{"id":2267,"date":"2017-11-05T01:37:12","date_gmt":"2017-11-04T22:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=2267"},"modified":"2017-11-05T01:37:12","modified_gmt":"2017-11-04T22:37:12","slug":"steve-wasserman-we-need-love-for-difficulty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/2267\/steve-wasserman-we-need-love-for-difficulty\/","title":{"rendered":"Steve Wasserman, We need love for difficulty"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here follow excerpts edited by Ellopos Blog<\/a> from a chapter in The State of the American Mind: Sixteen Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism<\/a>, edited by A. Bellow and M. Bauerlein. The author emphasizes the point that “time is required to think through difficult questions. Patience is a condition of genuine intellection. The thinking mind, the creating mind, said Wieseltier, should not be rushed. ‘And where the mind is rushed and made frenetic, neither thought nor creativity will ensue. What you will most likely get is conformity and banality. Writing is not typed talking’.\u201d<\/p>\n

____________<\/p>\n

In the postwar era, a vast project of cultural uplift sought to bring the best that had been thought and said to the wider public. Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago and Mortimer J. Adler were among its more prominent avatars. This effort, which tried to deepen literacy under the sign of the \u201cmiddlebrow,\u201d and thus to strengthen the idea that an informed citizenry was indispensable for a healthy democracy, was, for a time, hugely successful.<\/p>\n

The general level of cultural sophistication rose as a growing middle class shed its provincialism in exchange for a certain worldliness that was one legacy of American triumphalism and ambition after World War II. College enrollment boomed, and the percentage of Americans attending the performing arts rose dramatically. Regional stage and opera companies blossomed, new concert halls were built, and interest in the arts was widespread. TV hosts Steve Allen, Johnny Carson, and Dick Cavett frequently featured serious writers as guests. Paperback publishers made classic works of history, literature, and criticism available to ordinary readers whose appetite for such works seemed insatiable.<\/p>\n

Mass circulation newspapers and magazines, too, expanded their coverage of books, movies, music, dance, and theater. Criticism was no longer confined to such small but influential journals of opinion as Partisan Review, The Nation, and The New Republic. Esquire embraced the irascible Dwight Macdonald as its movie critic, despite his well-known contempt for \u201cmiddlebrow\u201d culture. The New Yorker threw a lifeline to Pauline Kael, rescuing her from the ghetto of film quarterlies and the art houses of Berkeley. Strong critics like David Riesman, Daniel Bell, and Leslie Fiedler, among others, would write with insight and pugilistic zeal books that often found enough readers to propel their works onto bestseller lists.<\/p>\n

Intellectuals such as Susan Sontag were featured in the glossy pages of magazines like Vogue. Her controversial \u201cNotes on Camp,\u201d first published in 1964 in Partisan Review, exploded into public view when Time championed her work. Eggheads were suddenly sexy, almost on a par with star athletes and Hollywood celebrities. Gore Vidal was a regular on Johnny Carson. William F. Buckley Jr.\u2019s \u201cFiring Line\u201d hosted vigorous debates that often were models of how to think, how to argue, and, at their best, told us that ideas mattered.<\/p>\n

As Scott Timberg, a former arts reporter for the Los Angeles Times, puts it in his recent book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, the idea, embraced by increasing numbers of Americans, was that<\/p>\n

“drama, poetry, music, and art were not just a way to pass the time, or advertise one\u2019s might, but a path to truth and enlightenment. At its best, this was what the middlebrow consensus promised. Middlebrow said that culture was accessible to a wide strat[um] of society, that people needed some but not much training to appreciate it, that there was a canon worth knowing, that art was not the same as entertainment, that the study of the liberal arts deepens you, and that those who make, assess, and disseminate the arts were somehow valuable for our society regardless of their impact on GDP.<\/em>”<\/p>\n

So what if culture was increasingly just another product to be bought and sold, used and discarded, like so many tubes of toothpaste? Even Los Angeles, long derided as a cultural desert, would by the turn of the century boast a flourishing and internationally respected opera company, a thriving archipelago of museums with world-class collections, and dozens of bookstores selling in some years more books per capita than were sold in the greater New York area. The middlebrow\u2019s triumph was all but assured.<\/p>\n

The arrival of the Internet by century\u2019s end promised to make that victory complete. As the Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page story in 1998, America was \u201cincreasingly wealthy, worldly, and wired.\u201d Notions of elitism and snobbery seemed to be collapsing upon the palpable catholicity of a public whose curiosities were ever more diverse and eclectic and whose ability to satisfy them had suddenly and miraculously expanded.<\/p>\n

