What’s Wrong with the World

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"The End of White America?" (enough, already!)

As I tried to suggest in my last post, I think that the "notion of racial transcendence" that is "the ultimate goal" of "the new [pop-]cultural mainstream" consists not in "transcendence" of race at all, but in obsession with it: in the obsessive idealization and celebration of African-Americans, qua African-Americans, Hispanics, qua Hispanics, Asians, qua Asians, American Indians, qua American Indians, etc. - i.e., anybody and everybody except white gentiles (and especially white gentile males) - who, qua white gentiles, are to be relentlessly and blatantly caricatured and denigrated.

Hua Hsu:

"Successful network-television shows...feature wildly diverse casts, and an entire genre of half-hour comedy...seems dedicated to having fun with the persona of the clueless white male. The youth market is following the same pattern...Pop culture today rallies around an ethic of multicultural inclusion that seems to value every identity - except whiteness."

This has led to a grotesque sense of cultural bankruptcy among susceptible white youth - especially those with elite educations:

"Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University...has observed that many of his white students are plagued by a racial-identity crisis: "...to be white is to be culturally broke. The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, "I don't have a culture." They might be privileged, they might be loaded socioeconomically, but they feel bankrupt when it comes to culture...They feel disadvantaged, and they feel marginalized. They don't have a culture that's cool or oppositional..."

Might this sense of cultural bankruptcy be an understandable response to their being...well...relentlessly and blatantly caricatured and denigrated? (Not to mention poorly educated in their own history and culture!)

Oh, no. White kids are just upset because they're losing power:

"'We used to be in control! We're losing control!'"

So it's not enough to make white kids, and especially white boys, feel guilty about their cultural heritage (of which they know little or nothing). Once you've got them feeling guilty, you drive the knife in: your guilt feelings are merely a cover for disappointed power-lust!

* * * * *

Unfortunately, Hua Hsu's portrayal of mainstream popular cultural rings quite true to me, and is confirmed practically everytime I turn on the television, go to the movies, or overhear what my niece and nephew are listening to on their Ipods.

* * * * *

Oh, and by the way: Steve Sailer has posted a very different, and probably much smarter, response to Hua Hsu's essay here.

Comments (43)

"The End of White America?"
(enough, already!)

My sentiments exactly.

Huh, aristocles?

"Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University...has observed that many of his white students are plagued by a racial-identity crisis: "...to be white is to be culturally broke. The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, "I don't have a culture." They might be privileged, they might be loaded socioeconomically, but they feel bankrupt when it comes to culture...They feel disadvantaged, and they feel marginalized. They don't have a culture that's cool or oppositional..."
Which is just another reason, one of many, why "cool" should have a stake driven through its heart, along with "youth culture" (i.e. mass marketing to youth) and the cult of authenticity. Forgive me, this is the best my flu-addled brain can come up with right now.

Part of this trouble for white kids is that, especially outside the South, white culture tended to be ethno-religious and not racial per se. Intermarriage among religious or ethnic groups and the cultural decline of public, historically-rooted religion has helped produce their bland world.

On the plus side, perhaps they recognize that pop-culture is no culture at all, being a manifestation of consumer preferences rather than shared customs.

