thinning


Thinning Mainstream

In Praise of High Intelligence

Once upon a time in a deep valley, the cuckoo and the nightingale, between them made a wager, which of them could sing the finer song. Whomsoever skill or fortune favoured, he should have the mastery, The cuckoo said, "If it please you, I have already chosen the judge." And he straightway named the donkey!

"For", said he, "he has two big ears, all the better to mark what is bad, and tell it apart from what is good." They flew away to the judge, and told him how the matter stood. He commanded them to sing. And the nightingale sang so sweetly.

The donkey spoke: "This is too intricate for me. Hee-haw, I cannot grasp it at all."

Then quickly the cuckoo began his song through thirds and fourths and fifths.

It pleased the ass. He just said, "Wait while I pronounce my verdict. Nightingale, you have sung well; but you, cuckoo, have sung a fine chorale and you keep the strictest measure. I speak from the height of a great intellect and though it should cost me a whole country I judge you to be the winner. Cuckoo, cuckoo, hee-haw."

From "Des Knaben Wunderhorn", German folk poetry

The pernicious forces of retailism and pop culture: the assassination of meaning and thought.

My critique emphasises four major themes:

1. Popular culture is undesirable because, unlike high culture, it is mass-produced by profit-minded entrepreneurs solely for the gratification of a paying audience. The charge is that mass culture is an industry organised for profit; that in order for this industry to be profitable, it must create a homogeneous and standardised product that appeals to a mass audience; and that this requires a process in which the industry transforms the creator into a worker on a mass production assembly line, requiring him or her to give up the individual expression of his own skill and values.

2. The consumption of popular culture content at best produces spurious gratifications, and at worst is emotionally harmful to the audience in ways that may be largely unconscious. Popular culture is emotionally destructive because it provides spurious gratification, it reinforces narcissistic trends within the population, and it is brutalising in its emphasis on violence and sex. It is also intellectually destructive because it offers meretricious and escapist content which inhibits people's ability to cope with reality; and it is culturally destructive, impairing people's ability to engage in high culture. The result of these trends is a weakening and denigration of the intelligentsia that results in a further deterioration of the power of thinking processes within society and an undermining of the ability of society to develop productively over time. Mass culture continually brings down the standards of the population and degrades serious and high culture.

Rather, what stand out are the symptoms of intellectual neglect. The poor of today watch television for half the day. These days, television producers even refer to what they call "Underclass TV." The new proletariat eats a lot of fatty foods and he enjoys smoking and drinking -- a lot. About 8 percent of Germans consume 40 percent of all the alcohol sold in the country. While he may be a family man, his families are often broken. And on Election Day, he casts a protest vote for the extreme left or right wing party, sometimes switching quickly from one to the other.

But the main thing that sets the modern poor apart from the industrial age pauper is a sheer lack of interest in education. Today's proletariat has little education and no interest in obtaining more. Back in the early days of industrialization, the poor joined worker associations that often doubled as educational associations. The modern member of the underclass, by contrast, has completely shunned personal betterment.

He likewise makes little effort to open the door to the future for his own children. Their language skills are as bad as their ability to concentrate. The rising rate of illiteracy is matched by the shrinking opportunities to integrate the underclass. The Americans, not ones to mince words, call them "white trash." Article from Der Spiegel. See link below.

How Globalization Is Creating a New European Underclass

3. The wide distribution of popular culture not only reduces the level of cultural quality -- or civilisation -- of the society, but also encourages the misuse of power by authorities, politicians, and shapers of mass opinion by creating a passive audience peculiarly responsive to the techniques of mass persuasion used by the purveyors of popular culture in the media. Popular culture lowers the taste level of society as a whole, thus impairing its quality as a civilisation. Additionally, because the mass media can "narcotise" and "atomise" people, they render them susceptible to techniques of mass persuasion which skilled demagogues can use to undermine democracy.

4). The above points are, of course, simplistic although they are partly true. “Popular culture” is both cause and effect, and thus can also be seen as a symptom of cultural trends and forces - just a reflection of what exists. The cultural process of "dumbing down" has, in this view, created a culture that is less sophisticated, complicated, tasteful, or thoughtful than that of the past, and has created a public or audience who have declined in taste, intelligence, and discriminatory powers. It is therefore necessary to have a high culture which supports the better and best of that society’s ethical and moral commitments. Questions about how culture forms personality, how it gets into the psychic structure of individuals, and how these individuals then reciprocally affect culture, are important at this point. We know that cultural background has an effect on releasing certain personality characteristics in the individual, giving permission for their expression, perhaps, and that culture can change very quickly and have an influence in this way very rapidly. We know, from extreme cases, that culture can get into the personality of the individual and create life-long personality difficulties and tendencies. The Holocaust is just one example of this. The interesting question is how these forces operate in modern Western economies. These pages are represent my own initial attempts to think about these questions.

Relevant Websites: Culture and Personality; Consumerism and the New Capitalism; It is My World; See also Stephen Frosh, (1999). The Politics of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to Freudian and Post-Freudian Theory. MacMillan.

In the past an argument could be fairly convincingly made that pop culture was a people's culture, that it originated from the creativity and concerns of the "folk", and that it was a continuation of a centuries old folk culture. The notion of possessing it, of controlling who could hear it and exchange it, of making a profit from it, would have seemed laughable and perhaps immoral. Then came the forces of homogenisation: technology made mass culture possible, and this allowed marketing to move in. "Corporate America" set the tone and provided the model for such institutional marketing of culture. Pop culture then became something imposed from above, created and manipulated by business and money interests at a vastly removed level from "the people". The people became the targets of these manipulations, rather than the originators and controllers.

In the twentieth century a new kind of audience developed - people with little experience either in self expression in music or the arts or of any kind of cultural background, but they did possess a steadily increasing amount of money and leisure. There then developed a new industry for the provision of popular music. The previous folk music was written by the people, this new popular music was written for the people. The achievement of business interests in places like Tin Pan Alley and the recording companies has been to manufacture a music, for example, for the people on the largest possible scale. This has been accomplished, inevitably, by a process of standardisation, providing a watered-down product that will be accepted by most of the people most of the time. Popular culture today is largely about the commercialisation of modernity, the calculated manipulation of taste and desire.

Amusing Ourselves to Death. Neil Postman

Postman illuminates something ominous: a society being rendered unfit to remember or to think, taking its ignorance as knowledge. New Society Review.

“Our politics, news, religion, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

..we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant”.

“From Erasmus in the sixteenth century to Elizabeth Eisenstein in the twentieth, almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one's habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the "analytic management of knowledge." To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralisations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalisation to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached”.

I do not mean to imply that prior to the written word analytic thought was not possible. I am referring here not to the potentialities of the individual mind but to the predispositions of a cultural mind-set. In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterised by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas. The public for whom it is intended is generally competent to manage such discourse. In a print culture, writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalisations, try to enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes when they don't notice, or even worse, don't care.

“The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining...Televison is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself”.

