I remember reading that article on Hemingway when I was a kid back before the Age of the Reagan Dinosaurs!
Brooks hits upon the reason that things changed:
the belief that how one spends one's leisure time is intensely important.
Back in 1961 - there was leasure time to be had. People weren't commuting 50 miles one way to a job that required every spare minute they had available before they would be released to go home and recharge - just in time to do it again the next day. Reading didn't have a bad reputation, and the media didn't treat the public like they were idiots incapable of understanding anything. There was also an attitude that one needed to participate in one's society instead of using it as a field to be harvested for one's own personal benefit.
I agree that for once Brooks actually has a valid point. The sad part is that he doean't understand the implications of his discovery.
Posted by pessimist at June 16, 2005 06:20 AMTV killed 'middlebrow culture'.
Posted by muckcat at June 16, 2005 06:29 AMSo what are the economic reasons, Matt? You piqued my intrest now, and then you left me dangling . .
Bradbury nailed it far far back in 1953 when Fahrenheit 451 was originally published. There is no leisure time . . "No front porches. My uncle says there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn't want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over. My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn't look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be
they didn't want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches. And the gardens, too. Not many gardens any more to sit around in. And look at the furniture. No rocking chairs any more. They're too
comfortable. Get people up and running around."
What happened wasn't what Bradbury imagined - he never thought that we'd become complete addicts of the television and replacing all that running around with a more satisfying experince of being a couch potato in front of 1000's of channels of TV.
Posted by idiosynchronic at June 16, 2005 06:47 AMThe leisure time we do have - and it's much less than what the previous generations had - has been occupied by efforts much less cerbral or by a work ethic that demands that we're always at work or on call.
Posted by idiosynchronic at June 16, 2005 06:50 AMMy uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn't look well.
Well I'm an architect and I'm in the process of adding a porch onto the front of my house. And we're gonna have rocking chairs too! Damn it!
Posted by muckcat at June 16, 2005 06:52 AMI'm an architect too and I submit that air conditioning got rid of the front porch as a useful and daily place of activity and the long summer evening habit of sitting and enjoying the cooling breeze and long light.
Turn off your AC and go outside and cool off the way our grandparents did...
So what are the economic reasons, Matt? You piqued my intrest now, and then you left me dangling . .
Well, pessimist got to some of it in his comment. Leisure time now is simply in shorter supply, and we're more fatigued by the time we get to enjoy any because typically both parents work, which means the kids aren't home. Which means lots of running around to drop off and pick up kids, too. Thus, we tend to use TV as our evening's entertainment, which is more a narcotic than a cultural vehicle in many instances.
Posted by Matt Davis at June 16, 2005 06:57 AMAlso, I think it's important to note that although we are focusing on cultural changes that happened mostly after the 60s, Brooks is saying that middlebrow's fall from grace happened in the late 50s and the 60s. That is, even before we lost our leisure time, we had already begun to use it differently.
I wasn't born until the 70s, so I can't speak from personal experience on that. But I do know a little about Clement Greenberg, and a little about the proliferation of me-centric thinking in the 60s, and his account sounds plausible.
Posted by Matt Davis at June 16, 2005 07:12 AMBrooks isn't all bad...he's 99% bad.
Posted by Romdinstler at June 16, 2005 07:13 AMHow is it "even-handed"? He blames two groups for the current lack of interest in the highbrow: intellectuals themselves and purveyors of pop culture. How convenient -- two of the Right's favorite whipping boys.
The Right itself has been demonizing intellectuals for decades. Adlai Stevenson was an "egghead"; George Wallace denounced "pointy-headed" opponents of segregation; Spiro Agnew railed against "an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as 'intellectuals.'" That last one was written by William Safire, whom Brooks replaced. And Brooks somehow forgot all this?
Posted by Steve M. at June 16, 2005 07:32 AMPersonally I object to Brooks' propping up his argument on a quote from Clement Greenberg. I don't know anything about this Dwight McDonald guy, but Clement Greenberg only spoke for Clement Greenberg. He was a highly opinionated and judgmental man who can't really be described as being representative of anything. A parallel would be suggesting that Alexander Cockburn speaks for the left.
I'm also not very sure that the argument is legitimate. Didn't Oprah just assign three books by William Faulkner to her audience? Aren't middle class couples across this country obsessed with authentic Tuscan cuisine? I don't care to spend much time thinking about this right now, but it seems to me that middlebrow culture is still around, but a bit transformed and a bit commodified. We may not be into ballet and opera as much as we were, but I always thought that the expectation that artforms from the 17th through early 20th century should speak to us in the same way as they did to their original audiences was a bit weird anyway.
