Defining Cultural Decline
Not too long ago, New Dealer asked me “How are you defining cultural decline?” in the comments to one of my posts about the city in which I live. Since the comments are closed, here goes…
Let’s start by defining culture in the broadest sense as the means by which a society explains itself to its members and gives them a sense of meaning that embeds them within that society. We can talk of a “warrior culture”, a “feudal culture”, the “French culture” and so forth, and we often do. Defining culture in this way, we can include things as diverse as songs, novels, customs, values, myths, and works of art. More vaguely, we can say that cultural products serve a group of people’s psychological/spiritual needs much more concretely than their material needs. Culture has no practical material use. Culture is the record of a society’s mentalité.
So, defining culture in this way, we can speak pretty easily of the livability or “health” of certain cultures. To use the most obvious baseline example, let’s say that the Nazi culture was pathological. Let’s say that the Catholic culture is currently troubled. Finally, let’s say that we can draw comparisons between the health of respective cultures. Certain cultures will thrive and others will die. All will change. Cultures will differ between eras as well. The idea of a national culture is fairly problematic because nations are too diffuse to maintain uniform cultures without state control. Cultures change. While specific cultural norms can become more or less healthy, it is nearly impossible to speak of an overall cultural decline in the Spenglarian sense or overall cultural progress in the arc of justice sense.
Admittedly, therefore, I used the word “decline” ironically because I find unconvincing the idea of cultural change over time in a particularly recognizable direction- a telos of culture. Cultural teleologies derive from Judeo-Christianity and its special sense of history, of a fall and redemption occurring in historical time, but coming from outside time. Perhaps the most noteworthy example of an attempt to translate this idea into a philosophy of history is Hegel’s system, really an ill wind that blew little good. Marx had the right idea in “standing Hegel on his head” by focusing on change in the material conditions of a society. But even there (and let’s admit that this criticism applies little to Kapital) the real problem with Marxist dialectical materialism lie in its claims to “inevitability”- to predictions of the future. But, at least, material decline is something we can quantify.
Cultures tend, instead, to differ. While I find this particular local culture pathological, I would not say it is in a trajectory of increasing pathology, which I suppose puts me at odds with a particular strain of conservatism, or just reaction. However, it also puts me at odds with many progressives who believe in an arc of cultural progress. In order to paint a picture of cultural decline over generations, the reactionary erases all evidence to the contrary, focusing say on the increasing rate of divorce, while the progressive will ignore all evidence to the contrary to show cultural progress, focusing say on the decline of racism. Hence, they fight.
I would call the culture in the milieu where I live dysfunctional. This is not “decadence” in culture, which might be characterized by a highly aestheticised depiction of the unaesthetic, of things that are morally or aesthetically repulsive- what Camille Paglia called the juxtaposition of the highly refined and the primitive, culture circling back upon itself. But this isn’t decadence because the cultural items I encounter are unaesthetic in their presentation. The art tends to be ugly and assaultive and to present themes that are stultifying, banal, and brutalizing. The values expressed tend to be ones of power, violence, and domination, particularly of women. Criminality is often valorized, especially if it involves drugs. There’s a cynical understanding of human relations. And where I live, early divorce and illegitimate children are common. I know more than a few men my age who aspire to government assistance. I’ve learned to identify on sight what drugs people are on and how to deal with them. The culture reinforces much of this. Admittedly, much of this is informed by the ethos of pop culture, but the local culture which I’m referring to is a particular lived practice of that ethos. More specifically, it is the culture of poverty.
This, of course, opens a whole can of political worms and in a subsequent post, I will ask how it is that cultural politics have evolved over the last hundred years or so such that the pathologies associated with poverty that were once so brilliantly dissected by a left-leaning writer and reformer like Émile Zola are now similarly dissected by right-leaning writers like Theodore Dalyrimple and, hopefully, consider the serious blind spots of both the left and right when it comes to these issues. Honestly, I believe cultural problems are far better addressed by artists than politicians. But, before that, I would like to highlight another comment by “Mike” that reminds me of my own turning point in thinking of these issues, which came a few years back when an elderly friend of mine was nearly killed when a group of local kids smashed out his windshield by throwing bricks at passing cars from an overpass for fun. (Then, of course, there was this local news item) Mike writes:
One evening some thugs arrived at corner bar in Belleville, Ont. and proceeded to act like bullies, most likely dressed for the part wearing basketball jerseys and straight brimmed UFC hats, basically children in men’s bodies. Dirtbags. Within a short time they found what they were looking for, a fight with someone that wasn’t going to put up with their shit. Well the guy was certainly outmatched by these wanna be ultimate fighters. THEY BEAT HIM TO DEATH IN A GRAVEL PARKING LOT. A 29 year old father, out for a beer with friends Life is worthless to people like this and they proved it that night. I see guys like this everywhere in this area, angry all the time, no jobs, no desire for one. Video games, Tim Horton’s and beer on cheque day……… is all they live for.
This doesn’t ring 100% true for me, probably since this is a different city, but that ever-present anger so hot it could burn you, lord does that ring true.
Thanks for expanding on my post.
I’m with you in that I don’t agree with the right or left on whether we are headed towards Gammorah or in a constant arc of cultural progress.
What if there was always X percentage of any society that was a malcontent class like the newsstories above? Drugs can make this worse, so can dire poverty and a lack of opportunity but I think that even the most prosperous and well-to-do cultures can have malcontents for various reasons. People who will always do what is sadistic and cruel like the torture story above or the men who beat the dad to death because they were looking for a fight.Report
I think it probably is the case that these things have always existed to some extent- at least, they’ve been written about quite a bit since the early industrial period. What seems to me to have changed is how society responds, or more often shrugs and says, “Ah, let the cops handle it.”Report
Rufus,
Your piece is utter rubbish.
In Harriet Tubman’s day, those kids would have beat her — and suffered no consequences.
The role of the overseer did not vanish until after the Industrial II era.