“The result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world. I say this in the face of the popular conceit that television, as a window to the world, has made Americans exceedingly well informed. Much depends here, of course, on what is meant by being informed. I will pass over the now tiresome polls that tell us that, at any given moment, 70 percent of our citizens do not know who is the Secretary of State or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Let us consider, instead, the case of Iran during the drama that was called the "Iranian Hostage Crisis." I don't suppose there has been a story in years that received more continuous attention from television. We may assume, then, that Americans know most of what there is to know about this unhappy event. And now, I put these questions to you: Would it be an exaggeration to say that not one American in a hundred knows what language the Iranians speak? Or what the word ``Ayatollah" means or implies? Or knows any details of the tenets of Iranian religious beliefs? Or the main outlines of their political history? Or knows who the Shah was, and where he came from?

Nonetheless, everyone had an opinion about this event, for in America everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge”?

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk: culture-death is a clear possibility”.

Neil Postman Information Page

British people increasingly appear to equate this kind of popular culture with British culture, as if this were all of the picture and as if this mass entertainment promoted by corporate ideologies and institutional values is really the culture of the British people and presents a whole and coherent picture of creative life in our country. Is this, after all, really culture at all, or merely a product that is superficial, empty, and disenfranchising? Yet there is also an unquenchable appetite for it that is disturbing because this appetite seems to point to the infiltration of pop culture values, ethics, and identities into the personality organisation, the fantasies, desires, and organising motivations of much of the population.

Society now seems increasingly captive to a "fever dream of fame", spellbound by a mushrooming celebrity culture where the main issue is exposure, and the populist media promotes the dynamics of celebrity even in the intellectual arena. In this world we are all expected to know the latest football sensation, the details of the latest game, to have seen the latest blockbuster film, to have opinions about the latest celebrity personalities. Parkinson, to take one example, used to be a forum for intelligent conversation with interesting and mature personalities: these days the show is in hock to the celebrity business, with a procession of uninteresting people who appear to promote their latest tour, film, or album. As a result, the programme becomes increasingly superficial and dull, and "celebrity", equating more often with superficiality and show, takes over. The entertainment monoculture is king. "Parkinson" seems increasingly subject to the delusion that "art equals success" and, once this premise is accepted, anything goes as long as it is valued by the wider public - indeed, the fact that it is in mass society becomes the justification for coverage, and the assumption seems to be that the public is always right and that public acclaim is the standard for quality.

Discrimination and Popular Culture. Denys Thompson

When, as a direct result of the important NUT conference on Popular Culture and Personal Responsibility in 1960, Penguin books published their influential collection of essays, Discrimination and Popular Culture, Thompson was entrusted with the editorship and provided a focusing introduction, which whilst acknowledging some possibility of the media's having a more positive role within society ('They could keep to the fore matters of public concern-art, education, aid to needy countries, the regeneration of towns.') still reinforced the main themes of Culture and Environment:

'Though not all teachers are willing and equipped to give their pupils lessons in discrimination, schools can still pursue one central purpose, and many of them do, supremely well. That is, to bring their pupils into as much contact as possible with the first-rate in art, literature, and music, all widely conceived. The aim is to provide children with standards…against which the offerings of the mass media will appear cut down to size.'

In this book, serious attempts were made to arrive at evaluative criteria for different aspects of popular culture. The essays in Discrimination and Popular Culture adopt extremely varied perspectives on the collective objective of counteracting the debasement of standards resulting from the misuse of the press, radio, cinema and television. The themes are: the machine has led to a lowering of standards through mass production, the resultant decline in quality concealed by the dazzling production values, enhanced by advertising, that technology can bring. Education plays the vital role of teaching children how to discriminate, by providing fine examples of music, art, and literature 'against which the offerings of the mass media will appear cut down to size'

This movement received its official imprimatur with the publication of the Newsom Report in 1963. In words directly echoing Crowther, the report spoke of the need for schools to provide a 'counterbalancing assistance' to the mass media and of the necessity of discrimination:

'We need to train children to look critically and discriminate between what is good and bad in what they see. They must learn to realise that many makers of films and of television programmes present false or distorted views of people, relationships, and experience in general, besides producing much trivial and worthless stuff made according to stock patterns".

This book is, then, a guide to the saccharine world: the world of newspapers, films, radio, TV, pulp magazines, commercial design and rock & pop songs, with their attendant advertising. Must a dead-safe competence be the necessary result, they ask, of the search for big audiences? And is a squalid mediocrity the highest common factor of popular culture, the best we can expect? Is mass culture ultimately unhealthy, degrading taste and discriminatory abilities, and creating an imagination rooted in deprivation?

The jury is no longer out. We must answer all such questions in the affirmative.

“Listening to the people” is the new mantra and political decisions are increasingly based on “customer” surveys, focus groups, and the like. In taking this stance politicians are, in fact, undermining their own skills, knowledge, and abilities. In this age of a general denigration of authority they seem to be avoiding the issue of authority, the use and demonstration of skill and expertise, and the need to take a position and hold it firmly - some might see this as evidence of a spineless reluctance to take a stance or a risk. The market is now more often than not the arbiter of decision-making and this avoids the issue of responsibility - by claiming that the public have decided, the politicians may feel that they are harder to blame. The danger is that, in the face of the public’s grotesque ignorance of many issues, the gap in authority will be filled by destructive, divisive, and irresponsible agencies.

The demand from the centre that those employed in public services take a similar line in relation to the public also potentially undermines professional expertise, authority, and judgement. This focus on “inclusion” and democracy, despite it’s positive aspects, runs the danger of creating a culture that raises participation above ability and expertise and popularity above excellence. It is to elevate public opinion and "the man in the street" above themselves, to give the impression that what the public thinks, desires, or likes is what should either be provided or accepted. This course, in my opinion, is dangerous for society, and raises the question of whether as a society we are encouraging mass omnipotence and mass delusions of grandeur that will ultimately do us no good. I will develop these ideas later on in this page.

Dumbing Down: Essays in the Strip-Mining of American Culture.

John Simon notes that a whole world of learning is disappearing before our eyes, in merely one generation. We cannot expect, he says, to make a mythological allusion anymore, or use a foreign phrase, or refer to a famous historical event or literary character, and still be understood by more than a tiny handful of people.

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

We are now caught up in an accelerating curve that is moving us towards the ever more shocking and attention-getting. This is partly due to the "massification" of the mass media: the proliferation of outlets and technologies has resulted in a situation of overcrowding of the ecosystem. Who shouts loudest gets the attention and there is an increasing spiral of bad taste, of pandering to the lowest common denominator, and to the voyeuristic inclinations of the audience. What would have been private and "off limits" in the past is now seen to be fair game for even the broadsheet media. What was once considered risqué is fast approaching the pop culture norm. We are increasingly immune from shock because this bombardment has eroded our sensibilities, and we accept the previously unacceptable. The media has , then, eroded our ethical senses and extended the field of what we consider acceptable and permissible. The media is creating a culture of complacency. Together with other cultural forces such as dysfunctional families, the break-up of communities, the increasing pressure of change, and changing moral values, these media-induced influences may well be extremely influential.