Posted by Alex at June 16, 2005 07:39 AMHow is it "even-handed"?
Well, he's more ambivalent about middlebrow than you think:
It's true there was a great mood of take-your-vitamins earnestness about the middlebrow enterprise.
As a result, we are spared some of the plodding gentility that marked middlebrow culture. But on the other hand, serious culture matters less now than it did then, and artists and intellectuals have less authority.
Yeah, Brooks always has an agenda; we all do. But for once, he doesn't let that agenda obscure actual analysis. This article simply doesn't read as "anti-left" to me.
Posted by Matt Davis at June 16, 2005 07:43 AMDidn't Oprah just assign three books by William Faulkner to her audience?
Well, and lots of Toni Morrison in the past. Good (great) counter-example. Of course, it's at least mildly ironic that this "book club" is happening on TV, but it's not to be ignored. Maybe it's because it's mostly women who are in Oprah's book club that it didn't show up on Brooks's radar screen. I know I feel foolish for having ignored it.
I think Greenberg was an enormously influential critic, though; you make him sound like just some crank. Harold Bloom wishes he had the impact that Greenberg had in his day.
Posted by Matt Davis at June 16, 2005 07:50 AMI think:
* We're more busy.
Remember when kids used to just play ball in the street with the neighbor kids? Not anymore. It's all organized, and time killing. So there's soccer games, pizza after soccer games, etc.
We have technology up the wazoo. Between cable TV with every sports game, to computers with the net, and MP3 players to load, we find ways to kill time.
* We're more productive.
Dinner in a microwave! That frees us up for more TV!
* That old stuff is boring.
Lets face it, all that cultural stuff is great when there's no TV, DVD, or internet. What other choices do you have? But with technology, you can have your entertainment your way. I like to call it, the "entertainment ownership society."
;)
Posted by muckdog at June 16, 2005 08:20 AMWell, muck, it's not hard to see how you got so smart.
Posted by Matt Davis at June 16, 2005 08:23 AMtwo tumultuous events mark the demise of culture in america and our descent into a barren desert:1) the publication of the first issue of the insipid people magazine;2) the broadcast of the first rancid music video on mtv. one could write a book on the moral and cultural decay which each has spawned. as an aside i did watch the finale of the most recent american idol. i have always believed that there is a fine line which american idol did cross.the program was so bad (and embarrasingly so)that it crossed over and became good. sadly the majority of folks watching never perceived it as bad.jjj
Posted by jjj at June 16, 2005 08:28 AM2) the broadcast of the first rancid music video on mtv.
Not un-ironically that was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles.
Posted by at June 16, 2005 08:43 AMthat is great piece of trivia! what year was that? jjj
Posted by jjj at June 16, 2005 08:53 AMthat is great piece of trivia! what year was that?
August 1, 1981.
Posted by at June 16, 2005 09:04 AMToday, commenting on South Knox Bubba's blog, I emailed Brooks on his column:
I emailed him today:
Dear Mr. Brooks, I just finished reading your thoughtful piece 'Joe Strauss to Joe Six-Pack. Being born in 1952, I did not realize that Time and Newsweek had covered culture to such an extent, although there is usually one story on culture or popular culture in each edition. I agree that the decline of interest in cultural topics has been a slow progression over the years. But I was wondering, do you give any credence to my opinion that the rise of the political adulation of the 'soccer mom' and the nascar dad' joined with the denigration of the so-called 'elites' has probably exacerbated the problem. I am not a writer and would have a hard time debating you, but I believe you see my point. It's a shame you did not include it in your column. Sometimes people need to be told the truth, even if it hurts.
PS- And yes, I am a liberal. But as you also know, liberals want to hear both sides of the story. That may keep us from being ruthless in our opinions, to the point of going to war over them, but then again I'm sure you know what I mean. If I'm wrong, please flail away. I really do appreciate learning new things.
Somehow, people in this country are now denigrating education and culture, even dressing nice. Pretty soon we'll have the new 'white trash collection' by Ralph Lauren.
Please excuse me, I found the whole thing to be a useless blather of diarhea drivel from this offensive menace to our society. I do not ever normally read him and this was not worth it, hombre.
I never could get a handle on what precisely the cultural aspirations of the middlebrow 50's-60's crowd. Opera? Literature? Perhaps a general sense that the arts were supposed to be paid atention too? I guess.
It reeks of bullshit. How the fuck would Brooks know? Are you telling me this cretin, this flaming egotist who happily kisses the ass of war felons, can make even a hazy assessment of what culture was actually like? Forty fucking years ago, using that Luce snotrag Time as an example? Barf.
