In considering the politics of artists and how they are not necessarily what people expect them to be I have found myself also thinking of the politics of journalists--another group stereotyped as Establishment-bucking "liberals" who in fact produce a very conservative product. In his exposé The Brass Check Upton Sinclair stressed the extent to which journalists went about this work in a cynical and increasingly demoralized way amid the very real compulsions of their business. Still, that hardly seems the case with every journalist, especially in an era in which the field is so glamorized. Indeed, just as with artists I can picture a host of factors impelling would-be journalists toward conservative attitudes, especially at the more elite levels of the occupation, even apart from what they are required to do by a Fourth Estate that is, in practice, a Big Business pressed by innumerable political factors to stay on the right side of the powerful, which does not hire, does not keep employed, does not promote to positions of responsibility, those it does not trust to conform to its standards.
There is the "professionalization" of journalism, which gives their field a rather conservative ethos, just as it does all professional fields. (The evocation of a priesthood by the word "professional" is not unimportant.)
There is what partly followed from this, the general upper-classness of those who are likely to have access to the educational credentialing while being in a position to brave the low starting salaries in that career.
There is their occupational contact with an elite, which often dazzles them--not least in its "show business for ugly people" form, as they identify upward and imagine themselves up on society's commanding heights with the people they write about, and even becoming one of them (up until they learn the hard way that they are not really members of the club).
And there is the fact that journalists so often see themselves as "storytellers," offering narrative rather than analysis--a tendency to which I suppose they are the more susceptible in that so many of those who do become journalists have literary aspirations, as the attempts at "color" in the nonfiction books they write all too clearly show.
Alas, the articles-puffed-up-into-books they tend to produce rarely show much sign of promise in that field.
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
The Conservatism of Artists, and the Hollywood Strike
Considering what Upton Sinclair (among others) had to say about the tendency of artists to conservatism I found myself thinking of the recent Hollywood strike. After all, there seems to me no question that Hollywood's writers, if commonly characterized by mainstream and right-wing commentators as a pack of "liberals," have for the most part produced a thoroughly conservative product, glorifying the rich and powerful, championing traditional institutions like religion, etc., etc., as they obfuscate or elide social realities that do not fit in with orthodox views of the world. Yet amid the deteriorating working conditions Hollywood's personnel have faced this last decade and longer, and the labor battles of more recent times, the writers found themselves personally confronting a less rosy social reality than the one they present in their movies in the process of just trying to pay their bills for having found themselves at the sharp end of neoliberalism-come-to-Tinseltown.
Of course, these days artists in Hollywood as elsewhere are kept on a very short leash by businessmen even more deeply invested in a conservative outlook than they. Yet, for whatever it may be worth, I wonder if their worsening lot and their fights with management have not had an effect on how they see the world.
Of course, these days artists in Hollywood as elsewhere are kept on a very short leash by businessmen even more deeply invested in a conservative outlook than they. Yet, for whatever it may be worth, I wonder if their worsening lot and their fights with management have not had an effect on how they see the world.
That Particular Stony-Faced Expression . . .
I have observed time and again that a certain sort of person--usually of very low intelligence--responds to any remarking of the ills of the world, and especially those of society, with a certain stony-faced expression, in which the lower jaw tends to jut out in a rather simian fashion. No one ever asked anything of this person--but they compulsively reacted as if someone had just come to them for a large handout which they were refusing, often as merely the beginning of a display of conspicuous callousness.
The very low intelligence of such persons cannot be emphasized enough. But that is far from being the whole of the issue. There is what that low intelligence led them toward--a narrowness as well as weakness of mind that leaves them uninterested in anything they cannot eat, a deeply neurotic intolerance for any reminder that all is not well with the world as some completely unacceptable attack on their own personal selfishness, and frequently an idiot desire to swagger combined with an alertness to any opportunity to do just that by showing how much they do not care.
Bad enough as this all is, it goes further still with some--an ingrained contempt for the disadvantaged as such, and equal contempt as such for those conscientious about such matters, and the combination of raging conformism and self-importance that makes them think it is their duty to police others' statements and punish anything that they register as the scent of dissent.
Of course, dealing with such is loathsome--and the Internet is crawling with them.
The very low intelligence of such persons cannot be emphasized enough. But that is far from being the whole of the issue. There is what that low intelligence led them toward--a narrowness as well as weakness of mind that leaves them uninterested in anything they cannot eat, a deeply neurotic intolerance for any reminder that all is not well with the world as some completely unacceptable attack on their own personal selfishness, and frequently an idiot desire to swagger combined with an alertness to any opportunity to do just that by showing how much they do not care.