Mass culture has become increasingly removed from any genuine sense of community or tradition, and there has been a wholesale denigration of what might be learned from past heritage and learning. "Computer Music" recently featured correspondence "debating" the issue of whether music theory is necessary to compose good quality music - the consensus was "no", and some of the answers were truly ignorant and omnipotent, denying any need for knowledge derived from past experience and learning. In this view, music seems to arise from an "instant fix", a doodling on the computer that will produce a masterpiece. There is a denial of the need to learn, to struggle with difficult ideas, to grapple with one's ignorance and need to acquire skill gradually over time and to learn from the accumulated wisdom of past centuries about what will work and what will not work, and why this is the case. This is a narcissistic position: that somehow one is "fully formed" with no need to work, learn, or develop - one has it all from the very beginning, and "the rules" do not apply to me. My argument is that modern culture encourages this type of psychology. Computers, with their "magic" perhaps also encourage ideas of omnipotence. We might all have become citizens of some virtual world of instant sensation and pre-packaged products fitted to a formula.

Plato’s Children: The State We Are In. Anthony O’Hear

We live in a society in which there has been a systematic attempt to deny any distinction between the high arts and the low. The serious broadsheet newspapers now have sections in which, in all apparent seriousness, articles about pop figures such as Halle Berry, Eminem, Oasis, and the Rolling Stones are on the same level as discussions of Bach or Beethoven, Turner and Wittgenstein. One would look in vain for anything not English, or for any discussion of Dante, say, or Virgil or Homer which assumed in the reader any familiarity with their works......It is a blatant example of the “non-judgmentalism” we are supposed to cherish.

(As a postscript to the above, a letter appeared in the June 2003 edition of “Computer Music” commenting on the introduction of a music theory series in the magazine. I quote from the letter: “While I had doubts about including what seems a basic music primer, it is likely to open a perhaps uncool door to many. So good luck with it.” The writer is obviously sceptical about the usefulness of music theory, certainly for himself, and defining himself as “cool” for denigrating the need for theory. It is certainly a truism that one should read “uneducated, unknowledgeable, unashamed, and opinionated” whenever one reads the word “cool”).

Consumerism has much to answer for, with the equating of freedom with the idea that everything is, and should be, for sale, and of democracy with the idea that whatever people want the most must be best for them. Historically, a culture of restraint has been replaced by a culture of consumption, excess, and greed. As religion and socialism, both based on some kind of idea of ethical conduct, have been overturned, they have been replaced by the religion of consumption. This is truly the age of triumphant consumerism.

Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged. Roger Scruton

“A world without culture would be one fixated on immediate excitement and pleasure”.

“There are two important factors that are causing this to happen to us. The first is mass communications, which flood all the channels in which culture might grow with a stream of endless noise, so that it becomes difficult to separate out things that are worth attending to from things that are not. That, combined with the democratisation of everything, means the type of criticism that is vital for separating out the valuable from the trivial becomes very difficult to maintain. That’s the principal thing we have lost through the egalitarian reforms in education and through current political correctness.”

Popular culture today celebrates fame, indeed, fame is manufactured in a process that create plastic images and presents the false self as the real item. It discourages reflection and encourages the hedonism of instant accessibility, the provision of the familiar and that which is already known so that it produces no change, growth, or challenge to existing mindsets. “Instant accessibility” also applies to the performer or originator of popular culture - and a high level of skill and ability is not valued highly by the consumers of popular culture. It gives the consumer what they want rather than what might be good for them and it serves to waste and “kill” time in the pursuit of the trivial. Popular cultural products are structured on the basis of formula that are constructed by the needs of the market and this market tends towards sentimentalisation or spectacle and crude use of violence, sex, hedonism, narcissism, and individualism. They encourage regression to childlike states of “me-ism” and the escape to consumerist dreams, they encourage overstimulation and overheated fantasies of complete fulfillment. These products tend to lack ambiguity and complexity, things are black and white or cardboard-thin. In contrast, high culture attempts to focus on the timeless and universal and actively encourages thought and reflection by challenging and transforming assumptions and the normative and by using symbolisation, deep structure and abstraction. Much of popular culture today is a homogenised mass culture that refuses distinction or discrimination and is destructive of any and all values. Serious culture tends to subvert and creatively twist formulas and genres. The use of skill, talent, hard work and ability is emphasised in the development and performance of art. High culture values works that are not immediately comprehensible and works that benefit from repeated, careful scrutiny: they require some form of intellect to comprehend. It is assumed that works of value will last and are not merely ephemeral.

Culture, in Western societies, has become ever more infantile and childlike - it is as if the population has regressed to a state of narcissistic desire in which needs for comfort and satisfaction have to be met fairly immediately, frustration cannot be tolerated, there is an omnipotent focus on the self, and tastes gravitate towards the non-demanding and the saccharine. Since the 1960’s, tastes and values have descended towards those of the adolescent - a desire to shock seems to permeate the mass media, as does a preoccupation with violence as spectacle, an obsession with celebrity as icon, and the “vogue” as substitute for academic interest in depth and serious reflection. Transience, a loss of interest in the even recent past, and shallowness define even products of “high culture” - witness the Turner Prize, for example or the transformation of current affairs programmes into racy spectacles fit for six-year-olds. Seriousness and profundity are “uncool”. Also characteristic of adolescence is an attitude of rebellion, a wish to tear down authority, experience, and expertise. It is also characteristic of the adolescent state of mind to deny that there is any problem with regard to narcissistic preoccupations and to reject any reality that conflicts with one’s personal gratifications and viewpoint - a common enough reaction to the above arguments in my experience. Western culture lives largely on the surface, lacking both knowledge and wisdom. There is no mourning for the loss. This is a "me-first" culture, satisfied with complacency because of a fantasy of being fully-formed without work or effort, blaming others and unable to take responsibility for actions. For further information, see the research conducted by Dr Jean Twenge on the Evidence 3 page.

UK: Trash Culture

Sweeping social changes, reflected in academic practice, thus underlie the deterioration of the school system and the consequent spread of stupidity. Mass education, which began as a promising attempt to democratise the higher culture of the privileged classes, has ended by stupefying the privileged themselves. Modern society has achieved unprecedented rates of formal literacy, but at the same time it has produced new forms of illiteracy. People increasingly find themselves unable to use language with ease and precision, to recall the basic facts of the country’s history, to make logical deductions, to understand any but the most rudimentary written texts, or even to grasp their constitutional rights. The Culture of Narcissism. Christopher Lasch. 1979.

Radio has made of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony a hit tune which is easy to whistle. Adorno

At its worst, mass culture threatens not merely to cretinize our taste but to brutalise our senses while paving the way to totalitarianism. And the interlocking media all conspire to that end. Bernard Rosenberg, "Mass Culture in America," in Rosenberg and White, Mass Culture, pp. 3-12, quote on p. 9.

