The Challenge: Disinterested Critique

How do you reconcile these two statements? If you are making it a general principle to take the path less traveled, then you're not engaging in a free play of the mind. Using the word "malarkey" already shows that you've renounced disinterest.

Criticism can show DI by keeping aloof from the practical view of things (i.e. that which is malarkey) and thus take the path less traveled.

The idea being that the DI critical minded person will not get involved in the partisan back-and-forth and focus on fundamental matters thereby helping to shift the attention from partisanship and onto fundamental reasoning in the hope that this will lead to a rational approach to the matter and shy away from the emotional or narrow focus.

Do you really believe this equation, Coberst?

I couldn't agree more that a critical thinker should be able to see through arbitrary and unnecessary polarizations. This is why I ask: isn't the above statement an arbitrary and unnecessary polarization? It assumes that the "practical" is opposed to the "rational," that "partisanship" is opposed to "fundamental reasoning." Sometimes they are, certainly, but how much room do you leave for exceptions? Haven't you ever had the experience of reasoning about something and, as a consequence, taking a side on a matter--even an emotional matter?

Shapeless

The moral of the story is look beyond the surface of reality and focus upon fundamental matters. There are lots of individuals throwing sand at one another in the sand box but there are very few to turn the focus on the foundation of new ideas and new solutions.

Yes, that's a much more modest and thus more palatable way to put it. Naturally, there is a difference between mudslinging and taking a stance; all those bells and whistles over "remaining aloof of practical matters" made it sound like you were generically lumping the two together. I'm all for maintaining a rational stance wherever possible, but sometimes critiquing requires getting one's hands dirty in the partisan's sandbox: how else could Matthew Arnold, for example, repeatedly lambaste uncultured philistines and berate the average member of modern society--going so far as to write a whole book against the anarchic tendencies of "progressive liberalism"--and still keep a clear conscience?

From what little I know about the man I assume that he considers his job is very important and might be like that of the satirist.

The critical spirit as advocated by Arnold seeks the best that's known regarding the underpinning on all problems that are within the social discourse domain. The critical approach is not to take the common practical approach but display perpetual dissatisfaction at such that exists not because what exists has no value but that what exists is not satisfactory because it is not the ideal; for criticism, as advocated by Arnold, these are elementary laws.

The ideal can never be popular nor can it be realized and the critic will constantly encounter immense obstacles. That is the reason the ideal must be asserted again and again. The critical spirit must remain neutral and independent of the practical spirit and aims. "Even with the well meant practical efforts of the practical spirit it [critique] must express dissatisfaction. If in the sphere of the ideal they seem impoverishing and limiting…I must be patient and know how to wait; and flexible, and know how to attach itself to things and how to withdraw from them."

One of the most questionable aspects of this belief is that it artfully refrains from mentioning whose concept of the "ideal" is to be held as the paragon of criticism; or, more to the point, it assumes that the reader will take it on faith that Arnold has the best standard of the ideal. Taking something on faith is the opposite of reasoning and criticism. I'm sure he sincerely believed that his concept of the ideal was a universal one, not a personally conceived one for which he patted himself on the back; such was a commonplace of Romantic aesthetics, in England and elsewhere. Still, if he'd been more intellectually honest, Arnold would have held himself to some standard of refutation. But to do that would be to open himself to matters of practicality, and as you pointed out, that is exactly what he shunned. I don't think that's a coincidence.

If Arnold's ideal seems dubious in matters of literary criticism, it can get outright ludicrous in matters of social issues. The unbending (a euphemism for unquestioning) glorification of the "ideal" led Arnold to some alarming ideas: complaining that the English were placing too much value in "freedom"--i.e. they were elevating freedom into an ideal all its own--Arnold claimed that this would lead naturally toward anarchy. As a solution to this, he wrote that the English needed to remind themselves of the only trustworthy arbiter of the ideal--the State. In his words:

"...we are left with nothing but our system of checks, and our notion of its being the great right and happiness of an Englishman to do as far as possible what he likes, we are in danger of drifting towards anarchy. We have not the notion, so familiar on the Continent and to antiquity, of the State--the nation, in its collective and corporate character, entrusted with stringent powers for the general advantage, and controlling individual wills in the name of an interest wider than that of individuals." [Culture and Anarchy (1869)]

Most all of my threads are exemplars of what Arnold suggests. I just borrowed his book from the library about a week ago and as I read it I became aware of the fact that I have been doing what he suggests for the last 30 months. So my threads are what I think he is talking about.

If the critic knows nothing then that criticism is worth nothing.

Sensible enough. To this I would add: A critic who expects to be taken on faith is not a critic but a propagandist.

Well said.