The Unum Necessarium

An examination of Samuel Lipman’s essay –
“Why Should We Read Culture and Anarchy?”

At the time of its publication in 1869, Matthew Arnold’s socially probing essay Culture and Anarchy was met with some resistance. Today, nearly one hundred and fifty years later, to say as much would be an understatement. Recent critics chalk Arnold’s postulating up to nineteenth-century idealism, and feel that there is even less room for his theories in modern society than there was in his own. However, there are still those who value Arnold’s beliefs, notably Samuel Lipman, as evidenced in his essay “Why Should We Read Culture and Anarchy?” The answer to the question he poses is simple: because we need culture and we have anarchy. Lipman’s essay recognizes just how Arnold’s wisdom can be interpreted and applied to our own problems. This essay will evaluate Lipman’s article to show how he is correct in these conclusions.

Lipman’s examination of Arnold’s relevance to late-twentieth-century America begins with religion – the heart of Arnold’s Victorian culture and its fading from American. Religious anarchy had its presence in Victorian England but as Lipman correctly states, modern religion is even more anarchically divisive due to its change from “faith and dogma” to “morals and conduct” (Lipman, 219). Arnold’s world was one ruled by Hebraism, faith through “fire and strength [and] strictness of conscience” (Arnold, section 173). However, today’s world is not one content with tradition and conformity. We have progressed to a more Hellenic frame of mind – the desire “to see things as they really are” (A. 145) – and have discovered that many old customs are unreasonable. Thus, as a result of our pursuit of the truth, we proceed toward anarchy.

A natural consequence of religious anarchy is the deformation of the traditional family unit. Whereas inter-gender marriage and children born of wedlock were the only accepted norms of Arnold’s time, today marriage is a matter of “convenience” (L. 219), which leads to divorce rates over fifty percent. There are so many children born out of wedlock that we have institutions in place to facilitate proper care of these children. Lipman is concluding that religion breeds the value of “ordered behavior” (L. 220) and family, but does not draw attention to the good that is born from resistance to it. Many marriages are not meant to last and many children are born out of wedlock through faulty birth control, and so by resisting the ordered behavior of religious laws the people involved are gaining freedom from a constricting situation. As a child of a broken home myself, I understand that a divorced single-mother who is happy is more productive than a destructive family unit. Thus, as Arnold suggested, society must bring together a “mutual understanding and balance” (A. 169) of Hebraism and Hellenism: the strength to persevere and the wisdom to know when perseverance in itself is not enough.

Although anarchy can produce much that is good, disordered anarchy will inevitably lead, as Lipman tells us, to destruction. As in Arnold’s time, today’s anarchy affects our three social classes (upper, middle, and lower) more or less equally. However, through unemployment and oppression North America has created a fourth division: the underclass. These are the men, women, and children of “ghetto culture,” whose lives are ruled by poverty, criminal activity, and a lack of education. Unfortunately, Lipman’s words are truthful when he states that this lifestyle is encouraged by a “triumphant popular culture that glorifies, and profits from, the depiction of bestial acts” (L. 220). It is disturbing to admit that popular culture has reinforced humanity’s must primal urges. American culture has spawned a lust for pain and destruction which should not belong to minds as advanced as ours.

Ironically, one of the solutions to anarchy is education, to provide all dissenters with the knowledge necessary to inspire co-operation for the under-class is a mechanism of governmental oppression which maintains this under-class, an intentional creation to induce fear, whereby wages can remain low without opposition. In our three other classes a uniform American education is viewed as “stifling [the]…urges of the children,” (L. 221) while parental education denies the children “familiarity with…groups in society.” Arnold no doubt would have countered this paradox with our need for his idea of “culture,” which carries us to the next stage of our discussion.

Samuel Lipman brings to light that Arnold’s definition of culture is not our own. Arnold defined culture as “the study of perfection,” (A. 8) in which all of the world’s best ideas are analyzed and realized in our “best self” (A. 89). However, today culture is defined as multiculturalism. Lipman’s definition of multiculturalism today is exacting, stating that it is not so much about content (which Arnold’s culture is) but about process. He is right in saying that multiculturalism is often the enforced study of “artificially constructed products of supposed art and learning” (L. 221). Lipman’s key word is supposed, being that multiculturalism is largely a lie. People travel the world in the belief that experiencing other cultures has made them a better person when in actuality they have not integrated any personal change due to these experiences. Simply traveling does not bring anyone closer to perfection, whereas improving oneself by incorporating the greatest ideas of others does.

Were Matthew Arnold alive today to pose culture in response to anarchy it would soon become clear “just how little culture we have with which to oppose it” (L. 222). To oppose anarchy with the arts is essentially to oppose with more anarchy. Our universities are bent on staving our students rather than educating them; our music is oversaturated with mindless artificiality rather than enlightenment; our television, magazines, and newspapers prey upon those who are easily open to suggestion. Of course, there are those who strive for Arnold’s perfection, but they are too few to impact the whole of humanity, for Arnold believed that true culture is “to make all live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light” (A. 49). Lipman exaggerates when he says that Arnold’s true education is “nowhere to be found,” (L. 223) although he makes a valid point. Our high schools only teach those works which are politically correct, foregoing anything regarding religion or sexuality; our universities are fraught with professors bent too high on their own agenda, instilling in their students only their point of view, which often sucks out all that is great about literature in favor of overtly sexual, political and racial themes.

We have come to find that just as Arnold thought, the responsibility of self-perfection cannot be attributed to either religion or an educational establishment. Thus we arrive, as he once did, on the matter of the State. However, as Lipman correctly infers, Arnold’s hope for the State was naïve. Arnold viewed the State as the “organ of our collective best self, or our national right reason,” (A. 92) and assumed that it would have the conscience to institute “whatever great changes are needed…on behalf of order.” Arnold is continually optimistic about the State, never one postulating whether it, too, could fail – and fail it did. Somehow Arnold failed to see how the State could not only lead to anarchy, but cultivate it towards serving oppression. He assumed that, only naturally, the State would be made up of our greatest minds – which we all know now is definitely not the case. Perhaps it was his one remaining hope for sweetness and light.

That Arnold did not correctly predict the future is not at all surprising. The thought of now predicting society in the year 2160 seems impossible, for there will always be social shifts that one could never have anticipated. Therefore it is in no way a knock on Arnold as a man of supreme intelligence and value that he believed that his concept of culture could be universally embraced, because in one respect, it still can. Arnold’s gift of Culture and Anarchy shows that within each one of us are the means to discover our best self. The battle for true culture – the pursuit of perfection – begins within our self.

Despite the dislike in which Arnold is held today, Samuel Lipman is able to discern Arnold’s true importance. He understands that while Arnold may not have predicted things as they turned out to be, Arnold understood anarchy and our need to counter it with culture, be it within one’s self or within one’s society. In his essay, Arnold mentions that the Puritan’s great danger was that he imagined himself in possession of a rule telling him the “unum necessarium,” or the one thing needful. Arnold argues that the Puritan is wrong, that humans need to value more than one thing; that the real unum necessarium is to be our best in all ways. In this, I am afraid, Matthew Arnold was wrong. For society, the real unum necessarium, is Culture and Anarchy.