Whatever happened to high culture? -- Joseph Epstein

Painting by Boris Chaliapin (1955)

Joseph Epstein

"For many years I taught an undergraduate course in prose style to would-be writers. At one point in the course I used to present my students with a list of 15 or so items that included such names and events as the Peloponnesian War, Leon Trotsky, Serge Diaghilev, the 1913 Armory Show, the Spanish Civil War, Nicolas Chamfort, Boris Chaliapin, C. P. Cavafy, the Dreyfus Affair, and a few others. I asked how many knew who or what these items were. A few among them knew one or two of the names and events listed. I said that, at 20 years old, I myself could not have done better than they. I then added that, if one wanted to pass oneself off as a cultured person one had to know such things and a great deal more. My sense is that these students were, as I hoped they would be, as I myself as an undergraduate was, properly cowed by their own ignorance.

I’m not sure that this same exercise would be of much avail today. Now students need merely pick up their smartphones and Google the names on my list. I’m less than sure that culture, and the notion of being a cultured person, has anything like the high standing it once had. Might most people today rather be well informed than cultured? What was once a high human aspiration—the possession of culture—may no longer be so. How did such a change come about?

Truly cultured people were always a minority, at any time and in every place. One used to be able to find a certain number of them in universities. Some schools appeared to have more than others. Columbia in the days of Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, F. W. Dupee, & Co. was notable among them. They were also to be found in the books one read at universities. One could not read, for example, George Eliot without being immensely impressed with her vast learning, deep understanding, and artistic control over complex material, and wondering if, were she alive today, one could engage her in conversation without oneself seeming sadly inadequate.

No George Eliots around today, and no Barzuns or Trillings either, which is a sad subtraction from the richness of not merely culture but life itself. Nor is it easy to imagine such people soon replaced. Universities, operating under the tyranny of political correctness and the requisites of dumbing down, seem just now keener on building up the self-esteem and protecting the tender sensibilities of their students than in creating young men and women eager to possess culture.

The acquisition of culture requires repose, sitting quietly in a room with a book, or alone with one’s thoughts even at a crowded concert or art museum. Ours is distinctly not an age of repose. The rhythm of our time is jumpy. The smart phone is its characteristic instrument, with calls and texts coming in more than intermittently, Google there to consult as an aide-memoire, to check for stock prices, ball scores, recent terrorist murders. Information not culture is the great desideratum of our day, distraction our chief theme.

 

Cable television, with something for everyone but the thoughtful, awaits at home. What with raising children under the full-court press regime of parenting, making a living, working out at the gym, worrying about one’s diet, taking a breather to watch a baseball game or a movie, there is scarcely time left to read a serious book or anything else that might be construed as acquiring culture."

 

What is culture? -- Joseph Epstein

 

Joseph Epstein

"During my teaching days, along with courses on Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Willa Cather, I taught an undergraduate course called Advanced Prose Style. What it was advanced over was never made clear, but each year the course was attended by 15 or so would-be—or, as we should say today, wannabe—novelists and poets. Usage, diction, syntax, rhythm, metaphor, irony were some of the subjects taken up in class. Around the sixth week of the eight-week term I passed out a list of 12 or so names and historical events—among them Sergei Diaghilev, Francis Poulenc, Mark Rothko, Alexander Herzen, the 1913 Armory Show, John Cage, the Spanish Civil War, George Balanchine, and Jean Cocteau—and asked how many of these items the students could identify.

The identification rate among my students was inevitably low, which did not much surprise me. I mentioned that at their age (20 or 21), I should probably not have done much better, and then added: "But if as writers you intend to present yourself to the world as cultured persons, you have to know these names and events and scores of others, and what is important about them. This is not something that one gets up as if for an exam, or Googles and promptly forgets, but that must be understood in historical context—at least it must for those who seek to live a cultured life."

Oddly, no one ever asked what a cultured life was and why it was worth pursuing. This may have been just as well for, though I believed I was myself by then leading (or earnestly attempting to lead) such a life, I'm not sure I could have answered either question. I'm going to attempt to do so now. 

