"Cultural" elite?
Apr. 21st, 2006 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbI recently read an interesting but, to me, oddly extreme article by Frank Furedi: http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAF37.htm, in which he seemed to me to make rather too much of a number of hysterical reactions against "religion" - that is, of course, Christianity - by the usual suspects brigade. At this time of day, it should not be news that Polly Toynbee, who is sixty if she is a day, Philip Pullman, or even Muriel Gray - I am old enough to remember her before she became the voice of youth - holler and scream against Christianity; it would be far more astonishing that, having made not only their lives but their living out of this hatred, they should alter their views now. Besides, as GKC once said, "we find it tolerably easy to answer" them.
What stimulates me to write is one of those twinges of irritation one experiences when reading for the fiftieth time a description which is wrong at the most basic level. Furedi - himself not a Christian - calls, not these people, but the pool of more-or-less agnostic, more-or-less sceptical, PC types who may be assuemed to follow them to some degree, "the cultural elite". And having heard this association of culture - of all things! - with the PC brigade for the umpteenth-squinchieth time, I had to protest. They may be an elite; in fact, in some matters - from occupation of the mass media to control of education from the cradle to the PhD - they may have morphed from an elite to a vast and immobile mass, spread across these areas from their highest to their most humble place. But what the Devil do they have to do with "culture"?
Now, culture is something I revere. You will never hear me run it down as C.S.Lewis, suffering I suppose from the mixed populism and Calvinism of his Belfast background, did. The work of a musician, a poet, a scientist, or a philosopher, seems to me, in and of itself, more valuable than that of a road-sweeper or a secretary, independently of whether or not the secretary or the road-sweeper are closer to sanctity than the musician, poet, philosopher or scientist. Indeed, from what I know personally of philosophers and musicians, I would think it highly likely that the average secretary or manual worker would be a better human being. But the point is that what they make has a higher spiritual value; indeed, in the case of the greatest works of the intellect, their value is eternal. A road once swept will require being re-swept in a week. But the existence of Beethoven's symphonies does indeed change the world, for the better, and pretty much does that independently of Beethoven's own moral level.
But what do the PC crowd have to do with "culture"? Let us look at our culture, what it is. Our culture, our heritage, is made of works of art or of the intellect, which are beautiful and noble enough to be remembered. Now the curious fact is that, discounting the masterpieces composed before the rise of Christianity, which by their nature cannot be Christian, and the work of certain scientists, nine out of ten of the heights of culture just happen to be Christian. Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Tiziano, Rembrandt, the builders of the cathedrals, Shakespeare, Milton, Christopher Wren, Palestrina, Bach, Haendel, Beethoven, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky - the line goes on and on.
It is more significant still - in fact, it is all but conclusive - that even those of the real giants whose Christianity was problematic or nonexistent, were actually more Christian in their work than in their stated public belief. Thomas Mann's DOKTOR FAUSTUS is not only impossible to distinguish from the work of the most devout of Christians, but it has a visible Catholic tinge, including a strong polemic against Lutheranism - the Devil uses Lutheran theory and language to subvert the protagonist. Verdi's REQUIEM is likewise indistinguishable from the most devout Christian work, and so is the REQUIEM of the Freemason Mozart. Wagner moved from the suicidal sensualism of TRISTRAM UND ISOLDE, to the dignified paganism of the Ring, to the strange, heretical near-Christianity of PARZIFAL, and Nietsche broke with him on that account.
In most of these works, especially the musical ones, it is possible to say that the traditions and precedents of the art itself imposed themselves to some extent on the artists. Western classical music had been born in the cathedrals, its first musical forms had been masses and psalms, and it is not unlikely that someone who, like Verdi, wanted to give a musical response to the idea of death, would instinctively cast that response in Christian terms. (His contemporary Brahms did not; but, with all due respect, Verdi's REQUIEM is a much greater work than Brahms' GERMAN REQUIEM.) That is certainly the case with someone like Vivaldi. A priest in orders, he used his job as music master to a female orphanage in the notoriously libertine and music-loving metropolis, Venice, to enjoy a love life that would make the whole Kennedy family jealous, at one time sharing his quarters with a mother and two daughters. Yet a good deal of his music is not only religious, but beautifully composed and genuinely devout in feeling. It is possible to argue that the great tradition in which he lived, which emanated from and was still largely based in, the Church, moulded his musical intellect even though it did not stand much of a chance with his sexual organs.
