Right Wing Nation

Yesterday was the twentieth anniversary of the release of The Closing of the American Mind, as I was reminded by Mark Steyn. Perhaps it was that I was again reading one of the first works of English literature when I read Steyn’s article. Perhaps it was something else. Whatever the cause, I have been thinking a great deal lately about who we are, why we are who we are, and where we are headed.

Let me confess something. When I was in school, I loved math, science, music, literature, even geography, but I intensely hated history. It seemed at the time to be a list of dates, names, and places that had no connection to who I was. As a result, I had to work far harder in history than any other subject to ace those classes. That made me hate history more then, but now, I have a different perspective.

Who we are lies not in the tea leaves of the future. It lies in the past, in where we came from, and how we evolved our society. This isn’t just history. This is literature, math, the sciences, philosophy, and the arts. This is the fundamental purpose of education: To teach us who we are and where we came from. Yet these days, all we hear from educrats is “digital” this and “21st century” that and “relevance.”

I am certainly no foe of relevance, nor do I believe in that ever-imaginary education for its own sake fantasy. But a well rounded liberal education is not, and never has been, education for its own sake. A well rounded liberal education is education for civilization’s sake. For the nation’s sake. For our sake.

Part of me agrees that it’s good that kids are reading Harry Potter books. At least they’re reading. But Harry Potter isn’t all they should be reading. Harry Potter gives us no connection to our past, to where we have come from, and tells us nothing about who we are. It’s no doubt an absorbing read, but it is culturally void. If students aren’t reading Chaucer, they should at least know who Chaucer was and why he is so very important. They should be grounded in our culture: Where we came from, and who we are.

What does it say about us when a person can get both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English literature without ever having been asked to read a word of Shakespeare? What meaning do those degrees have when they result from reading and studying culturally void material? How can someone who has never read Chaucer call himself an English professor without feeling shame? And what kind of education will our children receive when they are taught English literature by these frauds?

It is obscene that the chattering classes — the cultural elite who dictate what we should and should not say, think, and do with their PC party line — decry anything that moors us to our culture as “elitism.” There is nothing elitist about Mozart. There is no reason Mary should like Mozart, even. What Mary likes isn’t the issue, nor is it important. The cultural importance of Mozart is the issue.

There exists a cultural chain of knowledge beginning in Egypt and Mesopotamia, extending to Rome and Greece, the Holy Roman Empire and then the Renaissance, to Jefferson, Adams, and the Declaration of Independence, the story of who we are and how we came to be. This is not elitism, and these are not “dead white males.” This is knowing who we are.

Ed Driscoll quotes Terry Teachout:

The result is a quintessential example — perhaps the quintessential example — of the American middlebrow culture of the ’40s and ’50s, which at its not-infrequent best educated and entertained in like measure without dumbing down beyond recognition the art it popularized. The same impulse that inspired Life magazine to publish Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” and CBS to telecast Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts” can be seen at work in “Lust for Life.”

It says everything about Minnelli and his high-minded collaborators that they made no attempt to turn van Gogh into a regular guy, a potato-eater like you and me who just happened to paint “Starry Night” and chop off his left ear. Instead, he is unapologetically presented as a genius, set apart from the common run of men by his God-given talent and his sense of artistic mission. And that’s what makes the film so special: It takes art seriously.

A wise old cynic once observed that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. Had he lived three centuries later, La Rochefoucauld might have added that biopics are the tribute Hollywood pays to real art. Anyone who chooses to make a movie about a great artist, be it good or bad, is making an implicit declaration of faith in the enduring significance of Western culture. Hence it says something of interest about the state of American culture that pictures like “Lust for Life” and “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” in which Charlton Heston played Michelangelo, have become so rare in recent years. “Amadeus” and “Shakespeare in Love” weren’t biopics but fictionalized fantasies (albeit smart ones). “Pollock” and “Girl With the Pearl Earring” were art-house films aimed at a smallish audience. When was the last time a Hollywood producer with muscle used it to make a big-budget movie about an indisputably great high-culture figure, pitched to the public at large? Instead, we get “Walk the Line.” From “Starry Night” to “Folsom Prison Blues”: That’s how far we’ve traveled in the past half-century.

Believe me, I’m not turning up my nose at Johnny Cash. I love country music (in fact, I used to play it). Besides, “Walk the Line” is terrific, one of the finest biopics ever made. But Cash himself would surely have admitted that he was no Mozart. Whether or not they enjoyed high art, most Americans of Cash’s generation were brought up to respect it, and middlebrow culture allowed anyone to share in its glories. Now we’re expected to discover them by ourselves. It strikes me that our culture was healthier when Hollywood offered an occasional helping hand — even if it belonged to Kirk Douglas.

