Philistinism and Failure
Tens of millions of young Chinese now study classical music, including an estimated 36 million pianists. Nothing builds attention span and analytic fortitude like classical music, and a nation that combines a vast amateur music culture with academic ambition will overwhelm the world with qualified and ambitious young minds.
China may fail; it might even descend into political chaos, to be sure — but then again, it might not. China’s massive and enthusiastic adoption of Western classical culture just might give it a world-dominating edge. There’s a difference between an engineer and an engineer who plays Bach. Higher mathematics as we know was incubated in music theory to begin with, as I explain in an essay in the April issue of First Things, “The Divine Music of Mathematics” (subscription required).
Asian dominance of classical music is nearly matched by the Asian presence in America’s top art schools. India does not give us classical musicians, but seems to aspire to dominate English fiction. What Americans deprecate as “highbrow culture” has become a mass presence in the lives of aspiring Asians on a scale that would have baffled the European elites who had an audience of thousands rather than millions. Our Philistinism could turn out to be our demise. America thrived in part because other countries failed and sent us their best minds along with their tired and poor. That’s not the sort of thing we should count on happening in the future.
That is why Fred Siegel’s diatribe in the April issue of Commentary, “How Highbrows Killed Culture,” makes such depressing reading. He begins:
It is one of the foundational myths of contemporary liberalism: the idea that American culture in the 1950s was not only stifling in its banality but a subtle form of fascism that constituted a danger to the Republic. Whatever the excesses of the 1960s might have been, so the argument goes, that decade represented the necessary struggle to free America’s mind-damaged automatons from their captivity at the hands of the Lords of Conformity and Kitsch. And yet, from a remove of more than a half century, we can see that the 1950s were in fact a high point for American culture — a period when many in the vast middle class aspired to elevate their tastes and were given the means and opportunity to do so.
“Given the means and opportunity to do so,” indeed. The notion that evil highbrows undermined an inherently robust American culture is, well, spieβbürlicher Scheiβdreck. It’s true that NBC maintained its own symphony orchestra and paid Arturo Toscanini a superstar salary to conduct it for radio broadcasts, while today’s American orchestras can barely give their broadcasts away. But immigrants and their children dominated the classical music audience, including Jews and Italians on the coasts and Germans in the Midwest. The war produced a flowering of American culture in fields from art to rocketry because so many of Europe’s best thinkers sought refuge in the United States.
America has produced genius that tower above all other countries in only one field, namely politics: one can argue that the Federalist Papers are the greatest work of political theory ever penned, or that Abraham Lincoln is the supreme visionary among Western political leaders. But that is where it ends. Allan Bloom observed in The Closing of the American Mind (1988) that American intellectuals were singing from a cheat sheet, with bad English translations of German originals. Keynes said that the practical man of business is usually the mental slave of some defunct economist, and our practical politicians today are the mental slaves of defunct theorists.
It’s true, as Siegel complains, that leftists of all varieties derided American democracy and egalitarianism:
The Frankfurt School, led by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, theorized that the rough beast of popular fascism would come round at last in bourgeois America. Relying on an unholy blend of Freud and early Marx, the Frankfurt School writers averred that private life had ceased to be private since it had been colonized by the forces of industrialized leisure — movies, radio, TV, and comic books. These amusements were, they argued, the modern equivalent of the “bread and circuses” used to contain Rome’s plebeians as the empire descended into decadence. With their formidable dialectical skills, they had the intellectual dexterity to argue past the lack of evidence and insist that the jackboots were coming. Because the underlying reality of American life, dominated by hectoring fathers à la Freud, was intrinsically fascist, they argued, there was no need for an overt movement of the sort represented by the Nazis. Nazism was inevitable in America.
The whole vocabulary of the counterculture, as Allan Bloom explained two decades ago, is watered-down Nietzsche. Siegel is quite right to excoriate the Frankfurt School and other left-wing “highbrows.” The trouble is that conservative culture is dominated by European highbrows. What one might call the conservative mainstream consensus rests on two pillars: Natural Law theory as revived by Catholic neo-Thomism, and self-styled classical political rationalism as espoused by Leo Strauss, among others. What great homegrown Catholic philosopher stands beside de Lubac, Urs von Balthasar, not to mention Ratzinger? What American Straussian can claim the mantle of the elusive sage whose dissertation was supervised by Ernst Cassirer? What American Protestant can be compared to Karl Barth? Most of the main currents of American Judaism derive from individuals who studied at the University of Berlin in the 1920s or early 1930s: Joseph Soloveitchik, A.J. Heschel, Leo Baeck, not to mention Menachem Schneerson. To make sense of Strauss, moreover, one has to understand why he considered Heidegger the decisive mind of the 20th century (how may programs in “political philosophy” include instruction in Heidegger, which in turn requires study of Aristotle, Kant, Kierkegaard, and the Phenomenologists?). I don’t like Strauss at all, and rely instead on another German Jew, the theologian Franz Rosenzweig.
We were a frontier culture, not another European state. The U.S., culturally, is ill-suited to guide the world, and was not designed nor sought to be a superpower. We were a place to go to live free in an expansive new world, and to live practically and inventively, without worries about class and “knowing your place.” There was room for everyone. The job of running things was thrust upon us, because Western Civilization broke some time between August 1914 and November 1918.
Being an Anglo-Saxon culture with lots of Scots-Irish cussedness thrown in, we inherited a suspicion of continental theorizing, which trends toward anti-intellectualism. It’s unfortunate that these crazy German philosophies developed such a strangehold now — perhaps, in the New World, we didn’t have the immunities against it, which is what it sounds like you’re arguing.
In any case, the frontier is gone, and in many places, the farms that replaced the frontier have yielded to housing developments and strip malls; the latter is threatened by the Internet.
Anyway, an interesting set of thoughts, Mr. Spengler. Thanks.
I agree, American culture, even pop culture, in the 1950s, far from being conformist, was wonderfully diverse and effortlessly creative. Science fiction stories were published in the 1950s were published that even today are considered too nuanced to play properly as TV adaptations, such as “Fondly Fahrenheit,” (1954) and “The Big Front Yard” (1959) – the former was adapted for TV by the author himself in 1959.
A cult of cool came into play in the mid-1950s, based on a the idea of a revolution that needed to happen. The players were not poor and disenfranchised, but adopted the culture of people who were, black Americans. Those players were almost entirely white and entirely outsiders in a social sense. Of course they didn’t like America. Some of them weren’t even Americans, such as Robert Frank, whose book, “The Americans,” (1959) portrayed us as sad, confused, racist and empty.
Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac and Frank kept finding and then pushing against an oppression that largely existed in their own minds. Jim Crow was being undone, not because of them and their art, but because of Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 and the housing cases in New York of 1957 about segregated deeds. The very institutions that were pilloried actually were working – one cannot revolt in a truly oppressive society and Ginsberg was exonerated in court, perhaps to his annoyance.
It wasn’t broken and we fixed it – now it is broken.
Politics is not the only field in which Americans are tops. American film is home both to a lot of crud and many genuine masterpieces; in any case American film outranks in world historical significance any other cinema. And then there is the the field of jazz which in the 1950s and early 60s arguably reached its peak of creativity. As for intellectuals, humanists, I think America today is home to one of world historical significance, Eric Gans, though the generative anthropological discipline he founded is yet not well known, perhaps in part because he is a secular Jew from the Bronx.
The universities should be where the questions are asked, not where the answers are dispensed. Could that be restored? The tuitions have shot to the stratosphere and what you get in return has often degraded to the level of attitudes, mannerisms and superstitions. Maybe we will soon have an education bubble, and a backlash in which the desire to satiate curiosity and intellectual ambition would come back?
