The Political Path to Sweetness and Light
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| Reintegration of Paradise by Darwin Leon |
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
In Contrast to the Narrow Economic Motive
It was as if Barrack Obama, when he became the leading candidate for the presidency, served neocons as their repressed Shadow. It was not really his fault that he was running. The election, he said, was not about him, but about “you.” That is, not about the power elite.
He said he would tax the rich and pay the poor; he would lead the alternate energy crusade, and make American independent of foreign oil producers; everyone who commits to public service shall get a higher education under his regime; the compassionate-conservative public-private alliance of the Republicans will be put to shame by an even more compassionate, Democratic alliance. The United States would still be the only civilized nation in the world without national health care, but at least the premiums would be cheaper if he were elected. Men and women would get equal pay for the same jobs; gays and lesbians would have the right to visit their significant others in hospitals; women would have control over their bodies. And so on. Family values are briefly mentioned.
Republican or Democrat, it is really all about who gets money, the purchasing power. Religion worships absolute power while politics distributes it. Political candidates try to bribe us with our own money. The rub is in the redistribution.
We recall that the high priest of the Democratic Party wanted a more catholic distribution. John McCain was bound to protest the catholic redistribution plan, notorious for its compassion towards the poor, many of whom do not want to work hard for a living. Florida State Representative David Rivera of Miami summed up the Republican attitude towards the crusty soldier:
“McCain might not be the most charismatic candidate, but the prospect of an Obama presidency is scary enough to energize our folks to work very hard for John McCain.”
Liberty was wanted to pursue property, in the name of God if need be. The first draft of the famous document read, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property.” Happiness was substituted as an afterthought. It is said that liberty and property are the pillars of a free society. But is there not a higher god or even better possession than money or the property it can buy?
Matthew Arnold criticized the narrow, economic view of life in his 1869 essay, Culture and Anarchy. He also took liberties to task, such as freedom of speech, the notion that “when every man may say what he likes, our aspirations ought to be satisfied. But the aspirations of culture, which is the study of perfection, are not satisfied, unless what men say, when they may say what they like, is worth saying.” Freedom, he said, is worshipped regardless of the ends desired. But freedom is so much machinery. The central idea of personal liberty for its own sake fosters anarchy.
“The English ideal is that everyone should be free to do and to look just as he likes. But the culture indefatigably tries to draw ever near to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get a raw person to like that.”
The culture of which he speaks is obviously a higher culture than what we call the popular or vulgar culture to this very day: the cultivation of saying, doing and getting whatever is liked.
“Candidates for political influence,” Arnold writes, “caress the self-love of those whose suffrages they desire, knowing quite well that they are not saying the sheer truth as reason sees it, but that they are using a sort of conventional language, or what we call clap-trap, which is essential to the working of representative institutions…. I admit that often, but not always, when our governors say smooth things to the self-love of the class whose political support they want, they know very well that they are overstepping, by a long stride, the bounds of truth and soberness.”
When Barrack Obama first ran for the White House, free speech in the Democratic and Republican conventions identified the oil supply as the most important thing in the United States. Both presidential candidates said they wanted to liberate America from its dependence on foreign oil, naturally produced by dangerous nations. The Democrats declare victory on that score as oil prices plummet, and they would now cool off the globe with alternative sources of energy. Although Republicans deny conclusive scientific evidence that global warming exists, coal has become the dirty word. Coal was the thing in Matthew Arnold’s day:
“Our coal, thousands of people were saying, is the real basis of our national greatness,” Arnold wrote. “If our coal runs short, there is an end of the greatness of England. But what is greatness? Culture makes us ask. Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest and admiration…. What an unsound habit of mind it must be which makes talk of things like coal or iron as constituting the great of England, and how salutary a friend is culture, bent on seeing things as they are, and thus dissipating delusions of this kind and fixing standards of perfection that are real…. Never did people believe anything more firmly, that nine Englishmen out of then at the present day believe that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being so very rich. Now, the use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standards of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery…. If it were not for this purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future as well as the present, would inevitably belong to the Philistines.” The Philistines are responsible for the “fashion of teaching a man to value himself not on what he is, not on his progress in sweetness and light, but on the number of railroads he has constructed, or the bigness of the tabernacle he has built.”
Arnold’s high culture, that which cultivated “sweetness and light,” was fostered by the established church. “The great works by which, not only literature, art, and science generally, but in religion itself, the human spirit has manifested its approaches to totality, a full, harmonious perfection, and by which it stimulates and helps forward the world’s general perfection, come, not from nonconformists, but from men who either belong to establishments or have been trained in them.”
