Word: arnolds
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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From a similar window 134 years ago, Arnold beheld his progressive, aggressive world and began serenely: "The sea is calm tonight./ The tide is full, the moon lies fair/ Upon the Straits . . . Come to the window, sweet is the night air!" A long, successful life lay ahead of him. His new bride was near by. But by the end of the stanza, he was hearing the "eternal note of sadness" in the sea and the rolling of the pebbles, and by the second stanza, the "ebb and flow/ Of human misery" was overwhelming. The final lines of Dover Beach...
...Dover Beach the same place as Arnold's? Certainly the disjuncture between feeling and intellect--or science and emotion--has only seemed to widen since the mid-19th century. The transition from the industrial society to what Daniel Bell called the post-industrial society, consisting of services rather than manufacturing, has resulted in a difference of occupations but not of attitude; people are more than ever the bewildered children of progress. The past year alone has produced enough scientific inventiveness to shake the spirit for a lifetime: the first baby from a frozen embryo, surrogate mothers, genetic transfers between animals...
...this does not ring true somehow. Unlike the industrial adventurers of the 19th century, most people today are very much aware of the problems, economic and spiritual, wrought by dead-eyed materialism. Arnold's criticism of his times would not be a bit shocking in ours; such criticism has been along on the march of progress for quite a while--even if it often sounds like short- order disapproval, whipped up automatically for predictable occasions. The computer is born, the computer is pilloried. An oil rig goes up, conservationists marshal their forces. Nineteenth century minds may have planted the seeds...
...divorce of intellect and feeling is the wrong place to look for a modern Dover Beach, however, it may yet have bearing on the right one. The world does not look as unremittingly bleak as Arnold painted it in those final lines of Dover Beach (How could it?), but it often can feel that bleak--minus joy, love, light, certitude, peace and help for pain. As yet, no industry has disinvented poverty or starvation. And one advanced invention threatens to turn the earth into a polar waste. Even if most people learn to adjust to machines or the new science...
...general advancement of knowledge, but that takes its effect silently in individuals. Jacques Ellul criticized the modern idea of work as compared with the ancient because, he said, work with machines puts people at a distance from their labors and thus evokes a feeling of absence instead of presence. Arnold, too, focused on the absence of things. It is a peculiarly desolating experience to look upon something new that one despises or has no feeling for and to recall with pleasure whatever it displaced, or to see nothing where something was that once was cherished. Our affection attaches to that...