You really are one of the better writers on the subject of the "humanities" that I've encountered! To jump off this and your comments on Pistelli's substack, there isn't much of a lay American intellectual life - a trend which I think has less to do with abstruse academics and more to do with Star Wars and Michael Jackson (and, later, Netflix and social media). For 99% of people, mass culture is just too popular, and too easy, to the point where it's hard to imagine what an intellectual culture (beyond the semi-professionals of academia and magazines in New York) would look like. And critiques of mass culture have vanished even more than the culture war over the great books.
Like many Americans, I sometimes hope this is better in Europe, but even Kundera at the end of his life was complaining that the French elite watched TV instead of read novels. Maybe the growth of Korean and Latin American pop culture will compel Americans to invest more in their high culture since their mass culture will no longer be hegemonic, but that seems a bit far-fetched...
Yes, in the comments to a post in the Eminent Americans, Pistelli and Oppenheimer and I discussed the notion of the intelligentsia: those who apply, rather than generating, ideas. I think that America has a large and healthy intelligentsia, but the ideas they're interested in tend to be political and scientific, not philosophical, and they're certainly not very interested in high art. I think that's probably always been the case.
There's a reverence for high art in America (if I tell someone that I'm publishing a book with Princeton Press they're unbelievably impressed), but people don't have a strong sense of how to interact with it or get involved in it. At what point in someone's life, precisely, do they start watching opera and listening to classical music--the unfortunate truth is that if you don't do it as a child, you'll likely never really get into it as anything other than a pose or an act. Peoples' tastes don't really change as they age, which is why you've got full-grown adults who're gushing over Taylor Swift and the Barbie movie.
I can't speak for Kepler and what I've read of Euclid confirms your description, but Galileo is anything but dreary.
Wasn't there a Great Books program in the mid-20th century that included local book clubs and standardized editions? I am remembering this from the elementary school version in the 1960s.
Yes there was! Run by the great books foundation, one of mortimer adlers pet projects after he left Chicago. The man managed to eke a living out of producing these materials
I think it will take more than close reading of St. Augustine and pushback on false interpretations to change the larger conversation. As you say, the class in power cares little for the liberal arts. And the working class never did, really, except as a path to power. I indulged a theory, while teaching at a private liberal arts college, that wealthy kids were allowed to explore their passions freely, to join the liberal arts conversation and thus find their place in the world. I felt that limiting undergraduate curriculum to employability narrowed the horizon unnecessarily for low-income students, that the real path to mobility lay in those elite forms of literacy. But a friend who works for NBC disabused me of that notion. Everyone in his very wealthy circles is pressuring their kids to conform; if Dad works at Goldman Sachs, he wants his son to follow in his footsteps. I found this quite sobering. If we don't all approach St. Augustine open to discovery, rather than with a pretext to confirm with selective evidence, then the text is just a way to leverage power through public discourse.
Yes I don't really understand what the point of being rich is if your kids can't do what they want. I think maybe one problem is the Goldman guy probably has more wage / bonus income than rents. He's living like someone who earns ten million a year, but the moment he stops working thatll end. He's very much in the position of Mr bennett, with a comfortable living thatll last for his lifetime, but who needs his children to secure their own places. That's a different position from someone with a lot of land or a lot of stocks, etc, a Getty or Rockefeller type. When I was at Hopkins one of the lecturers in the English dept was john d Rockefeller the fifth! But yes ingeneral I've been surprised that the rich aren't more forward looking, like Joe Kennedy was, and don't encourage their kids to acquire more polish. Of course rich kids can also rebel, but they're giving up more comparatively, since they're used to living better. I also think the rich and privileged can be surprised by just how rough it is in the world of arts and letters, and how difficult it is to acquire distinction. This was one of the themes of a Bill Deresewicz book I loved, EXCELLENT SHEEP
Yes that's what really separates the autodidact from the educated person. The autodidact is far better read than the average grad student in primary sources, but has read almost none of the secondary literature. That's what leads to a lot of the wackiness in our interpretations!