Our society has grown, in that we now do not consider it socially acceptable to brutalize other folks.
Yes, there are plenty of folks that are dissatisfied with this. So much the better, that they lie in the depths of poverty, or in the “working class.” They have no life skills that are needed, and their personality is rubbish as well.
Let ’em squall and fight, it’s better than rewarding them.Report
This essay brings up what rubs me wrong in some Country and Western music and also in Juggalo culture. The proud ignorance and violence and valorization of outlawism.
This produces a tension between my economic liberalism and my social liberalism.
On the one hand I sympathize with lyrics about the closing of the factory and hard economic times. On the other hand, there I often perceive a proud anti-intellectualism and proud vulgarity in Country and Western music that turns me off. I am not sure how to deal with these tensions. The same is true for Juggalos. I feel sympathy for their economic plight but I am turned off by their embrace of being vulgar and dysfunctional.
Though what I do consider cultural decline (though there is probably a better word for it is a lack of caring for high culture in praise of the constant props. Recently a friend said I came from the “same bygone era” as her parents because of my knowledge and true appreciation for cultural literacy and high culture. It seems so many people in my generation don’t care to move beyond listicles of childhood nostalgia. Passed along Buzzfeed pieces with titles like “65 signs you were a 9 year old boy in 1987 who owned a Sega Master System.”
Alyssa Rosenberg called someone a lit snob a few years ago because he made a statement about having too much adult stuff to read and not being able to waste time on YA and the Hunger Games. I am more disturbed about adults spending all their time reading YA instead of getting challenged by Joyce, Woolf, Millet, Edgers, Lethem, Murdoch, etc instead we seem to have a generation or two whose cultural tastes largely stopped developing at 12-14. Julian Sanchez noted during the Rosenberg essay debate that there was a time when people felt some kind of obligation to tackle difficult and adult art.Report
The problem is that they aren’t even tackling YA and Hunger Games anymore. Why bother? Any book worth reading will be made into a two-hour movie.Report
What age demographic do you mean by “they”?
There seem to be a large number of adults reading YA fiction. I ask why this is and am told that YA fiction is where all the revolutionary stuff is happening. I ask for examples and am told YA is revolutionary because YA is revolutionary.
This is a tautology but when I point that out people say I am not being very nice. A large part of “geek” culture seems to be an intense dismissal of literary fiction and anything that can be described as high-culture.Report
Among the Juggalos?Report
That’s sort of what bothers me about geek culture too- it’s that the die hard geeks I meet seem to not want anything past that one thing that they geek out about and it always seems to come back to trying to relive the feelings they had when they first encountered it as adolescents. Don’t get me wrong- I certainly enjoy relaxing with bad horror movies from time to time, but not as a steady and consistent diet.Report
@newdealer I wouldn’t care to speak on behalf of all geeks, but speaking just for myself here is a set of reasons why I haven’t really ventured into literary fiction:
1) Familiarity of a genre improves one’s ability to appreciate it. A Song of Ice and Fire (especially the major twists in books 1 and 3), is pleasurable to me in part because its depends on certain tropes of the fantasy genre, its harder to enjoy a deconstruction if you aren’t conversant in what it is deconstructing (I feel the same way about Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy). This means it pays to specialise in the media you consume, although its certainly possible to specialise too far.
2) I’m not really looking for “challenge” in fiction books. From a technical difficulty standpoint, I bust through the top of the reading ability scale when I was 6, so I haven’t thought of books as being challenging in that way for 25 years. In terms of the ideas expressed, well I really don’t believe fiction is much good when it comes to presenting challenging ideas. Generalising from fictional evidence is dangerous, and I try to avoid doing it. When I want to consume ideas, I read non-fiction.
I do agree though that adults shouldn’t spend all their time consuming media made for children or adolescents (though some children’s fiction, like Avatar: The Last Airbender, holds up just fine for an adult audience).
I also have a weakness for Gilbert & Sullivan, if that helps.Report
@james-k
I dislike Gilbert and Sullivan. Though they do tend to be geek favorites for some reasons.
In some ways, I consider Gilbert and Sullivan to be part of the problem because they stick to tropes and seem to be part of the unwillingness of a vast majority of people to leave art that could have existed in the 1950s. I find it interesting and somewhat surprising that Picasso is still considered shocking and modern even though the Armory Show happened in 1913.
And I completely disagree with you on fiction or art being unable to convey powerful and important ideas. Perhaps it is the difference in an arts-oriented brain over an economics/engineer brain but emotion is important and art. Humans are emotional and psychological creatures. Art like The Age of Innocence and Babbit can cut through the hypocrisy of society and show the violence of social eradication in ways that non-fiction cannot. Name me a piece of non-fiction that conveys loneliness better than Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West, etc.
There are other ways art can convey difficult concepts and challenging ideas in ways that non-fiction cannot. Does non-fiction play with form like Joyce did in Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake? Could you read Joyce or Pynchon at 6?Report
Rufus F and ND, part of the problem is that education is very STEM focused and does a poor job at educating people about the arts and humanities. Very few people were exposed to literary fiction and other forms of high culture in a way that will endure them to it. The other problem is that high culture is demanding, it doesn’t grant instant gratification. You need to listen quietly to the symphony, watch the play carefully, and read intensely. Genre fiction and other popular culture is more immediately fulfilling. You don’t have to worry about whether something is symbolic or not. The level of attention needed is much less. In a culture that favors instant gratification, high culture is bound to be less than popular.Report
ND, I don’t think that Piccaso is still considered shocking. Its just that Piccaso is abstract in a way thats more understandable to people than a lot of living artists are. More people can probable appreciate Piccaso than the Cre Master cycle.Report
NewDealer,
Umm… bullshit? Just because someone likes lovecraft and gibson (both challenging authors, gibson in particular prone to assuming you know everything he does).Report
NewDealer,
“they stick to tropes”
oh, bullshit. everything’s a trope, including pretending that you aren’t using them.
