it becomes  increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not". 

Therefore, "culture" does only belong to the critically adult public, then, is very small indeed: they are a very small minority who are capable of fending for themselves amid the smother of new books. Concerning the topic, he mentioned that this problem has been quite solved in America by the Book of Month Club, and similar organizations, as well as in England with The Book Society and The Book Guild.

Furthermore, he gives an example of the Book Guild's review, where the word "Highbrows" was mentioned, which literally means "an intellectual person". He later says that Shakespeare was not a "high-brow", because there were no "high-brows" in Shakespeare's time. I quote: "It was possible for Shakespeare to write plays that were at once popular drama and poetry that could be appreciated only by an educated minority". Later, he gave examples of books such as: "The waster land, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Ulysses or To the Lighthouse" and then stated that these words are read only by a very small specialized pubic and are beyond the reach of the vast majority of those who consider themselves educated. The age in which the finest creative talent tends to be employed in works of this kind is the age that has given currency to the term "high-brow". Yet, it would be as true to say that the attitude implicit in "high-brow" causes this use of talent as the converse. Leaves adds on that: "the minority is being cut off as never before from the powers that rule the world".

Briefly, Leavis says if it is vain to resist the triumph of machinery, then it is equally vain to console us with the promise of a 'mass culture' that shall be utterly new. It would, no doubt, be possible to argue that such a "mass culture" might be better than the culture we are losing, yet it would be futile: the "utterly new" surrenders everything that can interest us. Later on, he questions sadly what hope is there to offer? The vague hope that recovery must come. At the end, he advises that: "It is for us to be as aware as possible of what is happening, and, if we can to 'keep open our communication with the future' "