Uh-huh. This was not worth it, not worth it all, I'm creased I burned precious calories on this asshole, Matt, oy. I mean, it's no big deal, you know, but I don't like bobo. Not at all, zero in my day, he's still a dangerous lying offensive delusional prick.
Posted by paradox at June 16, 2005 09:22 AMMy apologies, paradox. Won't happen again.
Posted by Matt Davis at June 16, 2005 09:37 AMparadox.......your diatribe is prima facie case of the decline of culture and civility. your third paragraph is a descent into barnyard epithets and vulgarity and never would never have happened 40and 50yrs ago. i dont necessarily agree with other parts of what you have written but the other pieces of your post manifest a thoughtful mind and more than a modicum of intelligence.you demean yourself and your message with all the vulgarity in paragraph three.it is possible to have intelligent debate and discourse without rolling in the gutter. respectfully submitted,jjj
Posted by jjj at June 16, 2005 09:38 AMI don't know anything about this Dwight McDonald guy, but Clement Greenberg only spoke for Clement Greenberg.
Well, Dwight MacDonald did speak for a highbrow impulse in the 1960s. My discipline is film studies, so that's what I know best, and MacDonald's "Midcult and Masscult" essay in Partisan Review corresponded to a bourgeoining avant-garde culture comprising NY/SF experimental film on the one hand and the European art film on the other. All of a sudden the highbrows began to look down upon the kinds of middlebrow "quality" filmmaking they'd accepted in the immediate postwar years (social problem films, serious Broadway adaptations). In sum, Brooks may be exaggerating the shift, but basically he gets it right.
I agree with Matt's notion that we need to look for economic reasons for middlebrow's decline, but I'm less interested in direct ones like lack of leisure time (after all, the middle classes still have the time to consume mass-market magazines and popular culture) and more interested in finding materialist ones. Something likely shifted in the underlying class structure in the U.S. in the 1960s - I'm just not sure what!
Posted by Chris at June 16, 2005 09:44 AMI hope you know I was trying to be snarky/funny, Matt, I wasn't irritated with you, of course not.
My servers are down in a disaster recovery and I hate it, God I've got things to do, but all I can do is drink too much coffee and buzz comment screens.
Posted by paradox at June 16, 2005 10:04 AMthe middle classes still have the time to consume mass-market magazines and popular culture
They sure do, Chris - on their ten-minute breaks and their thirty-minute lunches. The mass-market stuff is something my Good Orange County (CA) Republican coworkers can put down after these short periods and feel like they got something out of it. They don't have the time to mentally digest Dostoyevsky or Mishima or Goethe and eat also! Such is the nature of 'leisure time' today.
Posted by pessimist at June 16, 2005 10:06 AMAsk your kids:
"What do you think for tonight, the opera or XBOX?"
LOLOLOLOLOLOL
Posted by muckdog at June 16, 2005 10:13 AMI think more to the point of the decline of Western Culture is the rise of "Teenager Cool" and Freud. Intelectual art is considered artificial and repressed. We have been spinning around the art of the personal psycosis or art as therapy for a good thirty years. Most Universal symbols have been reduced to one - love. Why waste time with balance or the golden mean, jump to pure pleasure.
But that is just my take on it, I could be wrong. ... :)
They sure do, Chris - on their ten-minute breaks and their thirty-minute lunches.
Look, I'm as eager to see measures to increase workers' leisure time as much as their affluence. I'm a big fan of Juliet Schor's book. But we should stop pretending we're all living in some Fordist-Taylorist dystopia. People wouldn't purchase home theatres in the numbers they do if they didn't have a couple hours a day to spend in front of it.
Which makes me wonder about the role of television in the changes in culture. I don't want to subscribe to a technological determinism, but TV had tipped the balance a bit away from reading and in favor of popular culture.
Posted by Chris at June 16, 2005 10:19 AMMy entire point, jj, now that I read all the thread, ir neither you, I or certainly David Brooks has not a clue, not even the slightest glimmer, as to what culture is like now, let alone a time when the hoser was just born.
I doubt to an extreme degree that the great masses of Americans were more culturually sophisticated--or that we are more coarse--than our previous generations. I do not in any sense comply with the view that any observation can be made of culture simply by looking at a grossly skewed "journalism" sheet like Time magazine.
It wouldn't suprise me the phenomena is simply what the journalism class of writers like to think about. What I think happened is the explosion of multimedia technologies and access opened more windows to American culture, so what you define as vulgar or coarse has simply always been here but never given a platform to be broadcast on.
