阅读理解
Late Victorian and modern ideas of culture are always, in some sense, attributed to Matthew Arnold, who, largely through his Culture and Anarchy (1869) , placed the word at the center of debates about the goals of intellectual life and humanistic society. Arnold defined culture as "the pursuit of total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world". It was Arnold''s hope that, through this knowledge, we can turn "a fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits". Although Arnold''s thinking about culture helped to define the purposes of the liberal arts curriculum in the century following the publication of Culture, three concrete forms of disagreement with Arnold''s views have had considerable impact of their own.
The first can be seen as protesting Arnold''s fearful destination of "anarchy" as culture''s enemy. This division seems to set up simply one more version of the old struggle between a privileged power structure and radical challenges to its authority. Arnold certainly tried to define the arch-the lawful order of value-against what he saw as the an-arch existentialist democracy, yet he himself was annoyed in his soul by the blind pride of the reactionary powers in his world.
Another form of opposition saw Arnold''s culture as an absurd perpetuation of classical and literary learning, outlook, and privileges in a world where science had become the new arch and from which any really new order of thinking must develop. At the center of the "two cultures" debate were the goals of the formal curriculum in the educational system, which is always taken to be the principal vehicle through which Arnoldian culture operates. However, Arnold himself had viewed culture as enacting its life in a much more broadly conceived set of institutions.
Today, however, Arnoldian culture is sustained, if indirectly, by multiculturalism, a movement aimed largely at gaining recognition for voices and visions that Arnoldian culture has implicitly suppressed. At the level of educational practice, the multiculturalists are interested in lessening the arbitrary authority that "high culture" exercises over the curriculum while bringing into play the principle that we must learn what is representative, for we have overemphasized what is exceptional. The multiculturalists'' conflict with Arnoldian culture has clear similarities to the radical critique; yet multiculturalism affirms Arnold by returning us more specifically to a tension inherent in the idea of culture rather than to the culture-anarchy division.
The social critics, defenders of science, and multiculturalists insist that Arnold''s culture is simply a device for ordering us about. Instead, it is designed to register the gathering of ideological clouds on the horizon. There is no utopian motive in Arnold''s celebration of perfection. The idea of perfection mattered to Arnold as the only background against which we could form a just image of our actual circumstances, just as we can conceive finer sunsets and unheard melodies. This capacity which all humans possess, Arnold made the foundation and authority of culture.