(I do know someone fond of completely revamping genres, but that’s probably a trope too.)
Lee,
“The other problem is that high culture is demanding, it doesn’t grant instant gratification. You need to listen quietly to the symphony, watch the play carefully, and read intensely. ”
… you don’t dance to the symphony? I’d say some of the purest expression of new orchestral pieces comes in movies, where you aren’t even supposed to pay terribly much attention to it.
If you think high culture is demanding… you ought to look at some good trollery. Good writing demands that the audience take a second, hard look at itself.Report
Lee,
My problem with “high culture” as expressed in school is that certain teachers of mine insisted on choosing “age inappropriate” works. “Old Man and the Sea” is something that works a lot better once you really understand nostalgia. “Jane Eyre” works better when you’re not a hormonal teenager (and Rose, who really likes the author, agrees with me on this point).Report
@newdealer I suppose it was my mistake to try ands get on your side with Light Opera 🙂
I agree that literature can convey emotions, but emotions aren’t ideas. I have a flat affect, so while I have been moved emotionally by things I’ve read, it’s not usually something I look for in the media I consume as most emotional work will leave me cold.
No it can’t. Because it is a work of fiction you cannot rely on what it is conveying. A literary work can “show the violence of social eradication” whether there is any social eradication happening or not. This is the danger of fiction, its persuasive, but has no necessary correlation to reality. Fiction can add texture to ideas you already have reason to believe are true, but if you rely on fiction as a source of ideas, you open yourself to the risk of being convinced of things that aren’t true. The same is true of emotive content that attempts to persuade, invoking emotion to make your ideas more plausible is manipulative, and the defences I’ve built up over the years against that kind of manipulation mean I find it very hard to read fiction books about ideas, even if I agree with the ideas.Report
Jaybird,
I just read about the Juggalos and it makes me shudder.Report
I totally have The Bugaloos’ theme in my head now, except with Juggalos.
Nathan Rabin wrote a few good pieces at AVClub about The Gathering.Report
i’m a big fan of saying “no anime and no juggalos – not in my house” but at the same time they, by and large, are nonviolent doofuses. they seek no legislation to hem their fellow man nor generally throw bottles at people. they make their parents a bit sad no doubt but getting hard into a subculture tends to do that.
after all, think about how badly you’d feel if you found out your kid was a theatre major. 🙂Report
dhex, so by opposing hemming their fellow man, your saying that the Juggalos are opposed to fine clothing?Report
“dhex, so by opposing hemming their fellow man, your saying that the Juggalos are opposed to fine clothing?”
in all kindness to the juggalo massif, i’d say that’s pretty dang obvious.Report
I think there have always been people who were into being vulgar and proud of their dysfunction. We just hear about more now. People tend to feel more affection to their own affection since its theirs, there doesn’t really need to be much more reason than that. We’re Americans after all, we don’t’ like being told what to do or think. We want to be ourselves even if that means doing things we agree are stupid and hurtful.Report
Has this always been in the case? It actually seems like something that happened because of the 1960s. During the 19th and most of the 20th centuries, there was a great pressure to conform to societal standards in America. This was especially true if you were middle-classed. Rufus wrote about this in his post on Babbit. I’d argue that it was actually worse during the mid-20th century than any part of American history. One aspect of the Hayes Code was that correct standards of living had to be depicted on film and Hollywood was very good at creating conformity.Report
Lee,
Fox still had requirements for Arrested Development. “Family moments” and all that jazz.
ProTip: giving comedians “requirements” like that leads to many, many incest jokes.
Comedians hate “requirements”.
Simpsons used to get routinely yelled at for making dead baby jokes. I think the censors actually managed to get them to stop.Report
In the movie version of Lolita, and probably the book which I admit not to have read, there is a seen where Lolita’s mother is trying to impress/seduce Humbert Humbert with her knowledge of high culture. Naturally, as a sophisticated European intellectual, Humbert Humbert is underwhelmed.
However, the seen got me thinking. There was a brief time in the 20th century where knowledge of high culture was something required in middle class society in the Western world. Otherwise you were a rube. It might have been phony, it might have mainly been a status symbol, and most people might have been over their heads but you were expected to know something about art, literature, and other aspects of high culture. This usually got derided as middle-brow. Maybe middle-brow was a good thing though since it required that people have at least a superficial knowledge of high-brow culture.Report
I think knowledge of high brow culture has been something people have wanted for a long time. I think it is much more of a recent belief that education is all or mostly about signalling. Poor and middle class people pushed their way into colleges because education was something they valued and aspired to. That may have been because they just wanted to be like those rich folk over there or it may have been that lots of people have valued education for itself AND because of the greatly improved job opportunities.
Back in the days of gold rushes around the country, and often the world, newly rich cities would build opera houses.Report
Greginak, but did they actually enjoy the opera? 19th century accounts are mixed on that subject. A lot of the support of arts from the newly rich was done because they were doing what they thought rich people should do. By signaling I didn’t mean anything bad, I just meant that people pursued these things because they saw them as part of their class.Report
Remember people saying “Give me the Reader’s Digest version”?
Reader’s Digest had “condensed books” that, instead of forcing you to slog through S. Morganstern’s version of the story, gave you William Goldman’s “Just The Good Stuff” version. Books that everybody who was anybody had read… only abridged. Mocked as being the height of middlebrow then, but what’s replaced it? Oprah’s bookclub?Report
Beats me how many people really enjoyed going to the opera or reading serious lit. But the actions of generations of people searching out classical music or opera or lit and education it seems to me they were showing they valued it. Signaling certainly happens but its also a common and, i think, easy crutch for everybody to throw out. Not that you were but it comes up a lot in arguments about culture and education.Report
Jaybird,
No.