Steve Sailer's response may be different, but I don't interpret it as being incompatible with Steve Burton's observations, not even in the slightest respect; in my estimation, each considers a different aspect of one multifaceted phenomenon. Of course the continued dominance of whites in and through the institutional architectures they have created must be acknowledged, as it is the invisible atmosphere in which we live and move and have our social being. Simultaneously, in ways too numerous and protean to enumerate, the artifacts and traditions of recognizably 'white', European cultures are relentlessly denigrated, and the bearers or presumed bearers of those traditions - some of whom are not even European - stigmatized as retrogrades. The essential unity of these phenomena is that the "white culture" that is ubiquitous and atmospheric, and as such unnoticed and unremarked, is the deracinated and deracinating, cosmopolitan-globalist political economy, the utopia of the utilitarian universalists - only Europeans, and probably Western Europeans at that, could have found in the resources of a cultural heritage - or perhaps its wreckage - the materials, political and ideological, for the construction of such transnational and a-cultural institutions. Other civilizations and great nations would almost assuredly have remained resolutely nationalistic or ethnocentric. But the denigration of specifically white, European cultural artifacts and traditions is a mere function of this utilitarian universalism, its cash-value for the white proletariat, if you will; rooted particularities must be delegitimated and stigmatized so that rising generations will abandon them both out of a sense of embarrassment and a longing for opportunity within the utopian - everywhere and nowhere - order aborning. Those who cling stubbornly to these retrograde attachments, loyalties, and affections are to be effectively dispossessed and marginalized, the functional nonpersons of the new order, who are permitted to perpetuate their idiocies provided they acknowledge somehow their manifestly subordinate and beaten status. It is the particularity of white, European cultures that must be sloughed off, because these were foundational to cultural and political power in the old order; hence, the glorification of any non-European culture that proves expedient: Multicultural consciousness among whites is a marker for membership in - or, at least, cultural alignment with - the one white power structure that is permitted, namely, the architecture of globalization. The poor kids who feel that they have no culture are not exhibiting signs of resentment, owing to a loss of power, but rather signs of anxiety or anomie; they do not yet know where they belong, trapped as they are between a designated unterkultur (apologies to the German-speaking) and the opportunities of rootlessness. Power requires distance and detachment, and these white kids have yet to grasp that reality.

Well said, Maximos. What dark and depressing times we live in. The only consolation I take at this spectacle is that God is just, and our merciless transnational/ multicultural utopians will receive their just due.

I don't know what is more profoundly disturbing: the seemingly incessant organ tones of an oppressed people that continues to this day without any regard to progress or the risible exaggerations put forward here humorously reflective of those periodic exhibitions by the High Art extortionists of the PBS variety who declare the apocalypse of culture and art absent your patronage.

Simply put, I've yet to meet an acquaintance who regrettably is unaware or even repudiates their European cultural patrimony.

Perhaps it might very well be more so the case that you happen to travel, more frequently than not, in the wrong circles.

I dare say, Ari, that the average American is more conversant with the effluvia of mass culture, the detritus of globalized entertainment conglomerates, than with any fine literature or music featuring in the Western patrimony. And no, I'm hardly a music snob looking with disdain on anything unlikely to be performed at the symphony hall - I'm the one here who has repeatedly illustrated points with examples from heavy metal. Americans are the consumerist people par excellence, and consumerism ain't culture.

If only I was personally present to deliver a high-thin "oh" sound that would float above such rolling barrage not unlike Norma's glissando above the chorus of the druid priests in Casta Diva!

If you'd care to present some evidence for the contention that ordinary Americans are steeped in our cultural patrimony, that mass culture valorizes the permanent over the ephemeral, and that high culture is not in fact mocked by the masses as effete, by all means, please do so. Otherwise, please leave off the rhetorical equivalents of tongue-clucking.

Maximos,

While I won't defend ari's tone, I do think he is more right than you let on. To wit, you say "If you'd care to present some evidence for the contention that ordinary Americans are steeped in our cultural patrimony, that mass culture valorizes the permanent over the ephemeral, and that high culture is not in fact mocked by the masses as effete, by all means, please do so."

I will continue to say, until I am blue in the face, that there is absolutely no evidence that your description isn't simply a description of life for "ordinary Americans" throughout our history and furthermore, I wonder what evidence can be adduced that "ordinary" Europeans, to the extent that they weren't focused on simple survival, were ever "steeped" in their own cultural patrimony any more or less than they are now. In other words, high culture has ALWAYS been for a small elite; if anything, thanks to the material prosperity we all enjoy due to "utilitarian universalism", or as I like to say, capitalism, more and more folks have the leisure time and capability to enjoy high culture.