Sadly, it’s more likely that the bursting of the education bubble will result more immediately in an even fiercer rejection of anything that smells of “intellectualism” or “highbrow culture.” Just goes to show yet again: Abuse it, then lose it.
p.s., I’ve always thought there was a special genius in Anglo-American middlebrow culture. Middlebrow was a term coined in the 1920s by smug highbrows who recognized that, unlike in the nineteenth-century, the middle- class market for culture did not in all respects seek to model itself on the leading edge of high culture. Middlebrow was a response to the increasing nihilism of high culture in the wake of WW1. A large middlebrow publishing industtry emerged in the interwar years, whose works held to many traditional values. I think this was key to Churchill finding the constituency to keep fighting in spring 1940. Many British highbrows would have accomodated themselves to Nazi rule. Germany was in some respects a more modern or modernist culture, with many highbrows. And, since all its professions were implicated in the genocide, this is what led to the great loss of faith in high culture, after the war, even if America in the 1950s han’t fully learned the lesson yet. Today we must learn how to keep alive the true values of high culture without trying to create the singular or totalitarian focus of attention for the “high” that allowed it to be harnessed by a totalitarian politics.
I’m not too sure if the British intellectuals would have been able to accommodate with Nazi rule.
After all they could observe how the German intellectuals where treated by the regime. Many German authors and professors were forbidden to publish any more or their books where forbidden for sale. This applied especially for left-wing highbrows, but also for conservative ones like the namesake of Mr Goldmans pseudonym, not to speak about these of Jewish belief or lineage.
Many emigrated to the US, the UK, Switzerland, Moscow or Constantinople, like Thomas Mann, Berthold Brecht, Adorno or Albert Einstein.
> Many German authors and professors were forbidden
However, many others were lauded and elevated. On the whole, the German intellectual class went all-in with Nazism. See Heidegger.
This isn’t surprising. The intellectual class always gloms onto totalitarians. They think that they can control the tiger.
Yes, some were driven out. Think of that as “extreme tenure denial”.
Kissenger (or Sayre) said that academic politics are vicious because the stakes are so small. That’s wrong. The stakes are small because academia is small. When those folks get to play on a bigger stage, they’re just as vicious.
Dear Mr Goldman,
thank you for this article, especially “spießbürgerlicher Scheißdreck”, wonderfully put.
What comes to my mind, is that maybe the West will show the same division of labour like in the Antique world with Rome advancing the cause in terms of Politics and the Hellenes providing the scholars or in the Chinese realm during the Warring States Period where Qin showed the most military and political strength and Chu and kingdoms advancing philosophy and poetry.
I think in the long run, America will move towards its supposed “fellah religion” (as the namesake of your nom de guerre put it) Evangelicalism, and which might feature some inspirations in politics and philosophy on its own.
Doctor Zhivago when smuggled out of the USSR became a best seller in the US. This was back in 1958. Now what do we get? Harry Potter and metrosexual vampires.
Dr. Zhivago surely beats “Twilight.” Tolstoy, though, it isn’t.
This is an interesting and much appreciated post (and comments). It’s all well and good to chew over Islam, Iran, elections and economics but it is also valuable to occasionally look into the mirror.
Well put. Nevertheless, the required cultural and political foundations will have to be and will be created here, in the US. At least in the US, online, there exists a wide and far-ranging debate on such matters among young people. I am thinking of for example the HBD and PUA communities – I do realize you want to stay away from those, for better or for worse -.
In Europe, at least in the languages I read, there is no debate anywhere. Not on the left, not on the right, only crickets. Japan, nothing either. I do not speak Chinese, but what I understand is that there, people are happy to have any sort of debate, let alone on such more foundational issues.
I wonder if the spittoons that appalled the Europeans and the Buffalo Bill Cody Wild West show that mesmerized the Europeans were rightfully most influential in defining America’s culture. Clint Eastwood and Chuck Norris don’t get enough credit for carrying the torch. As for physics, it seems that the “European” immigrants continue to have the best spin. http://theresonanceproject.org/pdf/origin_of_spin.pdf
Who can imagine anything worse than the cacophony of ninety six million Chinese classical pianists washing up on our shores and starting in on those crashing chords of the Tchaikovsky #1?
….correction:
…..read: thirty six million…..
Maybe they like J.S. Bach instead. He was the mathematician composer.
No more than Chopin.
Indeed, Chopin is the best introduction to Bach.
We have something worse now: you can grow to adulthood and have a college degree without ever having heard Tchaikovsky, at least not having known you were hearing it. The ONLY place my stepkids, ages 25-29 now, have ever heard any “classical” music was in my home and a few ocassions when we could get them to actually go with us to local symphony performances. There is no Music class even in wealthy school districts and no requirement for the survey Music and Art Appreciation classes that were once a mainstay for establishing some cultural literacy for college freshmen and sophomores.
That said, even here in the land of Mama Grizzlies and Macho Moose Murderers, the Symphony season usually sells out quickly, though the crowd is decidedly graying.
I discovered Tchaikovsky from cartoons and “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” Errol Flynn version. You never know when the bug will bite, nor how. I would LOVE to have had a classical education, but alas, public schools all the way into college.
As a child here, discovering Prokofiev, from Peter and the Wolf.
Bugs Bunny, ‘The Barber of Seville’; greatest cinematic opera moment ever.
…though the crowd is decidedly graying.
The audiences for classical music have always been graying. When I first discovered chamber music 30 years ago I was one of very few people in the audience with hair a color other than grey or white. Now I’m one of them. That said, I couldn’t agree with you more about the disappearance of music education from most schools.
“When America encountered real horrors in the form of Asian Communism, our national religion centered in mainline Protestantism cracked apart within three years, between 1965 and 1968. Our culture was inadequate and vulnerable as we entered the 1960s. It is inadequate and vulnerable now. It cries out for a tough critique, not the self-congratulatory complacency that Siegel proposes.”
As far as I can tell the current ‘mainline’ secular religion is even less adequate and more vulnerable. A system that prides itself in a non-existent tolerance of diversity which is really no more than a willful ignorance of differences. A proud march to the end of history that was actually just a downhill stroll that hadn’t needed to climb anything for the last 25 years. False concern for the poor and the environment that is really just tokenism and anti-humanistic Gaia worship. It would not require a sustained shock to completely destroy this belief system. As always, my question is who and what replaces the rotten secular religion when the current one collapses under its own weight.
“False concern for the poor and the environment that is really just tokenism and anti-humanistic Gaia worship. It would not require a sustained shock to completely destroy this belief system.”
Well put.
“..my question is who and what replaces the rotten secular religion when the current one collapses under its own weight.”
Good question. I would suspect another pseudo-relgion more nastier than the last.
After the pretense is stripped off, this contingent, secular, grab-bag of sentiments will appear as simple hedonism, but not the crude, virile pleasures of a satyr, rather the sort that comes from a perverse sense of self-loathing, the man hoping someone puts him out of his misery because he lacks the will to do it himself. It is the “anything” that Chesterton refers to in his famous observation, and this anything has a Janus face called nothing at all.
But that nothing is not to be confused with the tragic nihilism of Nietzsche. His intimacy with the abyss requires a heightened consciousness just to endure it, to stand in that darkness until something could be was created from it, something enduring that would give existence meaning and revitalize it from the dead myths that now began to deform, not elevate human life. The nothingness of the last man is a retreat deeper into the hollows of the cave, into the rock itself; a diminishment of consciousness, a urge to be so small that one vanishes from notice altogether.
Your right, this day is coming. And Mr. Goldman is correct to note that this problem has been hashed out at great length, in a series of remarkable conservations, starting with Nietzsche, and then then on through the last 150 years. I came to it in my final year of high school though Allan Bloom, whose work absolutely demolished the path I had been on up to that point.
The oddest thing to me about A. Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind” is how a book so impassioned in its urge to have the reader take the problems that Nietzsche (and Strauss) raised very seriously, and how precisely Bloom draws out a difficult map of complex Continental ideas and explains how much they do, in fact, matter to our lives here in America, insisting this discussion is still unresolved and to ignore the origins and intents of these ideas is great folly, yet somehow this great book still failed to be understood as such by the general reader that Bloom was trying to reach.
The book wasn’t just about what a bog of humbug and cowardice that the modern university had become, and how the humanities and the natural sciences had formed their own split based on Weber’s fact/value distinction, or how the professors, from sheer cowardice and lack of any conviction that what they taught mattered at all, had completely capitulated to the lowest demands of the lumpen proletariat, though all of that is in there and more. Bloom was insisting that the way forward required the most serious minds in America understand, very thoroughly understand, that ideas come from somewhere, and that those ideas have a pedigree, and that when you let them in the door, their extended family often comes with them. Bloom was telling us to be very careful or these ideas, along with their relatives, might just highjack our “low, but solid” political system and replace it with something more dangerous. He points to the problem of Heidegger, or how the greatest philosophical mind since Nietzsche could have delivered the Rektoratsrede, as strong evidence.