We stood, it appeared, on the verge of a munificent new world\u2014a world in which technology was rapidly democratizing the means of cultural production while providing an easy way for millions of ordinary citizens, previously excluded from the precincts of the higher conversation, to join the dialogue. The digital revolution was predicted to empower those authors whose writings had been marginalized, shut out of mainstream publishing, to overthrow the old monastic self-selecting order of cultural gatekeepers (meaning professional critics). Thus would critical faculties be sharpened and democratized. Digital platforms would crack open the cloistered and solipsistic world of academe, bypass the old presses and performing-arts spaces, and unleash a new era of cultural commerce. With smart machines there would be smarter people.<\/p>\n

Harvard\u2019s Robert Darnton, a sober and learned historian of reading and the book, agreed. He argued that the implications for writing and reading, for publishing and bookselling\u2014indeed, for cultural literacy and criticism itself\u2014were profound. For, as he gushed in The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, we now had the ability to make \u201call book learning available to all people, or at least those privileged enough to have access to the World Wide Web. It promises to be the ultimate stage in the democratization of knowledge set in motion by the invention of writing, the codex, movable type, and the Internet.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this view, echoed by innumerable worshippers of the New Information Age, we were living at one of history\u2019s hinge moments, a great evolutionary leap in the human mind. And, in truth, it was hard not to believe that we had arrived at the apotheosis of our culture. Never before in history had more good literature and cultural works been available at such low cost to so many. The future was radiant.<\/p>\n

Others, such as the critics Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier, were more skeptical. They worried that whatever advantages might accrue to consumers and the culture at large from the emergence of such behemoths as Amazon, not only would proven methods of cultural production and distribution be made obsolete, but we were in danger of being enrolled, whether we liked it or not, in an overwhelmingly fast and visually furious culture that, as numerous studies have shown, renders serious reading and cultural criticism increasingly irrelevant, hollowing out habits of attention indispensable for absorbing long-form narrative and sustained argument.<\/em> Indeed, they feared that the digital tsunami now engulfing us may even signal an irrevocable trivialization<\/em> of the word. Or, at the least, a sense that the enterprise of making distinctions between bad, good, and best was a mug\u2019s game that had no place in a democracy that worships at the altar of mass appeal and counts its receipts at the almighty box office.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The arrival of the Internet has proved no panacea… Information is abundant, wisdom scarce. It is a striking irony, as Leon Wieseltier has noted, that with the arrival of the Internet, \u201ca medium of communication with no limitations of physical space, everything on it has to be in six hundred words.\u201d The Internet, he said, is the first means of communication invented by humankind that privileges one\u2019s first thoughts as one\u2019s best thoughts.<\/em> And he rightly observed that if \u201cvalue is a function of scarcity,\u201d then \u201cwhat is most scarce in our culture is long, thoughtful, patient, deliberate analysis of questions that do not have obvious or easy answers.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

Time is required to think through difficult questions. Patience is a condition of genuine intellection. The thinking mind, the creating mind, said Wieseltier, should not be rushed. \u201cAnd where the mind is rushed and made frenetic, neither thought nor creativity will ensue. What you will most likely get is conformity and banality. Writing is not typed talking.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

The fundamental idea at stake in the criticism of culture generally is the self-image of society: how it reasons with itself, describes itself, imagines itself. Nothing in the excitements made possible by the digital revolution banishes the need for the rigor such self-reckoning requires. It is, as Wieseltier says, the obligation of cultural criticism to bear down on what matters.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Where is such criticism to be found today? We inhabit a remarkably arid cultural landscape, especially when compared with the ambitions of postwar America, ambitions which, to be sure, were often mocked by some of the country\u2019s more prominent intellectuals. Yes, Dwight Macdonald famously excoriated the enfeeblements of \u201cmass cult and midcult,\u201d and Irving Howe regretted \u201cThis Age of Conformity,\u201d but from today\u2019s perspective, when we look back at the offerings of the Book-of-the-Month Club and projects such as the Great Books of the Western World, their scorn looks misplaced.<\/p>\n

The fact that their complaints circulated widely in the very midcult worlds Macdonald condemned was proof that trenchant criticism had found a place within the organs of mass culture. One is almost tempted to say that the middlebrow culture of yesteryear was a high-water mark.<\/p>\n

The reality, of course, was never as rosy as much of it looks in retrospect. Cultural criticism in most American newspapers, even at its best, was almost always confined to a ghetto… From the start of the republic, Americans have had a profoundly ambivalent relationship to class and culture, as Richard Hofstadter famously observed. He was neither the first nor the last to notice this self-inflicted wound. As even the vastly popular science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov understood, \u201cAnti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that \u2018my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The effort to insinuate more serious standards into the instruments of mass culture was always difficult, even when a rising middle class made possible the notion of increasing cultural sophistication… After all, the very idea of cultural and intellectual discrimination is regularly attacked for the sin of \u201csnark,\u201d and notions of authority and expertise are everywhere under siege.<\/p>\n