Cyrus,

You are so right. A very smart John Podhoretz movie review of "Juno" pointed out that aside from all the sturm und drang related to the issue of abortion that movie is really a devastating portrayal of a grown man trying to be "cool" and his resulting moral bankruptcy.

Maximos,

Though I hold but the highest respect for you and your purpose (and all due apologies for sounding so flippant in the previous comments); however, I think you fail to realize that elements in your preceding remarks have been the subject of recurring utterances by even a multitude of various historical figures since (it seems) time immemorial and are not novel in the least (mind you, the Republic, too, had its mob complete with a comparable taste for excrement).

Yet, regardless of how it seemed given the immediate, seemingly dire circumstances of the times (I recall how similar things had been said all throughout the 20th century), humanity has managed to spawn their comparable cultural versions of a modern-day Cicero to produce even a Bill Buckley and even a Maximos.

Make no mistake about it -- high culture will survive regardless. It is unmistakably an uncontested fact that this patrimony has been passed on (quite rightly) to your generation (as evidenced by individuals such as yourselves) and will no doubt (at least, in my opinion) continue onto the next.

As in my first post, in consensus with the above title: enough already.

I will continue to say, until I am blue in the face, that there is absolutely no evidence that your description isn't simply a description of life for "ordinary Americans" throughout our history...

Exactly!

I was along the lines formulating and finally posting my above response, not having anticipated that somebody would be responding along the same lines.

There has and will always be the Plebs.

In other words, high culture has ALWAYS been for a small elite; if anything, thanks to the material prosperity we all enjoy due to "utilitarian universalism", or as I like to say, capitalism, more and more folks have the leisure time and capability to enjoy high culture.

Jeff Singer seems to have nailed much more precisely (and in better elaborate terms) what I was attempting (rather poorly) to express.

The difference between the past and the present, with regard to the perennial lamentation to which I've given voice, is that in our past, high culture existed along a continuum with popular, folk culture, whereas in the present, these two are alternately opposed, as warring factions, or exist as constellations of loose categories presumed to be incommensurable - which is to say, as objects of consumer preference simply, and not as rungs on a roughly hierarchical ladder, which is the indispensable presupposition of all culture worthy of the name. In the past, the masses were not told that they were entitled to regard their aesthetic preferences, however vulgar and untutored, as equivalent to those of genius; now, they feel themselves emboldened to mock, in an inversion of the elitism they condemn, any expression of a higher sensibility.

And yes, there is an aesthetic hierarchy, though in the nature of things, it is not possible to fully express or articulate it. There are both obvious rank-orderings and more or less obvious incommensurabilities. The classical tradition in music generally trumps heavy metal, much as I enjoy the latter from time to time, though I'd rank just about any black metal band you'd care to name above Schoenberg, inasmuch the former actually produce music with intelligible structure and rhythm, as opposed to aesthetic enormities that can only be understood by reference to some nihilistic theory.

And I discern not the slightest evidence that increasing numbers of Europeans and Americans enjoy the fruits of high culture, still less that this is the result of utilitarian universalism, which has been the engine of the dissemination of anti-art and lowest-common-denominator popular culture. The sort of music mass-marketed today, under the umbrella of various genres, is not even good rock music, for example; the genuine aesthetic creativity in these genres is resolutely elitist and non-commercial, in the sense that it does not, and will not, appeal to a mass market.

Maximos - thanks for your comment, which reassures me that we agree about more things - and more important things - than those about which we disagree.

Aristocles (mutt?) & Jeff:

I don't get the impression that either of you have done your homework here.

"High culture has ALWAYS been for a small elite."

Oh, really?

Dickens?

Rossini?

Shakespeare?

Verdi?

Homer???

Maximos - I commented before seeing your latest:

"in our past, high culture existed along a continuum with popular, folk culture, whereas in the present, these two are alternately opposed, as warring factions, or exist as constellations of loose categories presumed to be incommensurable..."