Lee and Greg,
Interesting points on what the rich build to signal their class. One of the many things that old Bay Areans dislike about the tech rich is that they don’t support the old arts. Here is a good article about it:
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-bacon-wrapped-economy/Content?oid=3494301Report
I didn’t see middle-brow as “high culture for low culture people” as much as “accessible culture”. “Opera” wasn’t middlebrow, but the 1984 version of “Carmen” was. Life magazine’s treatment of celebrity news, Look magazine’s treatment of architecture, and the Saturday Evening Post’s reliance on the art of Norman Rockwell, of all people.
“Middlebrow” was (is) a greatest hits mixtape of culture.
The highbrow people will snort and say that, sure, maybe the middlebrow stuff is good… but it’s not as good as the obscure stuff and, anyway, we knew about that stuff decades ago.Report
The 1984 version of Carmen??? I thought i was familiar with all of Orwell’s works.Report
ND, the article was interesting. I wonder if conditions were similar with the new money during the Gilded Age. There were some differences since the fortunes of the Gilded Age generally took much longer to build. Cornelius Vanderbilt started working at seventeen and a lot of his kids were adults by the time he made it rich. John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie took several years to build their fortunes. Morgan was born wealthy even if he increased it over time.
At the same time, I think that the tech rich aren’t supporting the arts mainly because they weren’t socialized into philanthropy and like many people of our generation, don’t have the education background.Report
Jaybird, I’d categorize the original Carmen as mass entertainment and probably more towards the low-brow, albeit a very beautiful one.Report
I have a great love for the middlebrow, probably because my grandparents were the sort that told me, “you’d better sit down and read these books” in the same way they said “you’d better get out there and cut that lawn”. They had the Harvard Classics anthology, which probably did more than anything to get me interested in the rest of the stories. This is why it sets my teeth on edge when people talk about the “elitism” of high cultural institutions, when so many of them were so radically egalitarian in their mission. I remember reading some nitwit complaining not too long ago that regular folks don’t go to museums, they go to baseball games, so why should the elitists who run the museums get tax money? I thought “wait, who’s the elitist here?”Report
Rufus F., its probably something that can’t be known for certain but it appears in mid-20th century America, a larger percentage of the population felt at least somewhat obligated to know high culture. How much the actually understood is debatable but the impulse to get some of it was there.Report
God damn, can we leave off the nonsense that Opera was high brow?
Opera was the entertainment of its day, and it was consumed by the lower class (with stolen music and singers who couldn’t carry a tune) just as much as by the upper class.
[And yes, my sources are circa Verdi, which means the 19th century].
High brow appears to be defined increasingly as “what our parents liked (or their great grandparents)” or “what nobody except the pretentious likes.” As such, I find it terribly banal and eurocentric to boot. There’s good in Beethoven, surely… but there’s also fantastic in Tori Amos or Love Solfege.Report
I am more disturbed about adults spending all their time reading YA instead of getting challenged by Joyce, Woolf, Millet, Edgers, Lethem, Murdoch, etc instead we seem to have a generation or two whose cultural tastes largely stopped developing at 12-14. Julian Sanchez noted during the Rosenberg essay debate that there was a time when people felt some kind of obligation to tackle difficult and adult art.
Was that really a good thing, that people felt obligated to read literature that they would not otherwise read? It’s not like learning calculus or computer programming, where effort is expended to acquire a practical skill. Either you like it or you don’t, and I don’t see much moral or practical benefit either way. People talk about “enrichment,” but this has always seemed kind of hand-wavy to me. Does it make people measurably smarter? Better citizens? Anything at all, other than bring their tastes more in line with those who have appointed themselves the arbiters of good taste?
I can’t stand hip hop. I see no esthetic value whatsoever in it, and it mystifies me that other people—grown men and women, no less!—actually like it. And yet, other than life being somewhat more aurally pleasant for me personally (which isn’t even an issue for literature), I can’t think of any significant way in which the world would be better if people just stopped listening to it altogether.Report
Yes, of course.
You won’t understand half the jokes if you don’t know the context.
And it’s much harder to make jokes when folks have limited context.Report
I am more disturbed about adults spending all their time reading YA instead of getting challenged by Joyce, Woolf, Millet, Edgers, Lethem, Murdoch, etc instead we seem to have a generation or two whose cultural tastes largely stopped developing at 12-14.
Two things: one, it seems to me that you’re getting hung up on the idea of young adult fiction as really just being for kids, instead of being mostly about kids (I see nothing inherently wrong with adults reading about kids; at least, I don’t see it as a sign of immaturity). Two, is it really the case that fewer people are partaking of literature (pronounce “LIT-ra-choor”) or whatever label you want to apply to Joyce and Woolf and whoever the hell those other people are, or is it just that more people are reading? I mean, my own experience is that vastly more people are reading regularly than 20 years ago, they’re just reading easier stuff, because the easier stuff is what brought them to reading. I mean, if Joyce and Woolf are your entry into reading, as they were for many high school and college students once upon a time, then if you find Joyce and Woolf extremely unpleasant, then moment you don’t have to read, you ain’t gonna.Report
ND and I were voracious readers since we were kids. Our reading tastes when we were younger were always at the geeky end. Fantasy and science fiction novels, comic books, and manga. We discovered literary fiction in high school and liked it but we were reading before that. Our tastes changed as we grew up.Report
I suppose I am on the other end of the famous CS Lewis essay on criticism. There is a famous passage in which he compares the literary and non-literary reader. The non-literary reader does not need the writing of Woolf and Joyce and likes the simple communication of a sentence like “his blood ran cold”. Lewis argued that getting people to read for writing is like selling something they don’t want or need.
I am the person who wants and needs the writing of Joyce.
Are people reading more than they were 20 years ago? I was only 12 then so I can’t say for sure. What I can say is that in the 1960s, Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor appeared on the NY Times bestseller list. Maybe most people did not complete Ada or Ador but there was at least a sense that it was important to try and crack that very difficult book. Perhaps it is snobby but I think it is says something good about society when people feel it is important to attempt to comprehend and appreciate the difficult in art and literature.
Why are there no more Leonard Bernsteins that can bring audiences to classical music? We have video game and movie nights that are massively popular but this doesn’t make people try for Ravel or Mahler or Shostakovich or even Bach and Mozart.