Great essay, Mr. Goldman, you’ve stirred up a whole beehive of passions and longings that I pray will never go away, the sting of Eros. I feel fully satisfied in being late for work now.
Here’s my problem with Strauss, in a nutshell: once Kant destroys naive sense-perception, subjectivity enters epistemology, and then (with Kierkegaard) passion. Idolatry can arouse as much passion as revealed religion, and Kierkegaard’s religious passion becomes something horrible in Heidegger. Strauss knows all the issues; he was a doctoral student of Cassirer, and worked for Rosenzweig at the Frankfurt Lehrhaus. He knows Heidegger can’t be refuted in secular terms (see the lecture transcription that Pangel published)but he doesn’t like the consequences, as you observe. His return to Athens is an esoteric move, I think: he knows perfectly well that classical philosophy doesn’t stand up to the Kantian critique and it successors, but he wants to promote a dispassionate idea of reason precisely because he fears that passion will support totalitarianism, and he distrusts religion. His “esotericism” means that he can read classical philosophy any way he wants. Strauss can’t be understood on his own terms, and it’s his own fault. My view is that we are going to have to choose between religious and idolatrous passion: without passion human beings don’t bother to keep living.
What I gained from Strauss certainly did not originate with Strauss, but I find his arguments compelling, comprehensive, and stimulating. I never fail to come away with far more than I came in with, provided I take the time to slow down and read closely. He and Allan Bloom (and many others, including Harvey Mansfield and Harry Jaffa) were the teachers I longed for but never found; they formed the backdrop to my real education while I plowed through what remains of the university.
Yes, I find his esoteric tendencies exasperating at times, and it leaves me wondering if I’m being turned in circles. But I honestly don’t turn to philosophy to draw conclusions entirely, I turn to it for the felling of fellowship, of a self-initiated circle of friends that stretches through long epochs, giving a euphoric sense of timelessness; something akin to what Machiavelli describes in this letter to Vettori. It is my own responsibility to turn myself back to face what appears to be a doorway, and keep on moving toward it, even after being left bewildered for a while. I view the process of imparting ideas holistically; they are all there, but the ordering is the obligation of the man who has them, that is his own Republic, the rightful ordering of all the contesting claims.
Strauss inculcated in me an obligation to do a slow and deliberate reading, of serious writers, with my full active attention, even in short bursts if that’s all I can do. That to do this was better than reading superficially. Strauss also allowed me to appreciate just how sublime and intricate the great thinkers were, I came to feel a sense of elation in reading them, like I’d joined the most exclusive hidden, secret society ever founded; this engaged the passions in concert with the intellect, and that has been the way I believe reading is best approached. This is where I think Strauss and I part ways; I often find his passions too muted, to studied and controlled; too little joy and too much circumspection.
My preoccupation is at the root of what constitutes human consciousness; without elaborating too far, I don’t share the view that what is commonly referred to as consciousness is, in fact, worth the name. And from my reading, neither do many other men and women who have thought about the problem at length.
I agree with you that the passions are the key to anything, without the horse neither the carriage nor the driver arrive anywhere. But I loathe passions engaged in idolatry (the twin horrors of Nazism and Marxism left deep imprints on my conscience, and I hate both with an active fervor that sometimes makes me uncomfortable with it), and cannot bring myself to capitulate to revealed religion–far too deep a skepticism to do so in good faith.
So I work hard, sit quietly, and try to stay awake so I might not miss a sign of a fellow pilgrim that I might lend a hand (or a book) to. Since the university has abdicated it’s rightful role to retain and communicate the ideas, it falls to the layman in America to pick up the treasure and store it safely in human heads until the time is right to invest it openly.
I really don’t think there are any secrets. There only are things that are hard to understand, that we have to live with long enough to grasp. That is my final objection to Strauss. There’s no esoteric knowledge. It’s all in the open. Butit’s hard. The whole corpus of Mozart is available. Try to compose an alternative ending to the Requiem yourself. Or prove/disprove the Ontological Proof of the existence of God.
David:
Are you still blogging at First Things? I have missed your blogs there, and then saw you were not listed on the editorial board of FT.
Salim
No, I left FT staff a year ago, although I still contribute from time to time.
Mr. Spengler,
US is a democratic country. Much more democratic than UK, Russia or China. Democracy is always hostile to culture – poor Socrates ( or poor biblical prophets – if you prefer the Jewish flavor of the conflict).
Unlike those countries US does not have an official cultural elite. Elitism is something universally opposed by the American democracy. OTOH, US has many ‘unofficial’ elites – political, artistic, technocratic etc. They are less visible than in other countries, but the y do exist. I am not sure any other country will succeed better than US in solving this conflict. Modern Russia is a good example. It is more democratic than before the collapse of USSR, but it is culturally inferior to the USSR.
Let’s consider hi-tech elite. China may succeed here and there, but I doubt it will clearly ‘beat’ the US, just like Japan could not do it. Take the technology example: Japan is just as good (or better) than US in mass production of anything. But have you ever seen a Japanese SW start-up? (or German for that matter). Where are the big Japanese SW companies (or Indian ones?). Tech elite thrives in the US, even if the majority of it are immigrants. OTOH, it will never have a serious political or cultural influence. I guarantee you that it would in Russia (if most of Russian tech elite was not already working in the US).
Thank you David. Very few are brave enough to confront and critique the American people in such a thoughtful way.
Brave? Not me. Talk is cheap. The brave ones are the handful of teachers who keep the high culture of the West alive and transmit it to the small number of students who still care.
Nope, I associate myself with Ben H. in thanking you.
“Talk” is not cheap at all, as in fact your column shows so well. We need to learn to talk, and to defend ourselves against those whose words are aimed at convincing us that right is wrong and wrong is right.
And that’s the most difficult thing. Learning to talk is a never ending task.
The leftists, that are only the agents of nihilism, have spent the last fifty years to delete the western culture and substitute it with sophisms.
With your columns, you show that you are one of the good teachers you mention in your answer to Ben H.
No, this talk isn’t cheap; it is beyond price because it is so rare. You certainly couldn’t buy this talk on a university campus these days. The tragedy in America today is that we now have a couple of generations who follow Neitzsche and his post-modernist progeny and Marx and his Trotskyite and Maoist progeny and they don’t know it; they just think they’re “educated” people and that education distinguishs them from the mass of bitter clingers.
One of these days the 60′s will be over and not a minute too soon. I don’t watch television on a regular basis but when I do I am fascinated by the cultural references that site events that happened almost 50 years ago. I attribute it to youth culture that simply won’t die even when the vast majority of the baby boomers are starting to decay at a rate even higher than the decay that they wrought upon this one great nation. This current generation will hopefully look at what was given and what was lost and then decide that our current course is unnavigable. Let us hope that our next great American adventure will deliver us to the city on the hill and not into it’s sewers.
I am searching for the connection to Rosenzweig in this piece. Its hiddenness intrigues me, perversely serving as evidence that it must be there however concealed. Not that FR did not offer pungent criticism of all aspects of his world and its thinkers, but he outlined and constantly referenced a grand vision of how all the pieces fit together.
Of course, the great sages mentioned in passing, in particular R. Soloveitchik and R. Schneerson, offered such visions. However trenchant their critiques, they disciplined themselves with a rigorous hope that admitted no categorical cynicism or despair. Certainly, R. Schneerson scrupulously refrained from establishing the greatness he demanded of all on the foundation of the thinking that criticism had reduced to rubble. Instead, he insisted on an indelible core of the universal good that all good criticism would reveal.
Perhaps it’s just because there is so much that must be criticized that that core is not yet shining. But that path requires extraordinary restraint, for it is only a hair’s-breadth away from the philosophy of the Cultural Revolution.