Yes. That is *exactly* right.

Example: the works of Bruckner & Mahler incorporate infinitely affectionate idealizations of local folk-dances, military marches, etc. They both deeply loved the popular music they grew up with, and celebrated & tranfigured it in their great symphonies.

Jeff Singer:
I suppose even JPod is right once in a while. I pray my daughter never wants to be cool.

High culture wasn't always for a small élite - it wasn't even as recently as the 1950s. Steve's list could be extended quite a ways. I think that's somewhat beside the point of Steve's posts, which is more about the use of cultural deracination as a means of control, and how this has borne fruit in the end of white America announced triumphantly in Hsu's essay.

Just to distill a point from the comments above I think is especially helpful, one of the main differences between "how things have always been" and how things are today is the recognition in the past of an aesthetic order such that some things are better than others, whereas today all art is generally seen as merely equivalent preferences, like vanilla or chocolate.

However much there were and always will be disgusting aesthetic slobs, in past times there were popular aspirations to higher and better culture, even if material resource limitations precluded the fulfillment of those desires. It's tragic that today, when such great art is materially available to almost all in Western society, the public has largely lost the capacity to recognize greatness and grow in love for it.

It's a similar trend to that in which contemporary people of both genders don't want to grow up because they increasingly do not even see a difference between adolescence and adulthood. I think the same is true for aesthetics, and this is an undeniable change in popular culture.

Steve Burton,

I'll simply glance pass your uncalled-for, grossly off-color remarks as to my person and avoid the provocation altogether and merely address the more substantive point.

However, to make it seem that, for instance, all of Rome, including its mob, would primarily and supremely consist of a populace that were, for the most part, lover of the arts & classical literature and that this has indeed been the case all throughout history where subsequent periods & peoples are concerned, either evinces a gross ignorance of the history of humanity or a deliberate prevarication of the facts.

And to cite such distinguished figures does not even for one moment prove your rather profoundly dubious claim, for, indeed, much of the contributors to high art and literature have in several instances been people even from outside the higher classes.

That does not disprove nor even diminish the fact that lovers of such art and literature, of high culture itself, have often always consisted largely of those from the latter for reasons even cited by Monsieur Singer.

Steve and Cyrus,

Data please? At this point, all we are doing is trading in ancedotes. Again, I return to the Alan Jacob's post on "the decline of literature". In the absence of some sort of context, analysis, and most importantly data (e.g. I know Dickens and Shakespeare were popular and profitable...but more popular or profitable than Saul Bellow? Robert Frost? Marilynne Robinson? Tom Stoppard?, etc.) I remain skeptical of your claim that only in the modern era has high-culture been relegated to some sort of sideshow status in place of pop culture on the mainstage.

Maximos,

To begin, I would direct your attention to the previous article I linked to concerning 2008 album sales. That article lists classical music album sales of 18,044,000 in 2007 and 13,323,000 in 2008 (jazz album sales went from 14,047,000 in 2007 to 11,791,000 in 2008). In one sense, given 300 million Americans, these numbers aren't a lot -- but in another sense, never before in the history of the Western world do so many people have so much access to our culture's greatest works. Just think of all the regional and even amateur orchestras that exist all over the country in addition to all those folks listening to classical music on their high-fi sound systems bought from the fruits of their capitalist work and investment. None of this would have been possible in 18th Century America when the colonists were simply struggling to survive.

As for the supposed war between the two (high culture and pop culture), again I want evidence (and data) that it was different in the good old days.

I will agree with you, Steve, and Albert that there is a certain intellectual rot that exists on our campuses and in our elites that suggests that we shouldn't make any distinctions between high and low art (or Western culture and third world cultures). This rot should be excised, because as the brilliant Bellow has already asked, "who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Popuans?" There are important distinctions to be made, no matter what goof balls like Hsu claim.

Cyrus, Albert: your responses greatly improve on my post. I thank you both.

aristocles: "uncalled-for, grossly off-color remarks as to my person"...

