Phoning It In During the Holidays (Left-wing edition)
Nick Gillespie | December 28, 2004, 10:09am
Via Arts & Letters Daily comes this set piece from The Nation:
Why are we so lame? Why is American culture, and the American intelligentsia in particular, so closed off from what's happening in the rest of the world? Why do we still need Paris to tell us what's going on (if we still even listen to it)? If anything, the situation is more dire than it used to be, when instability or repression in Europe supplied us with a steady stream of emigres who acted as a bridge back to their former world. Susan Sontag used to play a similar role, but she no longer does, and no one's taken her place. The more we impose our image on the world, it seems, the more foreign the world becomes.
That's the conclusion of a review by William Deresiewicz of Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters which--surprisingly for a French book--posits Paris as the cultural capital of the galaxy. Whole thing here.
Look, we all know the week between Christmas and New Year's is a time for mailing it in, but do we really need yet another piece from leftoid (or rightoid, for that matter) critics lambasting Amurricans for being insular, stupid, boorish, blah blah blah? This is literally the oldest goddamned theme in elite American discourse (dating back to ye olde colonial tymes) and it's about time that what Charles Paul Freund memorably called "the high culture sputter" finally be retired.
For more on globo-culture and America's role, check out this interview we did with Tyler Cowen.
gaius marius | December 28, 2004, 1:33pm | #
Novels and poems (at least poems that are written in journals and read by subscribers) are moribund forms.
it's not just the medium that changed, mr cavanaugh. what is the message of postmodern cinema? what does it say? largely, that none of us have any obligation to each other, that the nietzschean heroic quest for individual justification is what is right and that any limitation upon that prerogative is wrong.
go watch some american movies. it's what they're about. i rarely see a film that isn't.
that is fundamentally antisocial -- as is the vaunted libertarianism of this magazine, fwiw. taken with the moderation and measure of locke, there's much that can be gained by individualism. but limitation is right out today -- anyone so much as breathes at the slightest impingement upon your individual prerogative today and it's lawsuits.
the compromise that made individualism compatible with society is dead at the hands of the romantics. good luck with what remains.
that the Romans added nothing to the Greek culture they "stole."
this is obviously not entirely true -- but take a look at what is original in roman sculpture, mosiac, fresco. essentially, nothing. there's a reason the romans plundered greece for its art and artisans. there's a reason cicero went to athens to be educated.
The plays of Seneca and Terence were in reality far more influential than anything from the Greek drama, furnishing the models and in many cases the plots for most of the Elizabethan plays
indeed they were --
seneca is a wonderful mind in my estimation particularly -- but he is using the vehicle of euripedes for his comments on roman decadence, isn't he? moreover, observe seneca's difference from euripedes -- pessimism, dark mysticism, the detachment of virtue as heroic and entirely ethereal but ultimately defeated in the world by the forces of evil. sound familiar?
when seneca died, he did his utmost best to imitate plato's socrates of the phaedo. this should say what there is to say about seneca and roman intellectuals, and the place they held for the greeks.
likewise, i would not say that the united states contributed nothing to western culture. but i would say that contribution is (like the roman) diminishingly small in comparison to the french, british and german (like the greek).
drf | December 28, 2004, 4:04pm | #
is it something like this?
("Part II" Bad Religion, 1988: "suffer")
it's superficial progress
they call it liberation
with opiates of silicon big brother schemes to rule the nation
we're one nation under god
we stand above the rest
with mighty high technology
we're never second best
our specialty is infiltration!
prepare yourselves for subjugation
victory through domination!
the trepidatious throngs all fear the big eye in the sky
the government observes them with their own electric eye
automatons, illiterates and indigents of every shape and size
don't stop but aid this cruel crusade
participate in their own demise
we're one nation under god
we stand above the rest
with mighty high technology
we're never second best
our specialty is infiltration!
so pack your bags you third world nation
victory through domination
gaius marius | December 29, 2004, 10:04am | #
So don't anybody try to tell me that entertainment today is so much coarser than it was in the "good old days".
who is trying to say this?
the culture of manners is not what i mean, ms jennifer and mr thoreau, when i say civilization. it's well known that anything we would construe as good behavior became commonly practiced among the nobility only as recently as louis xiv -- and the masses long after that.
Concerning high art vs. low: Shakespeare, back in the day, was considered extremely lowbrow and vulgar, writing plays filled with sex, violence and obscene puns.
it should be noted that
shakespeare but imitated seneca in this, who wrote in the decadence of the romans. but this is not to understand shakespeare's relevance to western art. he was first (or anointed first, after a much later rehabilitation) to develop character in western literature. prior to him, the persons of a play were types -- with names like Chastity, Gluttony, et al. shakespeare and his contemporaries were the first to put people -- fully fleshed characters, with complex personalities, into theater.
along with his mastery of the poetic style of the ancients, this is what made him revolutionary and important -- and high art.
but beyond that, civilization was a progression toward manners of sorts -- from the complete lack thereof during medieval times until the romantics, men aspired to live in a fashion that can only be called more civilized.
this process has plainly reversed -- in manners, in dress, in language (thank you e.e. cummings) -- and do you believe that these conventions have no role in bonding us to one another in society? this is the romantic impulse -- revolt of the solitary against the social is the philosophical cornerstone of romanticism; the aim was to emancipate the individual from social tradition and morality.
it is amazing to me that so many of us sit here and pretend to be the reasoning inheritors of burke or voltaire (who wrote "essay on manners" in 1756)
while implicitly condoning the backsliding of society that they so obviously would have abhorred -- but that rousseau endorsed. do we really understand so little of these men?