R. Soloveitchik is a far more important thinker for me personally than Rosenzweig; Rosenzweig concludes the “Star” with the encomium that all of his ratiocination leads “to life,” while R. Soloveitchik elaborates what a halakhic life entails. Nonetheless Rosenzweig’s sociology of religion offers unique insights that help make sense of the great events of the world. Their views are for the most part not contradictory but complementary. I should say that I have great respect and affection for Chabad, and have spent many happy hours davening with Chabad, but I do not rely on R. Schneerson in the same way.
Maybe this will be the spur that gets me to finally open Halachic Man; after all, I do have a copy of the original (published in a Hebrew journal, actually). Have you ever looked at the (somewhat daunting) writings of Rav Kook? The religious zionists here in Israel appear to have managed a synthesis of the Lithuanian, Modern, Chassidic, and perhaps even Sephardi thought. (I’m Lithuanian Chareidi myself, but I find it interesting.)
American Philistinism, however, is largely why intellectuals came here in the first place. Ideology based states kill their opponents, stagnate, collapse, and leave nihilism behind. America was low brow, not nihilistic.
North America has at least one great contemporary thinker, ofter ignored by some strange preference for European madness: Bernard J.F. Lonergan. I suspect his work will long outlast that of Hegel, et al.
Truth told, I only know Lonergan through secondary sources. Like Benedict XVI, I feel no affinity for Aquinas, and and like Benedict XVI, Augustine interests me much more. But isn’t Lonergan ultimately an interpreter of Aquinas, whereas Hegel is an original (albeit a pernicious original)?
My wife and I were in Sydney on vacation this past October.
As occurred in EVERY free concert we’d attended in the states, Sydney’s Music School program had a free concert showcasing their young talent.. 3/4′s were of Asian lineage.
American Philistinism indeed.
To add salt to the wound, PJMedia itself had not 1 but 2 recent op-eds discussing, ‘Best hip-hop, Rap albums/ songs’ or like-minded title/ nonsense.
Sure, being an 80′s kid I liked rap, hip-hop like most kids. Then I hit puberty.
To borrow a line from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, ‘I weep for the future’. Indeed..
And very often, these Asian musicians obtain better performance opportunities than Russian ones, even those who are much better at the given discipline. We are neglecting nepotism as a driving force.
A culture of individualistic freedom and liberty made America great. As we lose the appreciation for an environment that made creative progress possible and replace it with a stultifying collectivist statism we will necessarily degenerate into mediocrity, decay, and failure.
I enjoy Spengler’s analysis of the contemporary crisis. However, modernity reflects the near triumph of Hegel’s mysticism in conflict with those who chose to participate in a divinely ordered cosmos. The Christian lives in an apocalyptic age moving toward denouement while the modern is burden with a spiritual pathology that has the potential to destroy everything. As Voegelin says: “Spiritual disease is not a man’s private affair, but has public consequences…”
That pesky Hegel, again! Didn’t Siegler just tell us that American interest in Hegel (along with Plato and Aristotle) proved that the 1950s already had a high culture? I remember that show — Ozzie and Hegelette.
Our Elementary, Middle, and High schools have been degrading for decades. And now, we see the results. Too many of today’s colleges admit students with little to no capacity to read these great books. Philosophy used to be a core of a western college education. Today, it is relegated to the sidelines, while instead we teach the modern equivalent of vocational training.
Today’s students are simply not equipped to read this stuff. They’re given answers they can not understand, while the questions themselves remain unasked.
This is why 1968 happened. This is why 2012 is happening with OWS. History is trying to tell us something, but few are listening.
Indeed; it’s worth remembering that Why Johnny Can’t Read was published in 1955 and the use of phonics in teaching reading (which is necessary for a substantial fraction of children) is still being bitterly fought.
Does “The Jetsons” count? Is that as good as “Jane Eyre?” Why? Is wine more sophisticated than soda pop, or a sign of a medieval alcoholic?
Why is the sky blue?
I think of wine as spoiled grape juice, so I appreciate your position. But of course in most cases simple ideas do not solve problems unless they are forced to do so. Your shoes are too small for the traveler’s comfort on his journey. If you are not going anywhere, then the Jettsons are just fine.
Your problem is that you do not believe that there is anywhere to go and you have reached that conclusion without having been anywhere much. As usual, you have failed to address the implications of Goldman’s analysis. He is an elitist and that is anathema to anyone seeking entropy for all classes of people. The problem is that the Jettsons may have contributed to being 31st in the PISA math competition. When nothing is important, then certainly math is unimportant.
Also, please do not point down the road toward quantum electrodynamics. We must solve human problems in the Newtonian world. Don’t you agree?
Ahhh! But, Mr. Goldman; The United States has an elite collection of the finest tele-prompter virtuosos known to man.
And with this technologically advanced instrument, masses of people are being serenaded into an obsequious mental state as if their drinking water had been spiked with a hallucinogenic.
With this instrument, the most incompetent, confused, and ill-educated, individual, can be elevated to a status never experienced by previous generations.
Oh, no, Mr. Goldman; You don’t give America near enough credit for ingenuity.
The United States Congress has performed the most significant operas ever scored.
AND THERE’S MORE TO COME!
There is a short, usually unnoticed chapter in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America titled “Why Study of the Classics is Essential in a Democracy,” or something like that. In it he makes the point that, absent a familiarity with aristocratic virtues, even elite culture will degenerate into instrumentalism.
Observe the core requirements of colleges today — I mean those colleges that actually HAVE any at all. They do not require students to address a body of knowledge or read certain texts; rather they require the (paltry) demonstration of skills, such as “quantitative reasoning,” “oral presentation,” “writing,” or of pseudo-skills like “global awareness” and “social consciousness.” You can fulfill these requirements by writing about hip-hop as easily as about Shakespeare. There are no ends, no works or truths valuable in and of themselves. There are only tools.
You cannot have “high culture” when nothing is high and there is no tradition to be passed on and cultivated. You cannot have philosophy where there is no truth. All you can have is job-training or ideology, where “the point is not to understand the world, but to change it.”
American high culture has ALWAYS been Eurocentric. The roots are European. Cut them off — Hey,hey! Ho,ho! Western Civ has got to go! — and the plant dies. So now we have elite culture (“Piss Christ,” anyone?) but no high culture at all.
“American high culture has ALWAYS been Eurocentric. The roots are European”.
But would you agree that the roots of that European high culture are ultimately in the Jewish and Christian bibles?
Regarding the study of the classics, I seem to remember Spengler (DPG) urging the study of Judges and Chronicles over Thucydides and Polybius.
My problem with this article is that it seems to take continental philosophy as the only player in the game. But that ain’t necessarily so. There is another, English speaking tradition, very much alive, which does not accept, for instance, Kant’s critique of perception as final, and thus can reject the solipsism which always seems to issue from it.
I realize that the Europeans insist that their tradition is somehow “deeper” than the Anglo, and that many are put off by the avowed atheism of such as Ryle, but there is much more to the English tradition than just those who carried with them the baggage of their positivist baggage, and even among those, there was also the Aristotelian/Thomist influence in their understanding of will and reason. And the atheism was not a fixity–we even got Flew, in the end.
While it may seem too dry for many, there is a lot to say for the Intellectualist approach to the will. In my own opinion, if you take the ultimately subjectivist approach of the continentals, you cannot help but ending up with Nietzsche. As Casey would say, “you could look it up.”
Every undergraduate should have to endure the debate between Continental and Anglo-Saxon philosophy. My own sympathies, as you indicate, lie with the Continental side. I believe that game and match were won by Goedel, who was a Kantian of sorts. See http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/07/the-god-of-the-mathematicians. And I agree with Allan Bloom that the unacknowledged influence of Continental philosophy in the US is enormous. But vive le difference.
“Variety is the spice must flow.”
Or something.
Does John Courtney Murray come anywhere being a representative American Natural Law philosopher? Also, Do you think the “highbrows” are chiefly to blame for a general cultural tendency toward laziness and egalitarianism? Ideas have consequences, but a lot of things have happened since the 1940’s in America to encourage an entitlement mentality, and the performance shortfall that goes with it. As to the 36 million Chinese piano-playing math-whizzes: that is the result of an old Mandarin tradition of advancement by competitive exam that finds a current incarnation in the university system. It provides a lot of skilled labor. But that system also produces conformity, and a fearful unwillingness to innovate or improvise. To cite one example: A friend of mine once described what should have been a fairly lucrative idea, but who despaired of taking a chance with it, so certain was he that a Party member –a “made guy” in effect—would be able to steal it from him. And respect for intellectual property is still problematic in the PRC.