Bad enough as this all is, it goes further still with some--an ingrained contempt for the disadvantaged as such, and equal contempt as such for those conscientious about such matters, and the combination of raging conformism and self-importance that makes them think it is their duty to police others' statements and punish anything that they register as the scent of dissent.
Of course, dealing with such is loathsome--and the Internet is crawling with them.
The Searing of the Heart and the Cruel Irony of the Artist's Path Through Life
It seems to me safe to say that many artists become artists because they are more sensitive than others, and what another century would have called "sensibility" and "fine feeling" mean so much to them--and pursuing a career as an artist seems to them a way to save that from what they fear will be the deadening of their sensibility by the kind of workaday existence those not born rich typically endure, with its drudgery and innumerable meanness. Living from their art, living well from their art, thus seem a salvation from something unbearable. Alas, the artist rarely finds the alternative for which they hope in that artistic career, the more in as so few ever really do get to live well from their art, while even of those who do find their way to that all but the most fortunate are apt to find, as Balzac wrote in Lost Illusions, that by the time they attain success their "heart is seared and callous in every most sensitive spot," their faculty for that sensibility and that fine feeling by which they set store seared and calloused with it--and many apt to be reduced to pessimism and even nihilism. Indeed, the common fate is probably to find their heart "seared and callous in every most sensitive spot," without ever attaining success.
It is hard to see how it could be otherwise in a society where art is nothing but something from which business can make money, and the price of trying to be one of the few who can live this way is far, far higher than the propagandists of "aspiration" allow--the more is as so many pay the price, with nothing but what they lost to show for it.
It is hard to see how it could be otherwise in a society where art is nothing but something from which business can make money, and the price of trying to be one of the few who can live this way is far, far higher than the propagandists of "aspiration" allow--the more is as so many pay the price, with nothing but what they lost to show for it.
What Gets Read Online?
Over the years I have argued that, contrary to the advice peddled on any number of sites, the real reason no one is reading your blog is because the ratio of blogs to potential blog readers is extremely high--far more people wanting to write for an audience than people wanting to be an audience for this sort of content (especially as online life becomes less and less verbal and more and more audiovisual, vloggers replacing bloggers, etc.). Indeed, where people of conventional and conformist mind will call that activity extremely "competitive" I would say that the sheer number of people jostling for attention (600 million blogs existing in the world according to one estimate), and the terms on which they do so (our reliance on search engines indexing very little of the Internet with search subordinate to ad dollars, the unwillingness of search engine users to venture far from the first "hit," etc., etc., ad nauseam), renders the idea of competition, in the sense of some functional market mechanism whereby consumers make judgments about the goods on offer and those who deliver the goods get ahead absolutely meaningless, any such sorting process completely collapsing under the pressure. This is made even worse by the fact that this is not a remotely level playing field--with those who can spend lots of money on site design and gaming the search engines and buying promotion plausibly having an edge, those who have connections with or can otherwise gain access to larger platforms and especially legacy media definitely having an edge, and so forth, all as search engines and other such means of discovery (apparently) "reward" those who have had clicks in the past with more visibility and more clicks, and vice-versa, so that those who start out obscure are likely to only become more so. The result is that many a writer seeking an audience online learns the hard way that no matter what they put out there no one will see it--while the sheerest drivel by someone with a claim, however dubious, to being a "somebody," will be lavished with attention and praises.
Still, even acknowledging that this is a game in which only an infinitesimal proportion of the players can win any prizes whatsoever, played on the most profoundly unfair terms from the outset with the odds getting much, much worse for those who fail to make a lot of headway early on, I will not deny that it seems to me that some kinds of content are indeed more likely to gain an audience than others; that, even if very, very few of the purveyors of that kind of material gain any audience at all, the point is that they are producing what people are taking, however little good it does them, while one is likely to find that those who do have an audience tend to offer their readers such fare.
I doubt I will surprise anyone if I say that people are more inclined to the entertaining as against the informative, the simple and quick as against the complex and involved, the emotive to the cerebral--and thus, of course, the narrative over the analytical, the personal to the impersonal. When they do go in for information the same principles apply--as they favor what promises to be immediately and readily useful in their own personal lives for solving a problem they care about (even if it is a false promise) rather than require any actual thought on their part, let alone any interest in the wider world.