The decline of the individual in the mechanised working processes of modern civilisation brings about the emergence of mass culture, which replaces folk or "high" art. A product of popular culture has none of the features of genuine art, but in all its media popular culture proves to have its own genuine characteristics: standardisation, stereotypy, conservatism, mendacity, manipulated consumer goods. Leo Lowenthal, "Historical Perspectives of Popular Culture", in Rosenberg and White, Mass Culture, p. 55.

The recent idea that all should be rewarded equally, no matter how much or how little they contribute to or even care about the ultimate goal, is a mistaken and ultimately self-defeating social/political and educational goal. Similarly, the conception that all are
equally talented and evenly prepared for present or future tasks is doomed to a short life. Imagine how destructive such a policy would be were we to institute it in our hiring craftspeople: we would have to say that we don’t want the best mechanic or doctor or carpenter; after all, they all are equally gifted or all deserve equal recognition. Of course, this on the surface sounds like egalitarianism, but it is the sort that is destined to subject us all to the ‘Tyranny of the Majority’, as John Stuart Mill rightly called the desires for power of the ill-informed and ill-willed. Daryl L. Hale.

Mass Culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audience are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying. The Lords of Kitsch, in short, exploit the cultural need of the masses in order to make a profit and/or to maintain their class rule. Dwight MacDonald, "A Theory of Mass Culture", in Rosenberg and White, Mass Culture, p. 55.

Corruption of past high culture by popular culture takes numerous forms, starting with direct adulteration. Bach candied by Stokowski, Bizet coarsened by Rodgers and Hammerstein. . . . Freud vulgarised into columns of newspaper correspondence advice (how to be happy though well-adjusted). Corruption also takes the form of mutilation and condensation . . . works are cut, condensed, simplified and rewritten until all possibilities of unfamiliar or aesthetic experience are strained out. Ernest van den Haag, "Of Happiness and Despair We Have No Measure," in Rosenberg and White, Mass Culture, pp. 524-525.

As typography moves to the periphery of our culture and television takes its place at the centre, the seriousness, clarity and above all, value of public discourse dangerously declines....when a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is being redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business ( New York: Viking-Penguin, 1985).

In life: democracy. In art: aristocracy. Toscanini.

The Dumbest Generation By Mark Bauerlein

To Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, the present is a good time to be young only if you don't mind a tendency toward empty-headedness. In "The Dumbest Generation," he argues that cultural and technological forces, far from opening up an exciting new world of learning and thinking, have conspired to create a level of public ignorance so high as to threaten our democracy.

Adults are so busy imagining the ways that technology can improve classroom learning or improve the public debate that they've blinded themselves to the collective dumbing down that is actually taking place. The kids are using their technological advantage to immerse themselves in a trivial, solipsistic, distracting online world at the expense of more enriching activities – like opening a book or writing complete sentences.

Mr. Bauerlein presents a wealth of data to show that young people, with the aid of digital media, are intensely focusing on themselves, their peers and the present moment. YouTube and MySpace, he says, are revealingly named: These and other top Web destinations are "peer to peer" environments in the sense that their juvenile users have populated them with predictably juvenile content. The sites where students spend most of their time "harden adolescent styles and thoughts, amplifying the discourse of the lunchroom and keg party, not spreading the works of the Old Masters."

If the new hours in front of the computer were subtracting from television time, there might be something encouraging to say about the increasingly interactive quality of youthful diversions. The facts, at least as Mr. Bauerlein marshals them, show otherwise: TV viewing is constant. The printed word has paid a price – from 1981 to 2003, the leisure reading of 15- to 17-year-olds fell to seven minutes a day from 18. But the real action has been in multitasking. By 2003, children were cramming an average of 8½ hours of media consumption a day into just 6½ hours – watching TV while surfing the Web, reading while listening to music, composing text messages while watching a movie.

This daily media binge isn't making students smarter. The National Assessment of Educational Progress has pegged 46% of 12th-graders below the "basic" level of proficiency in science, while only 2% are qualified as "advanced." Likewise in the political arena: Participatory Web sites may give young people a "voice," but their command of the facts is shaky. Forty-six percent of high-school seniors say it's " 'very important' to be an active and informed citizen," but only 26% are rated as proficient in civics. Between 1992 and 2005, the NAEP reported, 12th-grade reading skills dropped dramatically. (As for writing, Naomi Baron, in her recent book, "Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World," cites the NAEP to note that "only 24% of twelfth-graders are 'capable of composing organized, coherent prose in clear language with correct spelling and grammar.' ") Conversation is affected, too. Mr. Bauerlein sums up part of the problem: "The verbal values of adulthood and adolescence clash, and to enter adult conditions, individuals must leave the verbal mores of high school behind. The screen blocks the ascent."

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardises Our Future by Mark Bauerlein. (Tarcher/Penguin).

"The ignorance is hard to believe ... It isn't enough to say that these young people are uninterested in world realities. They are actively cut off from them. ... They are encased in more immediate realities that shut out conditions beyond -- friends, work, clothes, cars, pop music, sitcoms, Facebook.''

"It's a new attitude, this brazen disregard of books and reading. Earlier generations resented homework assignments, of course, and only a small segment of each dove into the intellectual currents of the time, but no generation trumpeted illiteracy ... as a valid behaviour of their peers.''

Lack of capitalisation and IM codes dominate online writing. Without spellcheck, folks are toast.

"On MySpace, if you write clearly and compose coherent paragraphs with informed observations on history and current events, 'buddies' will make fun of you.”

Despite being surrounded with more information than ever before, the generation that grew up on the Internet has become intellectually lazy, and that's not just one man's opinion, it's supported by statistical fact. Mark Bauerlein proves that while young Americans’ technological savvy is growing, their knowledge retention is shrinking -- leaving them drastically uninformed about basic scientific, political and historical facts; ill-equipped for successful careers; and unprepared to contribute to society.

The Dumbest Generation airs an uncomfortable truth that many people sense, but are unwilling (or afraid) to utter: that much of the present youth generation is every bit as shallow, uninformed, and self-centred as it seems. As Bauerlein reveals, compared to previous generations, today's American youth have more schooling (college enrollments have never been higher); more money ($100 a week in disposable income); more leisure (five hours a day); and more news and information (Internet, cable TV, RSS feeds…). What do they do with all those advantages? Download, upload, IM, post, chat, network (9 of their top 10 sites are for social networking); and watch television and play video games (2 to 4 hours per day).

Since 1960, the U.S. population has increased 41%; the gross domestic product has nearly tripled; and total social spending by all levels of government (measured in constant 1990 dollars) has risen from $143.73 billion to $787 billion - more than a fivefold increase. Inflation-adjusted spending on welfare has increased by 630%, spending on education by 225%.

But during the same 30-year period there has been a 560% increase in violent crime, a 419% increase in illegitimate births; a quadrupling in divorce rates; a tripling of the percentage of children living in single-parent homes; more than a 200% increase in the teenage suicide rate; and a drop of almost 80 points in SAT scores.