Well...ummm...wha-huh?

Maximos & Steve,

To bring home the point, I present to you an article I read last year from the Journal concerning this very same topic, which should serve not only to duly collaborate my previous assertions but also disprove your points on the matter:

"Memories are deceptive. Classical music has never been the passion of the young. It is an acquired taste that requires both encouragement and education, like voting or drinking Scotch. And in fact, more young people today are playing classical instruments than ever before, according to conservatory enrollments. More surprising, the classical music world has never been healthier; since the early 1970s the growth has been robust.

The heralding of the demise of classical music is based on flimsy evidence. The number of concert venues, summer festivals, performing ensembles and overall performances in classical music and opera has increased exponentially over the last four decades. There are currently nearly 400 professional orchestras in America, according to the League of American Orchestras, while 30 years ago there were 203. There are up to 500 youth orchestras, up from 63 in 1990. The number of orchestra concerts performed annually in the U.S. has risen 24% in the past decade, to 37,000. Ticket-sale income from orchestra performances grew almost 18%, to $608 million, between the 2004-'05 and 2005-'06 seasons.

The widening of interest in classical music isn't limited to our shores. The Asian embrace of Western musical traditions took off in earnest after World War II. It first rose in Japan, then spread to Korea, and is now making its way throughout China, following the path of economic progress. The result: There are more young Asian instrumentalists and audience members for classical music than anywhere else in the world. In Venezuela, classical music training has become a powerful tool in the improvement of primary and secondary school education. When a nation backs music education, as in Finland, a new cadre of world-class young performers emerges and audiences grow accordingly. We are in the midst of a global classical musical renaissance marked by a new vitality and higher standards of virtuosity and finesse."

SOURCE: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122299103207600279.html

I'm happy to learn that classical music is not so unpopular as I'd feared, though this does nothing to vindicate utilitarian universalism; it is no justification of a bookseller that he retails Shakespeare alongside Hustler, and no aesthetic warrant for that utilitarianism if it at once provides access to the Western patrimony but reduces it to a mere ineffectual consumer preference. Which, of course, is all that it is. There is not much of a common cultural and aesthetic language left in our society, and to the extent that there is one, it is not provided by the classical tradition. Quantitative data do not alter the fact that the spirit has departed.

The course this thread has taken is to descend into the sort of fuddy-duddying for which we white folk are renowned. We certainly aren't discussing Hsu's essay. Let's return to this quotation from the essay:

"Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University...has observed that many of his white students are plagued by a racial-identity crisis: "...to be white is to be culturally broke. The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, "I don't have a culture." They might be privileged, they might be loaded socioeconomically, but they feel bankrupt when it comes to culture...They feel disadvantaged, and they feel marginalized. They don't have a culture that's cool or oppositional..."
They don't really have a culture at all, rather they have one or another commercial subcultures. There's scarcely a widely-shared, lived tradition in the age of atomization and mass media. Now, there are many of these retail subcultures, but the most successful one by far is an ostensibly "black" culture which derives its aura of authenticity, that joy of the modern's desiring, from the moral cachet accorded by past oppression, which justifies current resentment. Since this culture deals in a black identity predicated on a rejection of whiteness, of course white kids feel excluded. They are now in the position of being outside, looking in on this (phony) world of righteous anger, primal sexuality, and self-assertion that is perhaps all the more alluring for being just slightly out of reach to them (save for the rare Eminem).

Would it be fair to say that one reason white students say that they don't have a culture is because they are not allowed, culturally, to say so as any matter of pride?

