Clear And Present Danger

Consider, please, the following observation:

The mark of a cultural highbrow nowadays is a cheerful readiness to embrace the lowbrow. In these playful, perverse, postmodern times, no one wants to be branded an elitist, especially the elites. There isn't a junior professor of cultural studies who doesn't dream of twitting his stodgy elders by showing that Madonna ranks with Mozart or that ''Star Wars'' is an improvement on Wagner's ''Ring'' cycle.

—from a New York Times book review by Walter Kirn of Stephen King's new "literary" opus, Everything's Eventual.

That's as neat an epitome of our present cultural environment as you're ever likely to read. Is it any wonder, for instance, that today classical music radio, and the classical music recording industry are all but moribund? That National Public Radio — that thirty-years-old bastion of high-grade programming presumed free from the strictures and pressures of ratings and money-grubbing commerce — has, for the express purpose of attracting more listeners and thereby increasing donations, recently made the decision to dump a major portion of its cultural programming in favor of more news, news-talk, and expanded coverage of the pop culture scene? That the previously high-minded, uniquely informative, and at times fairly lofty Sunday Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, our national "Newspaper of Record", two years ago forced out its erudite editor, John Rockwell — who despite his wrongheaded and lamentable devotion to the concept of the equality of importance of high and pop culture nevertheless possesses refined tastes in the arts, and so maintained the section's high-minded quality even while including selected coverage of pop-cultural events — in a shakeup that saw him replaced by someone (John Darnton) of considerably lesser erudition who was devoted to even greater and wider coverage of the pop-culture world?

No, no wonder at all. The rampantly promiscuous equalitarianism, and ferociously adamant populism so insidiously infecting every domain of our culture today looks on such developments as a Good Thing; a movement in the proper and necessary direction, and long overdue. Like the first narcotic rush of a powerful opiate, it feels so surpassingly right, good, true, and pleasurable that its ultimately poisonous effects are unthought of, unseen, even unimagined.

We're all in the deepest sort of trouble, and seemingly unconscious of the corrupting danger that threatens not merely from all sides, but from deep within our intellectual and spiritual selves; a danger that if unchecked will eventually overwhelm all that's lastingly valuable and nourishing in our cultural life, the resulting ineluctable impoverishment of which will sound finally the death knell even of the very ground of our present civilization.

Overwrought? Alarmist? Would that it were so. When we today have two generations of young (and now no-longer-quite-so-young) people who are all but totally ignorant of the great music and literature that for centuries past have nourished and informed our intellectual and spiritual lives; generations who imagine that pop and rock music; fantasy, sci-fi, and other genre novels, and even Spiderman comic books are what culture is all about — a notion that today is actually given academic imprimatur at the university level, and afforded sanction, even encouraged, by our critical and cultural elite — you may be certain there's much about which to be alarmed. It's not that such pop-culture artifacts are in themselves harmful or evil, but rather that they're a danger when elevated to a level in the hierarchy of things cultural to which, by any sober and informed reckoning, they've substantively and aesthetically no rightful or justifiable claim.

An elitist view, you say, and undemocratic. Why, yes. It's indeed both. But so-called high culture (to distinguish it from the popular sort) has always been elitist and undemocratic, and can be nothing other. There's just no getting around it. Great Art in all its forms is, and has always been, an elitist and undemocratic enterprise, not by design but by nature. To condemn it on those grounds is as inapt and mindless as to condemn, say, Julia Roberts (or you-pick-the-beauty) for being fabulously beautiful when, overwhelmingly, most others are not.

And so having declared the problem, what, then, is the solution? I can suggest only a beginning, and that is a return to the cultural sanity that existed prior to the grotesque populist cultural upheaval that began in the mid-1960s as an adjunct to that era's then needful if excessive political upheaval.

But that return can begin only when our genuine cultural and intellectual elite — i.e., those who by native intellect, education, and experience know the Real Deal and its what-for — drop their currently fashionable pose of being champions of the common, and again start telling it as it really is rather than as the common man wants it to be, and perhaps even as the elite themselves wish it were.

As I say, it's only a beginning, but as with all journeys a first step must be taken if the journey is to be embarked upon at all.