Some feedback on my “Two Cultures” piece.

Reader A:

I realize it’s bad form when responding to a blog post or an article to discuss what was omitted rather than included, but I would note that any discussion of the marginalization of the fine arts is misleading to the extent it places the bill entirely on demand-side forces. On the supply side, artists and writers have much to answer for as well. For complex reasons which no one will ever fully understand — though I have a number of theories — over the course of the 19th century the great arts of the West — plastic, performance and literary — were pushed to their “logical” extremes, with the result that tonality was taken to the breaking point and then some, ditto for representation in painting and sculpture and ballet; and verbal pyrotechnics and obscurantism conquered and resettled the humanist pursuit of literature. The various Kandinskys and Schoenbergs and Joyces of each discipline had a hand on the shovel digging our collective cultural grave, or at least in digging a deep ditch that separated the fine arts from what can reasonably be expected of society at large. Mozart’s audiences appreciated high culture because they were offered Mozart. Our audiences are offered Milton Babbitt. It’s not fair to blame lotus-eating and indolence on the resulting marginalization.

[Me]: As a pretty regular listener to serious-music radio stations, I got to wondering a few months ago why I couldn’t recall ever hearing one of Babbitt’s pieces, since he is such a huge name in music. (“A distinguished and seminal American composer” — the Pulitzer Prize board.) Seeking enlightenment, I asked Jay Nordlinger, who knows everything there is to know about music, and then some. Jay: “Babbitt’s music is difficult and not very often listener-friendly. Terribly bright guy, though.”

And the point of non-listener-friendly music is … ?

Reader B:

Great essay.
As a sort of sidebar, I have the impression that scientists of my generation — I’m 59 — were likely to be far more acquainted with culture, very much including high culture, than literary types were to know anything about science. As I started out to be a biologist — populations and evolution — (during the great early years of UMass Boston, where all the young bio profs were products of the evolution group at Harvard) and only later became a writer and took literary courses, I was in a unique position to see the contrast. I still have scientist friends from those days with serious interests in literature, even opera.
Of course most of my friends were from Harvard and especially MIT so there may be some bias. But still …
The scientific illiteracy of the average English prof., even of my age (or older), is ever-astounding.

[Me]: We math students used to joke that when dating a girl in one of the Humanities departments, if at leisure in her room we’d browse her books; but they never browsed our books! And yes, the social pressure on a math/science geek to have at least a decent acquaintance with the Humanities, was much stronger than vice versa. I think this may be different today, though.

Reader C (a physicist):

Mr. D. — You said: “Furthermore, because the human sciences, as rigorous sciences, are all fairly new, and their results often debatable, everyone can talk about them.
Well. Talk is cheap, as the saying is. When I went to school (apparently in those same dim reaches of time as you did), science was deemed to be “rigorous” when it was “observable, repeatable, falsifiable and predictive.” Isolating variables and understanding that correlation is not causation were important means of making science rigorous, so I would be interested to learn which “human sciences” you would recognize as “rigorous sciences.”

[Me]: The quantitative social sciences (e.g. heredity studies, including population genetics). A good bit of neuroscience. Medicine! Psychometrics. Genetics itself, of course …

[Note: “rigorous” doesn’t mean results are indisputably solid. Even the physical sciences often take a century or two to attain that. “Rigorous” means that research is done by strict protocols of objectivity, peer review, openness to criticism, repeatability of observation or experiment, etc. And anyone missing the point on correlation/causation in any serious discipline would be a laughing-stock. It’s the first thing they teach in statistical-methods courses.]

Reader D:

Not sure what is correct here: “a further (or farther?) century and a third along that road.” Working backwards, “along that road” is a distance metaphor, and distance requires “farther.” But as an adjective modifying “century,” “further,” in the sense of “additional,” seems correct. Maybe it’s a mixed metaphor (time and distance), and neither can be correct.

[Me]: Those durn editors!

Reader E:

One other thing that the US (especially) populace diverts itself with is sport — college and professional. With football and basketball reaching down to the middle school level to entrance significant segments of society. As opposed to music and art (almost completely debauched), sport, nearly alone, retains the value of striving for and paying for excellence. As another example of Obama’s shallowness, if not cowardice, why didn’t he pick on Kobe Bryant rather than Joe the Plumber and stoutly assert he was going to take away all but $250k of Kobe’s $50M a year? Bein’ from the ‘hood an’ a ballplayer with some skills, I don’ think he’ll touch that one.

[Me]: I’m not sure that sports are the last hold-out for meritocratic excellence — the Fields Medal comes to mind. Sport may, though, be the last zone in which we are not embarrassed to talk about meritocratic excellence.

Reader F:

Derb: didn’t we bring this cataclysm upon ourselves? Didn’t we let the rot of pop culture, which you properly described as “filth,” permeate every aspect of our lives? Your Spenglerian commentary is well put, and might be taken as a warning, though few, I opine, will heed it, just as few will heed our friend Fr. Rutler’s call to heroic faith (see A Crisis of Saints, a grand book, full of common sense). But you tried, and he tried, each in your own way. That in itself is commendable.

[Me]: Well, pop culture has always been there; and while it’s now pretty much all filth, there are still a few diamonds in amongst the dung — a movie, a song, a sitcom that is fun, even instructive, even moving. It sure has swamped high culture, though, with a mighty assist from the “Higher Superstition” of those college flim-flam courses in literary deconstruction, post-colonial studies, and the like. High culture just ran out of gas some time in the early 20th century. It is now a museum culture: pictures painted 400 years ago, symphonies written 200 years ago, operas, poems, and novels written 100 years ago.

Somewhere in Goebbels’ diaries there is a passage that haunts me. He’s going down into the bunker for one of the last times, as the allies close on Berlin, and he expresses his joy at the sight of “bourgeois civilization” disappearing in flames. (How they loved their Wagner!) He was of course right. Now we have Madonna, Damien Hirst, Milton Babbitt, Regietheater, and Maya Angelou.

Oh, here’s the composer of that ballet clip I posted earlier, since someone asked. He died in 1870.

With pop culture sloshing round in the midden and high culture chewed up and spat out by the postmodernists, science is pretty much all we have as an arena for cultural advance (unless, pace Reader E, you allow sport, which I don’t think I will). As a science geek from childhood, I should be happy about this. I can’t say I am, though.