I reject your whole premise of vulgarity in speech anyway. I use it precisely to offend your ridiculous priority of what is offensive. Must be nice to live a live so unsullied, so easily offended by "vulgarity."
Offensive is stealing an election and starting a war for lies and just obviating our last governor's election. Why I insist on being a good person and playing by the rules is truly beyond me--what a sucker I am. This game is rigged, and if outrage and coarseness is your game then lemme tell you, directing your energies at people like me who say fuck and snark too much in such an outrageous horror show we call Life In America, well, that's surely the best way for me to keep it up.
I hate playing by the rules, even though I'm very good at it. All this clucking about some abstract thinking on past culture while our children are butchered and we kill for lies strikes me as all the indicator of American culture I need.
The 50's got us into Vietnam in a jim crow south while we gutted emerging demcoracies wherever we could while McCarthy cheered. But we've coarsened since then. I see.
Posted by paradox at June 16, 2005 10:23 AMTV had tipped the balance a bit away from reading and in favor of popular culture.
Reading and popular culture are not opposites; high culture and popular culture are. Popular culture was in print for quite some time. Reading People is still popular culture, even though it's reading. Watching opera on PBS is high culture, even though it's on TV.
paradox.....i appreciate your thoughtful response. i have spent my adult life in various wall street trading rooms which are crude and rude. and i can be as crude and rude as the next guy. so excuse a bit of hyperbole in my previous post. maybe my larger point is that civility in discourse has deteriorated dramaticallly over the last 50yrs. so has well written and well thought out prose.this is a long digression but i think the computer has gone a long way towards destroying what was once considered fine writing.good writing is a product of time patience and deliberation. it develops because the language has rules which dictate form and structure.the form and structure ,i believe,leads one to substantive writing. when i first started in the business world,circa 1972, i was investigating bodily injury claims for an insurance company. reports would be handwritten and then typed and edited several times.thay went through a long editing and corrective process. people who got promoted ,as i recall, were the best commnicators, the best writers. patience ,thought and deliberation and attention to gramattical rules received due reward. the computer is the antthesis of that mindset. the essence of a computer is speed,speed and more speed.half sentences,phrases and sentence fragments are now acceptable.against that loose background i think good clear writing is on the decline and probably wont recover. that is sad. i wandered far afield and apologize. in spite of my earlier post you sound like a gentleman and a nice guy.all the best.jjj
Posted by jjj at June 16, 2005 10:46 AMReading and popular culture are not opposites; high culture and popular culture are. Popular culture was in print for quite some time. Reading People is still popular culture, even though it's reading. Watching opera on PBS is high culture, even though it's on TV.
You're right, high:low, reading:TV don't map onto one another neatly at all. I'm just wondering if television had any impact beyond the underlying class dynamics of middlebrow culture, or the changes in social practices.
Posted by Chris at June 16, 2005 10:48 AMI'm just wondering if television had any impact beyond the underlying class dynamics of middlebrow culture, or the changes in social practices.
Well, there are a few different ways to think about "TV" and its impact on culture:
1. TV qua TV; is there something about the difference between TV as a medium of cultural transmission and preexisting media that would tend to produce a different sort of cultural production?
2. Is there something about the business model of TV (free airwaves to stations, profits from 30-second ads) that would encourage different cultural products than one might find in print or onstage?
3. Do TV and radio, with their ability to traverse wide distances, have anything to do with suburbanization? Does this suburban lifestyle actually produce the changes?
There are doubtless others, but it's important to unpack "TV" into analytically distinct avenues of inquiry.
Posted by Matt Davis at June 16, 2005 10:56 AMParadox...you are the MAN.
Posted by Jedr at June 16, 2005 11:21 AMTV releaves us from actually having to interact with each other in a physical way. TV killed civic life.
Posted by at June 16, 2005 11:23 AMChris wrote:People wouldn't purchase home theatres in the numbers they do if they didn't have a couple hours a day to spend in front of it.
With large amounts of liquid credit laying about, quite a few people will buy some really fantastic stuff that they'll use poorly or infrequently.
Evidence One: I point you towards all those personal computers bought since 1980.
Posted by idiosynchronic at June 16, 2005 11:26 AMThere are doubtless others, but it's important to unpack "TV" into analytically distinct avenues of inquiry.
Good point.
Do TV and radio, with their ability to traverse wide distances, have anything to do with suburbanization? Does this suburban lifestyle actually produce the changes?
Possibly, though it would be an interesting departure from conventional wisdom which sees the postwar middlebrow moment as tied into suburban culture in the 1950s (I'm thinking of Marianne Conroy's scholarship on middlebrow in film melodrama, for instance, or even C. Wright Mills concept of "status panic").
