Third Monday Musing: Charlatans and shopkeepers

Matthew Arnold

The continuing relevance of Matthew Arnold

By Eric Meub

Edith Sitwell once famously quipped that the only people who like Matthew Arnold’s poems are precisely those who dislike poetry. Time has not agreed with Miss Sitwell: Arnold’s work remains, unlike her own, securely within the canon. But there is some truth in her remark. Arnold was not primarily a poet of craft; he was a poet of thought. And his thoughts often found more fruitful expression in his later prose.

Sitwell, portrait by Roger Fry

    Arnold – who is most efficiently approached though the watershed critical biography of Lionel Trilling – was greatly distressed, like many of his mid-nineteenth century contemporaries, by events in the world around him. Like our own times today, his was a world of political tumult at home and abroad, unprecedented technological innovations, and ominous social upheavals in which an apathetic upper class attempted to ignore or contain the increasing enfranchisement of the lower. What made his situation different from ours was that most of these phenomena were new: the Church had never before fallen into such disrepute, communism had never before appealed to so many as a social model, the ideals and aspirations of the working poor had never before been taken so seriously, and the French Revolution was still a recent singularity and a paradox: one part hope and one part terror. 
    The novelty of these circumstances compelled the thinkers and writers of the day to pose questions we no longer ask in our more experienced age. In some respects, not only do we not bother to ask the questions, we don’t seem to realize that questions might still be asked: we assume the train has left the station. As the regional director of my architecture firm so often puts it, “It is what it is.” But, for Arnold, “Literature is a criticism of life.”
    The great thing about reading Arnold is the progress of his thought over the decades. In light of the wars, brutalities, and genocides that have intervened between his time and ours, we see conclusions that are inconsistent with one another, or downright wrong-headed. He was accused of reaction by some and liberality by others. Nonetheless, although he offers few answers, he poses illuminating questions.

Shopkeepers
    Arnold lived in a society of strict and limiting class divisions. And he wanted to correct it. He lobbied to abolish the aristocracy, seeing it as a last vestige of feudalism. It had once been useful, but now monopolized the country’s resources, giving nothing in return. At the other end of the spectrum, Arnold championed the working poor, but felt they needed something to aspire to. The middle class of England was thus Arnold’s primary target. He felt there was no intelligence in the middle class, and that it had, in Trilling’s words, “betrayed the work of the Revolution,” that benchmark of (sometimes) failed but noble aspirations.
    Arnold asks:

What brings about, or rather tends to bring about, a natural, rational life, satisfying the modern spirit? This: the growth of a love of industry, trade, and wealth; the growth of a love of the things of the mind; and the growth of a love of beautiful things. There are body, intelligence, and soul all taken care of.

The French had energized all three of these in their revolution, but what could the English boast of?

The fineness and capacity of a man’s spirit is shown by his enjoyments; your middle class has an enjoyment in its business, we admit, and gets on well in business, and makes money; but beyond that? Drugged with business, your middle class seems to have its sense blunted for any stimulus besides.

The English legislation of the times was geared entirely toward business, and decidedly not towards the French ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity. The artists, the poets, the philosophers – who were the backbone of French ideas of social progress – were seldom invited to the discussion in Arnold’s England.

Adam Smith

    It was upon such grounds that Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, called the English “a nation of shopkeepers.” In perhaps no other way has the United States so imitated her first cultural parent as in her preoccupation with business (shop-keeping) and her simultaneous subversion of revolution.
    Take Apple, for instance. The iPod was a gadget like any other business novelty, but iTunes was supposed to represent a revolution. True, it invented a new system of music distribution, allowing users to download songs and music with unprecedented ease and speed. The immediate benefits seemed staggering at first, and the system electrified contemporary culture. One feature of iTunes that distinguished it from previous music production and packaging was that songs could be individually acquired. In fact, that was now the primary mode of acquiring music: it was after all iTunes, not iAlbums.
    Phonograph-based single-song delivery of music had died for good in the 1990s after having trailed for decades the popularity of album-based music delivery. But, in the early 2000s, Napster offered peer-to-peer digital file sharing, and then iTunes eliminated altogether the commercial packaging of songs. The Album Era was over: consumers could now assemble their own play lists. Cheers all around, right?
    One side effect, however, was that artists could no longer count on expressing their abilities over a range of styles and tempos – within what classical music called a suite. Another casualty was the experimental offering – often the Side B of a 45 rpm or the last track on an album – since every song must sell, sell, sell. Music critics now complain about our culture of one-hit wonders, lack of innovation, and shallow musicality. Wow, Apple, total bummer.
    The music industry will right itself – it always has – but notice how it’s called an industry, and not an art. The point is that these consequences were foreseeable. Did a conversation about goals and outcomes ever happen? If so, it was entirely within the walls of Apple, which is, despite its constant self-congratulation, just another profit-obsessed shopkeeper. Where were the musicians in this discussion? And for those who counter that it was the vinyl phonograph that caused the initial aberration, that just pushes the argument back a generation. How is it possible that we, as freedom-loving Americans, so seldom question our enslavement to the single point-of-view of business.
    Arnold wrote:

Freedom, like Industry, is a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere. You seem to think that you have only to get on the back of your horse Freedom, or your horse Industry, and to ride away as hard as you can, to be sure of coming to the right destination.

It requires a completer set of deciders than just the shopkeepers to discern that the destination is indeed the one we all want.

Charlatans
    Arnold could see in the culture of his day that the horse of Industry had brought his countrymen to a desultory society. He witnessed a middle class whose typical member considered it

the highest pitch of development and civilization when his letters are carried twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell, and from Camberwell to Islington, and if railway-trains run to and fro between them every quarter of an hour. He thinks it is nothing that the trains only carry him from an illiberal, dismal life at Islington to an illiberal, dismal life at Camberwell; and the letters only tell him that such is the life there.

One is reminded of the unprecedented technological undertaking that got us all to Twitter, where the vast majority of membership epistles are variations on the themes, “How r u?” and “LOL!”
    Arnold saw the problem as the divorce of reason from matters of the soul, just as pre-Enlightenment Europe had left out matters of the mind.

The main element of the modern spirit’s life is neither the sense and understanding, nor the heart and imagination; it is the imaginative reason.

With this phrase Arnold attempted a synthesis, and it underscores the previously quoted “Literature is a criticism of life.” This is not a definition of literature, nor does it describe how literature achieves criticism: the statement represents literature’s function. Whether we read a novel that delights us, or a poem that inspires us, or an essay that instructs us, insofar as these types of literature help us to live (in addition to delighting or inspiring or instructing), that ingredient is the criticism of life. And it is a criticism of life in its entirety: physical, intellectual, and emotional. Arnold wrote:

The grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery.

Charles Dickens

    Synthesis was becoming rare in Arnold’s time, as it is in ours. The eighteenth century had believed in civic and intellectual order as the foundation for intellectual greatness. But in the nineteenth century, Romanticism had substituted for societal order the energy of individual genius, that absolute success who has made it “all by himself.” In Arnold’s day, the reality that society helps to shape and support a genius, no matter the power of individual talents, seemed as ridiculous as its opposite would have appeared a century earlier. As Trilling notes, it took the character of Josiah Bounderby in Dickens’s novel Hard Times to begin the exposure of the myth of the self-made man.
    This myth still flourishes in America today. And the damage done to the work of critical synthesis is further undermined by current cultural idiosyncrasies. The internet for instance – most notably sites like Wikipedia – is a limitless treasure chest of information. But, while it provides unprecedented benefits to mankind, it tends to lead users of data retrieval services to think that all data is of the retrievable kind. Yet being able to retrieve a fact is not the same intellectual process as critical thinking, or maintaining in one’s head the perspectives of various sorts of data. Without such intellectual habits, what we do with the data at our disposal is more like what Arnold thought of as “analysis and discovery,” and very different from “synthesis and exposition.”
    But the real danger to synthesis of mind and soul for Arnold was the burgeoning notion of the equality of ideas. This notion of intellectual equality among men came to Europe part and parcel with the concepts of democracy. Democracy assumes each person’s ability to choose what is best, therefore each person must be able to weigh his or her own best interests against that of the state. But the intellectual life is fraught with difficulties and mental rigors, even for the educated few. How many individuals can truly be expected to support such intellectual requirements? To Arnold, the answer seems clear:

The highly-instructed few, and not the scantily-instructed many, will ever be the organ to the human race of knowledge and truth. Knowledge and truth, in the full sense of the words, are not attainable by the great mass of the human race at all.