Meanwhile, one gets further appealing to the audience that is actually there online than the population at large, of which the online audience may be less representative than most think. The talk of "digital divides" may seem passé in a world where even a decade ago more people had cell phones than toilets, and a significant majority of humanity is online, but it is one thing to have access to the Internet, another to spend lots and lots of time online using the Internet to do things besides access the most essential utilities or perform the most essential online tasks so that one has a chance of discovering things and taking an interest in them; of being active in comment threads, forums, social media; of registering their "likes" and sharing those things they find interesting with others. Consider, for example, the difference between the white collar worker who has a desktop at work--inside their own office--and is little supervised during the working day, and the service worker who has to hand their cell phone over to management when they clock in and only get it back when they clock out. Consider the difference between the web-connected individual with the full range of devices, with their handy keyboards if they want to do any prolonged typing in searching for information or engaging in dialogues, as against the person whose sole online access is through that cell phone they hand over when they come in to work--or maybe their local library. Between those extremes there lies a lot of difference in the quantity and quality of time spent online--and what appealing to those at one end of that spectrum will get you as against appealing to those at the other, online life still disproportionately dominated by the socioeconomically privileged, such that appealing to them pays off better than doing otherwise (a fact that has had important implications for our politics).
Will working in the way suggested here make you an online star? Very likely not. But to the very small extent that anyone can hope to reach an online audience their odds of succeeding with this course are probably a good deal better than the opposite.
Still, even acknowledging that this is a game in which only an infinitesimal proportion of the players can win any prizes whatsoever, played on the most profoundly unfair terms from the outset with the odds getting much, much worse for those who fail to make a lot of headway early on, I will not deny that it seems to me that some kinds of content are indeed more likely to gain an audience than others; that, even if very, very few of the purveyors of that kind of material gain any audience at all, the point is that they are producing what people are taking, however little good it does them, while one is likely to find that those who do have an audience tend to offer their readers such fare.
I doubt I will surprise anyone if I say that people are more inclined to the entertaining as against the informative, the simple and quick as against the complex and involved, the emotive to the cerebral--and thus, of course, the narrative over the analytical, the personal to the impersonal. When they do go in for information the same principles apply--as they favor what promises to be immediately and readily useful in their own personal lives for solving a problem they care about (even if it is a false promise) rather than require any actual thought on their part, let alone any interest in the wider world.
Meanwhile, one gets further appealing to the audience that is actually there online than the population at large, of which the online audience may be less representative than most think. The talk of "digital divides" may seem passé in a world where even a decade ago more people had cell phones than toilets, and a significant majority of humanity is online, but it is one thing to have access to the Internet, another to spend lots and lots of time online using the Internet to do things besides access the most essential utilities or perform the most essential online tasks so that one has a chance of discovering things and taking an interest in them; of being active in comment threads, forums, social media; of registering their "likes" and sharing those things they find interesting with others. Consider, for example, the difference between the white collar worker who has a desktop at work--inside their own office--and is little supervised during the working day, and the service worker who has to hand their cell phone over to management when they clock in and only get it back when they clock out. Consider the difference between the web-connected individual with the full range of devices, with their handy keyboards if they want to do any prolonged typing in searching for information or engaging in dialogues, as against the person whose sole online access is through that cell phone they hand over when they come in to work--or maybe their local library. Between those extremes there lies a lot of difference in the quantity and quality of time spent online--and what appealing to those at one end of that spectrum will get you as against appealing to those at the other, online life still disproportionately dominated by the socioeconomically privileged, such that appealing to them pays off better than doing otherwise (a fact that has had important implications for our politics).
Will working in the way suggested here make you an online star? Very likely not. But to the very small extent that anyone can hope to reach an online audience their odds of succeeding with this course are probably a good deal better than the opposite.
The Technocrat and The Cult of the Good School
For some decades it has been common for social critics to speak of professionals, "experts," technocrats, "the overclass" (Michael Lind's term, that one) or what have you as a distinct social grouping with a shared political sensibility that has been important in political social life because of the group's numbers, functions, affluence, social standing and broad cultural influence.
I think there is at least some truth to that view. Indeed, the outlook of the "professional" seems to me to have played a formative role in the political centrism that has dominated the mainstream of American political life for nearly a century now. If as I have said again and again centrism is readable as an extension of the American and Western conservative tradition, applying the classical conservative outlook to a liberal political and economic order, the specifics of the prevailing adaptation do reflect the outlook of professionals (a group whose conservatism is important to understanding its attitude toward its work, and toward society and its place in it), while centrism has an important base of support in the professional groups.
