Culture and Anarchy: A Serious Consideration

Today I finally turned the last page on Culture and Anarchy. Perhaps I should summarize it after all, as fairly as I can. Matthew Arnold wrote it in the 1860s, and even though this was about 30 years after the Reform Bill that amongst other things finally allowed more adult men [to vote]— not all adult men, because over two thousand years after Solon it was still believed that the men who were poorest were not men who should vote — it remained a period at which ordinary economic and political rights and social standing for the middle class were disputed. He was also much taken by the Oxford Movement, which as I understand it was a conservative tendency to want the Anglican Church (which was highly institutionalized, integrated with the monarchy and the government and the elite, because until after the essays of Culture and Anarchy were published, Oxford University still administered religious tests making sure its students were Anglican before conferring Master's degrees, etc.) to take up archaic rituals again. Of course a leader, Cardinal John Henry Newman, went over to the Catholic Church, which I imagine must have derailed matters a little. And in contrast, the middle and lower classes were scampering into churches and sects outside of the established church — and influential 'Dissenters,' gaining influence with liberal parliamentarians, wanted to weaken the state's intertwinement with the Anglican Church. This Dissenting uprising also fought successfully against the continued use of state taxes to prop up the Catholic Church in an Ireland that the Queen of England still ruled at the time.

Although he identifies himself as one of the 'middle class' and as very much in favour of any established church, which Matthew Arnold considers leads to a better and a less discomfiting religion than zealous individual fumbling after new creeds, he is very much the elite Anglican. His father was an Anglican, and head of Rugby School, and (like his son) became a professor at Oxford University.

I may be caricaturing Arnold when I say that he is trying to claw back privileges and equality from the rising middle classes and working classes beneath him, tooth and nail. But he has so many class neuroses in general as evidenced by his disdainful remarks about 'Philistines' (middle class), 'Populace' (working class), and 'Barbarians' (aristocracy) alike, that whatever he may say about dispassionately letting reason and pure motives shine on social questions, I find it hard to discern much magnanimity or enlightenment here.

His attitudes toward religion: Although I was wondering if this interpretation is inaccurate, given how much he read the Bible and theologians, etc. —  I had the impression Arnold did not think that one should believe in religion enthusiastically ('Hebraism'). He believed we must keep it in firm bondage to secular intellectuality ('Hellenism') and only believe as much of it as feels comfortably uplifting.

He also criticizes 'doers,' whether it's liberal politicians who want to address sociopolitical ills without deliberating about what is the most agreeable way of doing it; or believers in religion who want to worship with 'fire and strength.' I imagine he wouldn't have approved of Martin Luther King Jr. at the time as he 'made people too uncomfortable.' What Matthew Arnold seems not to realize is that the cause of fixing the lack of coal in his neighbour's hearth will of course feel less urgent if his own hearth is well-filled — for emotional reasons rather than logical ones.

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A passage or two suggests the duty of a cultivated person to spread enlightenment to other people. I have an absolute horror of telling anybody what to do, if it isn't sanctioned by their own conscience and free will. But now I perhaps get more why someone who felt intellectually strong and well read might want to bend others to her way of doing things; it cleared me up a little on the magisterial ways that my father's mother sometimes exemplified.

Ideally, Matthew Arnold's 'culture' is what I think of as 'cultivation.' The best books, the best music, the best philosophy, the best lessons from history and foreign affairs — learning all this and also steering to high principles. I am in favour of culture, with the modern meaning, as well as cultivation. But he rarely mentions it except when he mentions e.g. the painter Mr. Frith.

'Lower' culture lends colour to my days, it mirrors a broader part of the society around me and helps me feel less lonely, it inspires a few of the highest endeavours in the arts, and, like the proverbial flower in the wall, it is miraculous how it springs from the deserts of existence. It makes me happy, sometimes, and it makes me happier than the finest dialogue of Plato when things are not going so well because it is very much alive.

I also think, by the way, that religion can be a beautiful and helpful thing even if unleavened by classical philosophy and modern skepticism. Like any impulse toward a better understanding with one's fellow human beings and a kinder standard for one's self, it can be a cultivation in itself.