Richard Schickel, the longtime film critic for Time magazine, writing in a 2007 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, objected to the \u201chairy-chested populism\u201d that increasingly dominates and enfeebles what passes for cultural commentary. \u201cCriticism\u2014and its humble cousin, reviewing\u2014is not a democratic activity,<\/em>\u201d he insisted. \u201cIt is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinion of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author\u2019s (or filmmaker\u2019s or painter\u2019s) entire body of work, among other qualities.<\/em>\u201d Sure, he seemed to be saying, let a hundred million opinions bloom; but let\u2019s also acknowledge the truth that not all opinions are equal. In these matters, I, like Schickel, am a Leninist: Better fewer, but better.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

When did \u201cdifficulty\u201d become suspect in American culture, widely derided as anti-democratic and contemptuously dismissed as evidence of so-called elitism? If a work of art isn\u2019t somehow immediately \u201cunderstood\u201d or \u201caccessible\u201d by and to large numbers of people, it is often ridiculed as \u201cesoteric,\u201d \u201cobtuse,\u201d or even somehow un-American. We should mark such an argument\u2019s cognitive consequences. A culture filled with smooth and familiar consumptions produces in people rigid mental habits and stultified conceptions.<\/em> They know what they know, and they expect to find it reinforced when they turn a page or click on a screen. Difficulty annoys them, and, having become accustomed to so much pabulum served up by a pandering and invertebrate media, they experience difficulty not just as \u201cdifficult,\u201d but as insult<\/em>. Struggling to understand, say, Faulkner\u2019s stream-of-consciousness masterpiece The Sound and the Fury or Alain Resnais\u2019s Rubik\u2019s Cube of a movie \u201cLast Year at Marienbad\u201d needn\u2019t be done. The mind may skip trying to solve such cognitive puzzles, even though the truth is they strengthen it as a workout tones the muscles.<\/p>\n

Sometimes it feels as if the world is divided into two classes: one very large class spurns difficulty, while the other very much smaller delights in it. There are readers who, when encountering an unfamiliar word, instead of reaching for a dictionary, choose to regard it as a sign of the author\u2019s contempt or pretension, a deliberate refusal to speak in a language ordinary people can understand.<\/p>\n

Others, encountering the same word, happily seize on it as a chance to learn something new, to broaden their horizons. They eagerly seek a literature that upends assumptions, challenges prejudices, turns them inside out and forces them to see the world through new eyes.<\/p>\n

The second group is an endangered species. One reason is that the ambitions of mainstream media that, however fitfully, once sought to expose them to the life of the mind and to the contest of ideas, have themselves shrunk.<\/p>\n

We have gone from the heyday of television intellection which boasted shows hosted by, among others, David Susskind and David Frost, men that, whatever their self-absorptions, were nonetheless possessed of an admirable highmindedness, to the pygmy sound-bite rants of Sean Hannity and the inanities of clowns like Stephen Colbert.<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, the ideal of seriousness may not have been a common one, but it was acknowledged as one worth striving for. It didn\u2019t have to do what it has to today, that is, fight for respect, legitimate itself before asserting itself.<\/p>\n

The class that is allergic to difficulty now feels justified in condemning the other as \u201celitist\u201d and anti-democratic. The exercise of cultural authority and artistic or literary or aesthetic discrimination is seen as evidence of snobbery, entitlement and privilege lording it over ordinary folks.<\/p>\n

A perverse populism increasingly deforms our culture, consigning some works of art to a realm somehow more rarified and less accessible to a broad public. Thus is choice constrained and the tyranny of mass appeal deepened in the name of democracy…<\/p>\n

The ideal of serious enjoyment of what isn\u2019t instantly understood is rare in American life. It is under constant siege. It is the object of scorn from both the left and the right.<\/p>\n

The pleasures of critical thinking ought not to be seen as belonging to the province of an elite. They are the birthright of every citizen. For such pleasures are at the very heart of literacy, without which democracy itself is dulled. More than ever, we need a defense of the Eros of difficulty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here follow excerpts edited by Ellopos Blog from a chapter in The State of the American Mind: Sixteen Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism, edited by A. Bellow and M. Bauerlein. The author emphasizes the point that “time is required to think through difficult questions. Patience is a condition of genuine intellection. The thinking mind, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[5652,5651,671,5653,5654],"class_list":["post-2267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","tag-anthropology","tag-humanities","tag-literary-criticism","tag-popular-culture","tag-social-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}