I recently had a discussion about global warming with several people who believed that they had done all that they needed to do to have a sound opinion about the subject. They had read State of Fear, a novel by Michael Crichton about a group of environmentalists who plot mass murder to publicize the dangers of global warming. Although the book is fiction, it includes charts, graphs, and a bibliography in support of its view that climate change is a hoax or is at least far less a danger than the environmentalists think.
When I mentioned other books on the subject that they might want to read, they asked me why they should bother. State of Fear was, in their opinion, final and authoritative. When I pointed out that Michael Crichton was not a climate scientist, and that books written by people who are climate scientists would be better guides to the subject, they replied that climate scientists are academic bureaucrats saying whatever they need to say to get grant money. Their belief in the truth of this was unshakeable.
This discussion made me think, quite naturally, of Matthew Arnold, and in particular of his book Culture and Anarchy (1869). There may be a sense in which any work of literature is an implicit criticism of the civilization in which it has its roots; Arnold’s book explicitly criticizes the civilization where it has its roots, that is, the civilization of Victorian England.
Arnold criticized England by proposing “culture” as an ideal and “anarchy” its opposite. Culture, Arnold says, is
a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.
”Anarchy” is the state that a civilization falls into when its members are satisfied with their opinions simply because they are theirs. They believe that they are in possession of the best that has been thought and said on whatever subject. It follows from this that a person can have any opinion about anything, and is justified in standing by it. There is no umpire of thought or feeling, no striving for perfection. There is anarchy.
Arnold’s book was controversial when it appeared. Hadn’t Macaulay shown in his History of England that the English people, despite their crimes and follies, were solidly in the path of progress? Who is this sniping critic Matthew Arnold who tells us that we lack “culture”? Aren’t the subscriptions to our concert series routinely sold out? And look at the enormous sums that we spend on education.
All that is the sort of complacency that we don’t need a Matthew Arnold to recognize and deplore. And who is to say what is in fact the best that has been thought and said about any particular subject? These are serious criticisms and Arnold did not successfully refute them, as far as I know. Culture then is a mirage and anarchy simply the natural state of a healthy snd strong civilization.
.So I concluded, twenty years ago, after reading the attractive copy of Culture and Anarchy that I had bought at Myopic Books in Providence, Rhode Island.
And then it struck me more and more that although Arnold had not succeeded is defining what culture is very clearly, its absence can always be felt unmistakably. The civilization of the United States of America is profoundly anarchic and the chief Anarch is Donald Trump.
Arnold wrote:
One must, I think, be struck more and more, the longer one lives, to find how much, in our present society, a man’s life of each day depends for its solidity and value on whether he reads during that day, and, far more still, on what he reads during it.
Trump’s days lack solidity and value in large part because he doesn’t read. There is no free play of fresh ideas on his stock beliefs.
But can we hold Trump in contempt without ourselves sinking into anarchy? Is there a free play of fresh ideas that we could turn on our stock ideas about Trump? Isn’t it the case, for example, that as president he did not once use our country’s military might to force upon another country our own ideas of right? Reflections in this vein might lead us to more complicated and nuanced ideas about Trump.
No, the left has its own stock ideas and shibboleths and stands condemned of not loving culture enough. Even so, I have known cultured leftists. In the 1980s I was active in the nuclear freeze movement, the members of which held to their convictions passionately. The leader of our local group was a brilliant woman whose dedication to the cause was of a strength and purity such as I had never seen before. But one day she told our group that some nights she can’t sleep for fearing that “we might be wrong.” From somewhere, she had tapped into a fresh — and unsettling — play of new ideas that challenged her most settled convictions. That was culture.
But we are an anarchic nation, and Pope supplies our epitaph:
Lo! Thy dread Empire, Chaos! Is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! Lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.
Books Matter 