Unbelievably boring. ( )

The main reason that I read Culture and Anarchy is that A. N. Wilson, in his book God's Funeral, wittily expressed his dislike of Matthew Arnold. (God's Funeral is not an argument for atheism; in a later edition, Wilson, who based the title on a Thomas Hardy poem, expressed his chagrin at realizing that people took it that way.) Wilson argued that although Arnold thought religion was important in culture, he saw it only as as a means of “uplift”, and had no concept of the numinous or spiritual, indeed didn't really believe in the existence of God. Of course, I believe that he also confused Arnold's terms: the Barbarians were the nobility (who put great store in sports), the Philistines were the middle-class and gentry, and below them were the Populace, whom Arnold seems to have alternately pitied and feared. He had a real terror of too much independence and seemed to see demonstrations and riots as pretty much the same thing.

I personally could not get through this fast enough. This is one of the most tedious books I have ever read. The extremely long introduction put me off, especially since I felt Arnold was using “we” when he should have been using “I.” I don't care how often people do it, I think it's an unacceptable rhetorical trick. Some of the problems with the book are simply that it was produced in a different age. Arnold names a lot of his contemporaries, men who are now little known to the general population, especially people who don't live in Britain. I read the free edition, but if one really wants to read it seriously, I recommend an annotated edition. He spends a lot of time reacting to critics, which probably meant more then, and explaining why he doesn't like certain philosophers. Not surprisingly for this era, he writes in a convoluted style which is sometimes difficult to untangle, and tends to use the same phrases over and over. I also have some trouble taking his favorite phrase “sweetness and light”, as he meant it: I am accustomed to using it ironically, whereas he means “beauty and intelligence,” according to Wikipedia.

Beyond these, the book is extremely repetitious and not particularly well organized. Much of this is probably because the book is a combination of originally separate essays and needed more stringent editing. The weakest part of the book is simply that I find Arnold unconvincing. He uses broad generalizations, because-I-say-so, and what-we-all-[supposedly]-know, to make his case. It seems odd to me that Arnold resents culture being described as a smattering of Greek and Latin and the reading of ancient literature, but then leaves leaves Latin passages untranslated. Arnold means to convince us of the importance of culture, which he defines as the pursuit of perfection, and arises from a mixture of the Hellenic and the Hebraic. Whatever is not culture is mechanical and worthless. As an example, he views the pursuit of physical fitness as an end in itself as mechanical – it should be pursued as a means to the end of perfection.

Although Arnold calls himself a liberal, he seems to have been a knee-jerk conservatism in most cases.
He does not believe in religious pluralism – he thinks a country requires either a national church, e.g, the Church of England, or a cosmopolitan one, e.g., the Roman Catholic Church. He is vehemently against the Non Conformist churches; he views the congregations as too devout and too narrow-minded (too Hebraistic). As an American, this put me off, I believe strongly in the separation of church and state which Arnold deplores. In Arnold's time, only men belonging to the Church of England could attend Oxford and Cambridge, and that is how Arnold wanted it to remain. It seems to me that this might get in the way of spreading culture. An exception is his oft repeated desire to see the Roman Catholic Church, actually the most popular church in Ireland, get a fair share of the property and government held by the Church of Ireland, rather than merely disestablish the C of I. I'm not quite sure whether he wants the Catholic Church to be established, or to share establishment with the C of I.

His conservatism comes out in other ways – he opposed a bill that would have divided the property of a man who died intestate equally among his children. This, as he saw it, was an attack on the aristocracy, who were so badly needed after the fall of Rome in the fifth century. Actually, the nobility often had entails on their property, and so it passed mainly to the oldest son unaffected by any will. Arnold may have sensed that people would fail to see why they should be governed by the needs of the fifth century, and argued that it was a dangerous thing to interfere in the prerogatives of the aristocracy and wanted to wait until education convinced them to end their own hegemony.

Arnold was criticized in his own time for his unwillingness to support legal reforms, particularly the idea of allowing a man to marry his deceased wife's sister, which he mentions several times. He seems to have considered these to be unimportant and even counterproductive. What the people needed was culture, not an improvement in their physical conditions. Like many critics of broad social ills, he can diagnose problems, and produces the occasional gem, but is rather vague about solutions. He is also a bit vague on how we go about acquiring culture. How will we know when we have achieved it? He apparently thinks that all cultured people will agree on all subjects. Working in a public library, I am made constantly aware of the many, many books of contradictory advice that have been written. This seems like an aspiration, not a likely achievement, and a somewhat idiosyncratic one at that. We shall never get around to improving physical conditions if we wait for a “cultured, perfected” society.

I place a very high value on things like improved medicine, better public health and education, better housing conditions, and so forth, however “mechanical” Arnold finds them. Even if these things are not essential to Arnold's idea of “culture”, it seems to me that they are in themselves good and humane, and I fail to see why Arnold apparently thinks they block the acquisition of culture. Arnold might have benefited from the proverb “The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good.” I read that in Hindu philosophy, the first thing needed for a spiritually fulfilled life is a means of support, for it is ridiculous to suppose that most people can focus on philosophical and cultural matters when they are struggling to supply their family's next meal. ( )

Trying to apply a starred rating to this thing is impossible. The assumptions and sense of what counted as evident reason that held 150 years ago don't really lend themselves to being parsed that neatly. I'll try to get a better review together soon.