And I am not sure that it is better that people are reading if the content is candy or fluff or in some cases wildly incorrect. I’d rather have people watch the Real Housewives of Whereever than read Glenn Beck. There is more content in the Real Housewives.
We would say that a person who only eats junk food and candy and whatever comforted them at 8 is not doing their body service and they need more fruits and vegetables and to expand their taste buds. Why is it snobby to say the same about art and culture? Why is it acceptable for people to stay completely within the realm of their childhoods in this regard?Report
NewDealer,
“Why are there no more Leonard Bernsteins that can bring audiences to classical music? We have video game and movie nights that are massively popular but this doesn’t make people try for Ravel or Mahler or Shostakovich or even Bach and Mozart. ”
There are. I’ve even recommended some on here. Tori Amos is a brilliant concert pianist, for example.
But to say “nobody listens to Mahler anymore!” is to discount the inherent majesty in our current soundscape. It’s fair to say that Brosius achieves a level of immersion that Mozart could never have hoped to achieve — but really, to evaluate them on the same playing field is a mistake (Bernstein, on the other hand, can be fairly evaluated against Brosius, although I haven’t seen On the Waterfront, so I’ll refrain).Report
I’m of two minds here:
One, I worry that art as a consumer good inevitably becomes less sophisticated, but on the other, I’m excited if people are reading, period. I have a hard time getting snobby about more people reading; I don’t have a difficult time getting snobby about the fact that there don’t seem to be any obvious Nabokov’s writing books so that they could end up on the NYT Best Sellers list.Report
Ugh, that came out wrong: It should read: I have a difficult time getting snobby about more people reading, I do not have a difficult time getting snobby about the quality of the top-end writers these days.Report
I can’t help but remember a handful of “the emperor ain’t wearing any clothes!” moments I had when reading “important” lit-rit-chure. I was surrounded by smart people, talking smartly, about a book (I’m pretty sure it was “House of Leaves” but it couldn’t have been because I was still in college (it was right before the Sokal Affair) and House of Leaves didn’t come out until 2000) and I was sitting there saying “this is nothing but silly pretentious crap.”
If you’ve ever been burned by something like that, you’re going to be *REALLY* suspicious about books that “feel” a particular way a couple of chapters in.
Perhaps Duchamp was a great artist after all. He got us to try to think about whether we were just looking at a urinal.Report
Chris,
I suppose I am largely of two minds as well. I personally dismiss the Emperor is not wearing clothes story. That feels just as hackneyed as Tom Freidman starting a column by talking about a taxi driver.
Or perhaps this is just my NYC-SF pride and regionalism showing.
Keep in mind that I had no idea what twerking was until this week. So clearly my priorities are away from pop culture.Report
NewDealer,
Surely you can find a few recent books better than Twain, or Stevenson?
I do feel like the urge to look towards the past blinds us sometimes to the present.Report
@jaybird
I am not a post-modernist so I am embarrassed by the Sokal affair but I don’t think it makes studying engineering or science more academic and sound than studying literature.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/08/why-teach-english.html?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=facebook
And pretentious crap is a relative concept. I find that Tolkien is a woody and Victorian writer is pretentious and worthless in his attempts to copy old English and Icelandic sagas. I’m sure plenty of people would burn me at the stake for this. I also think that most music in Fantasy and SF movies is rather pretentious, dull, and tells you what to feel and exactly when. I hate the melodrama of it all. It is third-rate Carl Orff and Carl Orff was second-rate Wagner. Every time I hear the music from big SF and Fantasy movies, “We like pompous music” goes through my head to the tune of Carmina Burana.
Pretentious is a great attack word because it conveys a feeling without offering any substance. How could you tell that the people discussing were only reading to signal instead of sincerely enjoying it.
This is a bit of a sore point for me because I do get a lot of people telling me that I can’t sincerely like my reading and art choices because a lot of people simply see them as unenjoyable and that a person only reads Wharton to seem smart and look artistic and literary and what not. Are there people who signal this way? Probably but I think most fans of “highbrow” culture do sincerely like the stuff.Report
Probably 1 out of every 10 novels that I read was written after 1950, so at least in literature, my connection to pop culture is tenuous at best. However, when I read novelists who people say I should read from the last few years, I am almost always disappointed. That’s why when I find someone like Richard Flanagan, Pat Barker, or Victor Pelevin, I latch onto them and don’t let go.
Oh, and read Gould’s Book of Fish, Wanting, and Life of Insects.Report
New Dealer,
“This is a bit of a sore point for me because I do get a lot of people telling me that I can’t sincerely like my reading and art choices because a lot of people simply see them as unenjoyable and that a person only reads Wharton to seem smart and look artistic and literary and what not. Are there people who signal this way? Probably but I think most fans of “highbrow” culture do sincerely like the stuff.”
I’m not going to say you don’t like it! Jeepers, you’re allowed to like what you like! But, dude, why do you like it? (honest question)
People like pulp because it’s heartpounding, thrilling stuff (London’s pulp, so’s Twain).
Other people like… pointed literature (trolling, in other words, like Swift!)
There’s reflexive literature (like Arrested Development — which I’d need to consider why I like as much as I do).Report
Here’s a story from the restaurant. We had just finished a dinner party and the people had been eating dessert. The cake was a chocolate layer cake with caramel between the layers and the layers themselves were three kinds of chocolate: white chocolate, milk chocolate, dark chocolate. The frosting was dark chocolate and there were milk chocolate shavings on top.
One of our patrons, afterwards, said that kids wouldn’t appreciate that cake. They could eat a Snickers bar and be just as pleased.
My problem is *NOT*–absolutely not– with people who like stuff that they like. That’s awesome. Go nuts.
My problem is with “I enjoy what I like on a much deeper level than you enjoy what you like. My enjoyment is of higher quality than your petty enjoyments.”