That, however, is not the case with Goethe. He had no duty to, indeed hardly any connection with, any Church; and he was a man of the Enlightenment through and through. His duty to past traditions was neither as clear nor as univocal as Vivaldi's. His greatest work, FAUST, was, like Beethoven's or Wagner's, cast in a wholly new and disproportionately enormous shape. And yet, except for the strange closing scene - which, with its suggestion of the soul perfecting itself after death, has more to do with the yet-to-be-invented theology of Mormonism than with Christianity - here is a titanic work of poetry where it would be hard to fault, from the Christian perspective, a single page. In some ways, such as finding magic always diabolical and dangerous to the soul, it is not just Christian but extremely hard-line. Neither Tolkien nor JKR, both avowed Christians, would have written:
Könnt ich Magie von meinem Pfad entfernen/
Die Zaubersprüche ganz und gar verlernen/
Stünd ich, Natur, vor dir, ein Mann allein/
Da wär's der Mühe wert, ein Mensch zu sein.
"Could I but banish magic from my way,
Every last enchantment quite unsay,
And stand before you, Nature, just a man -
It would be worth it then to be a man!"
The immense importance of sin and redemption, the terror of damnation, the deceptive dangers of earthly love, in the episode of Gretchen, are all out of the dourest Christian moral teaching. Likewise the hollowness of earthly glory, even of the splendours and glories of heathen Greece (with a vision of Byron, the untimely product of Classical passions and modern magic, dashing himself against the world and destroying himself); likewise the dark vision of empires established by force and upon sand, with which the mortal course of Faust ends. But perhaps the most intimately and terrifyingly Christian picture in the whole majestic poem is - where one might expect it - in Goethe's magnificently imagined scene of the seduction of Faust.
Faust, a learned lecturer in a German university (and what could be more German?), is bored, restless. He decides to make use of his sleeplessness to translate the most philosophical of the four Gospels, John. At the same time, he welcomes into his study a stray dog, without realizing that this insinuating and apparently friendly creature is in reality the enemy of all enemies - the Devil himself. So as Faust opens the Scriptures, the dog starts giving all sorts of signs of displeasure, barking and growling. Faust is distracted. He tries to stick to his job - but comes a cropper at once. "It says here: in the beginning was the Word. But I cannot value the Word so much as that!"
BOOM! Faust is undone. By such small steps do we decide to damn our souls. He is no longer trying to translate the Holy Book; instead, he is trying to force his own meaning upon it. He tries "thought" and "will" and eventually settles on "Deed": "In the beginning was the Deed" - radically reworking the Gospel and diminishing the meaning of the Second Person of the Trinity. No wonder that the Devil himself appears to him almost immediately; he has called the Devil into his home, by doing force to the sacred text. He dies only half understanding the sin he has committed - both that opening one, and all the sins of violence and oppression that populated the poem thanks to his adoration of "the Deed" - and it takes that other purely Christian notion, Divine Grace only partially, if at all, motivated by Deeds, to rip his soul from Mephistopheles at last.
This is our heritage. This is our culture. Need I say that the average PC modern is not apt to connect? They will wander through it for hours like tourists in a museum, and totally miss the point. They will sit through a performance of the whole of FAUST, or Verdi's REQUIEM, and fail to catch the secret. It will never occur to them where the fury comes from with which Dickens describes the death of the crossings-sweeper Jo in tones that call on Heaven and earth to crack for the atrocity; or why, in the noblest ode in praise of mankind ever uttered or conceived, Beethoven calls on every man who ever tasted Joy in his or her life to fall on their knees before the Father who dwells above the canopy of stars. This class has totally separated itself from the best that our "Culture" has to offer, and to call it a "cultural" elite is therefore almost perverse.
What stimulates me to write is one of those twinges of irritation one experiences when reading for the fiftieth time a description which is wrong at the most basic level. Furedi - himself not a Christian - calls, not these people, but the pool of more-or-less agnostic, more-or-less sceptical, PC types who may be assuemed to follow them to some degree, "the cultural elite". And having heard this association of culture - of all things! - with the PC brigade for the umpteenth-squinchieth time, I had to protest. They may be an elite; in fact, in some matters - from occupation of the mass media to control of education from the cradle to the PhD - they may have morphed from an elite to a vast and immobile mass, spread across these areas from their highest to their most humble place. But what the Devil do they have to do with "culture"?
