Last year saw the 150th anniversary of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. In 1869, England stood on the brink of anarchy. The past few years had witnessed English rioting in Sheffield, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Ashton-under-Lyne, Manchester, and Hyde Park. Fenian terrorists took what advantage they could, striking in London, Manchester, and Chester. The epicenter of these disturbances was the Reform Act of 1867. The politics in the years surrounding its passage heated class antipathies beyond the boiling point. Liberals and Conservatives battled to win the war of public opinion. The “respective extremes” drove the action, demanding fealty from the moderates.
The young radicals who banished the police from six blocks of downtown Seattle would regard Matthew Arnold as an ambassador from a dead civilization. They would be joined in this view of him by the representative men and women of Seattle, luminaries of the political class, education, the media, and the fabulously wealthy tech industry. In this respect, at least, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) or, if we prefer, the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP), is at peace with its neighbors. If, in some imaginary world, the Seattle intelligentsia were obligated to respond to the sesquicentennial of Culture and Anarchy, an English professor might recall that Arnold attracted the opprobrium of Edward Said in his book Orientalism: “For every idea about ‘our’ art spoken by Arnold… another link in the chain binding ‘us’ together was formed while another outsider was banished.” The statement—representative in its way and manufactured to taste—is not true. For Arnold, the goal of education in science and the arts is “the same for all mankind”: it is the gradual “progress of humanity towards perfection.” Arnold is vulnerable to many criticisms, but racism is not one of them. He was essentially a religious man, whose faith put him at odds with a grave sin that no thinking Christian can abide.
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