The Function of Cynicism at the Present Time by Small Helen;

Author:Small, Helen; [Small, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2020-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

They kindly offered me the example of their civilisation as a help to mend ours; and I, not with any vain Anglicism, for I own our insular civilisation to be very unsatisfactory, but from a desire to get at the truth and not to deceive myself with hopes of help from a quarter where at present there is none to be found, have inquired whether the Americans really think, on looking into the matter, that their civilisation is much more satisfactory than ours. (22)

The tone is earnest; the attempt at naming and shedding national self-interest sounds arduous enough, but the assumptions of what is to be found on the other side of the Atlantic are cynical: America is pre-emptively judged to have made poor use, to date, of its much-vaunted freedom from the old and ‘unsatisfactory’ ‘insular civilisation’. It has shirked the work of criticism, and contented itself with a pre-emptive and complacent view of its ‘civilisation’. He (the clearer-sighted one) will not delude himself with hope of help where ‘there is none to be found’.

If cosmopolitan universalism, based on an ever more generally available liberal education in ‘right reason’, is the overall direction of travel here, Arnold has an odd way of going about things. Patriotic jostling of a ‘my culture is better and freer than your culture’ sort is not the most promising route out of the narrowness of one’s own national affiliations, but there was (and is) a market for it.61 Moreover, the approach has at least the virtue of a degree of honesty about the local limitations and biases of where it speaks from. As Bruce Robbins puts it, with an eye on nationalism as a possible standpoint for criticism of global economic inequality: ‘[s]aying nasty things about foreign goods [here, culture] and/or the foreigners who made them does not seem a likely path toward cosmopolitanism in a significant sense of the term’, but it has ‘a certain heft’, a ‘grounded’ acknowledgement of motivating interests.62 In Arnold’s case, that acknowledgement involves a critical element of realism, not only towards his own position but also towards the broad consensus of opinion about him in America, at the point when he began the tour. There was, as John Henry Raleigh showed in his classic study of Arnold in America, a general perception, even among more admiring critical readers, that Arnold suffered from being too English, meaning: ‘priggish and artificial’, over-concerned with ‘correctness’ in the use of the language, ‘amateurish’, and (Raleigh adds) personally dislikable on the basis of his writing (‘variously pictured as the ineffectual dilettante, the cool sophisticate, or the supercilious destroyer’ [66]). The antagonism he brings to the podium is, in that context, a way of acknowledging his reputation head on, playing up to the character already in circulation.

It is one thing to adopt the rhetoric of competitive nationalism as a fictitious basis for espousing the transnational value of ‘culture’ when the argument is theoretical, conducted on home ground, at a long distance from the comparator civilization; it is another to attempt that line of reasoning on the foreign soil in question.

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