To modern ears, this is a very disturbing utterance, and it reeks of the class-system Arnold was supposed to be undermining. But “highly instructed,” in Arnold’s day, did not necessarily refer to the aristocracy, although wealth always had greater access to education. Arnold himself was a product of the middle class, as were many of his fellow thinkers. And access to education was no guarantee of being “highly instructed.”
    One test of Arnold’s fear is the unbridled community of thought made possible by the internet. The global access to digital files, and the search-engines in place to sort and filter, have unleashed writers and readers from the previous strangleholds of the major publishers. Never in history have so many written so much. The original concept of an “information superhighway” was the spread of new ideas (hopefully good ones). For the most part, much of that promise may be coming true.
    But in easing the dissemination of new and good ideas, we simultaneously eased the spread of old ideas, ideas that were found, after much energy and dialogue, to be inferior a long time ago. Now that energy and dialogue must commence anew. The few thought-innovators are surrounded by masses of charlatans, and there are few criteria to help the average reader weed them out. Society’s energy is thus wasted in rehashing old terrain instead of moving forward.
    The other day I became aware of a young, well-meaning schoolteacher who had fallen for the writings of one such charlatan. It was a horrible thing to see a teacher – of all beings – succumb to and accept as rational an author guided not by objective research but with the intent to reverse-engineer historical methods to support his own scriptural-literalism (and, along the way, to denounce legitimate methodologies that contradict his desired results).

Voltaire, detail of portrait
by Maurice Quentin de La Tour

    Because the anti-intellectualism of fundamentalism (and most apologetics) is nothing new, we expect our schoolteachers, as defenders of truth and reason, to react to such charlatans in derision, as if, in an age of readily available antibiotics, a man should lecture to the world on the efficacy of cauterization. Alas, however, our poor young teacher, like most of us, is ignorant of the long legacy of historical research procedures: he doesn’t know that similarly irrational propositions have been proffered before and that better minds and techniques have overcome them. Our teacher is ignorant as well of the most basic philosophies behind scientific methods and thus cannot see past the obfuscations of a quack with no scientific training but with, seemingly, plenty of sophomoric misunderstandings. Furthermore, our teacher doesn’t seem to have the philosophic background of thinkers like Spinoza, Kant, Voltaire, Coleridge, and Arnold himself to guide the imposter back to his lower place.
    Most of us haven’t needed all of this knowledge before. Until the internet, the charlatan’s screed might have been available, at most, in a few country bookstores near his ministry’s headquarters. Now it can be effortlessly marketed and sold around the globe. New “publishers” with no history of intellectual standards or honesty have sprung up to serve the new markets and flood the open gates. Unlike his counterpart of a previous generation, our young teacher doesn’t have the imprimatur of a respectable publishing house defending him from unqualified exposure to such nonsense; he cannot be expected to fend for himself on such terrain. Not even in Dickens do we see such intellectual rascality as this.
    Thus, not only does our innocent teacher read and admire, but most likely starts to emulate and teach as well, exposing to his younger charges all sorts of intellectual fuzziness. He thereby not only enthusiastically repeats the mistakes of the past, but, in company with thousands of his similarly duped colleagues, helps plow the ship of society into the same iceberg again and again and again. It is hard to speculate on the emotional, spiritual, and even physical cost such drawn-out irrationality may eventually produce. As the members of a society that has enabled this backwardness, we should all of us be ashamed, profoundly ashamed. In our lust for the latest gadgets, we haven’t questioned culture’s long-term plan, and our children and tomorrow’s society will be so much the poorer. Arnold’s fear of intellectual democracy seems borne out, indeed.
    Of course, the careful reader has noticed that the author of this very article on Arnold is also writing on a blog, under the imprimatur of no New Yorker or Harvard Magazine. Is he to be tarred with his own brush? Perhaps he is. The reader must decide.
    In his defense, the author would remind his readers that not all meaningful credentials are lost to us in this new landscape of intellectual anarchy. Wikipedia is not perfect, but it is a good place to start in investigating an author. If you are seduced by a writer of what is purported to be instruction in the process of historical research, look up the author’s name and see if he or she is known for works of history, or if there is an affiliation with a nationally or internationally respected institution of higher learning. If the author writes of science, investigate whether he or she is recognized by the scientific community, or supports his or her arguments with scientifically recognized voices. Most important of all, do a Google search[] for conflicts of interest: an author’s sponsorship of a website or two dedicated to the very creed he or she has supposedly “discovered to be true” through a so-called objective process is indeed a very red flag.
    Arnold felt that poetry was the highest form of literature, and that poetry is “simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.” Trilling adds – and this applies to novels, essays, and even blogs – “if the things that are said are not the right things, no amount of energy – of genius – can excuse them.”
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Copyright © 2014 by Eric Meub

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