Still, I also think that one can make too much of professionals' supposed apartness from other groups, not concurring in how far apart from the "business class" some treat them as being. In the age of the MBA and "Big Law" and a thoroughly corporatized and financialized health care sector, in which engineers and lawyers rise through the ranks of their firms to become CEOs, the distinction between "professionals" and "business" can seem extremely overrated, especially at the top--business thoroughly "professionalized." At the same time the old-fashioned independent professional (like the lawyer or doctor with their own small practice) is themselves a businessperson, often servicing the needs of business. And at least among those simply doing well their being in the same tax bracket produces a certain commonality of interest between them (most obviously in opposition to high upper-bracket taxes, the more in as the use of the revenue so gained by the government is intended to benefit people other than themselves). Indeed, the up-and-coming lawyer in the blue-chip firm would seem to have far more in common in outlook and personal interest with an affluent businessperson than they would with, for example, a similarly professional schoolteacher (whose income, status, self-interest are, when looked at without illusions, make them working rather than "middle" class to the extent that that term ever had meaning).
The result is that the differences are often subtler than some make them out to be, with one matter that analysts of "the overclass" make much of their educational snobbery. This does not seem to me to me to be limited to the professionals by any means. But I do think it can be admitted that such snobbery has a different significance for the more elite, more technocracy-committed, professionals than to other elite groups. For the rich generally sending their children to an "elite" (read: exclusive and expensive, whatever the quality of the education it confers) college is simply what is expected of youth of a certain social standing, such an education one of the rituals and trappings of their social class little questioned, all as those looking for more justification find it easily enough in the view of college as a place for rich people to store their grown-up kids for a few years, a furthering of their socialization, an opportunity to integrate them into and develop the social networks of the elite. For the professional of the kind described here, however, there seems a snarling vehemence about attendance at such a school as a legitimator of the exalted status they demand and insist they deserve, proof that they are mentally and morally superior to those who never had occasion to park their car in Harvard yard, whose disadvantage and deprivations they regard as equally deserved--and thus not the problem of those more richly rewarded by what they insist (again, snarlingly) to be a meritocratic social system.
I think that in many ways this has been a more obfuscating and pernicious perspective than the view of elite college attendance as the mere badge of social privilege it has always been, and never ceased to be because it passes off what is almost always partly, and certainly usually, social privilege as if it were such superiority. Yet the different attitudes are merely parts of a common elitist package that in the end has far more to do with the money about which "respectable" persons are so reticent to speak than it does the "edumacation" they are so eager to extoll. Indeed, the next time you see the courtiers of the elite platform some "expert" for the purpose of telling the public what to think and shore up their "Because I say so" on the basis of their "credentials," rather than being awed by how they spent a decade after high school moving from Harvard to the Sorbonne to Oxford in the course of accumulating a mass of nearly unmarketable degrees, ask "Who paid the bill?" during all those years, and all that travel. And then after hearing the banalities they will almost inevitably speak ask yourself "Was the intellect I just saw on display worth the money?"
I think you already know the answer to that.
I think there is at least some truth to that view. Indeed, the outlook of the "professional" seems to me to have played a formative role in the political centrism that has dominated the mainstream of American political life for nearly a century now. If as I have said again and again centrism is readable as an extension of the American and Western conservative tradition, applying the classical conservative outlook to a liberal political and economic order, the specifics of the prevailing adaptation do reflect the outlook of professionals (a group whose conservatism is important to understanding its attitude toward its work, and toward society and its place in it), while centrism has an important base of support in the professional groups.
Still, I also think that one can make too much of professionals' supposed apartness from other groups, not concurring in how far apart from the "business class" some treat them as being. In the age of the MBA and "Big Law" and a thoroughly corporatized and financialized health care sector, in which engineers and lawyers rise through the ranks of their firms to become CEOs, the distinction between "professionals" and "business" can seem extremely overrated, especially at the top--business thoroughly "professionalized." At the same time the old-fashioned independent professional (like the lawyer or doctor with their own small practice) is themselves a businessperson, often servicing the needs of business. And at least among those simply doing well their being in the same tax bracket produces a certain commonality of interest between them (most obviously in opposition to high upper-bracket taxes, the more in as the use of the revenue so gained by the government is intended to benefit people other than themselves). Indeed, the up-and-coming lawyer in the blue-chip firm would seem to have far more in common in outlook and personal interest with an affluent businessperson than they would with, for example, a similarly professional schoolteacher (whose income, status, self-interest are, when looked at without illusions, make them working rather than "middle" class to the extent that that term ever had meaning).