It seems not unrelated that there has been a shift in the public's attitudes and beliefs. Social scientist James Q. Wilson writes that “the powers exercised by the institutions of social control have been constrained and people, especially young people, have embraced an ethos that values self-expression over self-control.'' The findings of pollster David Yankelovich seem to confirm this diagnosis. Our society now places less value than before on what we owe to others as a matter of moral obligation; less value on sacrifice as a moral good; less values on social conformity and respectability; and less value on correctness and restraint in matters of physical pleasure and sexuality.

Matthew Arnold. Culture & Anarchy

Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, the classic defense of high culture against the depredations of modernity, is a work that speaks to us directly, even intimately, a work that still sets a challenge.

Arnold's basic aim is to defend high culture as useful to society. He argues that it is the excellence of the citizens rather than the representativeness of their government that is essential to a healthy society and true progress. He rejects the argument that democratic institutions themselves tend to enlighten and educate--rather, they corrupt, by giving free rein to the aristocratic tendency toward unintellectual high-spirited barbarity, the middle-class tendency toward materialistic narrow-minded philistinism, and the lower-class tendency toward violence, sentiment, prejudice, and drink. The anarchy spawned by "doing as one likes' expresses itself in the darkling plain of willful dissent, religious and ethnic intolerance, spiritual emptiness, greed, intellectual relativism, and riot.

Accepting democracy as inevitable, and indeed necessary in the long run, Arnold brings culture to the rescue. What is culture? He describes it as a blending of the Hebraic impulse toward moral perfection and right action with the Hellenistic impulse toward clarity of thought and right reason. True culture blends sweetness (beauty and subtle decorum) with light (critical reflection). The cultured person, liberated from the self-deceptions of the flesh and the indolence of the aesthetic by the Hebraic element, and released from the "machinery" of economic interest and political power by the Hellenistic element, follows only reason and the will of God. Cultivated people manage to escape and become alienated from their inherited class and ethnic limitations into a wider, more humane universality, by means of some combination of natural potential and education. The health of a society depends on increasing by education the numbers of the cultured.

Arnold saw culture ("contact with the best which has been thought and said in the world" or "high culture"), as the crucial component of a healthy democratic state.

How to develop more sophisticated tastes

Elitism

Note: the following was written before the recent moves to popularise the content of Radio 3 broadcasts and should not be taken to refer to the present state of Radio 3 which is in a parlous state.

The May/June 2001 issue of "The Living Tradition" contained a letter that suggests that Radio 3 is elitist and undemocratic and should therefore open itself to playing a wider range of music such as folk music, brass band music, organ music(sic), blues, jazz, etc. In making this criticism the writer joins the ranks of those who have chivvied the Third and its successor for being too exclusive, too remote, too highbrow, and too donnish.

Attacks on institutions as elitist are easy these days: it can easily appear that many of those making these attacks lack the ability to give attention to anything for more than three minutes, are unwilling to work on something that demands concentration and thought, and their cultural horizons are limited to a pop culture of a minimalist standard. Today, elitist no longer means the application of the highest standards to a work of art, music, or literature; it means something that is not comprehensible to everyone within a few minutes. The problem with this is that subverts the meaning of culture. When art ceases to be a challenge, it ceases to be art. It has no future, because it deserves to have no future.

Attacks on elitist institutions became more frequent when academics began to give legitimacy to the idea that all cultural products are of equal value: so claims have been made, for example, that Geoffrey Archer is as good as Shakespeare. It has also produced the phenomena of criticisms of the products of popular culture being dismissed as arising from an elitist perspective rather than, as is often the case, being honest and accurate comments about poor, limited, and bad work. Anti-elitism is reminiscent of the anti-communist drives of the past, an irrational and witch-finding scapegoating process, an attempt to squeeze everyone into the same mould. The accusation that someting is "elitist" performs the same function as the application of the label "formalist" in the Soviet Union, or “degenerate” in Nazi Germany.

It seems that there is often a resistance to acknowledging the limitations of popular culture and the consequent idealisation of popular culture has an extremely negative effects upon society and general culture. People seem to fear that judgement, the discrimination of better from worse, is “elitist”, the exercise of these functions serving to mask prejudice and favouritism. The value that replaces the discrimination of worse from better is often replaced by the sovereign value of “what the people want”, and the pollster then speaks with more authority than the politician, the artist, the musician, the author, or the composer. This is democracy gone mad, a perversion of reality and an attack on excellence in art and culture. Promoting excellence in every sphere should, of course, be our cultural goal. However, institutions of excellence are increasingly stigmatised in our modern cultural milieu. No-one would want to be treated by an untrained dentist or medic, so why should we demand less from art, music, etc? It is a sad fact that enabling access and promoting inclusiveness seems to have resulted in the deterioration of critical standards across the cultural board when there is no need for this: inclusiveness and access can be pursued by increasing attainment levels, rather than by lowering standards. The pursuit of inclusiveness seems to have been sought through the technique of lowering standards rather than by promoting opportunities, increasing discriminatory capacities, and supporting and nurturing excellence.

John Humphrys: Beyond Words: How Language Reveals the Way We Live Now

In his new book Beyond Words, John Humphrys complains about, among other things, the way that Shakespeare is now converted into young person-speak. Teachers, terrified that children might find the old-fashioned language difficult and boring, have turned to reworkings of the text. The Radio 4 Today presenter cites a horrible example: "Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?" which appears in one of these books - issued by a reputable educational publisher - as "Oooh! Would you look at that."

“It is a sad commentary on the state of English teaching in schools that most universities now offer some sort of remedial course for basic grammar. The Oxford University Press has just published a new dictionary for students in response to lecturers' complaints that they're forced to waste time correcting basic errors of grammar.

In a monumentally depressing report, the Royal Literary Fund assessed the state of literacy among British undergraduates. It was a compilation of the accounts of professional writers sent in to help students with the basic skills of writing essays. Hilary Spurling, the chairman of the scheme, wrote: "The individual accounts read like dispatches from a front line where students struggle to survive without basic training or equipment… What began as a private scheme devised primarily for the benefit of writers has exposed a public catastrophe."

To judge by my readers' letters, I am pushing at an open door in defending language from the current onslaught. All those people who have written to me cannot be dismissed as a bunch of cranks living in the past. They are not saying language must never change, must always remain as they remember it in some mythical golden age. They know it must adapt to changing times, as it always has.

But they do not want to feel alienated in the public space that, at some time or another, we all occupy. They are entitled not to be offended by semi-literate rubbish. That is why we should not be deterred from continuing to make a fuss about the mangling and manipulating of the language. It matters too much”.

The idea that we should all be able to join in with anything and, if we can’t, that activity is “elitist” seems to be growing in popularity and influence. The mantra goes: we should be able to comment on what politicians decide, even from a position of ignorance, we should be able to appear on TV and get our moment of fame, we should be able to immediately understand something or be able to have a go at an activity otherwise it is rubbish, we are all experts. We must be able to fast-track to fame and fortune, without too much effort or time and we seem, with this mind-set, to have lost the ability to tell the difference between what is successful and what is excellent. Everything must be accessible. The result is an undermining of talent, expertise, and authority and a “dumbing down” of culture to the basic and the ordinary. If all are excellent we have lost all defining elements in culture, we have lost culture.