Later: here's what I came up with: https://wp.me/p4LPys-lP.

I had heard others speak of this book as if it were a cult classic. Any wonder. There are so many things going on in this work. I am still trying to see where Matthew Arnold fits in with the likes of Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Herbert Spencer. He was a professor of poetry by profession, and his niece, Mrs Humphrey Ward, became a metonym for a conservative wowser. So he was hardly a John Stuart Mill, yet he was also rather short of being a Herbert Spencer. He seemed to be the reverse of a modern Australian Liberal (not liberal) - he did not support free trade but looked to the cultural elite, while remaining socially conservative. The brief introduction eludes to the lack of definitions in the work, and this is supported by a critique of the work by Henry Sidgwick entitled The Prophet of Culture (provided as an appendix). Indubitably, the two were friends, but with some rather major philosophical differences. There are extensive notes and these are important due to the number of then-contemporary social, political, cultural, and religious debates (as indicated by the list of important thinkers above) that would be lost on most modern readers (or me, at least). These are rather important to understanding the context but I suspect the different disciplinary groups did not necessarily cross paths in their intellectual outputs. For my own memory, it is useful to outline some of Arnold's key ideas. First, culture is the seeking (as opposed to achieving) perfection in the pursuit of reason and the will of God. The phrase "sweetness and light" is used by Arnold to refer to the pursuit of beauty (in the Hellenistic sense) and light as intellect. Sidgwick counters with "fire and strength" as being more important to improving society (referring, in particular, to religion). Arnold navigates two approaches to understanding culture (albeit somewhat difficult to articulate a precise definition of either) as Hebraising (referring to the Hebrew penchant for religious discipline) versus Hellenism (referring to the Ancient Greek aesthetic and penchant for reason). Arnold brings in the idea of class here (something completely overlooked by many modern works that assume the myth of egalitarianism in contemporary society is not a myth at all), and names the classes the Barbarians (the aristocracy), the Philistines (the middle class) and the Populace (the working class). Given the book was published in 1869, the "Populace" was still a few decades away from any formal political power, and class-based rioting was emerging as a problem for the likes of Burke (who had issues with the Lockean and Rousseauian conceptions of the social contract. Indeed, Arnold was a form of anti-Jacobin). Arnold was closer to Hobbesian support for a strong State, but tempered by the idea that representatives of each class should strive to represent their ideal best selves (as a class rather than individuals), and the idea of the State was to enable such striving for social and political perfection. There were a few snippets that drew lines where the State should and should not intervene, relating to Nonconformism and antidisestablishmentarianism (I always wanted to use that word - but I must qualify, it relates to then-contemporary debates over the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland [refer to the Irish Church Act 1869], rather than the Church of England - but I had to use the word!) rather than intervening to protect the poor (some Malthusian debate was definitely going on at this time in history). Nevertheless, Arnold was opposed to government "control for control's sake" (p. 170) over education policy, and preferred the Continental approaches to education that had clear strategic objectives rather than simply government control. Sidgwick puts some of this confusion to rest - he is by no means a fan of this particular piece of Arnold's work but empathises with his cause to strengthen society by increasing its culture. Here, Sidgwick's essay does a great service to Arnold's theme, and the two works together are important. Sidgwick (p. 172) surmises that Arnold "wishes for reconciliation of antagonisms" - be these Hebraism versus Hellenism, class differences, or culture and religion (or sweetness and light versus fire and strength) - in an effort to improve society. Without Sidgwick's contribution, it would be easy to miss Arnold's point. But that does not make the work of any less value. Some of these statements have been made by others (including the introduction), and Arnold's belief in the "law of perfection" reminds me of a scene from The Last Samurai where Tom Cruise narrates: "From the moment they wake they devote themselves to the perfection of whatever they pursue". This was a difficult read. Not like Sir Walter Scott's work where one can readily get bogged down in Gaelic dialogue, but because numerous reference to the notes (there are as many notes as pages) are necessary to understand the context, and there is so much jam-packed in this otherwise short essay, that it takes a while to sink in. While that should not diminish the importance of the work, if the attitude to difficult works today is anything to go by - where we are routinely told by lazy egoists (as opposed to egotists) if we cannot explain something to a three year-old child we don't understand it ourselves - then Arnold is amiss. But he was so close to being a futurist that this work ought to be more widely read, not as a cult classic (which arguably it deserves to be), but because we are reaching the culmination-point Arnold seemed to warn about,-
should we ever relegate "sweetness and light" to "fire and strength". ( )

This philosophical dissertation on culture defines it as the study of perfection, the harmonious balancing of one's intellectual and artistic nature with the need for purpose and action. Despite its 19th century provenance, the book is illuminated by Arnold's clarity of thought and skill in language, which deliver an important and timely message to those of us today who wish to retain some shreds of humanity.