Culture and Anarchy

National Review, Sept 26, 1994 by Frederick Turner

By Matthew Arnold, edited by Samuel Lipman, with commentary by Maurice Cowling, Gerald Graff, Samuel Lipman, and Steven Marcus (Yale, 289 pp., $30)

EVERYBODY knows those last fatalistic lines of Arnold's "Dover Beach":

And we are here as on a

darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms

of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash

by night.

Yale's useful new edition of Culture and Anarchy is an excellent way of exploring discursively this poetic insight, which many observers find prophetic of our present-day cultural predicament.

Arnold's basic aim is to defend high culture as useful to society. He argues that it is the excellence of the citizens rather than the representativeness of their government that is essential to a healthy society and true progress. In the light of the then-recent Reform Bill, which extended the franchise to a much wider section of the British population, he writes that the chief law of democracy is the permission it gives to "do as one likes"--that is, to follow the impulses of one's ordinary self, not one's best self He rejects the argument that democratic institutions themselves tend to enlighten and educate--rather, they corrupt, by giving free rein to the aristocratic tendency toward unintellectual high-spirited barbarity, the middle-class tendency toward materialistic narrow-minded philistinism, and the lower-class tendency toward violence, sentiment, prejudice, and drink. The anarchy spawned by "doing as one likes' expresses itself in the darkling plain of willful dissent, religious and ethnic intolerance, spiritual emptiness, greed, intellectual relativism, and riot.

Accepting democracy as inevitable, and indeed necessary in the long run, Arnold brings culture to the rescue. What is culture? He describes it as a blending of the Hebraic impulse toward moral perfection and right action with the Hellenistic impulse toward clarity of thought and right reason. True culture blends sweetness (beauty and subtle decorum) with light (critical reflection). The cultured person, liberated from the self-deceptions of the flesh and the indolence of the aesthetic by the Hebraic element, and released from the "machinery" of economic interest and political power by the Hellenistic element, follows only reason and the will of God. Cultivated people manage to escape and become alienated from their inherited class and ethnic limitations into a wider, more humane universality, by means of some combination of natural potential and education. The health of a society depends on increasing by education the numbers of the cultured.

What kind of education should this be? In Culture and Anarchy Arnold reiterates his belief that the "best that is known and thought in the world" is recognizable as such to a cultured person, and if properly presented to any human being has the power to transform him into an arbiter of goodness, truth, and beauty in his own right. Looking toward the example of French and German education, Arnold demands that the state establish an educational system that will pass on the sacred flame. He calls upon the Anglican Church to give up the remnants of its dogmatic and local religious entanglements, and to become the unifying moral guide of this educational renaissance.

There is much in Arnold's essay that is relevant to our current situation in America, or so it appears to the commentators in this volume--with the exception of Maurice Cowling. Mr. Cowling argues that Culture and Anarchy is too deeply rooted in its local historical conditions to apply to us, and that its politics cannot be detached from a religious argument that is now irrelevant. Further, he warns conservatives that Arnold's own concept of religion is so latitudinarian and cut off from historical traditions of worship that it cannot be used as a unifying source of social authority.

A lively debate rages, however, between the liberal pluralist Gerald Graff and the more conservative Steven Marcus and Samuel Lipman.

Marcus and Lipman argue in different ways but from similar standpoints that we have anarchy, that we need a common culture, and that Arnold's vision of culture should be an inspiration. But though neither has given up the struggle, both seem to despair about our cultural prospects. Both agree that Arnold's faith in the state as the final guarantor of an excellent education was fatally misplaced. Both believe that cultural education in America is almost irreparable. Both seem to dismiss Arnold's strange ecumenical, ethical, evolutionary, and historical version of religion as not having the backbone to attract the allegiance of any but intellectuals. Both concede the circularity of Arnold's notion that the best cultural artifacts are made and recognized only by the best appreciators of them, and the best appreciators become so by contemplating the best artifacts. Though one can agree with almost everything both Mr. Marcus and Mr. Lipman say, we are left with a sort of invitation to read Arnold in a spirit of melancholy appreciation for a style that is dying, and as a diagnostician of our inevitable doom. What, then, of Mr. Graff?