How "philistine" stopped meaning "cop"

What the history of a slur can teach us about humility and art.

SONG OF THE DEPARTING BURSCH
A Mossy Bursch now forth I wend
O God Philister's house defend
Yes native home I come to thee
Myself must now Philistine be

-Traditional German graduation song, translated by William Howitt.

In Lace and Libels, I wrote about the way some words turn into slurs, and how this evolution was used to misrepresent a Matthew Arnold essay. I’ve been looking into the history of the slur “philistine” today, and it turns out Arnold plays a key role.

Biblical Philistines

Philistine was the name for an actual nation in ancient times, related to the name Palestine. But in Western culture Philistines are defined by their Biblical use as antagonists. Goliath was a Philistine, and, in particular, they’re associated with the story of Samson.

Samson is a miraculous birth, with an angel helping with prenatal rituals to ensure that he is born spiritually pure, and instructing that his hair must never be cut. Samson is necessary because the Philistines have conquered Judea, and now God wants to give them their freedom back. The idea is that he’ll have super-strength and use it to kill a bunch of Philistines.

To trigger his radicalization, God causes him to fall in love with a Philistine. At the wedding, he challenges the bride’s side to a high-stakes riddle contest: loser gives the winner thirty complete outfits of clothing. He loses when his bride seduces the answer out of him, the start of what will be a recurring theme in his life. He’s outraged that his wife would conspire with his enemies, and decides that he hates all Philistines. In order to settle the debt, Samson goes to a nearby city, kills thirty random Philistines, and takes their clothes.

After that, he stays away from his wife for a few months, and then tries to show up with an apology goat and pick up where they left off. Her father meets him in the doorway and explains that since he obviously hates her, she’s now with one of his groomsmen and refuses to see him. Wouldn’t it be better for all concerned, he suggests, that you leave her alone and marry her (younger and prettier) sister?

This is an actual painting of this scene, except Rembrandt inexplicably left out the apology goat.

Samson’s response is more or less “oh good, now I have an excuse to firebomb your farms.” After all of their crops burn, the Philistines blame the wife and father-in-law for the disaster, and execute them…for which Samson also considers himself entitled to take revenge. And so on, in a series of escalating conflicts that always end in Samson using his super-strength to kill everyone who came to capture him.

While he’s with a prostitute, a choice which apparently does not violate his spiritual purity, the Philistines nearly capture him. He escapes, using his strength, and decides he needs to try again at having a real, stable relationship. Which is how he meets Delilah.

Samson, maybe having over-learned his lesson from his marriage, stays with Delilah even after it becomes blatantly obvious that she’s betraying him. She’ll do things like tie him up with newly-woven rope, after he lied and told her that was his one weakness, and then wake him up with “Samson, the Philistines are coming!” The Philistines would burst in, and he’d tear them apart with his bare hands.

Eventually, he gives in and tells her his actual weakness, that his hair must never be cut. The Philistines capture him, blind him, and take him to be sacrificed…but before the appointed day his hair has grown back, and he dies toppling a building and killing three thousand.

Philister

Some time in or before 1687 students at the University of Jena started using “Philister” to mean “townie”. This aligns with stories of how German students in general tended to think of the cities and citizens hosting them. Life’s no fun if you avoid them entirely, and renting a house in town is cheap, but you can’t always trust them. And sometimes you need to take up arms against them. Howitt’s The Student Life of Germany describes the tradition of Marching Forth, wherein students pour out of the campus into the city at large, carrying swords, in order to prevent or avenge some real or imagined abuse of authority. Often it was in response to a cop beating up a student for being disorderly. At least once, during the Hep-Hep riots of 1819, the students of Heidelberg marched forth to prevent a pogrom the cops were turning a blind eye to.

In 1693, some Jena students verbally insulted a group of townie cops. For revenge, the cops soon murdered the first student they could get their hands on, one who’d had no part in the insult. At the funeral, superintendent Georg Heinrich Götze delivered a sermon combining the slang usage and the Delilah story, repeating the phrase Delilah repeated. “Samson, the Philistines are coming!” Stories of this incident spread the use of the term throughout Germany. Philister also became a slang term for a “summoner,” the guy who shows up to haul you into court. Or for the crud left over in a pipe after you smoked it. All Philisters are cops, and all cops are bastards. Just like those people in the Bible, always trying to arrest Samson for mass murder.