Unfortunately, these ideas have permeated society, making assaults on complexity, difficulty, and excellence acceptable: we are not allowed to be judgmental by distinguishing good from bad, simple from complex, or to be aspirational by talking about goals that are not universally attainable. This is an arrogantly populist, anti-intellectual, middlebrow attack on culture, and we can see it in our increasingly magaziney press, in the dumbing down of books pages, and in the diminishing quality of television. It appears that British culture is not just ignorant, it prefers and values ignorance, and is stubbornly and arrogantly so. The proudly philistine tabloids only reflect public attitudes. There is much evidence of the existence of a long-standing and deeply rooted anti-artist and anti-intellectual tradition in Britain that is supportive of these recent changes. The arts in Britain are marginalised in political discussions and not seen as central concerns of government because the political parties know that there are few votes to be obtained from taking up cudgels for the arts and culture. In this context, musical and cultural education is neglected, arts education is shallow and mediocre, cultural dexterity is lost.

Anti-elitism has now taken hold pushing those individuals who do possess authority and expertise to the sidelines in a time of the ascendancy of populism and a broadcasting ethos that reduces the audience to its lowest common denominator of tastes and responses. Mass democracy may be fine for the majority, who cannot appreciate Bach or the mathematics of relativity, but there has to be a place for enthusiasts of these high culture areas otherwise society is the poorer. Our culture must have the elite creators of art, as well as others who just enjoy it.

At first pass, the concept relates to pop-culture imagery that is, in fact, two-dimensional: the imagery of manga comic books and anime animated films, fantasy and sci-fi media geared to a young-adult and adult market, and often chockablock with sex and violence. But it does not end there. Superflatness, as conceived by Mr. Murakami, is less an aesthetic than a state of mind -- a state of mind in which Western distinctions between high art and low art or art and mass media (distinctions intrinsically alien to Japan) have no meaning. The superflat universe is many things: it's hip, it's cool, it's geeky, it's subversive, it's cute, and it doesn't need to be flat. Suit up as your favorite marketing icon -- a dancing yellow M&M, say -- and you, too, can be superflat. Matthew Gurewitsch in a review of Takashi Murakami’s work. Murakami uses the term “superflat” to describe the cultural slide into illiteracy.

Unfortunately, there are now no regular arts programmes on any TV channel and Radio 3, despite recent changes taking it downmarket, is the only broadcasting outlet in this country that has largely resisted pressure to become increasingly trite, shallow, and populist. There is nothing wrong with making people stretch themselves and their horizons, rather than reducing standards to the lowest common denominator. Providers of music should aim high and at least occasionally challenge listeners to extend their horizons rather than feeding them more of what they already know. As Chekhov said "the people are brought up to the level of Gogol, instead of Gogol brought down to the level of the people."

There is nothing wrong, then, with radio elitism if this means that we are talking about a radio station that deals with high culture, that specialises in unashamed talk about ideas on literature, science, philosophy, architecture, and that presents the best, and sometimes most difficult plays, operas, and other music. And at its best, Radio 3 is a radio station for those who want to be intellectually challenged. No other broadcasting channel in this country would host a Classical Greek theatre day, a Goethe weekend or a Becket week or even a Shakespeare season, as has Radio 3.

The word "elite," in its original sense, was not negative, but it has come to be perceived as such. People assume the arts are the outgrowth of something aristocratic -- that music, dance, theatre and art are intended for the rich. One definition of elitism, which the writer in the Living Tradition seems to accept, is the one that assigns an inherent moral worth to individuals based on their cultural taste. It is an extension of the Platonic concept of elitism, according to which society should be ruled by the "best". Elitism as so defined is repreprehensible but uncommon in modern Britain. Holding this view of elitism may lead to a form of anti-elitism, in which all aesthetic value judgements are rejected, and which is absurd.

An elitist, in fact, is someone who believes that some ideas are better than others, some values more enduring, some works of art more universal, some cultures more accomplished than others. Thus, it should be uncontroversial to state that Schubert is better than the mass produced and standardised product in the top ten and certainly not then be accused of the elitism described above. An elite is a group of people who know, and say, that some things are better, are more worth getting to know and to love, than others. In this case the debate is about the difference between a more “popular culture” approach and a “high culture” ethos to the creation of a piece of work. High culture pays explicit attention to the construction of cultural products, such as the relationships between form, substance, method, and overt content and covert symbolism, among other factors, although the relative emphasis that high culture places on these varies over time. In recent decades, innovation and experimentation in form have particularly dominated high culture art and music and, to a lesser extent, its fiction and architecture. The culture's standards for substance are less variable; they almost always place high value on the careful communication of mood and feeling, on introspection rather than action, and on subtlety, so that much of the culture's content can be perceived and understood on several levels. High culture fiction emphasises character development over plot, and the exploration of basic philosophical, psychological, and social issues. Popular culture fiction revolves much more around the use of an explicit plot and the presentation of a familiar and stereotyped format. High cultural products place much more value on the complexity and the quality of writing or skill involved in the production of the work. Thus, when we are talking about the arts as represented by Radio 3 we are talking about a group of performers who are working in the high culture tradition and who are dedicated to creating work that can be performed by only a very few, very gifted and very skilful people.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole. Benjamin Barber. Norton.

Barber writes about the deterioration of “civil society” and what must be done to reclaim it. He argues that “Once upon a time, capitalism was allied with virtues that also contributed at least marginally to democracy, responsibility, and citizenship. Today it is allied with vices that -although they serve consumerism - undermine democracy, responsibility, and citizenship”.

He argues that in a never-ending effort to make consumption the centrepiece of every American’s existence, marketeers have infantilised adults (“kidults”, Barber calls them). We are increasingly governed by impulse. Feeling dominates thinking, me dominates us, now dominates later, egoism dominates altruism, entitlement dominates responsibility, individualism dominates community, private dominates public.

Dr. Bernard W. Harleson, former president of the City College of New York, said excellence is defined by rigourous academic standards, by a faculty committed to free and open inquiry and the dissemination of truth, by an educational climate that ensures and respects diversity, nurtures creativity and individuality, and celebrates the uniqueness of each student as a maturing, growing individual. Excellence, he added, is an affirmation of the power of education and knowledge to make all people free. Why then are "excellence" and "elitism" used so often in a pejorative fashion, when they are, in fact, positive forces? The arts, and those who are professionals in the arts, are perceived as elitist; but the arts are surely for everyone to enjoy. Those trained in the field must be first-class, not well-meaning dilettantes. No-one would call an excellent, rarely skilled, footballer, comedian, gardener, or cook “elitist”, why then should an excellent performer in an artistic field be thus labelled? There is, however, an increasing problem with the idea that the arts are “for everyone to enjoy” because cultural forces are militating against individuals being able to acquire the tastes and cognitive skills to appreciate something that is more complex than a watered down and simplistic pop culture.