Murray was a serious thinker. So are my friends Russell Hittinger and Fr. James V. Schall. There are some excellent American scholars. There are also dreadful flaws in the Chinese system. But one also should consider that it paid for the Chinese to imitate rather than innovate during the past generation. It doesn’t mean they can’t, or won’t. Of course China might sabotage itself (as I said). What I am trying to say is that it would be folly to depend on that outcome.
“It doesn’t mean they can’t, or won’t.”
Since the Confucians concept of the exam still rules, I do think they are only very marginally likely to better in the area of creating and exploiting innovation, than they have in the past.
In 1957, a new breed of streetlight fixture was introduced. These fixtures were called “cobraheads”.
The central banks of the elite light up the cities so peasants can’t see what’s in the night sky. Then the elite blame peasants for not looking up at the stars to spark astrology and philosophy in our dark minds.
Peasants suspected that sooner or later the elite would blame us for our dark minds. So we have been buying the Star Walk app for the iPad to get a glimpse. Turn off the damned lights or sell us an iPad app that fills the philosophical gap.
The great philosopher of the jock generation, William “The Refrigerator” Perry, famously observed: You open the door and light comes on.
There’s something telling about the contrast between China’s prodigious output of musicians and its *relative* absence of composers or conductors. I don’t know if that points to something flawed or incomplete about China’s embrace of classical culture, but it seems as if it should be telling us something.
We shall see what the future holds, but I think you’re on to something there.
Personally I’m glad that the Chinese have embraced Western classical music so enthusiastically; perhaps they can keep it alive when it seems to be withering here among the young and where orchestras and classical music radio stations are constantly struggling to stay afloat. The counterculture as it turned out became low-brow culture with totally forgettable music, and as far as composers where are the great composers of today in any country that are on the same level as those of the past?
I am too. As a bonus, it bodes well for matters other than music, and in the meantime they can keep alive that which America is too smug in its pop music mediocrity to maintain. (Note: I do not say mediocrity in a completely pejorative way. In many ways, America is as good as things get.
Alas.)
Aren’t the true American thinkers Dewey and William James? James in particular was a pioneering psychologist who didn’t have a lot of time for the metaphysics of the continentals. Only a true American could get away with using the term ‘cash value’ in describing philosophical ideas. I think he is a refreshing antidote to the depressing Europeans and still speaks to our angst-ridden ‘me-centered’ times.
In regards to official art, perhaps we are at a crossroads? So-called Post-modernism is vapid, conformist and anti-intellectual; it will soon be a bad memory. So what next? Maybe a resurgence of traditional culture? Maybe just more mindless, cultural activism with a different name?
Outside of the purview of official art and those who promote it, there is a great deal of very good, even excellent art that very few people ever see; so, things might not be as bad as they seem among pundits and the gate-keepers of the culture-system.
We have warehouses full of “official art” all over America ever since the “1% for Art” program came along back in the ’70s (IIRC). Every publicly funded structure must have 1% of its budget dedicated to art to decorate said structure. I’ve gone “shopping” in my State’s warehouses several times to decorate or redecorate various offices I’ve been in. If I had painted something like most of that stuff on my mother’s walls, she’d have beat me within an inch of my life. Take a look around the next time you’re in a government building and see America’s “official art” and what happens when you subsidize the production of crap.
“Turd In The Plaza”, aka, “Plop Art”
Tom Wolfe on the often required 1% public arts set aside for construction/development projects in many urban areas: “I don’t care if they want to build those boring glass boxes, but why do they always deposit the little turd in the plaza when they leave (http://www.rosenblog.com/2006/03/15/turd_on_the_plaza_exhibit_1.html)”?
India does not give us classical musicians…
The hell it doesn’t. It exports its own classical musicians. You might snivel that they don’t use the framework of western classical harmony, but their far more sophisticated scales and rhythms even the score nicely.
…but seems to aspire to dominate English fiction.
Amazing – they do have ears for the nuances and powers of languages. Well, music is a language of communication as well, and theirs has roots that predate European classical music by centuries.
So let’s just stipulate that the Indians are not lacking in such disciplines as are evidenced by the engineers who play Bach.
I don’t mean to diminish Indian music, but it is hardly the mass participation phenomenon that Western classical music has become in China and Korea.
China’s golden age of intellectual success will be short lived. The negative effects of liberal thought have permeated Chinese thought to the extent that the next generation of Chinese will look completely different from the current one. One need only look to American Chinese for examples–some are great successes, and some are terrible failures.
China is having an existential crisis and Christianity is the only thing that may hold it together. Once this occurs, I suspect that China will either go through political upheaval or lean toward the American inclination of “helping people”.
The China I first learned about 5 years ago is culturally completely different from the one of today. 5 years might as well be the US equivalent of 15 or 20. As quickly as they gain the upper hand, they will just as rapidly fall apart.
Re: “When America encountered real horrors in the form of Asian Communism, our national religion centered in mainline Protestantism cracked apart within three years, between 1965 and 1968.”
That’s the dumbest statement I’ve read in at least a month. As an explanation for what happened between between 1965 and 1968 it goes beyond simplistic and into the realm of moronic. As usual, Goldman’s post is filled with blowhard declarations and gasbagging. But this declaration really takes the cake.
“America has produced genius that tower above all other countries in only one field, namely politics: one can argue that the Federalist Papers are the greatest work of political theory ever penned, or that Abraham Lincoln is the supreme visionary among Western political leaders…”
Yes !
But what was the source of that towering genius?
The Federalist Papers, and the Constitution, are the great gifts to mankind of the American Enlightenment.
According to Allen Guelzo and others, the ideas of the American Enlightenment were widely accepted in academia and in American society in general until well after Lincoln’s death.
However, the American Enlightenment is very nearly forgotten today.
I have 2 brief articles on what shaped the thinking of the Founders that may be of interest to you.
http://www.conservative.org/wp-content/themes/Conservative/bl-archive/Issues/issue113/commentsfounders.php
http://www.conservative.org/wp-content/themes/Conservative/bl-archive/Issues/issue114/commentsfrench.php
Thank you very much for your important contributions. I always look forward to your next posting.
With best wishes,
Robert Curry
“In the U.S., 6.04 percent of the report’s subjects were classified ‘advanced,’ meaning they scored at least 617.1 on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Finland led the pack at more than 20 percent, and 12 other nations more than doubled America’s percentage”
What percentage of Asian-Americans were classified as “advanced”? What percentage of Anglo-Saxon Americans? How does the performance of Latino-Americans compare with Latino youth in Latin America? (There is nothing magical about our borders, that crossing them would change a person’s culture. Why would we NOT expect our country’s culture to rise or fall in parallel with its changing demography?)
Not that serious intellectualism was ever a strong part of American culture. The Founders were consumers and implementers of 17th Century Scottish and English Enlightenment philosophy — more like engineers than like scientists, more Roman than Greek. Their descendents were occupied with practical opportunities that left little time for contemplation.
What’s not clear is the point the author is trying to make. Is it that we need elite intellectuals, despite the cultural destruction wreaked by the previous generations’ anti-elitist left-wing cultural elite? What, exactly, does Goldman want us to do? (Or does the “bottom-line” orientation of my question reveal my own intellectual philistinism?)