As blood feuds became less and less common between students and townies, Philister took on a more neutral connotation, or at least less negative. Student codes of conduct agreed to by fraternities involved situations where students were obligated to support “honorable Philisters.” You’d graduate praying for God to look favorably upon your erstwhile Philister landlord, and knowing that you were now a Philister yourself.

But of course they still made up songs mocking Philisters. Drunken students in taverns would annoy the locals by singing that Philisters were uncool prudes who watered down their own wine, that they always complained that the times were bad and the nation was degenerate, that they were hostile to art because they couldn’t make money off of it, and that they acted like they ruled the world by God-given right.

The word started getting used metaphorically in Germany, although different usages invoked different townie stereotypes, preventing a clean definition. A Philister was someone you wanted to tar as part of a group, by way of broad social criticism, for…something. Sometimes a lack of interest in art, but usually something else. In 1856, English speakers were still trying to translate it properly, writing in The Foreign Quarterly Review that

it has assumed several shades of significance which have not yet been merged in a single absolute meaning, and one of the questions which an English visitor in Germany will probably take an opportunity of asking is “What is the strict meaning of the word Philister?”

A Philistine and son of a Philistine

The metaphor was solidified, at least in English, a decade later. British poet/critic Matthew Arnold, in his 1869 book Culture and Anarchy, claimed the word Philistine for his own…and then proceeded to give it at least two different definitions and playfully equivocate between them.

Arnold was a Liberal. He believed in progress, egalitarianism, and fighting poverty. But he was hearing too many of his fellow liberals decrying elitist culture, saying that the idea of “fine art” is just another way of signaling how rich and elite you are. He wrote his book to defend the ideal of Culture, defined as everything that elevates the human spirit, moving it toward “sweetness and light.” People focusing on non-cultural pursuits were best seen as a “sacrifice,” meant to give future generations lives more worth living than their own. Sometimes a necessary sacrifice, he acknowledged. But we should mourn it, not celebrate it. In John Adams’s progression, we were at the “I must study medicine so my children can study poetry” stage, and we needed to make sure our children knew they were supposed to be poets, not doctors.

Cultural impoverishment presents differently in each social class, Arnold wrote, Britishly. He called the upper class Barbarians, invoking both the original meaning (another ethnic group associated with foreignness and violence) and the modern one. Barbarians were aristocrats who took pride in their mundane virtues—courage, health, power. His description reminds me of those German college students marching forth against the Philisters, like the one in Heidelberg who stood in the doorway of a Jewish home a mob had come to loot, sword in hand, shouting “The only way in is over my dead body!” Noble and admirable, but far from sweetness and light.

Today’s middle class are Philistines, Arnold says, and that’s a problem he’s more focused on. He acknowledges that it might have been simpler to just call the upper class Philistines too, but it seemed fundamentally wrong to use the same epithet for two “very different classes.” And Philistine, he thought, had more middle-class vibes. It connotes

something particularly stiff-necked and perverse in the resistance to light and its children; and therein it specially suits our middle class, who not only do not pursue sweetness and light, but who even prefer to them that sort of machinery of business, chapels, tea meetings, and addresses from Mr. Murphy which makes up the dismal and illiberal life on which I have so often touched.

Arnold gives at least two different definitions of Philistine. The primary one is more or less the modern meaning—somebody who’s too narrow-minded to appreciate culture. But, because he’s doing broad social commentary, he also defines it as “anybody in the British middle class.” In which he includes himself.

I myself am properly a Philistine [and] the son of a Philistine.

The Humble Snob

For Arnold, the pursuit of sweetness and light was just that—a hunt, one where you never quite catch up, and sometimes lose the scent altogether. He was on a journey, the same as everyone else, not a pure enlightened being. So it wasn’t too weird for him to give himself the same epithet he’s opposing. He was doing the right thing in seeking a better culture, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t part of his current one. His family came from a village named West Humble, and he never forgot that.

His humility was warranted. As a critic, he was pretty narrow-minded, failing to appreciate some works we now consider classics. He dismissed Mark Twain as too irreverent to ever say anything of substance, and was far too misogynistic to appreciate works by women. In all his writing about the Romantics, I can only find one line about the works of Mary Shelley: “her ability is manifest, but she is not attractive.”

