Friday, February 01, 2008
Quality
I don’t think I’ve had a good ornery rant yet on these pages, so I believe it is time to fill in that gap.
What the heck ever happened to quality? Quality anything?
An excerpt from one of my favorite essays, discussing one of the many differences between training, skill-learning for the purpose of employment, and education, the absorption of culture:
Education, in a word, leads a person on to ask a great deal more from life than life, as at present organized, is willing to give him; and it begets dissatisfaction with the rewards that life holds out. Training tends to satisfy him with very moderate and simple returns. A good income, a home and family, the usual run of comforts and conveniences, diversions addressed only to the competitive or sporting spirit or else to raw sensation - training not only makes directly for getting these, but also for an inert and comfortable contentment with them. Well, these are all that our present society has to offer, so it is undeniably the best thing all round to keep people satisfied with them, which training does, and not to inject a subversive influence, like education, into this easy complacency. Politicians understand this - it is their business to understand it - and hence they hold up “a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage” as a satisfying social ideal. But the mischief of education is its exorbitance. The educated lad may like stewed chicken and motor-cars as well as anybody, but his education has bred a liking for other things too, things that the society around him does not care for and will not countenance. It has bred tastes which society resents as culpably luxurious, and will not connive at gratifying. Paraphrasing the old saying, education sends him out to shift for himself with a champagne appetite amidst a gin-guzzling society.
From The Disadvantages of Being Educated, by Albert Jay Nock, 1937.
American society has spent the last hundred and more years glorifying the democratic ideal. That is, we have been proclaiming the glory of the common man. We are told that the common man, with his “what’s in it for me” politics, his low instincts for entertainment, and his minimal educability, is mankind, and any attempt to rise above this morass or expect more from anyone is met with catcalls and derision. The beatnik and hippie movements seemed to have been designed to blow away the last bastion of higher ideals, glorifying in moral relativism, hedonism, and meaningless feel-good “education” replacing anything of substance. It’s all been downhill from there.
Companies in a capitalist system, of course, will focus their efforts on the most efficient way to make money. The bigger the potential market, the greater the money making opportunity, and as a result, the vast majority of companies end up focusing their efforts on catering to the whims of the common man.
What then, does the market create? Garbage, because it seems that is what most people are satisfied with.
Another quote from Nock that I cannot find at the moment is paraphrased thusly - From a publishers point of view, the best possible book is one that is exactly like the last one that sold a million copies. How much evidence do we need of the truth of that statement? Look at TV shows, movies, books. There is nothing new under the sun. How many identical novels do trash fiction writers put out? How many identically sounding inane bands do we need? How many movie remakes can we stand? And yet, all of these keep being made because they make money.
People like them.
Now, I’m not here to tell people what to like. I really couldn’t care less what other people like. More power to them.
What irritates me is when a niche market, catering to connoisseurs, gets “discovered” by the masses and ends up being destroyed. Quality goes right out the window, because quality doesn’t sell to the masses. And then those who did appreciate that quality can’t even get it anymore, much to their dismay.
I don’t have the book on hand anymore, but I recently read an essay by H. L. Mencken titled “The Need for an Aristocracy”. The idea was that America was a country founded explicitly without an aristocracy, which has both positive and negative results. The positive is that there was no hereditary class to exploit the commoners, an issue near and dear to the hearts of many immigrants to America. Thus self-determination is more or less guaranteed, until someone learns to exploit the others with this new-fangled Republic thingy. The negative is that without a class of people who had refined tastes and manners, there was no one to set an example for the common man, and the common man ended up thinking that his base instincts are all that there is in life. He reverts to an animal of above average intelligence, and he loses the taste, refinement, and capability of complex thought that makes us human. This is not to say that all aristocrats had those characteristics either, but as a group, they did moreso than the rest of the population.
I think Mencken is absolutely right. The aristocracy we have today is not a cultural aristocracy, it is the common man having fallen into wealth. Thus we get stupid counter-productive social welfare initiatives by Bill Gates, calls for higher taxes from Warren Buffet, gaudy ugly risque clothes, brainless movie and music superstars, and sports heroes among the wealthiest people in the country. There is no taste, no refinement, no culture, there is only money.
There is no one to set an example of the good life. The humane life.
It occurred to me recently that it is rare for me to read a book less than fifty years old. I gave up on movies awhile back. And TV? Let’s not even go there.
Are there any modern classics being created in any medium? Seriously, anything at all that is of high enough quality that it will stand the test of time? Any evidence at all of culture out there, however minute? If so, please point them out in the comments, because I’m just not seeing them. I run across an exceptionally talented musician once in awhile, or a book that sticks with me for a time. However, these things seem so rare and usually so unrepeatable that looking for them amidst the morass of garbage isn’t worth the effort.
Yes, I am a snob. Yes, I am an elitist. Usually I manage to keep a lid on it, but sometimes my lack of quality options results in a simmering boil that overflows the pot. I am not entertained by substandard fare, and that seems to be all I can find these days.
The common man and all of his self-glorification is here to stay. I have no expectation of changing that. But can he not have the decency of leaving me even the crumbs of a civilization to enjoy?
Comments
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It’s impossible to tell, with anything new, whether it will stand the test of time.
The problem is that even people familiar with Sturgeon’s Law forget the context in which it was first articulated. “90% of everything is crap.” This in response to being asked why 90% of science fiction is invariably crap.
It sounds pessimistic, but it’s really not. The point of it isn’t that life sucks and has always sucked. The point is that the things which _aren’t_ transitory crap will last and be remembered long into the future, and the things that are will be quickly forgotten.
Virtually all of the classics of Western literature, for example, were targeted by their authors to the popular audience of the time, and most gained favor with the elites only long afterward.
This is not to argue for the exultation of what is popular on that basis alone, nor to condemn the elites for their supposed snobbery, but merely to remind ourselves that, as long as “stands the test of time” is one of our major criteria of judgment, that which is new will always fall short by definition, regardless of its other possible merits.
Matt | 2/1/2008 01:23 PM CDT -
You CAN write excellent stuff for the popular taste—IF the “people” are sufficiently educated to appreciate it.
Les Miserables, after all, was first serialized in the newspaper, before being bound and sold a a book.
(Mr.) Kim du Toit | 2/1/2008 02:41 PM CDT -
Shakespeare was also entertainment for the masses. Of all the playwrights of that era, how many have stood the test of time? Most of that was crap too.
It’s not often I disagree with Kim, but I suspect it’s harder for a writer to write GOOD stuff for the uneducated than for the educated, one of the reasons why GOOD children’s literature is so hard to find. Hugo (and Shakespeare) were brilliant not because they wrote good literature, but that they wrote good literature that the average person could understand and relate to.
Mark D | 2/4/2008 10:24 AM CDT -
Actually, while I can sympathize with your view, I’d say that quality still exists, but it’s much harder to pick out.
Heck, the “classics” have had a great many years to BECOME classics. How many books were written, during the time that we became educated enough to create a market for literature, that have NOT survived?
The volume today is incredible, and the ability to get something published has never been more evident. Self publishing is almost as easy as getting the big guys to do it.
OK, sure ... there are far too many Clinton-style tomes, but there’s so much more, it’s hard to stop looking and read some of it. It has never been easier to become educated in any subject one may be interested in ... all you have to do is try and turn the volume of the dreck coming out of Hollyweird down ...pete in Midland | 2/6/2008 03:54 PM CDT