The result is that the differences are often subtler than some make them out to be, with one matter that analysts of "the overclass" make much of their educational snobbery. This does not seem to me to me to be limited to the professionals by any means. But I do think it can be admitted that such snobbery has a different significance for the more elite, more technocracy-committed, professionals than to other elite groups. For the rich generally sending their children to an "elite" (read: exclusive and expensive, whatever the quality of the education it confers) college is simply what is expected of youth of a certain social standing, such an education one of the rituals and trappings of their social class little questioned, all as those looking for more justification find it easily enough in the view of college as a place for rich people to store their grown-up kids for a few years, a furthering of their socialization, an opportunity to integrate them into and develop the social networks of the elite. For the professional of the kind described here, however, there seems a snarling vehemence about attendance at such a school as a legitimator of the exalted status they demand and insist they deserve, proof that they are mentally and morally superior to those who never had occasion to park their car in Harvard yard, whose disadvantage and deprivations they regard as equally deserved--and thus not the problem of those more richly rewarded by what they insist (again, snarlingly) to be a meritocratic social system.
I think that in many ways this has been a more obfuscating and pernicious perspective than the view of elite college attendance as the mere badge of social privilege it has always been, and never ceased to be because it passes off what is almost always partly, and certainly usually, social privilege as if it were such superiority. Yet the different attitudes are merely parts of a common elitist package that in the end has far more to do with the money about which "respectable" persons are so reticent to speak than it does the "edumacation" they are so eager to extoll. Indeed, the next time you see the courtiers of the elite platform some "expert" for the purpose of telling the public what to think and shore up their "Because I say so" on the basis of their "credentials," rather than being awed by how they spent a decade after high school moving from Harvard to the Sorbonne to Oxford in the course of accumulating a mass of nearly unmarketable degrees, ask "Who paid the bill?" during all those years, and all that travel. And then after hearing the banalities they will almost inevitably speak ask yourself "Was the intellect I just saw on display worth the money?"
I think you already know the answer to that.
The Artist as Aristocrat
Those of conventional, "middle class" (aka, bourgeois) mind may look at the steady 8-to-6 routine of the employee at a materially productive task they regard as the sole responsible and respectable path (the more in as the routine entails no intrinsic pleasure, and much displeasure), and see in a person's opting for the career of an artist instead something subversive of conservative values. However, the choice the artist makes is apt to be a choice of one conservatism over another--rejecting the life of the bourgeois in favor of the life of the aristocrat. Like the aristocrat (certainly as analyzed by Thorstein Veblen) the artist lives not by diligence at "industrial tasks," but by a personal prowess that makes them part of an elite presumed to be entitled to a claim on the resources of a society where the majority is obliged to live on that diligent-industrial basis, all as the artist's motives often include a more than usually strong aspiration to enjoy what the bourgeois conventionally has little opportunity to partake of but which loom large in the aristocrat's life--leisure, the graces of life, personal distinction. They also include their avoiding the unattractions of the "workaday life" to which they are, similarly, likely to be more than usually averse (the kind of penury unavoidable by persons who do not have really great wealth, control by a "boss" for most of their waking hours, etc.), with really full enjoyment of all this hinging on their being vaulted from obscurity to that sort of latterday aristocratic existence called "celebrity."
Of course, it is a notorious fact that very, very few of the aspirants to celebrity by way of art or anything else actually realize that aspiration--and fewer still do so who are not themselves born connected with the world of the arts do so, or at least from backgrounds of comparable privilege facilitating entrée into that world. (Perhaps their parents were not movie stars, but as the sons of publishing executives and daughters of broadcasters still part of the "media-industrial complex." Or maybe if they did not have media jobs their parents were lawyers or real estate agents--to the stars! Or dad was a billionaire or mom a Senator. And so forth.)