And here’s the thing. That’s all of us. Nobody has good enough taste to recognize every kind of good art that exists in the world. Nobody even has good enough taste not to occasionally, with great confidence, call something bad art when it isn’t. I think acknowledging that is a key part of how Arnold was able to remain both a liberal and an art critic. If you see people raving about terrible art all the time, there are plenty of reactionary places you can go. “It shows that we live in a degenerate age. We need to bring back the focus on the Classics.” But you can also say, more correctly, “well, some of those people are probably on to something, but I can’t tell which, so I’ll keep promoting the kind of quality I can perceive.”

I am vs. I was

If philistinism is a narrow-minded inability to appreciate art, we are all philistines. There’s more art, and more genres of art, every day. It grows and diversifies faster than we can learn about it.

But there’s another kind of philistinism, the ideological kind. The ideological philistine doesn’t say “I am a philistine.” His only note of humility may be to say “I was a philistine. I once failed to appreciate art, but now if I don’t appreciate it, it’s not art.” The ideological philistine watches, in horror, the constant shrinking of the ratio of fine art to the dreck society-at-large considers art. These are the philistines who call other people philistines.

They look like Mortimer Adler, who created the Great Books curriculum as a reaction against the idea that dead white males were overrepresented. His first edition of the Great Books list was, I believe, entirely of that persuasion. In 1990, he reluctantly added four white women, but reiterated that no Black or Latin westerners had written any great books yet. Which felt true, to him, as someone who had never read W.E.B. Du Bois, who relied on the one Latino on his committee¹ to suggest Latin authors, who didn’t think of Alexandre Dumas, the grandson of a slave, as Black.

They look (sorry for picking on you again, you’re a good sport) like Henry Oliver, who writes “I was a philistine” about being a recovering film snob, but more often can be found decrying the “philistine supremacy” demonstrated by people saying things are fine art when they’re not. Which is a thing that can happen, but if you see it happening everywhere, you’re the philistine. In a comment on another post of mine, Oliver cites Samuel T. Coleridge as an example of an artist who was recognized as obviously great in his own time. But Arnold, a contemporary of Coleridge and the quasi-inventor of Oliver’s favorite word? His take on Coleridge can be crudely summarized as “well, he tried.” Nobody is obviously a great artist to every critic until they’ve been dead awhile.

Ideological philistines write books with titles like The Decline and Fall of Western Art or From Dawn to Decadence, arguing that nothing good has happened since cubism. They take a delusion we all have from time to time, that everything we can’t understand is performative nonsense, or simple pleasure cloaked in false sophistication, and convert it into a sweeping social thesis.

Ideological philistines are culture cops. If you see artistic value where they don’t, they’re coming for you. And history disproves their general claims so thoroughly that we forget they even made them, projecting our own sophistication onto the great critics of the past. We should see them as they are: Goliath, explaining to the jeering crowd that the idea that a scrawny kid with a sling could possibly be matched against him shows how warrior culture has degenerated. Saying David is the real Philistine. Getting cut off mid-sentence by a rock to the head.

And when the Philistine looked about, and saw David, he disdained him, for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance. Lithograph by former German university student Osmar Schindler, circa 1888. Critics panned his work as too derivative, praising his rivals who turned out to be literal plagiarists.

Bonus: The historical Philistines

Ancient Egypt, and neighboring countries, wrote about raids and invasions by “the Sea Peoples,” and historians have never been able to figure out who they were and where they came from, other than “the sea.” They were sometimes referred to by names that sound like Philistine, so it’s very popular to assume that they, or some of them, were Philistines. But we also don’t know where the Philistines came from, so even if true that doesn’t really solve anything.

Like their Biblical foes, the Philistines were eventually forced into diaspora in Babylon, but they seem to have been more successfully assimilated. Since we don’t know their ancestry, it’s hard to identify their descendants.

Oh, yeah, and they totally had art. Whenever archaeologists find fragments of their paintings, there’s a news article about how the old misconceptions about Philistines have been debunked, which is itself a misreading of history. Nobody ever said they didn’t appreciate art. They said they were cops.

1. The Latino on his committee was Octavio Paz, from whose essays and translations I first learned about Juana Inés. Adler claimed that Paz didn’t recommend any Latin American books, and while I can’t find any comment from Paz on the matter, if he really didn’t recommend Juana Inés it could only have been because he thought Adler would reject her and think less of him for it. Adler is most associated with my alma mater, the University of Chicago, which was slowly starting to change when I went there. Octavio and Juana were assigned as required reading by a Latino professor in one of my classes, presumably while Adler’s dead white ghost booed in a corner.