Andrew's Wiki
Culture Anarchy (changes)

Significance

• Can give me a genealogy of the relationship between early Victorian and mid Victorian that will foreshadow some of the late Victorian stuff
  • Early Victorian
    • Horrors of industrialism are visible and public
    • Parliamentary investigations, Blue Books, Engels
    • Condition of England novels: Sybil, Mary Barton, etc
    • In politics, James Mill Sr and Bentham: utilitarians and descriptive representationalism
      • Utilitarian: greatest good for greatest number of people, scientific rationalism
      • descriptive representationalism: growth of the voter base (ie Reform Bill of 1832) to more accurately give each person a space in Parliament
  • Mid Victorian
    • Horrors of industrialism are at least apparently ameliorated by acts of Parliament and the development of better machines
    • John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold move past representationalism and start going to a paternalistic, imperialistic attitude towards Britain itself
      • Your must transcend your class interests, and you will do so if you are educated, they both say
    • They still have the public’s greater good in mind, but are doubting utilitarianism as the way to get this done
    • Realism in Victorian novel is about greater good of England at a greater remove from the public
  • Late Victorian
    • The culture itself starts to come into its own, and we have Pater coming in, and Wilde and decadence
    • It is like modernism in that it challenges convention, but it doesn’t challenge for challenge’s sake, but instead on a need for experience personally. It’s more of a personal mission (ie accepting homosexuals) for realizing yourself than about the art itself.