Several years ago I saw a satire "news" article about a music store's being forced to remove various dead white male classical music greats from its window, because the window was "too white." I actually took it to be a real news report for several minutes. It seemed so plausible to me, somehow. So what does that show? It shows that the postmodernists can say, "Your canon has too many whites in it"--whether that's music, literature, or whatever--and can use that as a criticism. They can imply that there's something wrong with the fact that so many of the greats of past culture have been white, that it's something to feel guilty about. So they've stolen a march on us. There is _no way_ that it would be considered acceptable for a white college kid to say, "Hey, I have a culture! Mine is the culture of Bach, Beethoven, and Shakespeare. They were all white!" That would either sound a) racist or b) like it was giving a handle to all the people who want to _attack_ the best that has been thought and known on the grounds that it is "too white." Or perhaps both a and b. Nobody would ever say it seriously as a matter of pride. So what are they left with? Consumer kitsch culture.

Cyrus,

You say: "Now, there are many of these retail subcultures, but the most successful one by far is an ostensibly "black" culture which derives its aura of authenticity, that joy of the modern's desiring, from the moral cachet accorded by past oppression, which justifies current resentment." But I told you already that both country music and rock music outsell rap music by far. So why do you claim black culture is the "most successful one ["retail subcultures"] by far?"

Maximos,

You say: "There is not much of a common cultural and aesthetic language left in our society, and to the extent that there is one, it is not provided by the classical tradition." I do think this is a very interesting phenomenon/question -- given our history and the material prosperity I love, it seems inevitable that all our choices would erode a "common cultural and aesthetic language". I mean, just thinking about the greats of Western culture, it is tough for even someone who loves those greats to keep up (i.e. how many of us read deeply all the novels, poetry, and short stories available in a proper Western canon or listen deeply to all the greats of classical music -- having just finished Barzun's classic overview I realized how little I still know and have read).

Lydia,

I'm skeptical that there are really a lot of white kids running around with a "racial-identity crisis." But it would seem strange to me, and I say this as someone proud of the Western cultural tradition, to identify that tradition as white. As a practical matter, of course it is. But philosophically, I believe strongly in the power of the Western tradition to change for the better those who aren't white. Which is why there are now black writers who write serious novels and poetry that perhaps someday will be worthy (or are already?) of being put into the Western canon along side all those dead white men and women. In other words, we need to fight those postmodernists who claim that black kids should only be reading black authors and help those kids succeed in life by teaching them all the greats of Western culture.

That's surely a large part of it, too. There's a presumption of guilt attached to whiteness, a suspicion which can only be dispelled by public acts of racial contrition. As to your other point, about "white culture," first of all it's not the world in which most young people, if any, live today, and for another, it's something of a stretch to call it "white" culture. Bach and Shakespeare would probably not have thought of themselves that way. It is perhaps less of a stretch than Afrocentrists seeking pride in the accomplishments of (not black as the term is understood in America) ancient Egyptians, but there you have it.

I like the direction this discussion is taking. It struck me as an inadvertent, albeit partial, acceptance of Hsu's culturally relativistic racialization that we're even writing about "white" culture in these terms. I realize we're discussing Hsu's article and have to at least acknowledge his way of framing the topic, but it seems, at least to me, that we've accidentally implicitly conceded the propriety of framing culture in racial terms as opposed to terms of virtue. White kids shouldn't be racially self-conscious when learning what is best; it's not because a cultural belief/practice is "white" that they should be proud, but because it is "good." Let the racializing reductionists accuse us of masking white imperialism as "virtue," but we should continue to point out the inadequacies of that framework.

This sort of relates to my comment to Zippy in the last post: I really don't think race ought to have moral significance with respect to our loyalties, unlike family, place, and country which ought to have claims upon our loyalty.

In other words, we need to fight those postmodernists who claim that black kids should only be reading black authors and help those kids succeed in life by teaching them all the greats of Western culture.

