A reader chuckles at the notion that high culture has ceased to exist:
Responding to A.O. Scott’s essay, Freddie writes:
There is no such thing as high culture. There probably never was but even if there was it died long, long ago. Outside of your fantasies, there is no group of intellectual elitists looking down their noses at the music or TV you like. Such people do not exist.
I find that amusing, considering this article from yesterday’s issue of the New Yorker on the resurgence of the Frankfurt School (probably history’s foremost critics of “low culture”). One passage:
Culture appears more monolithic than ever, with a few gigantic corporations – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon – presiding over unprecedented monopolies. Internet discourse has become tighter, more coercive. Search engines guide you away from peculiar words. (“Did you mean . . . ?”) Headlines have an authoritarian bark (“This Map of Planes in the Air Right Now Will Blow Your Mind”). “Most Read” lists at the top of Web sites imply that you should read the same stories everyone else is reading. Technology conspires with populism to create an ideologically vacant dictatorship of likes.
I agree with Freddie’s claim that lovers of pop culture are not “an oppressed and denigrated minority,” but to say that there is “no group of intellectual elitists looking down their nose at the music or TV you like” is just plain wrong. As a PhD student in Communications, I sit in classes with some of them on a daily basis.
Another is skeptical of the entire end-of-adulthood argument:
I’m sure A.O. Scott wrote that piece with the best of intentions, but it amounts to a navel-gazing bout of bullshit.
If we have reached the “death of adulthood,” it’s because “adulthood” has in large part been a mirage. You don’t magically become “adult” by dressing a certain way, or having a certain amount of money, or going to a certain club, or deciding that you need Brahms instead of early Beatles.
The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized that the adults I trusted growing up weren’t mystical sages. They were winging it. Children need older authority figures, but those figures are only doing the best they can. As you age, you still put away “childish” (I would say immature) things – unreasonable expectations of fame or wealth, the ache and burning of teenage love, and most of all, the belief that being a certain age magically mutates you into a separate “adult” creature.
Count me in with Lewis. If you’re a 50-year-old guy worrying about the culture of being “adult,” you’re exhibiting the type of immature mindset of a 12-year-old, when you thought “acting grown up” was terribly important. I like Marvel movies; I’m also a divorced 30-something working a corporate day job in a law firm. I’m sure as hell not going to devote all of my time to reading Russian philosophers at night to satisfy someone else’s illusion.
Another is on the same page:
I think we’re finally allowed to admit that in a lot of ways, we never grow up. Think about it: do we ever stop behaving like we’re in high school? Workplace hierarchies are similar to the ways we grouped or were grouped as teenagers. There’s still bullying and peer pressure. We wear “uniforms” that fit the environment, and our time is scheduled when it isn’t outright micro-managed. On a personal level, we still have our cliques that include or exclude based on the same ridiculous set of preferences and prejudices that we picked up as older teens or young “adults.”
My parents, born of the Depression, were “grown ups.” But my memories of their lives, and the lives of their friends, aren’t so different from what I see in my peers or in the peers of my adult kids. The exterior that we’re willing to show has changed, and our parents and grandparents were willing to put up with a lot more discomfort than we are. But there was never an adulthood. There was just the extent to which people were willing to conform. Which today, isn’t so much.
Meanwhile, a 23-year-old reader notes that disposable entertainments have a long pedigree:
Every generation has produced pop culture that wasn’t considered respectable and wasn’t discussed or analyzed in a serious way. Bawdy saloon and beer-hall tunes thrived in the age of Wagner and Strauss, dime pulp novels outsold Fitzgerald and Faulkner, and five-cent peep shows brought in viewers in numbers that would rival any superhero movie today. I think we’re at a pop-culture moment where we no longer put away things we enjoy simply because we fear looking childish. I’m not ashamed to admit that I have been moved to tears both by Harry Potter and Wilfred Owen. To argue that a vast swath of Americans don’t value “pleasures based on work, ambiguity, or difficulty” because adults are reading The Hunger Games is to construct a straw man of staggering size.
I agree with Freddie that being an adult has to do with your ability to be a productive human who cares for others and is thoughtful and self-aware both about one’s actions and place in the world. As far as I’m aware, seeing The Avengers is not an impediment to that.
The Dish 