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Monday, January 20, 2014

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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12 comments:

  1. I liked Arnold back when. Oops.
    A good read, and I learned a lot. Thanks, Eric

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  2. Eloquent essayist Eric Meub looks at our times through the eyes of 19th-century intellectual Matthew Arnold. The view is unsettlingly revealing.

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  3. Eric in it was long and interesting. So much so I read it again. I liked it so much I may save it and steal from it now and then.[smile]

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  4. Jefferson's "Aristocracy of Talent" and Du Bois' "Talented Tenth", as with Arnold, assumed that those with ability would cultivate and use it for benefit of their societies. And saw that as the hope for the future.

    Now "Hope" has become "Nope, you dope", and the definition of talent and aristocracy is who is the greediest and grabbiest. The Wolves of Wall Street are doing the American Hustle.

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  5. A very fine article. I sympathize with Mr. Meub's assumptions, fears, and criticisms. Alas, at times I think democracy a terrible thing and wish for benevolent dictatorship or at least "a few good men" (and women) to set us straight. But then, there is Fox News...Is all lost?

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  6. That was a great read. Shared and will share again later in a couple of Facebook groups. Thanks!

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  7. The world's problems are overwhelming. First of all, it is impossible to contain a democratic ethos that has spread far beyond governance and pervades popular culture. Indeed, even my reference to popular culture implies that other forms of social culture are undemocratic in nature and either elitist or odd. For example, all of the evidence regarding biological evolution is denied in the face of creationist arguments, and creationism is accepted because, "after all, we are only talking about theories." This line of thinking pervades many, many college graduates in the United States. Likewise, I have read that in Muslim societies even persons with PhD's believe that an actual soul resides in the body and believe literally in the writings of Muslim prophets.
        As an undergraduate, I took a class in International Law. One day our professor made a statement with which I did not readily agree. He observed that the more people in the world come to know each other, the more likely they will be to dislike different cultures. Now, comparing 1963 to 2014, I believe there is more than ample evidence to support the professor's thesis. Never mind that the beliefs may be false or simplified propaganda created for political purposes—they exist, and they exist among people who are educated as well as among those who are not. In the struggle for existence it may well be that those who are adept in the use of Kalishnikovs may prevail over those with more rational mindsets.
        By the way, speaking in evolutionary terms, I have read articles that have suggested that in an evolutionary sense some species of insects may actually have a greater chance of survival than ours, included termites and cockroaches.
        The idea that people with more rational (skeptical or critical) minds can lead society to a better place was adapted and prostituted as a piece of propaganda by Nazi Germany. Of course they stirred in a little racism for flavor just as we did here, but worst of all in the South. As our old friend Jim Rix has often pointed out, our behaviors often originate in that part of our brain that stores primal impulses such as fear and its ally, loathing. I have seen no evidence that the masses of individuals in this world, educated or not, have developed the ability to recognize and challange those impulses within themselves.

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  8. My initial reaction has something to do with our recent visit to Williamsburg, where almost everything in the curio shops were “made in China.” Today, when our neighbors brought us gifts from Disney World in Florida, I noted that the gifts were “made in Thailand.”

    So much for thinking globalization hasn’t already happened. Folks—everyone—just needs to figure out how it applies to them or their particular circumstance. Strong convergences of people and cultures are impacting what we know, but not how we perceive the other cultures. Fascinating dynamism here.

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  9. Looking at this blog recently, I was astounded at how it has developed into an instrument of life style and diverse opinion, whose editing must take an immense effort.
        Has the blog's editor or the author of this essay read Ross Douthat's NYT blog on Yuval Levin's book, The Great Debate, between Edwin Burke and Thomas Paine? Levin discusses intellectual history of conservative and liberal thought and its applicability to today's political thought in the States.
        Douthat has a number of links to other reviews of Levin.
        These and other reviews from googling "great debate" show stark and interesting differences between conservative and liberal reviewers. A fine debate which your blog could feature.

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  10. All of these comments are so appreciated. Sounds like I need to read the Douthat blog, as well as its source material The Great Debate. Thanks for the recommendation Rolf.

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  11. Much of the essay was above my head, in part because I lack the historical context.

    Many/most who have the historical context lack the scientific context. If you go to the American Society for Quality's website, at www.asqhdandl.org, open the publications page, and look at the "Deming's profound knowledge primer," you will see Deming's proposal for basic scientific knowledge. I would be inclined to add biology, or at least some part of it beyond psychology.

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  12. Thank you, Brooks, for the reference to W. Edwards Deming. The healthcare design practice of my firm, of which I am a leader, is rapidly transitioning from a bricks-and-mortar practice to a systems-design practice. Part of our practice is made up of non-architects: ex-nurses, physicians, healthcare administrators and CEOs, as well as industrial designers and innovation advocates. I was making a presentation to a client this morning about Human-Centered investigation methodologies, and one of my co-presenting colleagues is a Six Sigma Black Belt out of our Omaha office, with amazing experience in systems improvement. Thanks to your prompt, I have downloaded Deming's Profound Knowledge and Leadership. The systems-thinking, and thinking of variation, knowledge, and psychology are an excellent review and overview. Thanks for the reminder!

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