And Steyn says:

I don’t really like the expression “popular culture.” It’s just “culture” now: there is no other. “High culture” is high mainly in the sense we keep it in the attic and dust it off and bring it downstairs every now and then. But don’t worry, not too often. “Classical music,” wrote Bloom, “is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archaeology. Thirty years ago [i.e., now fifty years ago], most middle-class families made some of the old European music a part of the home, partly because they liked it, partly because they thought it was good for the kids.” Not anymore. If you’d switched on TV at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999 you’d have seen President and Mrs. Clinton and the massed ranks of American dignitaries ushering in the so-called new millennium to the strains of Tom Jones singing “I’m gonna wait till the midnight hour/ That’s when my love comes tumblin’ down.” Say what you like about JFK, but at least Mrs. Kennedy would have booked a cellist.

“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.

This unmooring of us and where we came from is no accident. it is actively pushed by the pseudo-intellectual elite and — crucially — the educational establishment. And nearly every time they object to someone like me saying the things I’m saying here, they show how ignorant of their own culture, and how undeserved of any status, intellectual or otherwise, they are. Steyn goes on:

That’s something else that happens in a relativist culture. First, if Tupac Shakur is just as good as Milton, then everybody drops Milton. Then comes the second stage: once Milton’s dropped, and Bach and Keats and Mozart, you no longer have a very clear idea of who exactly Tupac Shakur is meant to be as good as. It’s not comparative anymore: he’s all there is. The argument is that, oh, well, you uptight squares are always objecting to stuff: you thought Sinatra exciting bobbysoxers was dangerous, and the Viennese waltz was the mating dance of a hypersexualized culture. No. Benny Goodman, noted by Bloom, was a huge pop star but he could play the Mozart clarinet concerto. Popular culture used to be very at ease with the inheritance of the past. One of the trends of the last forty years is not just the vanishing of “high culture” but of low-culture jokes about high culture—the variety-show sketches in which Schubert’s mates urge him to come down the pub with him and he says “No, I’ve got to stay in and finish my symphony.” It assumes a residual familiarity—from some half-recalled school lesson—with a bloke called Schubert who wrote an “Unfinished Symphony.”

Popular culture has become divorced from civilization because we have been separated from who we are. Artists, once the repositories of culture, have scornfully turned their backs on civilization, and redefined art as “pushing the envelope” and “making a statement.” The problem, of course, is that there’s only so far you can push without becoming ludicrous; once you’ve put a crucifix in a beaker of urine or hung a lamp on the wall and called it great, profound art, where else do you go? The very representatives of high art and civilization have scorned it in favor of narcisissm, the social disease that infected us during the “I refuse to ever grow up and be an adult” 60s.

The self-proclaimed elite — academics, educators, artists, and musicians — and their lickspittle worshippers — journalists and students — have for years been driving a wedge between us and our culture. Most recently, they have been chipping away at civilization with identity politics, replacing where we came from with a collection of aggrieved groups and the oft-mythological accomplishments of their — not our, but their — ancestors. Heroes, known for what they did and accomplished, have been replaced by role-models, who are known only because they “look like me.” Self-respect, taking pride in what one has accomplished, has been replaced by self-esteem, feeling good about oneself, no matter whether one has accomplished anything or not. Cop-killer worshipping rap and hip-hop has replaced Mozart — after all, the former is “relevant” and “authentic,” and the latter is, well, old and inconsequential to the “needs” of today’s culture. English departments across the US have replaced their Milton, Byron, and Shakespeare specialists with specialists in aggrieved groups. Their students, when they read, read the trite, aggrieved doggerel of Maya Angelou instead of the poetry of W. B. Yeats. The quality of the poetry is irrelevant. The color — the aggrieved status, also known as “authentic voice” — is everything.

Granted, certain authors and composers have gone in and out of fashion over the years. But Shakespeare can never come back into fashion, because few departments have anyone on the faculty who is capable of reading, much less teaching, Shakespeare. The coffin lid has almost been nailed into place.

A false dichotomy is almost always created in discussions about education and culture, that it’s either “dead white males” or Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison is a great stylist, and deserves a place in the canon as much as Hawthorne. But it’s not a question of recognizing new contributors to civilization. It’s about killing off any connection to what made us what we are.

And when I say we, I mean exactly that. Not we white people. It matters not whether your ancestors were slaves or where they came from. Our culture is larger than us and all of our petty grievances. Our culture is the reason we no longer have slavery. Our culture binds us together as a people, and without it, we will disentegrate.

That brings us back to the fundamental role of education: To ground us in who we are. If our educators are violently opposed to their fundamental mission and just as violently committed to tearing us apart in the name of “diversity” and “sensitivity,” where will we be in another twenty years?

If they were still alive, I would go back to my history teachers back home and tell them that now, I get it. History fascinates me now, because I understand that it’s relevant to who we are. When educators talk of “relevance” or “21st century learning,” they mean divorcing us from our identity as a people, and catering to students’ naïve and narcissistic ideas of relevance. But students will get older, and then, they will understand, as did I. The problem is to get the educators to understand.