All this, too, can seem a very plausible basis for, as David Walsh put it, "Bohemianism, individualism and egotism" that a bourgeois may disapprove for its implications in such matters as their urbanity or even self-indulgence in deviations from traditional standards in sexual conduct or narcotics consumption, or their libertarian opposition to intrusions of state authority into personal pleasure-seeking or the censorship of their work by authority figures--but which for all that are a long way from being "left." One may add to this that in getting to that point in their careers and in the public's renown at which one can really speak of them as artists and celebrities in good standing, enjoying the perquisites of the position, many will have experienced a brutalizing upward climb, which lends their assertion of their status that edge that comes with having had to fight (perhaps, fight without the support of those nearest and dearest from whom they would have expected loyalty) to get what they regard as merely their due recognized--all as they remember all too well the way "the public" ignored or insulted them. Combined with their attachment to the considerable privileges they enjoy, one can easily picture this making them at least as self-absorbed, self-pitying, callous to the plight of the less fortunate and hostile to any demands that might be made on the fortunate (like a higher tax bill) as any other "self-made man"--with all that goes with that ideologically. This is reinforced, again, by the reality that in a situation where business ultimately prevails it is those artists who most readily produce what business wants who are more likely to work, to get ahead, to exercise any influence over what gets made--and these, of course, tend to more readily produce what is wanted because their personal thoughts and sentiments are in line with those of the businessmen, thoughts and sentiments to which they gravitate as they go from merely being courtiers of the elite to being of the elite themselves (as it seems safe to say happens when as can now happen a writer or film director or recording artist becomes a producer, and the producer becomes one of the world's few thousand billionaires, and thus part of the "0.0001 percent").
For all that, there are artists who do espouse socially critical, left-leaning views and manage to produce works in accordance with them in spite of the considerable obstacles in the way of such. However, what is at issue here is not the existence of individual artists of left-leaning views, but the prevailing norm, especially among those who actually get to make a living from finding an appreciable audience their artistic production, and its extreme distance from the simple-minded yet endlessly repeated stereotypes of artists as leftist--and its implications for artistic production, which leftist analysts have been logging since at least Upton Sinclair's time, not least the way that those attracted to an aristocratic way of life are likely to give the lower orders they must find the less attractive for having sought to escape them the short shrift the arts have always given them.
Of course, it is a notorious fact that very, very few of the aspirants to celebrity by way of art or anything else actually realize that aspiration--and fewer still do so who are not themselves born connected with the world of the arts do so, or at least from backgrounds of comparable privilege facilitating entrée into that world. (Perhaps their parents were not movie stars, but as the sons of publishing executives and daughters of broadcasters still part of the "media-industrial complex." Or maybe if they did not have media jobs their parents were lawyers or real estate agents--to the stars! Or dad was a billionaire or mom a Senator. And so forth.)
All this, too, can seem a very plausible basis for, as David Walsh put it, "Bohemianism, individualism and egotism" that a bourgeois may disapprove for its implications in such matters as their urbanity or even self-indulgence in deviations from traditional standards in sexual conduct or narcotics consumption, or their libertarian opposition to intrusions of state authority into personal pleasure-seeking or the censorship of their work by authority figures--but which for all that are a long way from being "left." One may add to this that in getting to that point in their careers and in the public's renown at which one can really speak of them as artists and celebrities in good standing, enjoying the perquisites of the position, many will have experienced a brutalizing upward climb, which lends their assertion of their status that edge that comes with having had to fight (perhaps, fight without the support of those nearest and dearest from whom they would have expected loyalty) to get what they regard as merely their due recognized--all as they remember all too well the way "the public" ignored or insulted them. Combined with their attachment to the considerable privileges they enjoy, one can easily picture this making them at least as self-absorbed, self-pitying, callous to the plight of the less fortunate and hostile to any demands that might be made on the fortunate (like a higher tax bill) as any other "self-made man"--with all that goes with that ideologically. This is reinforced, again, by the reality that in a situation where business ultimately prevails it is those artists who most readily produce what business wants who are more likely to work, to get ahead, to exercise any influence over what gets made--and these, of course, tend to more readily produce what is wanted because their personal thoughts and sentiments are in line with those of the businessmen, thoughts and sentiments to which they gravitate as they go from merely being courtiers of the elite to being of the elite themselves (as it seems safe to say happens when as can now happen a writer or film director or recording artist becomes a producer, and the producer becomes one of the world's few thousand billionaires, and thus part of the "0.0001 percent").