Now, culture is something I revere. You will never hear me run it down as C.S.Lewis, suffering I suppose from the mixed populism and Calvinism of his Belfast background, did. The work of a musician, a poet, a scientist, or a philosopher, seems to me, in and of itself, more valuable than that of a road-sweeper or a secretary, independently of whether or not the secretary or the road-sweeper are closer to sanctity than the musician, poet, philosopher or scientist. Indeed, from what I know personally of philosophers and musicians, I would think it highly likely that the average secretary or manual worker would be a better human being. But the point is that what they make has a higher spiritual value; indeed, in the case of the greatest works of the intellect, their value is eternal. A road once swept will require being re-swept in a week. But the existence of Beethoven's symphonies does indeed change the world, for the better, and pretty much does that independently of Beethoven's own moral level.
But what do the PC crowd have to do with "culture"? Let us look at our culture, what it is. Our culture, our heritage, is made of works of art or of the intellect, which are beautiful and noble enough to be remembered. Now the curious fact is that, discounting the masterpieces composed before the rise of Christianity, which by their nature cannot be Christian, and the work of certain scientists, nine out of ten of the heights of culture just happen to be Christian. Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Tiziano, Rembrandt, the builders of the cathedrals, Shakespeare, Milton, Christopher Wren, Palestrina, Bach, Haendel, Beethoven, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky - the line goes on and on.
It is more significant still - in fact, it is all but conclusive - that even those of the real giants whose Christianity was problematic or nonexistent, were actually more Christian in their work than in their stated public belief. Thomas Mann's DOKTOR FAUSTUS is not only impossible to distinguish from the work of the most devout of Christians, but it has a visible Catholic tinge, including a strong polemic against Lutheranism - the Devil uses Lutheran theory and language to subvert the protagonist. Verdi's REQUIEM is likewise indistinguishable from the most devout Christian work, and so is the REQUIEM of the Freemason Mozart. Wagner moved from the suicidal sensualism of TRISTRAM UND ISOLDE, to the dignified paganism of the Ring, to the strange, heretical near-Christianity of PARZIFAL, and Nietsche broke with him on that account.
In most of these works, especially the musical ones, it is possible to say that the traditions and precedents of the art itself imposed themselves to some extent on the artists. Western classical music had been born in the cathedrals, its first musical forms had been masses and psalms, and it is not unlikely that someone who, like Verdi, wanted to give a musical response to the idea of death, would instinctively cast that response in Christian terms. (His contemporary Brahms did not; but, with all due respect, Verdi's REQUIEM is a much greater work than Brahms' GERMAN REQUIEM.) That is certainly the case with someone like Vivaldi. A priest in orders, he used his job as music master to a female orphanage in the notoriously libertine and music-loving metropolis, Venice, to enjoy a love life that would make the whole Kennedy family jealous, at one time sharing his quarters with a mother and two daughters. Yet a good deal of his music is not only religious, but beautifully composed and genuinely devout in feeling. It is possible to argue that the great tradition in which he lived, which emanated from and was still largely based in, the Church, moulded his musical intellect even though it did not stand much of a chance with his sexual organs.
That, however, is not the case with Goethe. He had no duty to, indeed hardly any connection with, any Church; and he was a man of the Enlightenment through and through. His duty to past traditions was neither as clear nor as univocal as Vivaldi's. His greatest work, FAUST, was, like Beethoven's or Wagner's, cast in a wholly new and disproportionately enormous shape. And yet, except for the strange closing scene - which, with its suggestion of the soul perfecting itself after death, has more to do with the yet-to-be-invented theology of Mormonism than with Christianity - here is a titanic work of poetry where it would be hard to fault, from the Christian perspective, a single page. In some ways, such as finding magic always diabolical and dangerous to the soul, it is not just Christian but extremely hard-line. Neither Tolkien nor JKR, both avowed Christians, would have written:
Könnt ich Magie von meinem Pfad entfernen/
Die Zaubersprüche ganz und gar verlernen/
Stünd ich, Natur, vor dir, ein Mann allein/
Da wär's der Mühe wert, ein Mensch zu sein.
"Could I but banish magic from my way,
Every last enchantment quite unsay,
And stand before you, Nature, just a man -
It would be worth it then to be a man!"