I strongly agree with this, Jeff. It seems to me that part of the issue here is something vaguely like the old saying that if you have to say, "I know what I'm doing," you don't really know what you're doing. I realize I'm being a little obscure here, but this is what I mean: If you took a well-educated Englishman in the 1800's, he had this quiet pride and confidence in his heritage, so he didn't need to go around talking about it. He might occasionally point out the European nature of that heritage, if it were relevant in some conversation, but for the most part it was like a fish swimming in water. And as Mark Steyn says, the real multiculturalists, in the good sense, were all those Englishmen out teaching Shakespeare to the natives in far-flung lands. But they had a confidence that their culture, their heritage, was not only worth preserving but also worth spreading.

What I would be looking for nowadays, after the fish has been made to see the water (and to some extent by the enemies of water--the enemies of great culture), would be a young person who might joke wryly (since such a big negative deal is being made out of it) about how his is the culture of "dead white males" but whose main deal in life, culturally, would be getting on with really knowing the best that has been thought, said, composed, etc. If somebody gives him a hard time about an "uninclusive" canon, he would be willing just to say, "Yeah, the vast majority of people who have done great things in that area _are_ white males. Deal with it. That's not my problem, and I'm not going to apologize. I'm proud of my heritage of Western civilization, and I'm not going go watering it down by including third-rate female novelists."

Jeff Singer:

What article about album sales did you link? I don't see a link, but I might have missed it.

Cyrus,

It was in a previous post, but since I like to help out, here it is again.

I just heard Ms. Swift's new hit on U.S. 99 (Chicago's country music station) and I like it!

They can imply that there's something wrong with the fact that so many of the greats of past culture have been white, that it's something to feel guilty about. So they've stolen a march on us. There is _no way_ that it would be considered acceptable for a white college kid to say, "Hey, I have a culture! Mine is the culture of Bach, Beethoven, and Shakespeare. They were all white!" That would either sound a) racist or b) like it was giving a handle to all the people who want to _attack_ the best that has been thought and known on the grounds that it is "too white." Or perhaps both a and b. Nobody would ever say it seriously as a matter of pride. So what are they left with? Consumer kitsch culture.


It amazes me to no end that those notably ignorant of even a rudimenta of bonae litterae should decry the ignorance, repudiation or even abhorrence by today’s misguided generation toward what has been casually referred to here as the various constituents popularly comprising of "white" culture.

Perhaps these should endeavor to remedy their own conspicuous deficiency in the matter rather than point out the mote in the other, as a proper understanding as to what actually constitutes such culture would undeniably be first and foremost a significant pre-requisite.

They’ll soon discover, as distinguished historical figures such as Desiderius once did, of what such patrimony actually consists and just how precious.

I'm not sure what your point is, Ari, but I think I got at least the rudimenta of bonae litterae in the course of getting the doctorate in English from Vanderbilt (completed in '95). Of course, they were knocking themselves out even then to drag in the third-raters in order to modernize the canon. And indeed, doing that was already passe. I narrowly avoided the courses in "gay and lesbian literature," chiefly by taking lots of independent studies from the old guard, of which a few were still left then, though all have retired and a couple have gone to their final reward.

Lydia (or, better yet, Dr. McGrew ? as may very well be the case ;^) and in anticipation of one of Meister Kevin's sharp rebukes),

That should have been perhaps more properly (and more specifically) addressed to those members in the audience (not restricted solely to the permanent or otherwise fleeting denizens of this blog, of course – most especially given the immediately present company – and I very well mean the whole continent of persons in all places, both in academia and the larger world) not wholly conversant in this knowledge but, yet, have the gall to engage in such pharisaic behaviour.

I thought that by my simply leaving out your name while merely devoting a comment to the select quote would have been enough to convey the thought that this, by no means, was actually addressed to you.

aristocles: thanks for the link to Leon Botstein's WSJ piece - which I had missed, and which is every bit as weak as his (dull as ditchwater) conducting.

Predictably, he simply doesn't "get" the problem, here. *It's not that there aren't enough warm bodies prepared to show up to "listen" to concerts of old stuff.*

It's that the *creative* tradition that led from Gregorian Chant & Magister Leoninus to Richard Strauss & Dmitri Shostakovich & Benjamin Britten is pretty much stone dead...