As for God, he quotes Luther: “A God is simply that whereon the human heart rests with trust, faith, hope and love. If the resting is right, then God too is right; if the resting is wrong, then God too is illusory.”
He explains that, “The worth of what a man thinks about God and the objects of religion depends on what man is; and what man is depends upon his having more or least reached the measure of a perfect and total man.”
It would seem, then, that if a man is not much to speak of, neither is his god.
Therefore it is the people who must enlighten the establishment, not vice versa: “The excellent German historian of the mythology of Rome, Preller, relating the introduction at Rome under the Tarquins of the worship of Apollo, the god of light, healing, and reconciliation, observes that it was not so much the Tarquins who brought to Rome the worship of Apollo, as a current in the mind of the Roman people which set powerfully at that time towards a new worship of this kind, and away from the old run of Latin and Sabine ideas. In a similar way, culture directs our attention to the current in human affairs, and to its continual working, and will not let us rivet our faith upon any one man and his doings.”
The culture of sweetness and light is a study of perfection and realization of neighborly love. “It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good…. It consists in becoming something rather than in having something…. Religion says: the kingdom of God is within you; and culture, in like manner, places human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity property, as distinguished from our animality, in the ever-increasing efficaciousness and in the general harmonious expansion of those gifts of thought and feeling which make the peculiar dignity, wealth and happiness of human nature.”
“What is alone and always sacred and binding for man is the climbing towards his total perfection, and the machinery by which he does this varies in value according as it helps him to do it…. The great thing, it will be observed, is to find our best self, and to seek to affirm nothing but that…. By our everyday selves, we are separate, personal, at war; we are only safe from one another’s tyranny when no one has any power; and this safety, in its turn, cannot save us from anarchy. And when, therefore, anarchy presents itself as a danger to us, we know not where to turn. But by our best self we are untied, impersonal, at harmony…. This is the very self which culture, or the study of perfection, seeks to develop in us; at the expense of our old untransformed self, taking pleasure only in doing what one likes or is used to do, and exposing us to the risk of clashing with everyone else who is doing the same!”
So he spoke not of constructing the best of all possible selves, but of finding the best self and developing it, as if it were a gift of God already accessible to everyone.
Matthew Arnold was in fact a liberal authoritarian; i.e. he found his liberty in conformity to traditional ideals. His Hebrew religious freedom was in the Hellenic cultural order. He found it convenient, in any event, to make the most of the given establishment instead of putting his faith in the anarchic trend. His best self or god was within everyone as one god.
He was certainly not a moral constructivist, someone who believes morals can be contrived by irrational individuals. “Not only do we get no suggestion of right reason,” he complained, “and no rebukes of our ordinary self, from our governors, but a kind of philosophical theory is widely spread among us to the effect that there is no such thing at all as a best self and a right reason having claim to paramount authority.”
It is wise, or so he thought, to give and take instead of to fight one another, sticking to our choices as best we can. And if we would all “follow freely our nature taste for the bathos, we shall, by the mercy of Providence, and by a natural tending of things, come in due time to relish and follow right reason.” What? Does he believe that a public bathhouse will cleanse us of our sins? Evidently, the Invisible Hand that presides over the liberal economy is none other than God.
We should have faith in Providence to coordinate doing what one likes into an harmonious outcome. “What a depth of Quietism, or rather, what an over-bold call on the direct interposition of Providence, to believe that these interesting explorers will discover the true track.”
Still, he expects each and every one of us to discover within and cultivate our best respective selves, which reside where sweetness and light prevail; the realm presided over by the Best Self. Somehow our self-spelunking will uncover the treasure. We shall need the guidance of experienced explorers and miners of deserts and mountains, and professors of the traditional lore of church and university. We may eventually know if they lead us astray, for if the Light at the end of the tunnel is within everyone to begin with, the truth shall eventually be known again, and shall set us free.
What lesson may we draw from Matthew Arnold as President Obama’s term comes to an end? Confidence in money is waning, portending an economic debacle, and with that all political hell could break loose as republican fascists and democratic socialists take their argument into the streets. No less than George Soros has said a world war involving China is eminent unless the money problem is solved.
What must be done? Can works save us? Must we go to church and actually believe in God and have blind faith that if we do so all will come out well in the end, in sweetness and light?
The lesson I believe is that each and every individual must do his and her best to develop the “Best Self.” Classical politics did not focus on money grubbing, but on the perfection of character, the perfection of the person that is at once social and individual, common and unique. And that is a most difficult path, the path to sweetness and light, the inner jihad, as the Muslims say.
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