normie wisdom 2: philistines

A continuation of this post

Hugh Trevor-Roper doesn’t use the term normie, of course – his key term of disparagement is “philistine.” Paul Fussell: “A Modernist is a late-nineteenth- or twentieth-century artist or artistic theorist who has decided to declare war on the received, the philistine, the bourgeois, the sentimental, and the democratic,” and I think it’s fair to say that the philistine in this sense simply is someone whose affections gravitate towards the received, the bourgeois, the sentimental, and the democratic. (One could say that those are the four cardinal points of the culture of the Shire.)

We owe this use of the word “philistine” to Matthew Arnold, who in turn borrowed it from a town-and-gown dispute in the German city of Jena. In his great book Culture and Anarchy Arnold sets the Philistine on the side of money over against culture:

The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the people whom we call the Philistines. Culture says: “Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voices; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?”

The condescension drips and drips. But like Trevor-Roper, Arnold did not confuse philistinism with stupidity: in a later essay he picks up a category he had briefly mentioned in Culture and Anarchy: the “Philistine of genius.” This category is dominated by three giants: “So we have the Philistine of genius in religion — Luther; the Philistine of genius in politics — Cromwell; the Philistine of genius in literature — Bunyan.” Though appalled by these figures, he has to concede their greatness. The whole project of Culture and Anarchy might be described as a thought experiment for creating a world in which such people could never be recognized as great; but in our real, existing world, such recognition is unavoidable to the honest.

However, did any of these figures desire money? If so, they went about the pursuit of it in very odd ways. I think the love of money is, for Arnold, just one of the ways a person can live in opposition to true Culture. One also opposes culture by a leveling impulse: Luther against the papacy; Cromwell against the aristocracy; and Bunyan against the state church and its confinement of the ability to preach to the formally educated. And over the course of his career I think Arnold much more consistently focuses on the Philistinism of Leveling rather than the Philistinism of Lucre.

Many artists and writers – and, I think it’s fair to say, most academics in the humanities – have inherited from Arnold a settled contempt for philistines — which is to say, for normies. This is a bit ironic, because Arnold’s famous dedication to cultivating “the best that has been thought and said in the world” – also from Culture and Anarchy – is now thought a normie ideal to uphold. But Arnold believed that such dedication to high and unphilistine culture was the best means of “turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.” That is – and it is important to remember that Arnold’s day job was as an inspector of schools – the cultivation of “the best that has been thought and said” will not reinforce existing prejudices and assumptions but rather will bring about necessary social change. And indeed this is how things worked out: as Jonathan Rose shows in his masterful book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes,

Even literature that appeared to be safely conservative was potentially explosive in the minds of readers. This may seem counterintuitive: in the recent “canon wars,” the Left and Right agreed that a traditional canon of books would reinforce conservative values (the Right arguing that this was a good thing). But both sides in this debate made the mistake of believing each other’s propaganda. Contrary to all the intentions of the authors, classic conservative texts could make plebeian readers militant and articulate.

Militant, articulate normies.