...and that the cultural space once occupied by the likes of Richard Strauss is now occupied by...well, other things...

Steve,

Thanks for your latest comments, as I find its latter remarks intriguing.

It's that the *creative* tradition that led from Gregorian Chant & Magister Leoninus to Richard Strauss & Dmitri Shostakovich & Benjamin Britten is pretty much stone dead...

...and that the cultural space once occupied by the likes of Richard Strauss is now occupied by...well, other things...


It would be a treat (at least, for me) that somebody as knowledgeable as you on the matter would devote an entire article that would elaborate on this.

Steve,

This is sort of off topic, but in trying to get my wife interested in opera, I took her to the Lyric's production of Britten's Peter Grimes. We walked out at intermission as we were both bored to tears. Could you direct me to a better Britten opera? Also, what is your take on Ligeti, who is best known for his film scores...speaking of which, couldn't one make the argument that a lot of really creative and inspiring music is being made in the classical tradition for films these days?

Jeff,
Thanks for the link. I'll confess mild surprise, but don't think it's dispositive. I'm not convinced that album sales are the right yardstick to measure a musical genre's cultural salience, nor even, by themselves, its popularity. For instance, R&B and rap dominate the singles charts (cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_100_Airplay_number-one_hits_of_2008_(USA)). In any event, the valorization of victimized, and therefore either righteously resentful or beatifically suffering, blackness extends well beyond music into almost all areas of American culture, whether it's the genre of "magic negroes" (Spike Lee's term) in cinema, show-boating athletes, or lately, "racially transcendent" presidential candidates. The point, to bring it back to Hsu's essay, is that whiteness is only normative as the other against which these other cultural identities on offer are defined, but not as something to which someone would unironically aspire. There are a number of things wrong with both of these identities, and with their racialization, but that seems an accurate summation of the cultural landscape, and to the extent that it reinforces white guilt and white moral disarmament, it is a bad thing. This is not to defend rock music, by the way, or to speak to the decline in classical music - I have the impression that, as Steve Burton writes, the tradition is dead, its place taken by the P-Diddys of the world, but I must confess that my musical education is lacking, too.

aristocles - that's a tall order, but I will try.

Oh, Jeff - you must have spent a small fortune on those tickets!

I could go on all day, about this. But, very briefly:

(1) *Peter Grimes* is, beyond doubt, Benjamin Britten's greatest opera - and probably the greatest opera by anybody, post Puccini.

(2) *Peter Grimes* is, beyond doubt, the last thing to which to take your wife, if you're trying to get her interested in opera.

What on earth were you thinking?

Take her to *La Boheme!* (Which Benjamin Britten - great master that he was - foolishly despised).

Or *Madama Butterfly.* Or, just possibly, *La Traviata.* Or even (moving on to more dangerous ground) *Carmen*.

(3) one could certainly "make the argument that a lot of really creative and inspiring music is being made in the classical tradition for films these days."

But one would be wrong.

Lots of talk about the high and the low, but what about the middlebrow? Has it been effectively destroyed by the sneers from above and the catcalls from below?


It's that the *creative* tradition that led from Gregorian Chant & Magister Leoninus to Richard Strauss & Dmitri Shostakovich & Benjamin Britten is pretty much stone dead...

Could that creative tradition survive (let alone thrive) in the regime of modern liberal democracy in any event? My Tocquevillean inclination would be to say: only with great difficulty.

Perseus:

"...what about the middlebrow? Has it been effectively destroyed by the sneers from above and the catcalls from below?"

Unfortunately, I think the unavoidable answer is *yes*.

The other day I saw/heard on YouTube a video of Lauritz Melchior, in his later years, gloriously belting out *In fernem Land* from *Lohengrin* - sponsored by Firestone Tires (!) (if I understand correctly).

But that sort of thing is, sadly, gone forever. I think.

aristocles - that's a tall order, but I will try.

Thanks, Steve!

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