For all that, there are artists who do espouse socially critical, left-leaning views and manage to produce works in accordance with them in spite of the considerable obstacles in the way of such. However, what is at issue here is not the existence of individual artists of left-leaning views, but the prevailing norm, especially among those who actually get to make a living from finding an appreciable audience their artistic production, and its extreme distance from the simple-minded yet endlessly repeated stereotypes of artists as leftist--and its implications for artistic production, which leftist analysts have been logging since at least Upton Sinclair's time, not least the way that those attracted to an aristocratic way of life are likely to give the lower orders they must find the less attractive for having sought to escape them the short shrift the arts have always given them.
Upton Sinclair on the "Accomplishment" Imparted by the Finishing School
A couple of years ago I wrote a post on Jane Austen's treatment of the theme of "the accomplished young lady", and specifically the extent to which it was a matter of foolish leisure class pretension than substance. In his discussion of the education provided by America's diversity of school systems in The Goslings, Upton Sinclair does not overlook the "finishing school," nor his knowledge of what they provide by way of his wife, a graduate of one of them (on New York's Fifth Avenue, no less), who acquired the accomplishments they provide.
As Sinclair remarks, the "accomplishment" consisted of the ability to "play three pieces on the piano, and three on the violin . . . sing three songs, and recite three poems, and dance three dances," while "she had painted three pictures, and modeled three busts, and heard three operas." Some, like the hacks who write Hollywood's garbage, are impressed by such a level of "accomplishment"--but as Sinclair's description makes clear even without his comment it is all laughably superficial, conceived "from the standpoint of the drawing-room, and just enough to get by on." Moreover, in line with the overlooked reality that time and energy and resources spent learning one thing are time and energy and resources not spent learning other things--such that Sinclair informs us that in acquiring all this accomplishment Sinclair's wife had "read three books."
Those unclear on just how much accomplishment is involved in playing three pieces, singing three songs, etc. might do well to think of just how much reading that is--and treat it as an index of the actual level of accomplishment in those other areas that seem more exotic and impressive to those who have not graduated finishing schools.
As Sinclair remarks, the "accomplishment" consisted of the ability to "play three pieces on the piano, and three on the violin . . . sing three songs, and recite three poems, and dance three dances," while "she had painted three pictures, and modeled three busts, and heard three operas." Some, like the hacks who write Hollywood's garbage, are impressed by such a level of "accomplishment"--but as Sinclair's description makes clear even without his comment it is all laughably superficial, conceived "from the standpoint of the drawing-room, and just enough to get by on." Moreover, in line with the overlooked reality that time and energy and resources spent learning one thing are time and energy and resources not spent learning other things--such that Sinclair informs us that in acquiring all this accomplishment Sinclair's wife had "read three books."
Those unclear on just how much accomplishment is involved in playing three pieces, singing three songs, etc. might do well to think of just how much reading that is--and treat it as an index of the actual level of accomplishment in those other areas that seem more exotic and impressive to those who have not graduated finishing schools.
The Intellectual Incuriosity of the Student
A certain sort of older person, addicted to the use of phrases like "Back in my day," commonly acts as if no want of what they regard as virtue ever appeared before the current crop of young people. As attitudes go it is as stupid as it is false and nasty, and in considering the incuriosity of young people more interested in their pleasures than in their schoolwork, or simply learning about the world around them--as has quite naturally always been the case--Sinclair raises the matter in The Goslings. Citing the answers turned in by young people to a contest quizzing them on such things as prominent public figures of the day the participants showed themselves generally ignorant of such things as the name of the governor of their state, but very knowledgeable about sports stars. (Thus did they all know who "Babe" Ruth was.) What makes Sinclair's recitation of what can seem a pedestrian enough sampling of youthful ignorance and disinterest worth noting (at least, to those who already understood that things were no different from what they are today a century ago) is that he sees it not as a matter of some failure of the "younger generation," but of the society around them, not least the schools that do so little to feed and encourage their curiosity, and so much to stultify it instead.
The Teaching Life and its Hidden Psychological Costs
One of the more interesting aspects of Upton Sinclair's study of the American school system The Goslings is his treatment of the situation and outlook of the schoolteacher with respect and sympathy, but also without the hypocrisy to which our "convenient social virtue"-demanding era is addicted. Yes, teachers do important work under lousy conditions--many of them rather heroically--but they are also human beings with human weaknesses and failings, the more in as they must cope with those lousy conditions. As Sinclair remarks, "[t]he effect" of these "is to reinforce and intensify the occupational diseases of the teaching profession, which are . . . aloofness from real life," and "timidity."