Well, he's more ambivalent about middlebrow than you think
Yes, but he obviously thinks we've lost something, and he thinks someone is at fault, yet he closes the case file without ever looking for suspects in his own intellectual neighborhood.
Posted by Steve M. at June 16, 2005 12:06 PMAsk your kids: "What do you think for tonight, the opera or XBOX?"
My kids are more likely to watch Phantom of the Opera than they are to play Xbox, muck. This is their choice - not my desires being imposed upon them.
They are also avid readers - each averaging a book a week. They find TV insipid and vapid, and would rather watch a good recorded movie than anything prime time. They also self-limit their telelvision time in favor of surfing the web.
Now - if only I could convince them that there's more on the Web than anime, ...
Posted by pessimist at June 16, 2005 12:20 PM[H]e closes the case file without ever looking for suspects in his own intellectual neighborhood.
Yeah; I meant he was even-handed in his treatment of middlebrow itself. Typically, he stacks the deck a good bit more than he did in today's column.
Posted by Matt Davis at June 16, 2005 12:27 PMNow - if only I could convince them that there's more on the Web than anime, ...
My daughter is a hopeless NickJr.com junky.
I'm teaching her chess now. Hopefully it takes.
Posted by muckcat at June 16, 2005 12:32 PMAsk your kids: "What do you think for tonight, the opera or XBOX?"
Gee, given that choice, I know my kids would say XBOX. In spite of that, my oldest reads a book a week. My youngest, well, he's only six but in addition to the video games he also spends a tremendous amount of time with Lego's.
Remember when kids used to just play ball in the street with the neighbor kids? Not anymore. It's all organized, and time killing. So there's soccer games, pizza after soccer games, etc.
I think about this phenomena a lot. I remember as a kid spending most of my day out of the house, riding my bike, playing sandlot football (tackle no less), playing "army" in the creek behind our house, etc., etc. Now, it's a fight to get my kids to just walk down to the park with my wife and me, and my oldest goes into a panic anytime the local "weather show" (we live in Oklahoma) reports a possibility of tornadoes in the area. What I wonder is, is this the result of technology sapping their vitality, or the result of a "culture" of fear that permeates modern American life?
It's this message of fear that almost forces kids to don enough protective gear to play Roller Derby just to ride their bike around the block. Let your kids play tackle football with no pads? You must be out of your mind! Soccer is the "safe" sport these days, and only if it's done under the supervision of a league. Let them play "army?" Hell, they can't even point their fingers at one another without getting expelled from school. And whatever we do, let's not forget the threat of a candy-passing boogeyman on every corner, ready to snatch our precious children at any given moment.
Is all this the result of a loss of culture, or rather an abundance of marketing-driven fear with the sole purpose of getting you to buy protection from what "might" hurt you, or in the case of TV, to get you to sit glued to the tube for the latest pearl of protectionist wisdom? Like the front porch, those innocent times appear all but gone. But unlike the porch, it seems to me it might be the result of something more sinister than air conditioning. Instead, it's being lost to greed driven fear mongering.
Posted by Cosrai at June 16, 2005 03:07 PMDavis, your prose is getting rather fragrant.
Posted by Toby Petzold at June 16, 2005 07:59 PMSo is your mom.
Posted by Matt Davis at June 16, 2005 08:08 PMWhat a topic!
I can't say with any certainty that how much has changed; I was born in 1976. I doubt that any one thing could be blamed for the changes. Capitalism, materialism, and technology have changed the way we work, make money, spend money, and entertain ourselves. They are all factors (and I think they have all been mentioned here already). There is way more crap to buy these days, and we have more money to spend on it. Things that we don't need are marketed to us so effectively that we think we do need them, so we buy them. Our entertainment is valueless and easy to digest. Today's role models do not push thinking, they push buying. You can't put a Mountain Dew advertisement in an opera (or they shouldn't, though they could). We are trained to get our stories in half hour or two hour servings, special effects included - not the many hours it takes to read a good novel. Certainly we had movies and advertisements in the 1950's, but culture takes time to change. A lot has changed since then.
I could go on and on about this, but really, there is a movie on right now. Plus I am tired of writing.
Posted by Andy at June 17, 2005 04:42 AMI could go on and on about this, but really, there is a movie on right now. Plus I am tired of writing.
- Posted by Andy at June 17, 2005 04:42 AM
But Monopoly is so much fun
I'd hate to blow the game!
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest
- ANYBODY -
Outside of a small circle of friends
- Phil Ochs