An elegy for middlebrow culture
This editorial reminded me of our recent Rumpus discussion about readers and non-readers and what to do about it. David Brooks laments the loss of middlebrow culture and the concommitant coarsening of populare culture, and suggests that the death of middlebrow culture is partly responsible for the dearth of adult readers. Brooks' analysis is necessarily sketchy, but for an amplification of some of the same themes, check out Terry Teachout's fine recent essay in Commentary; it's primarily about the rise of blogging and the meaning and potential effects of this new form of cyber speech, but it includes a section on the obsolescence of common culture. The introduction to Teachout's remarkable book, A Terry Teachout Reader, sounds some of the same themes.
Update: More interesting comments on the Brooks article from Aeon J. Skoble at the Liberty and Power blog.
Update: More interesting comments on the Brooks article from Aeon J. Skoble at the Liberty and Power blog.
posted by Kate Marie | 11:33 PM | Permalink
|
4 comments
4 Comments:
Interesting articles. I wonder, though, if we have indeed "lost" middlebrow culture as is claimed.
The evidence seems to be that Time strongly cut back its coverage of literary or "cultural" topics in the 80s, along with other magazines.
But there are other possible explanations for this phenomenon. High school and college enrollments as a % of the population were on the rise, so that the readership of magazines expanded. As a result, the new "average consumer" chased by Time or Life has changed, and they changed their coverage to adapt.
Moreover, these sorts of arguments assume an efficient market - they assume that magazines are great at giving people exactly what they want. But: is it possible that we lost middlebrow culture in a single decade? One would expect this to be a slow process. It follows that since the market made this shift so quickly that at some point the market was not efficient - perhaps companies were not giving people what they wanted before the shift.
Finally, Teachout's conclusions on how Americans have bid their culture goodbye are a good example of the peril involved in making claims based on observations, rather than statistics. In fact, the vast majority of the American population is more apathetic about politics than ever before. However, declining party identification has been matched with a more passionat party base, so that an observer of the public sphere hears discord everywhere - but this discord disappears when one looks at statistics.
Yes, I think any argument about culture is bound to be impressionistic, though it can be informed by statistics. You're never going to have a study proving definitively that middlebrow culture is gone (though I fully expect Madman to post one of his news parodies citing precisely such a study), so it's inevitably a matter of how one interprets statistics and cultural "trends."
One thing to keep in mind, I think, is that "middlebrow culture" and "common culture" aren't precisely the same thing. When Teachout describes the loss of "common culture," I think he's partly describing cultural fragmentation, for which -- whatever one may posit about the fate of the Midcult -- there's pretty good evidence (cable TV, niche marketing, decline of network news, steadily declining newspaper circulations, the current state of book publishing, etc.).
"It follows that since the market made this shift so quickly that at some point the market was not efficient - perhaps companies were not giving people what they wanted before the shift."
-- That may be true, but it's not necessarily inconsistent with anything Brooks or Teachout has argued, since -- as Brooks points out -- there's an element of a "take your vitamins" attitude about the whole middlebrow project which might expected to be unpalatable to consumers, especially once cultural institutions themselves no longer supported the idea. Teachout concentrates on the cultural factors (sqeezing/attacking the "middlebrow" from either side), and I find his arguments generally convincing.
Finally, I don't know whether general political apathy is a refutation of Teachout's notion of fragmentation, which he sees more in terms of "culture" than of politics (though, of course, culture has a political dimension, and politics has a cultural one, but I don't want to get venture too far into those wilds).
You are right in that the statistics are not a refutation of Teachout's broader thesis. He does, though, cite politics as an example of the cultural fragmentation, and it is a refutation of that example - and perhaps only that example.
I think you could have a study that measures middlebrow culture. Why not take a fact-based poll of the public (i.e. questions testing basic historical, literary, and cultural knowledge) and look at the clusters of scores. There will be a small cluster of high scorers; the majority will score pretty poorly, but one can measure the size of the "good but not great" cluster.
Now once in a while someone does do a survey seeing how Americans perform on fact-based questions, but I don't know of any efforts that ask the same questions going back decades, which is very important in polls of this sort. Still, it would be nice for someone to collect all these polls and see qualitatively how the cultural knowledge of the American public has evolved over time.
"Now once in a while someone does do a survey seeing how Americans perform on fact-based questions, but I don't know of any efforts that ask the same questions going back decades, which is very important in polls of this sort. Still, it would be nice for someone to collect all these polls and see qualitatively how the cultural knowledge of the American public has evolved over time."
-- Yeah, that would actually be really interesting. Since I've had recent discussions with teenagers and twenty-somethings who couldn't identify Auschwitz and who didn't understand what was going on in 1938 that Europe and the rest of the world might have been concerned about, my gut feeling is that a comparison of Americans'present historical and cultural literacy wouldn't compare favorably with their past historical and cultural literacy. But I could be wrong.
Post a Comment
<< Home