It’s like there is some hidden category between “matters of taste” and “matters of morality” when it comes to the aesthetic. Like “better” people enjoy “better” things. This cake, for example… and the kids wouldn’t appreciate it. They’d eat a Snickers and be just as happy.Report
NewDealer,
I can sympathize about finding some music overbearing.
I think you’d like “Castle in the Mist” though (the song).Report
Jaybird,
I hear you on that. Wine snobs really tend to piss me off, because when I explain what I like, they call me unsophisticated. I like the taste of grapes, sue me! I don’t want to taste butter when I’m drinking a wine. That’s not tasting your drink, that’s getting some sort of weird hallucination (which is fine, but it’s not my taste).Report
I like Hesse and Wharton because I think they are good writers. I think Wharton is very good at very subtle parody of her time and class and culture. I like the writing because it creates a whole world in the first page that dives you in. The sheer brilliance of opening paragraphs of The Age of Innocence, Narcissus and Goldmund, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Sputnik Sweetheart, and many other books are amazing.
I find the message/story of the Garden of Finzi-Continis (escaping from the ultimate hell by being exiled from the Garden of Eden) to be more interesting than a story about magical rings and swords. Same with the story and ideas behind Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby.
I like Richard Serra sculptures because of how they change your interaction and perceptions of an environment. Hockney’s paintings please me.
Beckett understood the absurdity and pain of modern life and the universal follies of desire. Play is interesting in its form.Report
<Narcissus and Goldmund made me cry. Damn that book!
Jay, I think society is better for having better art, because good art can be transformative (sometimes transgressive). To that extent, I think one could make an argument that liking better art is a moral good, though I don’t know if I want to actually make that argument.Report
We all got into this argument a few years back and the example that comes most readily to my mind is Velvet Underground’s “Heroin”.
Is that an immoral song? I waver.
It sure as heck ain’t a moral one, though.Report
I dunno. I think the morality of art, generally, and the morality of a piece of art, specifically, are separable questions (unless all of the specific ones come out immoral), but I’m reticent to speak on the immorality of a piece of art unless it creates unnecessary suffering (as, say, art that blatantly incites racial hatred might be).Report
Jaybird, I agree with that arguments about liking something on a deeper level are silly and snobby but I don’t think that relates to what ND and Chris are writing about. Take something like Star Wars. Lots of people like Star Wars but don’t venture beyond the movies. A serious Star Wars fan can argue that he appreciates Star Wars on a deeper level than others because he reads the novels, writes fan fiction, and cosplays. Its about pop culture but the elitism is still there.
What good art does, as Chris points out is transform people. Sometimes a painting is so beautiful that it creates a feeling of rapture and ecstasy in the audience and can captivate them and hold them silent for hours. The other thing is that art as you said can be immoral or Chris said transgressive. This art transforms the audience by challenging the audience in their assumptions and getting them to think about things differently or question what they believe. Art doesn’t necessarily have to be transgressive/immoral to do this though. Narcissus and Goldmund isn’t particularly immoral or transgressive but it is challenging.Report
It’s been said before but it bears repeating: violence, by just about any method you care to measure it, is the lowest it’s been in decades.Report
Very true, though Hamilton has the most violent crime of any city in Ontario.Report
Also the most gun violence of any vice president besides Cheney.Report
Represent.Report
I’m not sure it’s important but what city and whose culture? Are you writing about Ontario California but have an example at the end of a city in the province of Ontario?Report
It would be Ontario, Canada, and it probably does make some difference. A friend of mine went out for a walk the other night a few blocks from my house and witnessed a man dying in the street after having stumbled out of a house where a friend stabbed him in an altercation and one of my thoughts was that they have probably have more stabbings here than shootings (like other cities I’ve lived in) because of the Canadian gun laws. It also probably makes it easier to talk openly about these problems happening in this city because it’s overwhelmingly white.Report
Should read ‘unlike other cities I’ve lived in,’ referring to DC back in the early 90s.Report
@rufus-f Thanks. I was a bit confused.Report
The VMAs the other night is certainly a sign of cultural decline. The same thing with those Juggalo losers. But what should we expect after 40+ years of liberal social policies? This country will just keep slouching towards Gomorrah, heck it seems like we are now jogging.Report
“The VMAs the other night is certainly a sign of cultural decline. The same thing with those Juggalo losers. But what should we expect after 40+ years of conservative economic policies? This country will just keep slouching towards Gomorrah, heck it seems like we are now jogging.”Report
I think it might be best to refer to the Bible when talking about slouching towards Sodom and Gomorrah. According to Ezekiel 16:49, “Only this was the sin of your sister Sodom and her daughters:arrogance! She and her daughters had plenty of bread and untroubled tranquility; yet she did not support the poor and needy.”
Basically, the Bible isn’t saying that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah wasn’t cultural decadence, it was that they lived by “FYIGM” and that they refused to live as a community that cooperates and supports each other. That sounds more like a displeasure with conservative economic theories.Report
What bothers me most about the OP is a disconnect I think I see. I had a visceral feeling of frustration and of being deeply disturbed by my thoughts after I read it. I seem to see teenagers and young adults everywhere who seem so completely disconnected from adult life. It seems like they don’t see an avenue for them to go mainstream they seem to be reacting to this by going in the opposite direction as far from convention as possible. It seems to cut across race, gender, and social stratum. They just seem angry. “so hot it could burn you” as Rufus says. I’d like to hear Kazzy comment on this because I’ve thought about how to help kids become successful adults. I’ve seen it fail despite the best of intentions and effort and wondered why. Even though I’m old enough that I should have some wisdom to impart on this subject I’m afraid I don’t.
