A Response

In a post on his blog, The Transcontinental, Andrew W wants to make the case that the postmodern propensity by presumable highbrow types such as classical music critics and bloggers to declare pop culture every bit as worthwhile as high culture is, in reality, the new middlebrow way of thinking, and that the negative criticism by these presumable highbrow types (who Mr. W declares to be the new middlebrow) of the brazenly outspoken and unashamed highbrow types responsible for the website Musoc.org who defiantly declare the lowbrow artifacts of pop culture, and pop music in particular, to be crap is, at bottom and in reality, an attempt by middlebrows to "drag the highbrow people down into the middlebrow," and to simultaneously also raise lowbrow people into the middlebrow; in short, an attempt to assert the hegemony of the middlebrow, and a matter of implicit class warfare.

Well, it's certainly an interesting way of looking at things, but we distrust and instantly hold suspect any attempt to reduce the analysis of cultural matters to the sociological as analyzing anything in sociological terms is always to analyze the surface, never the underlying substance of the thing which underlying substance is always a matter of the psychological — individual psychology and the culturally conditioned psychological dynamics of the group — never the sociological.

To support his case, Mr. W sets forth several questionable premises such as, for instance:

I am often frustrated by the fact that, often, when I have a conversation with someone about music, and it invariably comes up that I listen/play to classical music, the immediate reaction is to look at me suspiciously and [I] get somewhat defensive. Maybe this is really just a Canadian thing, but I suspect that this happens quite a lot to other classical music musicians/lovers, and as such, we have all taken on a kind of defense mechanism to reduce the inherent social conflict that comes with being someone who enjoys the music of Brahms.

But you scratch this surface just a little and you start to see that the issue for classical music critics and bloggers isn't merely one of taste, but also one of class. Someone who enjoys caviar simply must also enjoy a ham and cheese on white bread. Someone who enjoys Schubert Lieder simply must also enjoy Def Leppard, not because these things are any good (on either side of the equation) but because it's very impolite to portray mass culture as something less than high culture.

[...]

To be clear — I am not saying high culture is better than mass culture. What I am saying is that people on the high culture side of things feel a very great tendency to say out loud, and often, that they think mass culture is just as good as high culture.

The matter a "kind of defense mechanism to reduce the inherent social conflict that comes with being someone who enjoys the music of Brahms"? The issue not "merely one of taste, but also one of class"?

Hardly.

What Mr. W has done here is merely to assert these things in order to make his sociological case. In truth, social and class conflict have little to do with this business. It has almost entirely to do with individual psychology and the culturally conditioned psychological dynamics of the group as we've above noted.

Since the populist cultural revolution of the Sixties the idea of an elite anything is anathema, and for anything or anyone to be labeled elite or elitist the equivalent in opprobriousness to being labeled pedophiliac or pedophile. It's against the possibility of such labeling that high culture types now "feel a very great tendency to say out loud, and often, that they think mass culture [i.e., the lowbrow] is just as good as high culture [i.e., the highbrow]" — in short, a case of shameful individual moral and intellectual cowardice, and as well of cross-contamination between those individuals and the culturally conditioned psychological dynamics of the group of which they're a part and is comprised of them.

Postmodern dogma — which is, at once, both a horrific and risible reductio ad absurdum of Sixties cultural thought, and which "seeks a dissolution of all hierarchies, both natural and culturally determined without distinction" as we've written previously elsewhere — is another culprit here, and it's as wrongheaded and boneheaded as it could possibly be. Hierarchies are essential to the well-being of Homo sapiens, and there's just no getting around that. It's in our DNA as it's in the DNA of all living things, also as we've written previously elsewhere, and any attempt to circumvent that ineluctable fact of life is doomed, ultimately, to abject failure, and the attempt itself certain to leave by the wayside scores upon scores of unnecessary and regrettable casualties.

In the instant case, however, what's really at work is an unwitting conflation of two essentially incommensurable hierarchies — the pop-cultural (i.e., the lowbrow) and the high-cultural (the highbrow) — rather than the dissolution of those hierarchies. As we wrote in the 2006 S&F article (a reprint of a 2003 article from our predecessor blog) titled, "A Call For A Return To Hierarchal Sobriety":

I've no argument with, nor objection to, the artifacts of popular culture per se. What I argue against, and lodge objection to, is the growing absence of a fundamental aesthetic distinction between, and separate hierarchies of aesthetic value for, such artifacts and the artifacts of the realm of high culture (so-called to distinguish it from the popular sort). Contrary to the pernicious equalitarian conceits of postmodern thinking, there is such a distinction; a self-evident and inarguably real one ... and no meaningful aesthetic continuum connecting the artifacts of the two realms can be constructed except on the merest technical and taxonomic grounds.

Or to put it more bluntly, it's nonsense to declare the artifacts of high culture (in the instant case, classical music) better or worse aesthetically than the artifacts of popular culture (in the instant case, pop music). As we wrote in the above linked S&F article, "one can no more compare such things on the same aesthetic continuum within the same hierarchy of aesthetic value than can the proverbial apples and oranges be compared, delectable-wise, on the delectability continuum of things-that-one-can-eat-that-grow-on-trees."

We refrain from going into this in more detail here as we've gone over this ground before. For those interested, our more detailed examination can be found in our above linked 2006 article.