It is fair to say that high culture is better or at least more comprehensive and more informative than lower ones and that high culture may well be able to provide greater and perhaps more lasting aesthetic gratification (I use “high culture” and “popular culture” in the generally accepted senses of these words). High culture tends to be be more comprehensive; because their publics are better educated, these cultures can cover more spheres of life and encompass more ideas and symbols than the other cultures. For example, they can address themselves to philosophical issues in ways which are beyond the scope and expertise of the lower cultures. In addition, the high cultures can borrow more widely from lower cultures, even if they rarely do so, whereas the lower cultures are restricted from extensive borrowing by the educational levels of their publics. Finally, the high cultures may provide more adequate information to their users, helping them to comprehend their own social reality, to solve their personal and social problems, and to function as citizens better than other cultures do for their publics. Or to put it more simply, high culture may be more functional for its users than the lower cultures are for theirs.

In fact, it makes sense to think that easier forms of thought precede more difficult ones in both individuals and cultures. This has nothing to do, necessarily, with intelligence but it has everything to do with the mental and cultural tools available to individuals. In any society it is only a minority of people who use the most sophisticated cognitive tools available to them. So a child's drawing, however good it is and however much we like it, cannot be compared to the complexity of a Michelangelo painting and the lifetime skills that were required to paint it. However, it does seem that the capacity to be interested in, to be moved by, to grasp and answer to major thought and form, is always confined to a more or less constant minority of any population. This minority is more embattled these days because a whole generation has been weaned on the simplicities of television and video games, and have become impatient of any idea that takes more than a few minutes to develop. The fact that an interest in high culture is confined to a minority should not be taken to be a reflection of its inherent worth and value.

The problem is that in our culture there has been an erosion of the ability and willingness to sort out and rank competing values: it is seen as invidious to distinguish between good, better, and best, whether among people or thought or cultures, in the present or the past. There is an obsessive avoidance of judgements of quality and an assumption that all opinions are as good as all others and therefore head-counting, or a majority vote, will always produce the right answer. The idea of excellence becomes ridiculed and yields to a brand of anti-intellectual populism running amok. The result is a cultural monoculture, in which the contemporary popular culture of the United States eradicates national cultures and quality and cultural differentiation fall by the wayside. At the extreme there are people and verbal and musical languages on the verge of extinction and places that will shortly give way to the global catastrophe of sameness. Consumerism is the cause - because it encourages standardisation of tastes and an emphasis on the lowest common denominator to create the widest possible market. Consumer society creates clones of its population, reducing individuality and thoughtfulness. Much of popular culture is moving increasingly towards sheer shoddiness, in thrall to the worse aspects of consumerism.

Classical music is as much part of our European tradition and heritage as folk music, perhaps more so, since it has had more of an impact of history and the formation of a common European identity. Radio 3 transmits music from the past 800 years from the Western canon in addition to the art music of other continents and its coverage is therefore vast, and includes music in a wide range of styles and formats from a wide range of countries. This music has survived and has proved to be of lasting value: it is not ephemeral, of no lasting value, here today and gone tomorrow. No one could accuse it of being parochial or limited in its coverage since the music comes from a wider set of cultures, styles, and time periods than any other radio station broadcasting in the UK. Radio 3, in fact, should be proud of criticisms that it is elitist, since it is a kind of compliment: Radio 3 sets a standard for a serious consideration and coverage of the arts in this country. Additionally, this has been done by meeting its responsibilities in broadcasting the new, the experimental and the innovative. The network, despite recent changes, still represents the BBC in its role as a national supporter of the arts at a time when serious consideration or the arts has been eroded on all other channels. What it represents and largely maintains is creative quality of the highest standards and as a result British cultural life has been expanded and supported throughout the time that Radio 3 has existed.

It is a cultural tragedy that Classical Music is losing out to populism. In 1993 classical music represented 10% of all music sales, in 2003 it is only 5%. Young people are not listening to the music. It is a tragedy because classical music is the only music that deserves the description of “art music” and this is so because it it the only genre of music that values and is passionate about pushing the boundaries: of tonality, harmony, key, texture, form, etc. It is the only music that values intelligence, skill, creativity, artistry, and courageous exploration of what is possible, that seeks deep meaning and the uncomfortable and difficult rather than the already known, that seeks discomfort rather than comfort and saccharine sweetness or mere complacency. It is committed to meaning and the truly serious. The loss of this cultural knowledge is akin to the loss of any other than a superficial awareness within a population of Shakespeare, Dickens, Proust, Balzak, Freud, Jane Austen, Marx, Darwin, Einstein, Kafka, Tolstoy, and the other greats of literature and science and their replacement with Catherine Cookson, Coronation Street, The Muppets and Star Wars. This process is happening with all of the serious arts but more so with music. We have lost any sense that it may be the duty of all educated persons to become "well-rounded" citizens, importantly by exposing themselves to great ideas, great art, and great literature. High, serious culture is being replaced by a commerce-driven barbarism that assassinates older values and European culture.

It is my belief that the suggestions in "The Living Tradition" would result in a lowering of standards and horizons on Radio 3. Classical music would be confined to a playlist of the most popular works, and Radio 3 would largely abandon the challenging and innovative programming that it still produces. Additionally, theatre and discussion would be curtailed or perhaps have to be abandoned altogether. The replacements for this cultural high ground would, if I read the Living Tradition letter correctly, be Radio 2 type programming, DJ fill-ins, and little analysis or discussion. The high culture agenda of Radio 3 would be lost and the station would dumb down to the level of another Radio 2. Radio 3 would become indistinguishable from other TV and radio stations which are becoming increasingly tied to a populist agenda and broadcasting diversity would suffer.

The idea that classical music is elitist has become an article faith in the area of art and educational policy. It is premised on the belief that ordinary folk lack the aesthetic or intellectual resources to appreciate any experience that soars above ‘common culture’. Consequently, music apparently must be recycled in a form that can be mass-consumed. These kind of patronising assumptions underpin the way that music is taught in schools today. In many schools, children are provided with what’s called ‘music-making opportunities’. Instead of providing an opportunity for pupils to study and learn about music, ‘music-making opportunities’ are often about involving kids in playing around with digital media and pretending to be djs. Some educators justify this dumbed-down initiative as a pragmatic response to the shortage of music teachers. But frequently the ‘music-making’ approach is praised because it allegedly removes the ‘barriers’ that prevent children from ‘making music’.

Often, teachers who attempt to provide a genuine musical education are criticised for being inflexible and elitist. Recently I received an email from an Oxbridge undergraduate who applied to Teach First. As some of you will know, Teach First is a scheme started in 2002 that aims to recruit exceptional and highly motivated students and place them in challenging teaching positions in schools in deprived areas. My correspondent had attended an assessment day for the Teach First programme, at which he was called upon to prepare a five-minute music lesson.

‘Sadly I did not get a place, but what really surprised me was their feedback’, he informed me. He reported that ‘the thing they could find most gripe with was that I had played “classical music” during my sample lesson’. The message seems to be clear: children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds cannot understand classical music, so Teach First teachers must be able to provide the kind of ‘music-making opportunities’ that their classroom charges will probably be able to grasp.