I have one small problem with your premise; the Europeans didn’t come up with any of their philosophies or ‘highbrow culture’ in a vacuum. Everything from Shakespeare to Nazism has its foundation in classical works. Many of Shakespeare’s plays could never have existed without Plutarch, and Nazism, like Czarism, the Holy Roman Empire, and Mussolini’s fascism, depended heavily on the concept of Roman revival. The twin tracks of Romantic/Hellenistic philosophy and Judeo-Christian Ethics ran along together, sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, since before the ‘official’ beginning of the Renaissance. Romanticism grew popular in the south of France in the 11th century, while Judeo-Christian thought walked its baby steps along with Maimonides in the 12th. Both of course have roots in the ancient philosophers and theologians. The point being, Europe did not develop anything completely new, but built on existing concepts and precepts. The idea that America is cheating somehow by doing the same with Europeans is ludicrous. There does exist in America new ideas derived from the old world, certainly, but reconstructed to match the modern world. The Chicago school of Economics, for example. There are also many superb ‘classical’ compositions coming out of Hollywood, really about the only thing these days that approaches excellence from that source, despite the fact that it is not considered worthy by the ‘highbrows’ of our time. My point is not that America is the pinnacle of the whole world in all these areas, but that the ‘highbrows’ have done their best to kill the culture, and failed. There exists a large body of Americans who have the ability to play classical music with superb skill, but are architects or bookkeepers or window-washers or homemakers by day. The popular culture has exiled them, yet they continue to have and hone their abilities. They don’t care what the ‘highbrows’ say about poetry being dead, or classical music having nowhere to go, or elephant dung being the latest thing in art. They go on doing what they do, and loving it.
The elites in America have lost touch with reality, which is one reason why they detest anything enduring like classical music or ancient philosophy. It doesn’t mean that those of us without formal training can’t read Plato and Marcus Aurelius, or pick up a paperback or ebook copy of Plutarch or Adam Smith, or play a mean fiddle as well as do a classical masterpiece justice. Just because it’s not easily visible doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. You just have to pay attention.
First, why should we care if anyone wants to do the Kultur thing. The self-discipline might be nice for you internal life, but it is not transferable to other skills. Back in the day, Morgan Stanley tried to misuse art history majors as financial types.
One of the reasons US education stats look so bad is that the country wastes resources on people who do not want the opportunity or have the ability to use it. It is like infant mortality rates: the US is higher because it tries to do more while elsewhere the unviable don’t even inter the pool.
Why do you keep flogging Rosenzweig? He is Jewish of course, but does not seem to have found an audience. From what DG has written, it seems Rosie has nothing to add to my life or the general fund of understanding.
All of you should realize that the US is different. While the rest of the world looks to dead religions and philosophies, we want to figure it out for ourselves, going forward based on hard experience anchored on our historical understanding.
Campbell made the point that there are two ways to go. You can go Roman, choosing your leaders from people with demonstrated ability. The other choice is that of revealed religion, being a people of the Book, culling through irrelevancies to cow.
The Book has won: Marx never bothered to visit the areas he wrote about. Not very surprising as he came from a line of rabbis, who look down on experience. Note how the Haredi in Israel hate military service. Much safer to stay in Shul.
As a note, what killed mainstream churches was giving divinity students deferments during the Vietnam War. What we got was a bunch of ideologically driven chapel-rats, which have chased away all but their own followers.
America will proper when we follow Roger Williams and separate church and state with special attention to the various millenial sects trying to enforce their religious belief with state power.
What nonsense. Marx’s father converted to get ahead; the only reliigon he really knew was Christianity.
And what of the Dati Leumi (religious zionists) who come from a similar tradition as the Chareidim, and consider military service (preferably elite) as am important commandment?
There is a difference between an engineer and an engineer who plays Bach.
That’s like saying “there is a difference between an engineer and an engineer who smokes.”
The added detail about one tells you nothing about who is a better engineer, a better person, a better anything.
So what is the point, Mr Goldman? Hi-brow, low-brow, the culture thing … OK, you polemicize with Siegel (of whose article I only read half a dozen paragraphs before he manages to mess up), throwing around some hefty names. As for German philosophy, Heidegger’s turgid nonsense would come top of the pile, closely followed by Kant. If I had to do some book burning, that is. It is just that Heidegger was much superior to Kant in scumbaggery.
Socrates: three battle sorties, all honorable. Heidegger: digging the ditches during Goetterdaemmerung to please his Nazi superiors. Who would you read and impose on the masses? (I know, I know – we cannot really read Socrates since he wrote nothing. It is all platonic, but good fun, and the rest are just footnotes as Lord Whitehead would have it.) Frankly, the whole oeuvre of German philosophy could go up in flames, and no one would be the worse for it. Yes, ideas have consequences, and it has been one European disaster after another ever since Kant. One of the reasons why I prefer to pronounce his name in proper German, especially for the benefit of native English speakers.
Why should anyone in their right mind really bother trying “to make sense of Strauss” if the guy “considered Heidegger the decisive mind of the 20th century”? Representative of 20th century, perhaps; just like Derrida, Nancy, and the rest of the deconstructivist shite, if you pardon my Irish. If that is the hi-brow, Siegel may be onto something after all. Disembowellers masquerading as intellectuals, now that is a paradigm to aspire to. One gets contaminated just by looking at them, and in this particular instance ignorance is not just bliss but advisable.
In the end, it is not about culture as much as about character, morals, and values – not much sophistication is needed to keep a healthy race; on the contrary. John Ruskin (referring to India, incidentally, and Highlanders) captures it well in the Two Paths:
::: Out of the peat cottage come faith, courage, self-
sacrifice, purity, and piety, and whatever else is fruitful in the work
of Heaven; out of the ivory palace come treachery, cruelty, cowardice,
idolatry, bestiality,–whatever else is fruitful in the work of Hell. :::
There you have it. No ivory towers are needed.
Very well put, indeed, Social Engineer!
“Yes, ideas have consequences, and it has been one European disaster after another ever since Kant.”
Since Rousseau.
Exactly two genuine advances in political economy have occurred since the revolution that worked (that one of 1775); one embodied by the 14th amendment, and they other by the Nuremberg trials. Both are American in origin. Each is a refutation of a continental “thought” taken to it’s logical but necessarily evil extreme.
The history and current existence of European political philosophy–as evidenced by their “elites” of the past and those now in Brussels–is a long one solely of how not best to do it.
It escapes me how anyone can take Bloom seriously, when (I believe, it was about 25 years ago, I could misremember) he idiotically wrote disparagingly of the American youth’s interest in science fiction and space travel. To paraphrase him, “After all, there’s nothing there!”
Mr. Goldman, do you think I have that wrong, or did he just have a bad day for three decades running?
As I said, American political philosophy is our greatest achievement. Nothing in American political philosophy, though, explains why large parts of the world seem intent on destroying themselves and if possible taking us with them. Franz Rosenzweig is not a political philosopher, but his sociology of religion makes sense of this. We ignore such things at our peril. Regarding Bloom: I dislike Strauss, which means I dislike Bloom, but his point about the pernicious influence of continental philosophy is important. I really don’t care what he said about science fiction.
Thank you for your reply, and I appreciate more that you have little use for Bloom–my point re the quote is that his mind is closed and a size small.
I have faith Europe simply went wrong with Rousseau and has stayed wrong since. I have a rational ignorance of the particulars, or at least given my profession and proclivities, believe its a rational one.
I believe the Rabbi Solveichick’s thesis was on Rosensweig. It’s an amazing story of how he (FR) rediscovered his religion, on the very edge of leaving it.
The truth is, when I went to YU in the 80′s, Rabbi Solvetchick was certainly revered, and people would go listen to anything he said, but it wasn’t like people were forming groups to study his writings as, say, they might study Rabbi Hutner’s (forget which European University he attended). YU was a pure Lithuanian Yeshiva, and Rabbi Solveichick’s class was for the most part a pure Brisker Tulmudic discourse. I believe that’s changed.
Now Israel is different, and the religous thought of Rabbi Kook and successors is widely studied in the Hesder Yeshivot. But I don’t think he ever saw the inside of a university; he just appreciated some Western concepts.
Sorry, I meant people in Chaim Berlin would study Rabbi Hutner’s works.
Allan Bloom produced what many scholars regard as the finest translation of Plato’s Republic. He also wrote several remarkable books including “Shakespeare’s Politics,” “Love and Friendship,” in addition to “The Closing of the American Mind.”
So Allan gored your teenage love of science fiction and comic books and you never forgave him. I hope he got over it.
There are two kinds of people who read “Closing..”, those who read it thoroughly and understood the real issues Bloom was raising (still unaddressed 25 years later), and those who picked at excepts where Bloom was shooting scattershot at popular culture, took offense, and then feigned indignation that the professor thought their special affinities rubbish. The latter camp so outweigh the former that is has been all but impossible to have a discussion of the book since.
