Culture and Anarchy

Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold, 212 pages

In the seminal essays that make up Culture and Anarchy, originally published serially in 1869, Matthew Arnold attempted to convince his hardheaded English countrymen, who prided themselves on practicality and efficiency, of the value of culture.  For Arnold, the cult of efficiency amounts to an idolatry of machinery, a confusion of ends and means, and a worldview closed to the "sweetness and light" that make life worth living.  In the process, Arnold famously distinguishes two rival tendencies in Western civilization, which he dubs the Hebraic and the Hellenic - the former demanding faithful action, the latter rational thought.  Both pursue the same goal of human perfection, but that goal is unattainable by either alone.

It is easy to criticize Arnold's scheme as overly simplistic and reductive, although the notion of a rivalry between Athens and Jerusalem can be traced back at least as far as Tertullian.  It is equally easy to point out its weaknesses - to ask, for example, whether Hellenism is not just as likely to lead to the kind of radical individualism Arnold deplores as Hebraism, or whether other forms of Hebraism beyond Puritanism might not admit sweetness and light as readily as Hellenism.  To do so, however, would be to fundamentally misunderstand what Arnold means by Hebraism and Hellenism, to imagine the former as simply religious and the latter as purely secular.  Arnold wants contemplative philosophers, not scientific administrators, true intellectuals, not chattering policy wonks.  Indeed, the latter are the vanguard of the mechanical anti-culture he abominates.