Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

by Sarah Bakewell

Above all, he shows an almost willful tendency to confuse people by using words to mean things they normally don’t mean. Thus, he borrows the term “Hebraism” from the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, but mostly uses it to denote Christian Puritanism. When he speaks of the “Barbarian” social class, a careless reader may think he is talking dismissively of the lower orders, but no; he uses it for the aristocracy. (The working class is “the Populace,” and the middle classes are “Philistines.”) Also misleading are two key phrases that he repeats often in the book. One is the statement that “culture” can be defined as “the best which has been thought and said in the world.” The other is also a definition of culture, this time as whatever brings “sweetness and light.” The first of these, “the best,” sounds elitist, implying high things accessible only through rarefied tastes and an exclusive education. But Arnold is emphatic in rejecting the tendency of the middle and upper classes to feel that all culture somehow belongs to them by birthright, whether or not they ever touch a book or look at a work of art. For him, real culture is accessible to all, and it comes from an “eagerness about the things of the mind.” It means curiosity and the questioning of received ideas; it means “turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.” This is the exhilarating sense of expanding into the human world that Humb...