... 

What I mean by the ideal of culture is high culture, as set out by Matthew Arnold in his 1869 book Culture and Anarchy. Arnold described this level of culture as "the best which has been thought and said," but in our day it has been enlarged to include the best that has been composed and painted and sculpted and filmed. Arnold believed that high culture had its "origin in the love of perfection" and the "study of perfection," and thought it an idea that the new democracy under the industrial revolution developing in his day needed "more than the idea of the blessedness of the franchise, or the wonderfulness of their own industrial performances."

Behind Arnold's notion of high culture was a program for the partial reform of human nature. Attaining the perfection of high culture, Arnold held, would bring about "an inward condition of the mind and spirit .  .  . at variance with the mechanical and material civilization in esteem with us." Properly cultivated, this elevated culture would lead to "an expansion of human nature" and release us from our "inaptitude for seeing more than one side of a thing, with our intense energetic absorption in the particular pursuit we happen to be following."

One might think Matthew Arnold's idea of culture is restricted to the well-born. He saw it otherwise. "In each class," he wrote,

there are born a certain number of natures with a curiosity about their best self, with a bent for seeing things as they are, for disentangling themselves from machinery .  .  . for the pursuit, in a word, of perfection. .  .  . And this bent always tends .  .  . to take them out of their class, and to make their distinguishing characteristic not their [social origins, wealth, or status], but their humanity.

Make no mistake: High culture, culture in the sense in which Arnold speaks of it as an ideal, is an elite activity—but one open to everyone with what Arnold calls a "bent" for it."

 

Mass at Dawn -- Roy Campbell (1901-1957)

I dropped my sail and dried my dripping seines
Where the white quay is chequered by cool planes
In whose great branches, always out of sight,
The nightingales are singing day and night.
Though all was grey beneath the moon’s grey beam,
My boat in her new paint shone like a bride,
And silver in my baskets shone the bream:
My arms were tired and I was heavy-eyed,
But when with food and drink, at morning-light,
The children met me at the water-side,
Never was wine so red or bread so white.

We've Only Just Begun -- The Carpenters (1970)

Pop music for grown ups. Nevermore. (Karen Carpenter died of anorexia nervosa, by the way -- poor thing.)

We've only just begun to live
White lace and promises
A kiss for luck and we're on our way
(We've only begun)
Before the risin' sun, we fly
So many roads to choose
We'll start out walkin' and learn to run
(And yes, we've just begun)
Sharing horizons that are new to us
Watching the signs along the way
Talkin' it over, just the two of us
Workin' together day to day
Together
And when the evening comes, we smile
So much of life ahead
We'll find a place where there's room to grow
(And yes, we've just begun)
Sharing horizons that are new to us
Watching the signs along the way
Talkin' it over, just the two of us
Workin' together day to day
Together
Together
And when the evening comes, we smile
So much of life ahead
We'll find a place where there's room to grow
And yes, we've just begun

Written by Nichols Williams

 

 

 

American Carnage -- Christopher Caldwell

First Things

"If you take too much heroin, your breathing slows until you die. Unfortunately, the drug sets an addictive trap that is sinister and subtle. It provides a euphoria—a feeling of contentment, simplification, and release—which users swear has no equal. Users quickly develop a tolerance, requiring higher and higher amounts to get the same effect. The dosage required to attain the feeling the user originally experienced rises until it is higher than the dosage that will kill him. An addict can get more or less “straight,” but approaching the euphoria he longs for requires walking up to the gates of death. If a heroin addict sees on the news that a user or two has died from an overly strong batch of heroin in some housing project somewhere, his first thought is, “Where is that? That’s the stuff I want.”