Self-indulgence has its price, although it probably helped his sales and fame, short-term.
>> There are two kinds of people who read “Closing..”, those who read it thoroughly and understood the real issues . . . and those who picked at excerpts where Bloom was shooting scattershot at popular culture, took offense, and then feigned indignation that the professor thought their special affinities rubbish. The latter camp so outweigh the former that is has been all but impossible to have a discussion of the book since.
uburoisc: This is oversimplified and distorted. What about the kind (such as myself) that read Closing young and was enthralled and introduced to the classics but in the process of studying them learned to reject Bloom’s anti-bourgeois stance over the years. Anyone who doesn’t have “last man” ringing in his cranium after reading Closing, and doesn’t grapple with it and resolve the question didn’t do himself any favors. There are at least as many who use Bloom’s Closing as as confirmation bias of their “decline of the West” thesis they’ve imbibed like mother’s milk as those who reject it for it’s critique of popular culture.
I’m forever grateful to Bloom for introducing me to the classics, but many are too uncritical of Bloom of his “last man” anti-bourgeois nonsense. Some people almost seem to think life-long study of the classics necessitates an anti-bourgeois stance. It doesn’t. Goldman says he doesn’t like Bloom, but he has an affinity for his anti-bourgeois position. He doesn’t call himself Spengler for nothing.
Americans never were peat cottage types. Pioneering was a business (you clear fields, built a house, improve the property, sell it to a settler, and move on). But that’s beside the point. We’re in a high-tech, long term arms race with China (not to mention Russia). Peat bogs don’t help.
Mainstream American conservatism is distinctively hostile to any sort of higher education that does not have immediate economic application (witness the jeering attacks on Occupy folks with liberal arts degrees).
A great civilization needs philosphers as well as engineers and welders.
Yes, it needs them, but they shouldn’t feel it entitles them to eat. And what sort of philosophy is “feminist studies”, which is a political viewpoint, not a field? Not to mention a field which produces advocates so devoid of any feeling of naunce that they cannot see, for example, the absolute horror in the prophet’s depiction of Amnon’s rape of Tamar, because the prophet does not actually outline it and point a finger at it. (This is seldom done in Samuel.)
This is not education, it is anti-education. It teaches you to stop thinking.
You went wrong when you conflated OWS with the philosophers of our civilization.
In response to the old joke that the US is the first nation in history to go from barbarism to decadence without ever having passed through civilization, a case could be made that the US is still in the process of emerging from barbarism.
I think the US today is in a position somewhat analogous to the Athenians a couple of decades after the Persian Wars. The Greeks of that era were not the lofty and dignified intellects of Victorian imagination. They were crude smart-ass newcomers, curious about everything and eager to learn, but not at all in awe of the ancient, sclerotic empires of Egypt and the East. Like Athens in the mid-5th century, post WW2 America enjoyed the prosperity it reaped from its position of relative dominance in a broken world, and grew overconfident and counted on more cultural and material resources than it had actually accumulated. But the Athenians were far from done as a civilization. They had hardly begun.
Re European influence, I know the field of physics best. Many great minds came over in the 30s and 40s, and inspired a leap from primitive pragmatic minimalism in many schools to a rapid mastery of the frontiers of the field. But European science was not simply taken over with all its baggage. American physics was not that of Einstein and Bohr, but the new intellectual/technological universe of Feynman and Ernest Lawrence. [Some Euro-Americans, e.g. von Neumann, adapted well to how things were done in the new world.] The philosophical foundations of physics have advanced hardly at all, and few care whether they have or not. But pragmatic operationalist physics has soared. And this is not at all a victory for empiricism or positivism as doctrines. The latter are considered as irrelevant as idealism. Bohr once said, after giving a lecture on the new quantum theory to a group of applauding positivists, “If they had really understood what I was saying, they wouldn’t have liked it at all.” [quoted roughly from the failing recollections of an old man] Today’s American physicist might have said, “I KNOW they don’t understand what I’m saying. If they did, they wouldn’t waste their time on that gibberish they write in their philosophical journals.” Physicists no doubt are the slaves of outmoded intellectuals when they pontificate outside their own field (as I am doing now – a self-referential paradox), but within physics they continue to be astounded and delighted by new and utterly unexpected observations, concepts and mathematical tools, from non-conservation of parity to the accelerating expansion of the universe.
A major “civilizing” impetus came from New England in the couple of decades before the Civil War, and continued to proselytize the rest of the county long after that. There were significant successes, especially in the establishment of compulsory education (now perhaps a mixed blessing). The provincials never surrendered, however. The 60’s are generally thought of in terms of the appearance of the so-called counter-culture (as if there were only one), but a more significance sea change can be seen in the horror expressed by the failing North-Eastern establishment at the rise of ‘crude smart-ass newcomers’ like Goldwater.
The US differs so much from other “advanced industrial nations” to a great extent because so much of the population are still frontiersmen, migrants and immigrants at heart, making all things new. In short, we are still barbarians. And proud of it.
Re: “Nothing builds attention span and analytic fortitude like classical music…”
Except the study of modern jazz, that is… many are the classical musicians who master playing from a written score only to run aground, musically-speaking, when trying to play Charlie Parker’s bebop.
Re: “The brave ones are the handful of teachers who keep the high culture of the West alive and transmit it to the small number of students who still care.” You’ve got that right, David… I speak from experience, having served my time as a youthful teacher in the ghetto. Bring your whip and a chair, and a thick skin, too… it isn’t a job for the faint of heart. Our nation would be better served if we drew high-school teachers from the ranks of drill instructors and platoon sergeants than schools of education. I’m not being entirely facitious, either…
Such an idea has crossed my mind many times. It certainly would be good for the boys, and just now, that’s where the focus needs to be. You’d need to screen those DIs a bit. Some of the various DI styles would not translate well.
Some other people think the same way: my oldest stepkid got a job as a teachers’ assistant in school in a rough neighborhood in Seattle solely on the basis of his experience in juvenile corrections in Alaska.
as an average east German it is really difficult for me to imagine god,
but either way i think about it (“i don´t believe in god but he employs me a lot of time”), very important for me: biblical rules, you only have to read it, there are no other important rule givers, infinite and sacred acts of behaviour; also impressive: holy places, churches and so on;
to think of Jesus as of gods son is quite outfashioned and especially the pastors preaching about it and we have a state church here, the state takes taxes if you want to be a member … (may be not for pentecostals);
and you have kind of philosophers for example i read Sloterdijk, who describe religion as a mere culture technique in a very interesting way;
but I have to say Mr. Goldmans theopolitics is also very, very impressive;
and as a good old German I want to find a way to get a future for my band even if the chances go to zero
Frank,
Den deutschen wuensche ich schnelle Genesung vom Geistesteifstand in dem sie sich befinden. Hauptsache ist dass sie mehr Kinder kriegen.
Frank, old buddy, you need to begin the quest for the ground of existence. Hint: it’s divine in nature and if it is conducted with an open psyche will result in the ever popular divine-human encounter. Or, you may continue to live in the miasma that is modernity. Good luck with that, dude!
What amazes me is the sway that John Dewey’s educational theories and philosophy still holds over the US educational establishment. Especially after the Russian Soviets tried it and then discarded as an epic fail.
“Mainstream American conservatism is distinctively hostile to any sort of higher education that does not have immediate economic application (witness the jeering attacks on Occupy folks with liberal arts degrees).”
“A great civilization needs philosphers as well as engineers and welders.”
Amen. I’ve also noticed that Paul Krugman and some of his worst critics (i.e. a certain University of Houston professor down in Texas) cannot agree on much, except that they both hate Ron Paul and Paul invoking Diocletian in a Bloomberg debate is absurd, and Diocletian’s policies are, in Krugman’s words, ‘hidden in the mists of time’. As if monetary debasement (as any coin collector of that era can point to), bread and circuses, and occasional persecution of Christians is not contemporary at all to the 21st century. Nope, that crazy old Uncle Ron with his majority of military contributors support is at it again. Or at least that’s the general PJM position.
