The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (Penguin Modern Classics) by Hoggart Richard

Author:Hoggart, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-14-119180-5
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

E. Indifferentism: ‘Personalization’ and ‘Fragmentation’

If tolerance is good, if to share the views of the group is good, if to ‘enjoy life while yer can’ is good; if, in addition, all men are free and equal, and life is constantly changing and progressing, then there must eventually follow a loss of a sense of order, of value, and of limits. If that is good which is the latest in the endless line and which meets the wishes of the greatest number, then quantity becomes quality and we arrive at a world of monstrous and swirling undifferentiation. This kind of undifferentiation can lead, as Matthew Arnold pointed out a century ago, to ‘indifferentism’, to an endless flux of the undistinguished and the valueless, to a world in which every kind of activity is finally made meaningless by being reduced to a counting of heads.

It seems to me a reaction from this, a drawing-back from the emptiness which is threatened, that encourages the present fondness for ‘sincerity’ as an end in itself. There comes to mind the extensive older charity of the working-classes and its relation to their mistrust of abstractions (‘It doesn’t matter what y’ do so long as yer ’eart’s in the right place’). Nowadays this attitude is expressed more and more, precisely because it does give some sort of measure in a world where measure is otherwise very difficult to find. ‘Well, at any rate, ’e meant well, and that’s all that matters’ may become a cover for the lack of any confidence in the ability to reach a moral decision. Sincerity is clearly not enough: but it has to do where there seems to be nothing else.

Thence flow wider evasions, an increasing use of phrases like, ‘After all, it’s only natural’, and ‘Well, it does no one any harm’ and ‘It does y’ good anyway, they say’. Or the evasions in language which make ‘orthodoxy’ or ‘authority’ automatically pejorative; and make gambling on the pools ‘investments’; a history of the social importance of ideas could be traced in word-changes like these. Everything is ‘a matter of taste’, and ‘one man’s meat is another man’s poison’. Usually there is a rider indicating the existence of an undefined but generally agreed outer boundary. ‘Mind you, I don’t hold with…’; and from that comes some sort of assurance that after all there is an order somewhere. If this were carried forward, to meet a testing problem in ordinary life, the shock would be great; but in day-to-day personal life earlier sanctions still to a great extent prevail. Yet no division like this can be healthy or more than temporary in the long run.

The situation is made worse by the fact that there is a sense in which, although no authority is felt to be justifiable, authority can be increasingly leaned upon. The use of phrases like, ‘They ought to do something about it’, ‘They ought to get us out of it’, ‘They ought to do this about the Health Service and that about the schools’, may occur more easily against the background described in this chapter.

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