Paradoxically, the most inflexible elitist snobs turn out to be those members of the educational and cultural establishment who have so little faith in the ability of children to appreciate and learn about classical music. Their anti-elitism is a populist gesture designed to flatter ordinary folk and reassure them that not much is expected of them. Sadly, such a populist orientation does little to overcome the disadvantages suffered by children in economically deprived areas. On the contrary, the provision of so-called ‘music-making opportunities’ instead of music education only serves to consolidate disadvantage. These children are being denied the opportunity to undertake the voyage of discovery that can sometimes occur when one is exposed to an education in music. Frank Furedi.

Much as I love, frequently listen to and play, the traditional music of these islands I must also admit that it is restricted in range, depth, and complexity. This music largely lacks the complex organisation of, say, a symphony or a string quartet, it is restricted in terms of the musical territory it explores (key, harmony, polyphonic structure, musical structure, etc.), and it does not require the sustained instrumental virtuosity that, for example, a Beethoven string quartet or a Bach cello sonata requires. Folk music displays, in general, a high level of use of a relatively small number of stereotyped templates and set patterns. It is mostly "light music", undemanding and easy listening because it is simple, predictable, and unchallenging. All of this does not mean that folk music is of no value, far from it, but to accept the above is to be realistic and to accept the limitations of the music. A jig, for example, can be a little gem, but the form is limited: it will be of a set number of bars, usually small in number, and usually is in a small number of traditionally used keys, the music will repeat, and the form is largely invariant and stereotyped. Harmony, when present, will usually be of a fairly basic kind. Although folk music is taking new directions these developments usually take the form of tying itself to the jaded and even more repetitive and limited forms found in contemporary pop music.

Nor is discussion of folk music usually carried out at any kind of high intellectual level. Radio 3 operates, largely, at the level of, for example, the Times Literary Supplement. In any issue of this magazine you would find a high level of prose, and detailed analysis of issues at some level of complexity and difficulty. Most discussion of folk music is not at this level and a comparison of The Living Tradition and The TLS will suffice to show the difference in levels. This is not to put down The Living Tradition, and to imply that it should be different (the level on which it is pitched is suitable to the subject it deals with and its audience): it is to be realistic and objective about folk music in comparison with other areas of culture.

My contention, then, is that the traditional music of these islands should not have any major place on Radio 3. It is fine when, as happens today, folk music appears on Radio 3 as part of an intelligent discussion or presentation of the music, and if it appears occasionally. But I'm afraid that the music is too limited in scope to appear frequently on Radio 3 and these limitations would be emphasised in contrast with the surrounding material if Radio 3 continued to broadcast a mainly classical diet. If, as the writer in The Living Tradition suggests, Radio 3 were to devote a major proportion of its airtime to folk music, brass band music, etc., this would lead to a serious dumbing down of the high standards of this station, something I would be opposed to. Radio 3 would become just another populist broadcasting outlet leading to a widening of the cultural and intellectual sameness that has infected radio and television over the last twenty years.

The author of the letter in The Living Tradition is right in that folk music deserves more broadcasting time than it receives at the present time. But, the natural home for British and Irish traditional music is on Radio 1 or Radio 2, not on Radio 3. Folk music fits more appropriately into a DJ type programme and the context and ethos of these stations. My belief is that it does not deserve any major place on Radio 3, and to suggest this as a serious option is to elevate it to a higher status than it merits.

Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?: Confronting Twenty-First Century Philistinism. Frank Furedi

The Intellectual is an endangered species. In place of such figures as Bertrand Russell, Raymond Williams or Hannah Arendt - people with genuine learning, breadth of vision and a concern for public issues - we now have only facile pundits, think-tank apologists, and spin doctors. In the age of the knowledge economy, we have somehow managed to combine the widest ever participation in higher education with the most dumbed-down of cultures. In this urgent and passionate book, Frank Furedi explains the essential contribution of intellectuals both to culture and to democracy - and why we need to recreate a public sphere in which intellectuals and the general public can talk to each other again. But the intellectual has problems in the present cultural context in which “Hostility to elitism," Furedi writes, "is now mandatory for any individual who hopes to join the cultural elite."

Frank Furedi Site

Further News about Radio 3

In March 2003 Roger Wright, controller of Radio 3, said that he was “thrilled” that a listener had recently told him “With my background and education I never thought I’d listen to Radio 3.” This individual was joining a similar chorus from other new listeners, attracted by the pop music oriented content of the new Radio 3. Wright was clearly approving but to my mind this listeners comments are a source of alarm and despondency and are indicative of the increasing dumbing down of the channel. It is unlikely that the above individual will listen to more traditional content on Radio 3 and his listening will only reinforce his limited viewpoint and addiction to substandard music and debate. The fact that Radio 3 is attracting new listeners to these pop programmes is not a cause of celebration since it is the thin end of the wedge that will inexorably drive down standards.

A Guardian article that appeared at the same time about the Radio 3 Awards for World music noted that the previous year’s event saw Hollywood star Johnny Depp, Brian Eno, Blur’s Damon Albarn and the late Joe Strummer of the Clash giving out the awards. The writer commented that the evening was therefore “glamorous”. I doubt that he would have used a similar term to describe such excellent and skilled musicians as Alfred Brendel, Colin Davis, Maxim Vengerov, etc. and the tone of the article seems to indicate that there is a high probability that the writer would not even recognise their names. This really is indicative of the dumbing down of Radio 3 - the substitution of celebrity for excellence, allowing commentators to enthuse about mediocrity whilst ignoring excellence and high standards of presentation, skill, and debate.

In fact, both Radio 3 and BBC 2 have been dumbing down in the past few years. Furthermore Radio Times is gradually shrinking the space devoted to Radio 3 (along with its coverage of other serious programmes) and consequently the amount of information on serious music broadcasts. In this way, serious issues, debate, and quality music gradually occupies less and less of the public consciousness and awareness, so that the horizons and knowledge of the general population becomes increasingly restricted to the monochrome and flat horizon that is the landscape of a plastic and shoddy pop culture.

August 2003: a new term has suddenly come into fashion with BBC bosses, and the phrase “quality pop” is now with us to justify the inclusion of yet more pop music on Radio 3. There is no such thing, pop and rock music have extreme limitations and restrictions, they are written to a mechanical formulae and constricted to simple templates. It is an insult to the intelligence to claim that there is any quality in this music or that they can compete with the classics. Why should all radio stations in the UK become increasingly the same with wall to wall pop and decreasing choice and standards for all? It is sad that our cultural horizons are being increasingly restricted to the tacky, cheap pop culture of only the past few years, and even the pop culture of five years ago is being thrown away, never mind popular culture of fifty years ago. In this context, the serious music of the past five hundred years stands no chance of being valued or heard.

Dumbing down: role models and the dangers of easy affluence

Unsung National Treasures - 1 - Radio 3

Lack of curiosity is curious

Concerned Librarians

Student Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of the University

Allan Bloom

Decline of Serious Culture is a National Disgrace

The children who won't grow up

The anti-elitist pose of the elites

Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

Founding of the Situationist International

How to develop more sophisticated taste