I know that values change across generations. Maybe I’m just ready for the handoff to the next generation, you know – “you’re problem now”. What I remember now about when I was young seems so different, naive, we went through that late 60’s thing and there was lots of rejection of our parents values but I didn’t see the total disillusion I think I see now. It was the opposite then, everyone thought they were going to remake the world. Well, that didn’t happen we just became adults with kids and mortgages. I hope I’m wrong but I see too many young faces that seem hopeless and angry about it.Report
sorry for the misleading use of “you’re”. should have been “your problem now.”Report
“but that ever-present anger so hot it could burn you, lord does that ring true. ”
Hell yeah. Seen that too.Report
I’ve never understood Toronto to be a particularly violent city, and Fnord’s point that statistically, violence is down is well-taken. Yet in the OP and in the comments two horrific murders are described. Could it be that you just live in a bad part of town, Rufus?
While the flavors of violence within the culture are new — video games and UFC — the presence of violence in the culture is not. Boxing, dueling, jousting — in most phases of history and in most cultures globally there have been forms of ritualized violence channeled into socially-accepted forms of competition. So too with art exploring both the sublime and the grotesque.
What is different about the post-war world is the massive commoditization of certain forms of media used to convey the culture. But we’ve always had violence in art and sport, always had unappealing aesthetics, always had substance abusers, just as we’ve always had singing and dancing.Report
Though in Southern Ontario, Rufus isn’t in Toronto. I won’t pretend to be an expert on his hometown, but it is definitely a rougher town than TO (his city has the most violent crime in the province). Historically, it was a steel town, but a lot of industry has closed down, one cause of much of the social and economic malaise he describes.
Don’t get me wrong, he’s not living in some Mad Max dystopia, but his city is different in nature from other major cities in the province.Report
Sounds like a classic rust belt city.
There are a lot of towns like that in Western Mass. The areas around Amherst are okay because there are a lot of colleges in the area but college towns are very weird economies.Report
Actually, what’s most interesting to me about Hamilton is that there’s one street downtown that’s supposedly leading the “cultural revival” of the city. Lots of Torontonians moving there, art galleries, festivals with tepid indie rock bands playing music that sounds like it belongs in Ikea commercials. Yet, it’s wedged between the crack block and the street that’s known for prostitution. One moment of cultural dissonance happened when I was at a club seeing a musical performer with the crowd of university students and two pimps and a prostitute chased a john who hadn’t paid two blocks down the street into the club and started a fight.Report
Rufus F., I think that gentrification usually starts in the worse areas of town because property is cheaper and rents lower. Gives you more money to spend sprucing up the place.Report
Rufus F,
If gentrification holds it will switch. I live in a gentrified neighborhood. 20-30 years ago it was a neighborhood where you dared not tread. It began improving about 10 years ago but drive by shootings were fairly common as recently as 5-6 years ago.
When I moved in to the neighborhood, you would see a lot of cars with busted windows.
Now you have one or two “sketchy” buildings in a largely gentrified neighborhood.Report
Apologies to Rufus re: my confusion of Hamilton with Toronto.Report
Yeah, I’ve read a fair amount about the downtown revival in Hamilton, but I keep hearing about stories like the ones you’ve highlighted, Rufus. Hopefully, this revival kind of takes.Report
@rufus-f
I think the middlebrow thing is part of a problem. Those old Harvard Classic tombs were democratic up to a point. Just like a MOOC course is democratic up to a point. You get to say you attended an MIT class but they are still credit free and you don’t get the advantages of an MIT and Harvard degree. A cynic could say this is Harvard and MIT promoting their brand and prestige. I also think a lot of the backlash against elitism comes from people who criticized middlebrow culture like Dwight MacDonald.
http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/masscult-and-midcult/
As a former geek I agree. A lot of die-hard geeks just seem very happy as children and adolescents. But this is considered acceptable as culture.
@kim
You are the last person in this community who should ever call something bullshit considering the vague and out there nature of most of your posts and your absolute refusal to clarify and speak clearly when challenged on incomprehension. And I firmly disagree with the very fandom-friendly idea that everything is tropes and nothing is new under the sun.
I will concede that some books in the HS reading list might be age inappropriate but this does not mean that adult or heavier stuff does not belong. HS students should read Shakespeare, they should read Fitzgerald, Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, the Beats, Hermann Hesse, Jane Austen, the Greeks along with Salinger and more age appropriate stuff. What do you propose for a HS reading list that will encourage people to seek out that sort of material later in life?
@leeesq
Good point on Picasso. Though I still think people have a bias towards representational art that I do not have but you are right that Picasso probably has more fans than Matthew Barney.Report
Mark Twain wrote some rollicking good books (though they’re just as good for the younger set).
(I’d go so far as to say, if you don’t like Twain, there’s something wrong with you.)
Shaw springs to mind.
Dostoyevsky, while tough, was still pretty good.
Moliere is a much more suited to adolescents study in wit and satire than Austen.
Dickens, that old hoary master of pulp of yesteryear.
Swift’s always readable and engaging.
But one ought to take it as a given that the best writer isn’t from the past, but the present. The craft has improved in the meantime, as has access to the materials on which to write.Report
Jack London, Joseph Heller, Robert Louis Stevenson, Steinbeck.
Adolescence is a tumultuous time, and adolescents are likely to enjoy vivid, bright books and other media.
Hesse is withered, the crinkle of dry parchment in an autumn breeze. And Fitzgerald’s point has been done far better in different media.
It is objectionable, the idea that folks should not consume media of all sorts — those who insist on raising books above all other media deserve scorn.Report
Narcissus and Goldman was one of my favorite books from Senior Year English class.Report
Hesse was my absolute favorite. Narcissist and Goldman was good but the Glass Bead Game and Steppenwolf were life changing for me at 15.Report
NewDealer,
I liked Jane Eyre. I’m deliberately leaving it off a young adult reading list, because all the guys hated it.
Did everyone else like Narcissus and Goldman (which, fwiw, was not the book I read of his)Report
On further consideration, it was the theme of the book of Hesse’s that I disliked (roughly: there is nothing new under the sun, and you can’t change that.) Skimmed a bit of Steppenwolf, seems like something I’d like a bit better.