“crazy old Uncle Ron with his majority of military contributors” ‘… you forgot to mention Ron Paul’s well documented, high level, and remunerative role in those slimy, racist “Ron Paul” newsletters (http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/company-ron-paul-keeps_613474.html).
Does he share those Diocletian stores with his friend and fellow conspiracy nut Alex Jones?
Ron Paul is a dumb yahoo of a country doctor with a fixed (and stupid) idea about money. He’s Exhibit No. 1 for the prosecution.
Ron Pauls’ desire for a gold standard does indeed demonstrate a lack of sophistication about money. However, he is 100% spot on about the Federal reserve, prodded on by the federal government itself, manipulating the value of currency for political expediency. The equity bubble of the late 90′s and the housing bubble of the oughts were the creation of artificially cheap money due to interest rates being set abnormally low starting around 1993. These bubbles were “fake” in the same manner as the Japanese bubble of the 80′s. They should never have been stoked in the first place.
Greenspan also pushed the federal government into redefining inflation with fraudulent concepts such as substitution effects and hedonic factors, again, starting in 1993. One trip to the grocery store makes clear that the CPI no longer correlates with the actual inflation rate at all.
Ron Paul is the only candidate who is addressing these issues.
Instead of a return to the gold standard, I think the Federal Reserve system should be subject to anti-trust legislation and broken up the same way Ma-Bell was in 1982. Instead of one federal reserve, we would be much better with several competing central banks. This would certainly eliminate the inflation problem as there would be intense competitive pressure to NOT inflate at all. Also, a system of competing central banks would result in the market itself setting the interest rate, rather than a government-influenced monopoly entity, as is the case now.
This thread is a welcome relief from a lot of the predictable political sniping, but the responses hint that much of the right is no more interested in philosophy and the classics than much the left, but you would also find decent numbers on both sides who are interested. It must be part of our special American blend of coffee and bourbon. Does commerce and the work ethic, or the ability to sell or build something, trump everything else? Not necessarily, but you’d damn well better have the folks around who happen to think and act as if those ARE the most important things in the world.
As for myself, I have been more of a literature than philosophy person, but have passed through stages of Jesus-Jung-Camus, to the classics and primary sources with a good dose of Thoreau usually present.
If you take Thoreau’s idealism and tamp it down by grounding it in nature and some science, add enough guns, sex, drugs, and rock and roll to keep the race going and liven things up, play your cards reasonably well with whatever hand life has dealt you, you get the beginnings of my “philosophy.” That said, grammar, classical music and the study of history including our Founders and their documents also seems to be of great value.
Life is so complicated and we humans so easily misguided or able to overreach, that we always need the other side(s) to tell us we are full of sh*t and try to vote us and ours out. The Founders did set in motion such a mechanism. It is never neat, tidy, or really acceptable to the discriminating mind, but otherwise the dance might just stop.
“America has produced genius that tower above all other countries in only one field, namely politics”
I am a bit late to the party, and others have made this point before me, but I beg to disagree. True, in spite of current dominance in the sciences, America has yet to produce a Galileo, Newton, or Darwin; not to mention great music, art, literature, and philosophy.
But what about cinema? that’s a greater art than opera if you ask me.
And then there is psychology, and the related (and undervalued) field of self-help books. Sure there are a lot of self-help books that are not worth the paper they are printed on, but what about Franklin’s Autobiography?
Most importantly, it is in technology and entrepreneurship that America towers above all other countries, at least since the late xix century. The business of America is business.
Having said that, I must also question whether American genius in politics really towers above other countries. In political *practice*, yes; but in political *theory*, there must be a reason why American conservatives mention Burke, Tocqueville, and Hayek more often than any American thinker.
I’d take a country doctor who keeps company with crazy Alex Jones over crazy Paul Krugman anyday.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/ron-paul-central-bankers-are-intellectually-bankrupt
And David, while I respect your insights on demographics and religion, if the FT/Bloomberg have to take Dr. Paul’s positions seriously (along with those of Jim Rogers, Marc Faber, etc), ‘this doesn’t pass the laugh test’ doesn’t work very well for you or PJM anymore (particularly now that a majority of GOP delegates in five states have backed Paul, including states like Iowa where PJM was in total meltdown panic mode that Paul might actually win — well he did and the sky didn’t fall).
In other words, clean house at the Fed and fire Bernanke (as Romney has vowed to do, we’ll see) before insisting central banking is a ok.
Dr. Paul has praised Volcker as the only Fed chairman he ever found credible, incidentally.
And if Romney fails, get ready for Rand Paul as your lead candidate in 2016.
“Americans never were peat cottage types. Pioneering was a business (you clear fields, built a house, improve the property, sell it to a settler, and move on). But that’s beside the point. We’re in a high-tech, long term arms race with China (not to mention Russia).” Last comment for this thread: much of the Russian leaps and bounds in recent years in fields like nanotechnology and drones (Rus were always good in high energy physics and even invented concept of stealth, despite not being able to engineer it in 70s) have come thanks to Israeli technology transfers as the ‘covert’ part of the Reset package. Just don’t tell MarcH, Frank Gaffney, Charles Krauthammer, et al…
End of thread for me.
“much of the Russian leaps and bounds in recent years in fields like nanotechnology and drones … have come thanks to Israeli technology transfers as the ‘covert’ part of the Reset package”
… well, it’s always nice to receive “covert” intelligence from an anonymous poster on the internet. If you are not too busy next week perhaps the CIA could task you to insert a listening device into Putin’s outhouse?
I wonder if conspiracy theorists have been around since the French revolution or before, or since Ron Paul. They are a funny bunch.
What empowers western cultural degenerates is a nihilistic capitalism which eagerly markets degeneracy for profit.This is a “culture” in which a manipulative,gap-toothed greedhead skank like Madonna is permitted to make millions by simulating masturbation on stage, while the NY SLIMES hails Eminem as a “genius.” Progressive notions of artistic relativism would go nowhere without the willing hand of corrupt entertainment marketeers who are their collaborators and beneficiaries.Summer Redstone:meet Herbert Marcuse.
Otherwise known as liberty? If we have a licentious culture, do we then demand less liberty? Let’s assume that the much-quoted John Adams line about the Constitution requiring a moral people is correct. If the people are not moral, what then? Whatever the market will bear…a puritan dictator…or just the Lord coming back? Morality has tended to be cyclical on some scale; Christian music is on the rise, right? Vampires will lead us to Jesus. Praise!
No Dwight,otherwise known as LICENSE due to 40+years of moral and intellectual corruption(liberalism).
Democracy does not work and never can work.
My sympathies are with the monarchists.
Robert Heinlein’s best stories come from the 50′s and 60′s.
It’s when he started doing stuff he liked that it went downhill.
I think Rabbi Solveichick’s thinking was mainly from the Talmudic school of Brisk (Brest-Litovsk, Lithuania), and of course Rabbi Schneerson (a.k.a. The Lubavicher rebbe) from the Kabbalistic (that is, theological) tradition of his family. But it would be a given that what they used from philosophy would be German.
American Reform originally was so German that the sermons were in German only. But they developed their own sort, particularly the branch (now dominent) that rejected anti-zionism. Conservative Judaism is American, but undoubtedly also influenced by immigrants. But the Jewish community in the US is too new (as a large community) to have developed that much.
Rabbinic Judaism has an autonomous culture that in no way depends on Western philosophy. But there are areas where the confrontation of Orthodox Jewish scholars with Western philosophy was productive. It’s a complex relationship which I tried to characterize here:
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/53221/faustian-bargains
Many thanks for the reply. I hadn’t realized you were the author there.
I still recall the complaint (by Elliot Abrams in Commentary) that you had a dispute among Jews; one side was for Western culture, and the other for postmodernism, but both ignored their own traditions.
Sorry, ther esould have been a question mary after “Commentary”; I forget who wrote the article, as it many years ago.
Yes, I’ve read Rav Kook, but not systematically. I am no expert on such things — I am a middle-of-life baal tshuvah — but for me, Rav Soloveitchik’s masterwork is U-Vikkashtem Mi-Sham.
Philosophy is crap.
It’s always self-serving navel-gazing. It’s usually a way to explain away the world so as not to feel the need for any traditional faith in God.