The immense importance of sin and redemption, the terror of damnation, the deceptive dangers of earthly love, in the episode of Gretchen, are all out of the dourest Christian moral teaching. Likewise the hollowness of earthly glory, even of the splendours and glories of heathen Greece (with a vision of Byron, the untimely product of Classical passions and modern magic, dashing himself against the world and destroying himself); likewise the dark vision of empires established by force and upon sand, with which the mortal course of Faust ends. But perhaps the most intimately and terrifyingly Christian picture in the whole majestic poem is - where one might expect it - in Goethe's magnificently imagined scene of the seduction of Faust.
Faust, a learned lecturer in a German university (and what could be more German?), is bored, restless. He decides to make use of his sleeplessness to translate the most philosophical of the four Gospels, John. At the same time, he welcomes into his study a stray dog, without realizing that this insinuating and apparently friendly creature is in reality the enemy of all enemies - the Devil himself. So as Faust opens the Scriptures, the dog starts giving all sorts of signs of displeasure, barking and growling. Faust is distracted. He tries to stick to his job - but comes a cropper at once. "It says here: in the beginning was the Word. But I cannot value the Word so much as that!"
BOOM! Faust is undone. By such small steps do we decide to damn our souls. He is no longer trying to translate the Holy Book; instead, he is trying to force his own meaning upon it. He tries "thought" and "will" and eventually settles on "Deed": "In the beginning was the Deed" - radically reworking the Gospel and diminishing the meaning of the Second Person of the Trinity. No wonder that the Devil himself appears to him almost immediately; he has called the Devil into his home, by doing force to the sacred text. He dies only half understanding the sin he has committed - both that opening one, and all the sins of violence and oppression that populated the poem thanks to his adoration of "the Deed" - and it takes that other purely Christian notion, Divine Grace only partially, if at all, motivated by Deeds, to rip his soul from Mephistopheles at last.
This is our heritage. This is our culture. Need I say that the average PC modern is not apt to connect? They will wander through it for hours like tourists in a museum, and totally miss the point. They will sit through a performance of the whole of FAUST, or Verdi's REQUIEM, and fail to catch the secret. It will never occur to them where the fury comes from with which Dickens describes the death of the crossings-sweeper Jo in tones that call on Heaven and earth to crack for the atrocity; or why, in the noblest ode in praise of mankind ever uttered or conceived, Beethoven calls on every man who ever tasted Joy in his or her life to fall on their knees before the Father who dwells above the canopy of stars. This class has totally separated itself from the best that our "Culture" has to offer, and to call it a "cultural" elite is therefore almost perverse.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-04-21 10:31 pm (UTC)More important here is the differentiation between "cultural (I)" meaning educated, polished, refined, cultivated, well-mannered etc., in short between evaluative sense of the word. And "cultural (II)" which means belonging to the realm of culture, which we have to describe, but let's for a moment assume it's all this verbalised and non-verbalised knowledge which serves as our social environment and at the same time is our tool in dealing with the world (descriptive sense of the word).
Anyway, why the PC (Politically Correct, isn't it?) can be called cultural elite? Mainly because they make it. In both meanings in fact. That the shape of their production may not be to our taste, it is something different.
Our culture, our heritage, is made of works of art or of the intellect, which are beautiful and noble enough to be remembered.
And also all the things antonymous to the above. Without knowing such works like Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto (or rather without having a vague idea what they are about; I'm afraid it's the same with many of the other classics; people rather tend to know more-or-less what Dante wrote about, than actually read Dante) we won't understand much of the current arts, literature, popular culture etc.
Now the curious fact is that, discounting the masterpieces composed before the rise of Christianity, which by their nature cannot be Christian, and the work of certain scientists, nine out of ten of the heights of culture just happen to be Christian.
I know it's a figure of speech, but I'd find it curious if it was otherwise. For the last 2000 years Christianity was a dominant ideology here. Nothing strange most of the arts deal with its subjects or problems it raises, either in direct or indirect way.
Same goes for any other cultural circle.
It is more significant still - in fact, it is all but conclusive - that even those of the real giants whose Christianity was problematic or nonexistent, were actually more Christian in their work than in their stated public belief.