Basic Points from Arnold

• Bad Culture: Culture nowadays is just “vanity and ignorance, or else as an engine of social and class distinction” 43
• Good Culture, Part 1, as curiosity: Should actually be motivated by CURIOSITY
  • Today we see curiosity as somewhat “frivolous and unedifying” but that’s not true
  • There is a disease type of curiosity, he says, but there is a good kind
  • Good kind: “a desire after the things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are” 44
    • There is still a realism in this!
  • Requires discipline, rather than unregulated spontaneity
  • Culture is the fruit of curiosity, when curiosity is understood as “a genuine scientific passion” 44
• Good Culture, Part 2, as social: springing from love of your neighbor, sympathy, generosity
  • Social motives
  • Thus, it is a “study of perfection” which adds “moral and social passion for doing good” to the scientific passion of love for knowledge
    • You must have both b/c only having the generosity and will might make you do something stupid!
  • All good social acts must be grounded in reason and the will of God
    • “ought” will regulate your actions
• Why can we have culture?
  • This is a time of faith
  • This is a time of ardor
  • This is a time of expanded intellectual horizons: “is not the close and bounded intellectual horizon within which we have long lived and moved now lifting up?” 45
    • We not longer have “a routine which they had christened reason and the will of God…inextricably bound” for the “the iron force of adhesion to the old routine,—social, political, religious,—has wonderfully yielded”
      • They also saw themselves as at a time of change, but it’s one of opening and newness and possibility and progress
      • What’s the good? New ideas aren’t blocked merely because they are new
      • What’s the danger? Yielding to novelty without investigating it or forgetting that you are working in the service of God and reason 46
• Why do we need culture?
  • Now that these bonds have loosened, we need culture to keep us on the Reason and God Track: culture makes reason and God “prevail” 46
  • Knowledge might look petty and if you only use it for itself it is a “caricature and degeneration” 47
• The Victorian Attitude
  • He has two aims “to draw towards a knowledge of the universal order which seems to be intended and aimed at in the world” and “to make it prevail” (that is to help this order along and make it happen)
  • You are happy ONLY when you go along with this order and strive to help realize it on Earth
  • He admits that the world doesn’t look perfect anymore
• The Victorian Goal
  • “to ascertain what perfection is and make it prevail” 47
  • “making endless additions to itself, in the endless expansion of its powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty,” seen not only as a Victorian ideal but NO as an eternal human ideal springing from human nature
  • culture will get us there
• Where Religion Comes In
  • “by which the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect itself” 47
  • Its new tendency away from fundamentalism and more towards interpretation: “The kingdom of God is within you”
    • The perfection inside of you is the sign of your religion
  • Both religion and culture are about “a growing and a becoming:” that’s what they have in common 48
    • Arnold himself might still believe in God and religion, but the way his definitions allow culture and religion to play the same role in society makes a virtual substitution, a step in the process of secularization.
• Danger: anarchy
  • people confuse perfecting yourself with doing as you like, and that’s anarchy
  • The “modern spirit” has “dissolved” the feudal habits of “subordination and deference,” so now our love of freedom in and for itself is an “anarchical tendency” 76
    • the modern spirit is: doing as you like
      • and that’s anarchy
      • he finds it in mobs, riots, etc (why? he thinks agitating for your rights is the same thing as “meet where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes” 76 he is totally afraid of the increasing # of demonstrations and riots going on around the country – he is so paranoid)
    • what’s neat: he shows that our love of doing as we like doesn’t extend towards other people, say for example Irishmen, whom we rob of their freedoms, showing our freedom to be reserved for Englishmen only, you hypocrites 79
      • he thinks this is what happens when politics is severed from religion: you don’t see your proscriptions as ones of love for every human anymore, but just the legal British subject
  • we have “superstitious faith” in machinery:” they see machinery as an end, rather than as a means
  • “if culture, which simply means trying to perfect oneself…brings us light, and if light shows us that there is nothing so very blessed in merely doing as one likes is worship of machinery, that the really blessed thing is to like what right reason ordains, and to follow her authority, then we have got a practical benefit out of culture” that’s against anarchy
• Industrial Rev and Classes
  • “our social machine is a little out of order….a good many people….taking the bread out of one another’s mouths” 80
  • each class wants its own class to rule
  • workers don’t want to “settle down” to their work, the lazy brats
  • It has ruined our idea of a State, the WHOLE “nation in its collective and corporate character” where each member should fight for “the higher reason of all of them,” of all classes not just his own 81
• Government Power
  • Carlyle says it should be the aristocrats, others say the middle class, and the Reform League say, the working class
  • Why not aristocrats? This is an “epoch of expansion,” which is “a movement of ideas,” but the aristocrats don’t have enough light, enough knowledge, and they just want to preserve status quo; they’re futile, sterile
    • aristocrats have no ideas
  • Middle class, which he notes acts like “heroes of middle-class Liberalism” have a great destiny and own the future; but they think they’re perfect as they are; they don’t want to achieve and growth: too self-satisfied
    • what have they done? free trade, parliamentary reform, voluntary church and education, state non-involvement between employers and employed, marriage laws
      • more problems with liberals, middle class and free trade: “mechanically worshipping their fetish of the production of welath and of the increase of manufactures and population, and looking neither to the right nor left so long as this increase goes on” 195
      • their works aren’t “practical for real good” 198: they need Hellenism: the love of intelligible laws of things to love perfection; rather than be so “practical”
  • Working class, they are untrained; they have sympathy and action but nothing to direct it
• Who Should Rule?
  • NOT our “everyday selves…we are separate, personal, at war,” tending to anarchy
    • governed by your class interest, Barbarian, Philistine, or Populace
  • Our “Best self…united, impersonal, at harmony” 95
    • How do you get this? CULTURE.
    • 109: each class has “a certain number of aliens…led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection”
      • and we can make more of these people, esp when we encourage to separate this impulse from the baser class impulses
      • in government, stop listening to your friends and flatterers
• Although government is limited: “certain crude reforms” aren’t really your true business, but instead helping culture 200
  • liberal government reforms aren’t a firm, sound “basis for future practice” 202
  • Culture will do MORE to help our society than politicians can
    • You should like society, and respect its order and structure and authority, though, and its administrators b/c they are “repressing anarchy and disorder” 203
    • we must have a sound government and society as the BASIS on which we can make an progress: thus the State is sacred
    • eventually the State will help us get to the goals culture points us to, and then we will make the State via culture the “expression…of our best self” with the wonderful virtues that are for all mankind (nobility, security)
      • right now, however, the state “enable[s] a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister,” so we have to develop culture outside the state, use it to reform the state, and then they can work harmoniously together (again he wants to have all, culture, religion, and state, but the way they all work together it seems like he is creating only a republic of culture after all…at least the seeds are there)