Tolerance ebbs as fast as it rises. The most dangerous day for a junkie is not the day he gets arrested, although the withdrawal symptoms—should he not receive medical treatment—are painful and embarrassing, and no picnic for his cellmate, either. But withdrawals are not generally life-threatening, as they are for a hardened alcoholic. The dangerous day comes when the addict is released, for the dosage he had taken comfortably until his arrest two weeks ago may now be enough to kill him.

...

In 1993, Francis F. Seeburger, a professor of philosophy at the University of Denver, wrote a profound book on the thought processes of addicts called Addiction and Responsibility. We tend to focus on the damage addiction does. A cliché among empathetic therapists, eager to describe addiction as a standard-issue disease, is that “no one ever decides to become an addict.” But that is not exactly true, Seeburger shows. “Something like an addiction to addiction plays a role in all addiction,” he writes. “Addiction itself . . . is tempting; it has many attractive features.” In an empty world, people have a need to need. Addiction supplies it. “Addiction involves the addict. It does not present itself as some externally imposed condition. Instead, it comes toward the addict as the addict’s very self.” Addiction plays on our strengths, not just our failings. It simplifies things. It relieves us of certain responsibilities. It gives life a meaning. It is a “perversely clever copy of that transcendent peace of God.”

The founders of Alcoholics Anonymous thought there was something satanic about addiction. The mightiest sentence in the book of Alcoholics Anonymous is this: “Remember that we deal with alcohol—cunning, baffling, powerful!” The addict is, in his own, life-damaged way, rational. He’s too rational. He is a dedicated person—an oblate of sorts, as Seeburger puts it. He has commitments in another, nether world."

"What school teaches, first and last, is “the need to be taught.”"

Where have all the education radicals gone? Roman Catholic priest and critic of modernity, Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

The Baffler, George Scialabba

"The first of [Ivan] Illich’s books, Deschooling Society (1971), made him very famous. It caught the crest of a wave of critique and experiment in American education: Paul Goodman, John Holt, Paulo Freire, free schools, community control. Illich shared his contemporaries’ anti-authoritarianism but not their reasons. For most educational radicals, the enemies were tradition—the age-old authority of church and state, bosses, and parents—and inequality: the gap between resources devoted to rich and poor children. From this point of view, the remedies were plain: practice emancipatory social relations in all schools and lavish more resources on those serving poorer children.

To Illich’s mind, those remedies missed the point. He thought the educational system had no good reason to exist. It was, like every modern service industry, in the business of creating and defining the needs it purported to satisfy—in this case, the certification of experts—while discrediting alternative, usually traditional, methods of self-cultivation and self-care. The schools’ primary mission was to produce people able and willing to inhabit a historically new way of life, as clients or administrators of systems whose self-perpetuation was their overriding goal. Thus schools produce childhood, a phenomenon that is, Illich claimed, no more than a few centuries old but is now the universal rationale for imposing an array of requirements, educational and medical, on parents and for training people as lifelong candidates for credentials and consumers of expertise.

It is not what schools taught that Illich objected to; it is that they taught:

To understand what it means to deschool society, and not just to reform the educational establishment, we must focus on the hidden curriculum of schooling. . . . [It is] the ceremonial or ritual of schooling itself [that] constitutes such a hidden curriculum. Even the best of teachers cannot entirely protect his pupils from it. Inevitably, this hidden curriculum of schooling adds prejudice and guilt to the discrimination which a society practices against some of its members and compounds the privilege of others with a new title to condescend to the majority. Just as inevitably, this hidden curriculum serves as a ritual of initiation into a growth-oriented consumer society for rich and poor alike.

Once young people have allowed their imaginations to be formed by curricular instruction, they are conditioned to institutional planning of every sort. . . . Neither ideological criticism nor social action can bring about a new society. Only disenchantment with and detachment from the central social ritual and reform of that ritual can bring about radical change.

What school teaches, first and last, is “the need to be taught.”