Again, fairly obvious. They were people of great ability; they struggled with the great problems of life. The questions they dealt with were shaped by the Christian framework of the culture which surrounded them. So, even if they declared themselves (or were declared) "enemies of the faith" they might have actually be closer to it - by its negation.
I guess Salman Rushdie may be in a way "more Muslim" than many of those who'd rather see him dead. Tout proportions, etc...
no subject
Date: 2006-04-22 06:05 am (UTC)For it is only Christian men
That guard even heathen things.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-22 08:16 am (UTC)Probably there would be better examples, but I don't know them.
Continued...
Date: 2006-04-21 10:31 pm (UTC)The most interesting notion is in the end – these are people, who treat our heritage like "tourists in a museum", not really connecting to it. If they do – and many do – it's just a sign of a certain shallowness of the mind. Does it preclude them from being creators of culture (II, but also I)? (Unfortunately) not. Maybe it will – from a 100 years perspective, when nobody remembers them, as we don't remember countless "hacks" of the Baroque, even though they were mainstream Christians and produced saints by bucket.
So they still are "cultural (II) elites", although we may not think that what they do is a "culture". Fair enough, but that's strictly evaluative (I) usage. Descriptively they are "cultural (II) elites". Also in fact "cultural (I) elites" as the non-elite members usually follows them in setting the current trend of how to behave "culturally".
Such times, such elites.
Alternatively, some of these people may perceive the world in different terms. Likely the people I'm talking about now will not be very politically correct, so technically they are not people in question. These are people who, usually using different cultural frameworks, address the world differently. Let's imagine modern European Buddhist – is he a member of the cultural elites (he writes philosophical and popular treaties of a good intellectual value)? There is the point the word "our" is lacking. If we define "cultural" as somebody who deals with the world in more or less Christian terms (even if by negation), he is not cultural. But for the sake of precision we should tell he' not a member of "our cultural elites", where ours is apropriately defined.
Re: Continued...
Date: 2006-04-22 06:14 am (UTC)Re: Continued...
Date: 2006-04-22 08:47 am (UTC)* If we grant the "PC crowd" the status of elites, because of their occupation - so we treat the word descripively - then there is no way, why we should not call them also "cultural", also treating the word descriptively.
* If we treat the word "culture" in an evaluative way, than first we must give the scale for evaluation. You propose two: artistic excellence (which can be operationalised and measured and let's not discuss the problems of meausurment right now); or retlation to the - predominantly Christian in the case of Europe - heritage. In such case, the PC people, because of their shallowness of mind, either "natural" or, for PC reasons, self-induced, fail to score.
Therefore should be denied the name of "elites".
Granting them the status of elites, but denying the status of being "cultural", as you did, seems to me a deliberate confusion of the terms, for the sake of persuasive argument. Very nicely written argument, BTW.
Which doesn't change the fact that we agree on the more basic level: that the great artist is usually well versed in his/her heritage, even - or sometimes more so - if appears to battle it. Also, the great artist/philosopher/etc will not necessary be a "part of the cultural crowd".
Only in such case the additional clarification of "our" or "European" would be necessary; otherwise we might end denying the status of greatness to a (hypothethical) case of person, who achieved very high level of excellence, but did not operate within (Judeo)-Christian framework. If we had such case, we'd need to decide that such person is a "foreign intrusion" - and despite his/her objective/claimed ethnicity is not an European. Or we'd have to agree that European culture changes.
I took a Buddhist as an example. If the European Buddhists produce great artists, we'll see (or possibly it will be to our grandchildren to look back and decide). And I meant real Buddhists, not the "elite" ones, who are no more Buddhists than they are self-proclaimed Catholics/Mormons/Anglicans/Atheists/Insert-whatever, but fail to adhere even to the most basic principles of their faith/philosophy.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-22 05:36 am (UTC)Culture is something "nice" people, the "forward-thinking" have.
Tradition is a nasty thing close-minded and *gasp!* religious and/or racist people cling to, since they can't think for themselves and hate the new and/or different.
Tolerance is something anyone who isn't PC must show for the new, while the PC are not required to have it for tradition or those who believe in or simply respect it.
Diversity no longer means varied at any or every level. It now means varied in outward appearance but homogenous inside, different-looking but like-thinking.
...
The cultural elite of which you lament aren't the elite. They are the effete, and unfortunately they are gaining ground.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-23 04:35 am (UTC)Göring is rumored to have said something relevant about culture, too.