You really are one of the better writers on the subject of the "humanities" that I've encountered! To jump off this and your comments on Pistelli's substack, there isn't much of a lay American intellectual life - a trend which I think has less to do with abstruse academics and more to do with Star Wars and Michael Jackson (and, later, Netflix and social media). For 99% of people, mass culture is just too popular, and too easy, to the point where it's hard to imagine what an intellectual culture (beyond the semi-professionals of academia and magazines in New York) would look like. And critiques of mass culture have vanished even more than the culture war over the great books.
Like many Americans, I sometimes hope this is better in Europe, but even Kundera at the end of his life was complaining that the French elite watched TV instead of read novels. Maybe the growth of Korean and Latin American pop culture will compel Americans to invest more in their high culture since their mass culture will no longer be hegemonic, but that seems a bit far-fetched...
Yes, in the comments to a post in the Eminent Americans, Pistelli and Oppenheimer and I discussed the notion of the intelligentsia: those who apply, rather than generating, ideas. I think that America has a large and healthy intelligentsia, but the ideas they're interested in tend to be political and scientific, not philosophical, and they're certainly not very interested in high art. I think that's probably always been the case.
There's a reverence for high art in America (if I tell someone that I'm publishing a book with Princeton Press they're unbelievably impressed), but people don't have a strong sense of how to interact with it or get involved in it. At what point in someone's life, precisely, do they start watching opera and listening to classical music--the unfortunate truth is that if you don't do it as a child, you'll likely never really get into it as anything other than a pose or an act. Peoples' tastes don't really change as they age, which is why you've got full-grown adults who're gushing over Taylor Swift and the Barbie movie.
I can't speak for Kepler and what I've read of Euclid confirms your description, but Galileo is anything but dreary.
Wasn't there a Great Books program in the mid-20th century that included local book clubs and standardized editions? I am remembering this from the elementary school version in the 1960s.
Yes there was! Run by the great books foundation, one of mortimer adlers pet projects after he left Chicago. The man managed to eke a living out of producing these materials
I think it will take more than close reading of St. Augustine and pushback on false interpretations to change the larger conversation. As you say, the class in power cares little for the liberal arts. And the working class never did, really, except as a path to power. I indulged a theory, while teaching at a private liberal arts college, that wealthy kids were allowed to explore their passions freely, to join the liberal arts conversation and thus find their place in the world. I felt that limiting undergraduate curriculum to employability narrowed the horizon unnecessarily for low-income students, that the real path to mobility lay in those elite forms of literacy. But a friend who works for NBC disabused me of that notion. Everyone in his very wealthy circles is pressuring their kids to conform; if Dad works at Goldman Sachs, he wants his son to follow in his footsteps. I found this quite sobering. If we don't all approach St. Augustine open to discovery, rather than with a pretext to confirm with selective evidence, then the text is just a way to leverage power through public discourse.
Yes I don't really understand what the point of being rich is if your kids can't do what they want. I think maybe one problem is the Goldman guy probably has more wage / bonus income than rents. He's living like someone who earns ten million a year, but the moment he stops working thatll end. He's very much in the position of Mr bennett, with a comfortable living thatll last for his lifetime, but who needs his children to secure their own places. That's a different position from someone with a lot of land or a lot of stocks, etc, a Getty or Rockefeller type. When I was at Hopkins one of the lecturers in the English dept was john d Rockefeller the fifth! But yes ingeneral I've been surprised that the rich aren't more forward looking, like Joe Kennedy was, and don't encourage their kids to acquire more polish. Of course rich kids can also rebel, but they're giving up more comparatively, since they're used to living better. I also think the rich and privileged can be surprised by just how rough it is in the world of arts and letters, and how difficult it is to acquire distinction. This was one of the themes of a Bill Deresewicz book I loved, EXCELLENT SHEEP
Yes that's what really separates the autodidact from the educated person. The autodidact is far better read than the average grad student in primary sources, but has read almost none of the secondary literature. That's what leads to a lot of the wackiness in our interpretations!