 

In a series of subsequent books—Tools for Conviviality (1973), Energy and Equity (1974), Medical Nemesis (1975), Toward a History of Needs (1978), The Right to Useful Unemployment (1978), and Shadow Work (1981)—Illich formulated parallel critiques of medicine, transportation, law, psychotherapy, the media, and other preserves of self-perpetuating expertise. The medical system produces patients; the legal system produces clients; the entertainment system produces audiences; and the transportation system produces commuters (whose average speed across a city, he liked to point out, is less than the average speed of pedestrians or bicyclists—or would be, if walking or bicycling those routes hadn’t been made impossible by the construction of highways). In this process, far more important than merely teaching us behavior is the way these systems teach us how to define our needs. “As production costs decrease in rich nations, there is an increasing concentration of both capital and labor in the vast enterprise of equipping man for disciplined consumption.”

Why do we have to be taught to need or disciplined to consume? Because being schooled, transported, entertained, etc.—consuming a service dispensed by someone licensed to provide it—is a radical novelty in the life of humankind. Until the advent of modernity only a century or two ago (in most of the world, that is; longer in “advanced” regions), the default settings of human nature included autonomy, mutuality, locality, immediacy, and satiety. Rather than being compulsorily enrolled in age-specific and otherwise highly differentiated institutions, one discovered interests, pursued them, and found others (or not) to learn with and from. Sick care was home- and family-based, far less rigorous and intrusive, and suffering and death were regarded as contingencies to be endured rather than pathologies to be stamped out. Culture and entertainment were less abundant and variegated but more participatory. The (commercially convenient) idea that human needs and wants could expand without limit, that self-creation was an endless project, had not yet been discovered."

The End of the University -- Roger Scruton

"Today's class will be about the same thing all your other classes are about -- How to make money."

First Things, Roger Scruton

"When Cardinal Newman wrote The Idea of a University in 1852, it was largely to uphold the old conception of the university, as a place apart, a quasi-monastic precinct opposed to the utilitarian mindset of the new manufacturing society. For Newman, a university exists to mold the characters of those who attend it. Immersing its students in a collegiate environment, and impressing on them an ideal of the educated mind, helps to turn raw human beings into gentlemen.

This, Newman implied, is the true social function of the university. Within college walls the adolescent is granted a vision of the ends of life; and he takes from the university the one thing that the world does not provide, which is a conception of intrinsic value. And that is why the university is so important in an age of commerce and industry, when the utilitarian temptation besieges us on every side, and when we are in danger of making every purpose a material one—in other words, as Newman saw it, in danger of allowing the means to swallow the ends.

Much has changed since Newman’s day. To suggest that universities are engaged in producing gentlemen is more than faintly ridiculous in an age when most students are women. Newman’s ideal university was modeled on the actual universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Trinity College, Dublin, which at the time admitted only men, did not permit their resident scholars to marry, and were maintained as quasi-religious institutions within the fold of the Anglican Church. Their undergraduates were recruited largely from the private schools, and their curriculum was solidly based in Latin, Greek, theology, and mathematics. Their domestic life revolved around the college, where dons and undergraduates had their living quarters, and where they dined together each evening in hall, robed in their academic gowns.

Only a small proportion of those who attended the old British universities in Newman’s day regarded study as the real purpose of being “up” at the alma mater. Some were there to row or play rugby; some were biding time before inheriting a title; some were on their way to commissions in the army, and were meanwhile rioting with their chums. Almost all were members of a social elite that had hit on this unique way of perpetuating itself, by coating its power with a veneer of high culture. And in this protected and beautiful environment you could also take culture seriously. With money in the bank and time on your hands, it was not so hard to turn your back on utilitarian values.

Today’s university differs from Cardinal ­Newman’s in almost every respect. It recruits from all classes of society, is open equally to men and to women, and is very often financed and provisioned by the state. Little if anything remains of the poised domestic life that shaped the soul of Newman, and the curriculum centers not on sublime and purposeless subjects like ancient Greek, in which there hovers the entrancing vision of a life beyond commerce, but on sciences, vocational disciplines, and the now ubiquitous “business studies” through which students supposedly learn the ways of the world."