Culture And/Or Anarchy

Like most Americans of my generation, I was introduced to Matthew Arnold in high school; the Arnold of "Dover Beach" and the Arnold of Culture and Anarchy. I remember finding his world-view stark, if not dark, but deeply humane. I also remember resisting it, to some degree: I wasn't ready for what appeared to me then to be a kind of doleful pessimism, but what appears to me now as sober late-Romantic realism. In any event, in graduate school I rediscovered Arnold as a religious critic whose views corresponded closely to my own: religion (as Harold Bloom puts it) is "spilled poetry." The great hidden precursor of all religious critics in the Arnoldian vein is, therefore, Alfarabi.

Lionel Trilling's intellectual biography of Arnold, first published in 1939, is a work of consummate scholarship and critical, literary intelligence. Arnold was worthy of a great biographer (no less than Samuel Johnson) and, like Johnson, he was fortunate enough to find one. Trilling truly rose to the occasion when he took on his subject and the result is a book that stands alongside Arnold's own work as a shining example of all that Arnold stood for.

Trilling does not arrive at Arnold's masterpiece, Culture and Anarchy, until the ninth chapter of his book. The first eight chapters prepare us for it--if anything could provide that service. His opening paragraph is priceless:

"Time and familiarity have faded the drama which lies in the title of Arnold's book and have obscured the tragedy it implies. Culture and Anarchy--culture or anarchy: it is a grim alternative, for Arnold's culture, as he was careful to point out, does not signify what the word commonly does, a vague, belletristic gentility; it means many things but nothing less than reason experienced as a kind of grace by each citizen, the conscious effort of each man to come to the realization of his complete humanity. And upon this urge to perfection, upon this 'possible Socrates' in each man's breast, Arnold bases the sanction which alone can prevent anarchy--the authority of the State. It is so much a counsel of perfection that it becomes a counsel of despair."

It is difficult to imagine how anyone could have summarized Arnold's book more succinctly, deftly, accurately, or hinted at the depth of pathos that drove Arnold's project--no less than Alfarabi's Principles of the Opinions of the People of the Excellent City composed a thousand years before. Utopias inevitably possess this quality because those who are moved to imagine them and record their fond imaginings find inescapable the fact that, as Wordsworth sang, "the world is too much with us; late and soon..."

And so it is. Consequently, all counsels of perfection become counsels of despair. This makes them, however, no less necessary. For without them, we too easily default to the status quo, and convince ourselves that mediocrity is the best we can hope for and that injustice is our lot.

Arnold's theory of culture, like Alfarabi's political science (falsafah), is an act of resistance: a refusal to go quietly. It is an insistence that a better world, in this life, is our due: so let us dream freely and, with resolution, work for the realization of our dreams.