This article about the disappearance of the "middlebrow" culture caught my eye over at Instapundit:
I grew up in the Age of the Middlebrow, that earnest, self-improving fellow who watched prime-time documentaries and read the Book of the Month. That was me, in spades. I was born in a small Missouri town in 1956, the year Dwight Eisenhower was re-elected by a landslide, and as far back as I can remember, I was eager to learn what was going on beyond the city limits of that small town, out in the great world of art and culture...I already knew a little something about people like Willem de Kooning and Jerome Robbins, thanks to Time and Life magazines and The Ed Sullivan Show, and what little I knew made me want to know more.
Ours is essentially a popular culture, of course, but in the democratic culture of postwar America, there was also unfettered access to what Matthew Arnold so famously called "the best that has been thought and said in the world"—and, just as important, there was no contempt for it...
For all its flaws, [middlebrow culture] nurtured at least two generations’ worth of Americans who, like me, went on to become full-fledged highbrows—but highbrows who, while accepting the existence of a hierarchy of values in art, never lost sight of the value of popular culture.
The catch was that the middlebrow culture on which I was raised was a common culture, based on the existence of widely shared values, and it is now splintered beyond hope of repair. Under the middlebrow regime, ordinary Americans were exposed to a wide range of cultural options from which they could pick and choose at will. They still do so, but without the preliminary exposure to the unfamiliar that once made their choices potentially more adventurous...Instead of three TV networks, we have a hundred channels, each "narrowcasting" to a separate sliver of the viewing public...
The information age offers something for anybody: Survivor for simpletons, The Sopranos for sophisticates. The problem is that it offers nothing for everybody. By maximizing and facilitating cultural choice, information-age capitalism fused with identity politics to bring about the disintegration of the common middlebrow culture of my youth...
I assume, since you’re reading this, that you’re distressed by this unmistakable symptom of the widespread cultural illiteracy with which what Winston Churchill liked to call "the English-speaking peoples" are currently afflicted. But it so happens that a great many American intellectuals, most of them academics, would respond to your distress with a question: so what? To them, the very idea of "high art" is anathema, a murderous act of cultural imperialism. They don’t think Leonardo da Vinci should be "privileged" (to use one of their favorite pieces of jargon) over the local neighborhood graffiti artist. And as preposterous as this notion may seem to you, it is all but taken for granted among a frighteningly large swath of the postmodern American intelligentsia.
Which brings us right back to the problem of cultural illiteracy. How can we do anything about it if we can’t even agree on the fact that it is a problem—or about what basic cultural facts ordinary people should be expected to know? The answer is simple: we can’t.
I think what fascinates me about this essay is that it seems related to some of the controversies in American education today. Those same "intelligentsia" who teach children to consider graffiti to be the same level of "art" as Da Vinci's work are the same folks who consider it "imperialistic" to demand that all children in US school learn to speak English well. These are the folks who consider it "unfair" to hold all children to the same standard, as opposed to moving the standards about to reflect various "cultural" influences. These are the same people who value "identity politics" so highly that we risk a return to judging people only by the color of their skin, rather than the content of their character (or the evidence of their academic achievement).
How, indeed, does a school decide what to teach, when there is such a widespread disavowal of the idea that there one middlebrow culture to which every American should have access? One can argue that the middlebrow culture can be expanded to include other information not emphasized in the past, but in my mind, the intelligentsia do a poor job of explaining why black children should learn more about Malcolm X than George Washington or Shakespeare. When even Columbus Day celebrations are controversial and opposed by those with limited knowledge of American history, or biased political ideologies, it seems doubtful that even the much-honored discoverer (or re-disoverer) of America can remain part of the "common heritage of mankind."
Posted by kswygert at October 13, 2003 02:34 PM