Three Cultures

There are three forms of culture: worldly culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self-development.

     [Ali Hujwiri, Revelation of the Veiled]

I’ve used this quote as an epigram before; I saw it many, many years ago, used for the same purpose in Idries Shah’s, The Sufis, and it made an impression on me even then—pre-Information Age and all of that—because it refers to information and, in part, inverts the order of layers within a culture. In the modern view “self actualization,” as the last level is called in modernese (by Abraham Maslow discussing hierarchies of needs), is till at the top, but religious culture is viewed as something we’ve progressed beyond to reach the current pinnacle of secular civilization.

Hujwiri, a Sufi teacher, lived a long time ago—990-1077—and clearly had a very sophisticated view of culture, as expressed when he described the basic level as engaged in seeking information. That’s all that’s really possible—at the worldly level. What comes above it transcends “the world” as we usually understand it.

Got to thinking about this today as I was pondering Yeat’s poem, The Second Coming, in which appear those famous words, “the center cannot hold.” Yeats (1865-1939) belongs to elite culture if anybody does; and beyond most poets he was interested in matters mystical. And he saw the problem, to be sure. Worldly culture, even when he wrote that poem, in 1920, was already overwhelming the second layer for many people: religious culture. Yeats saw that as a great disaster because he saw no hope. The Second Coming he darkly foresaw was that of something beastly:

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

Well, perhaps he failed to look far enough ahead—or his mysticism wasn’t deep enough. What he describes slouching towards Bethlehem to be born was modernity itself, not that which will follow its falling apart.

All this then led to another thought. If we look at Hujwiri’s categories, what seems to be clear is that the bottom and the top layers are always present—unless some plague or atomic war sends us back to hunting and gathering again; even that would leave one in place. Organized societies are a kind of necessary foundation for anything higher—except the elite culture at the very top. The elite culture is also always there; it springs from individual endowments. On this view, anyway, the middle layer, religious culture, is the most important. It provides social cohesion and is the vehicle by which masses of people can raise themselves, with the help of teachings and obedience (a despised word in this day) to realize transcendence—which is Job 1 in Sufi thought.