Will read.Report
@Kim Steppenwolf is great but a bit male adolescent perhaps for someone older. I’d suggest The Glass Bead Game. It took his whole career to write so it’s a bit more “mature”. N&G is pretty interesting but more from a Jungian appreciation, the separation between the academic and artistic sides of an individual.Report
Oh, and I do believe you’re missing the point on tropes.
It’s not that things can’t be new (certainly Dwarf Fortress pioneered new gameplay — post forthcoming, I hope).
It’s that immediately thereafter, people start copying them.Report
Oh, man, dissing the Harvard Classics? I was a bibliomaniac when I was a kid. I got a leather bound edition for my sixteenth birthday instead of a car. Dante, Two Years Before The Mast, The Thousand and One Nights, Aesop, Grimm, Darwin these are all great books in the HC without getting too meaty.Report
I’m not dissing the Harvard Classics. I said that some writers like Dwight MacDonald did though and this could have caused the backlash.Report
ND, if you want more people to appreciate high culture than you need to give them an accesible way to get it. Sink or swim isn’t going to work as a method for getting people to like high culture. Middle-brow is one of the best ways to get people to appreciate high culture.
I agree that most people like representational art but its more the same reason that Picasso is more appreciated than Barney, its graspable. High-brow isn’t a good thing in itself. At its worse, high-brow culture is incredibly obtuse and self-refrential in a way worse than geek culture.Report
Fair points.Report
Picasso had his blue period, but Barney was always purple.Report
@chris and @rufus-f
Kim and Jaybird as well.
I think part of the issue is that current culture for a variety of reasons tends to valorize silliness and embracing your inner-child. Part of this might be economic. I know a lot of young adults who say they hate all the bill and job paying aspects of adulthood and want to return to being cared for children again.
There are other parts though.
I think silliness can be important but people tend to over do it. The geeks I know are fond of a CS Lewis quote that riffs on the New Testament. The add on is that it is a childish desire to have the overwhelming desire to be an adult all the time. This might be true but I think a lot of people go too far in the other direction and forget about the pleasures of being an adult.Report
Eh, I think this trend’s antithesis, which I see a lot among certain segments of the population among whom I find myself all too often, though rarely by choice, is a trend to fetishize the complex, obscure, and opaque as a means of self-aggrandizement, without any real indication of genuine aesthetic sophistication. I don’t mean to imply this is what you are doing, or what anyone here is doing, but when I do see it, it drives me absolutely bonkers, and I’m tempted to go off on a rand about aesthetics any time I think about it, but it would be only for my own benefit, so I’ll refrain, or at least try.
This may be part of what Jaybird was expressing with the mention of postmodernism up there, but I think this trend, which has a much broader following than the postmodernist lit crit/theory crowd (in fact, I think I see it most among a set of people who would emphatically insist that they hate pomo, and they might even call it pomo), is slightly different.Report
I know a lot of young adults who say they hate all the bill and job paying aspects of adulthood and want to return to being cared for children again.
There is a simple solution to this.
It also begs the question: how can it be cultural decline if a large part of the problem isn’t the current generation?Report
@newdealer ,
I quite like the Wharton that I’ve read.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/EthanFrome?from=Main.EthanFromeReport
Ethan Frome is very different from other Wharton.
Read The Age of Innocence.Report
Ethan Frome is a very good example of why you should write what you know.Report
I’d suggest everyone read The Jacksonian Tradition, an influential article by Walter Russell Mead. I think it’s a great starting point for any discussion of American culture, both red-state country and blue-state black. It sounds like it applies to Canadian culture too, more than the average Canadian may want to admit. For the purposes of this conversation, browse through the beginning and jump down to “The Jacksonian Code”.Report
Oh my that was painful. Sorry, I couldn’t make it to the end of even the one section. Jacksonian isn’t “American” it’s Southern. To steal from Fiddler on the Roof, “May the Lord bless and keep the Jacksonians far far from us.”Report
Dude, don’t mess with a joke you don’t understand.
It’s much funnier in the original russian.Report
As Thomas Sowell noted in “Black Rednecks and White Liberals”, the American black culture derives from the Southern culture. As I noted in my comment above, or meant to, the country-and-western culture is a driving force in “red” America, and the black urban culture is a driving force in “blue” America. That’s a lot of impact. Jacksonianism isn’t just Scots-Irish anymore. The most interesting development in recent years is the way that Mexican / Central American culture in the US has identified with the Jacksonian “macho” sense of honor and family loyalty.Report
Pinky,
1) hispanic culture has always had the sense of macho. Hasn’t changed one whit.
2) PLEASE stop confusing ScotsIrish with Cavalier Culture.
3) African American culture was a determining factor in Cavalier Culture. To simply say that “the blacks borrowed the whites’ cultures”… is kinda racist, don’t you think? Well, frankly, it ain’t true either, so stop saying it!
4) Don’t be a goober. ;-P (Yes, I like linguistic jokes. Take it as a lagniappe…(yes, that’s another riff on Southern culture))Report
Albion’s Seed is a better treatment of what ScotsIrish is all about.
Ditto Born Fighting.
Read those instead.Report
Rufus:
What do you really expect after 40 plus years of liberal social policies?Report
A pony.Report
Wouldn’t a mule be sort of more appropriate?Report
I never pictured you as a bronie.
Talk about cultural decline!Report
A Moscow Mule perhaps?Report
Who figures an immigrant’s going to have a pony? Do you know what the odds are on that? I mean in all the pictures I saw of immigrants on boats coming into New York harbor, I never saw one of them sitting on a pony! Why would anybody come here if they had a pony? Who leaves a country packed with ponies to come to a non-pony country? It doesn’t make sense! Am I wrong?Report
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQl5aYhkF3E
(No offense. It comes to mind every single time someone asks me if they’re wrong!)Report
Heh… that wasn’t me asking if I was wrong, that was Seinfeld. It’s the scene I think of anytime someone says they want a pony.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RDLqb3umswReport
The troll is weak in this one.Report
See my responses above.Report