"Cult-cha, Dahling"

Culture: n. [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/culture]

"While I appreciate Matthew Arnold’s creation of the interrelationship between
culture and perfection in, Culture and Anarchy, I find it difficult to follow
how he arrives at such. How would he suggest we pursue total perfection, when we
are a very different people, individuals? He suggests that we allow the will of
God to prevail but sadly, the will of God is often misconstrued even by the best
of finite minds. Still, I uphold Arnold’s call to see and learn truth in an
effort to pursue both personal satisfaction and bring about culture. I wonder
whether this might realistically be a logical impossibility. Arnold’s essay,
provokes a lot of pertinent considerations, but in my mind, also leave a lot of
questions."

A classmate of mine wrote the above as a brief response to "Culture and Anarchy" by Matthew Arnold in her literary criticism blog. Her questions concerning the essay's realistic possibilities are valid. Truth be told, Matthew Arnold lived smack dab in the middle of the Victorian era, a time where lines of faith and religion were extremely blurred due to the rapidly-accepted theories of Lyell and Darwin and the ever-growing Industrial Revolution. Therefore, it's understandable for everyone, including Matthew Arnold, to have some cognitive dissonance about culture, God's will, and the such (what I'm getting at is that I don't necessarily have answers to those questions, either!).

At the time of the Victorians, the socially-elite bunch were obsessed with the kind of culture that distinguished them from the lower classes, the lifestyle that they lived. Arnold, sick of seeing the discrepancies between the extremely (few) wealthy and the extremely (plentiful) poor, decided to shake things up a bit in the socially-elite realm. He wrote that culture was not the distinction between classes, rather it was the driving force that united humanity as a whole (Arnold believed that isolation was undesirable; see “To Marguerite—Continued”). To Arnold, culture represented all that was the best of human thought and knowledge: one could say culture was a representation of all that is true in the world. With the Victorian faith crisis, what had been the established form of truth, Christianity, was negated. Therefore, Arnold’s culture became the new religion, the “sweetness and light” in the world.

Arnold’s theory of culture (literature/poetry) would match up, to a degree, with Shelley’s mindset of the ethical faculties of poetry. If all together, humanity strove towards truth and morality by means of studying literature, would it be beneficial?