As Sinclair puts it, a "teacher lives in a little world of her own," during which she spends time primarily with students who, at the K-12 level, and especially its lower levels, are "children," and primarily has contact with other adults "whose life is as narrow as her own." Moreover, the same administrators, the same society, that accords them so little pay and respect apart from the "compliments [that] cost less than nothing" that John Galbraith spoke of as the aforementioned "virtue," "shut up" the teacher's "mind in class greed and snobbery," telling the teacher that they are a "lady" or "gentleman," a salary-earning member of the white collar middle class rather than a wage-earning member of the working class that people with the barest claim to gentility so fear, and desire to set themselves apart from (and are afraid of falling into) they really are members of that working class in the ways that count as "an employe of the school board and the superintendent" rather than "a free citizen" or "professional expert" (however much that propaganda of convenient social virtue tells them they are "professionals").
Indeed, as Sinclair remarks, his experience of "school and college administrators" expect the loyal, cheerful, "willing and obliging" attitude that he remembered in "want advertisements of 'domestics' in the days of [his] boyhood"--all as, as he puts in in a chapter titled "Teachers' Terror," he discusses the frightened attitude of those instructors who see through the illusions and delusions. As Sinclair remarks, those persons in professions that society really respects as professions--"lawyers . . . doctors . . . engineers" do not "permit their superiors to exercise control over their social life, and forbid them to dance or play an occasional game of bridge," nor keep them in a state of "such subservience that they regard themselves as bold progressives when they utter harmless platitudes." Moreover, the habit of being afraid makes "rabbits" of them, a tendency that in many a case remains with them long after many of them have departed the profession altogether and so can no longer be tyrannized the way they were before.
I imagine that many think all this today--but very few would dare put it the way Sinclair did, especially when arguing on behalf of teachers.
As Sinclair puts it, a "teacher lives in a little world of her own," during which she spends time primarily with students who, at the K-12 level, and especially its lower levels, are "children," and primarily has contact with other adults "whose life is as narrow as her own." Moreover, the same administrators, the same society, that accords them so little pay and respect apart from the "compliments [that] cost less than nothing" that John Galbraith spoke of as the aforementioned "virtue," "shut up" the teacher's "mind in class greed and snobbery," telling the teacher that they are a "lady" or "gentleman," a salary-earning member of the white collar middle class rather than a wage-earning member of the working class that people with the barest claim to gentility so fear, and desire to set themselves apart from (and are afraid of falling into) they really are members of that working class in the ways that count as "an employe of the school board and the superintendent" rather than "a free citizen" or "professional expert" (however much that propaganda of convenient social virtue tells them they are "professionals").
Indeed, as Sinclair remarks, his experience of "school and college administrators" expect the loyal, cheerful, "willing and obliging" attitude that he remembered in "want advertisements of 'domestics' in the days of [his] boyhood"--all as, as he puts in in a chapter titled "Teachers' Terror," he discusses the frightened attitude of those instructors who see through the illusions and delusions. As Sinclair remarks, those persons in professions that society really respects as professions--"lawyers . . . doctors . . . engineers" do not "permit their superiors to exercise control over their social life, and forbid them to dance or play an occasional game of bridge," nor keep them in a state of "such subservience that they regard themselves as bold progressives when they utter harmless platitudes." Moreover, the habit of being afraid makes "rabbits" of them, a tendency that in many a case remains with them long after many of them have departed the profession altogether and so can no longer be tyrannized the way they were before.
I imagine that many think all this today--but very few would dare put it the way Sinclair did, especially when arguing on behalf of teachers.
Upton Sinclair's The Goslings and the Burden of Teaching English Composition
In Upton Sinclair's rather exhaustively researched study of American education, The Goslings, Sinclair refers to the prevailing ideal of the contemporary school system as the "education mill," churning out a standardized product in its students on a "machine" and "quantity production basis."
In discussing this he refers to a survey of conditions in the profession of the National Council of Teachers of English which took into account their "theme" reading--which is to say, how much reading of student papers they had to do. This survey "found that the average teacher had four hours of 'theme' reading to do every day, while the average high school teacher had five hours," as a result of being "required to take care of 125 pupils per teacher." Many responded by simply not doing the work. Some went so far as to destroy "the great bulk of them unread and [give] credit without reading."
I do not have knowledge of any English teacher I have ever met, at the high school or college or any other level, doing anything like destroying papers, or even being able to do this, given just how much monitoring they are often subject to. (I remember getting every paper back, remember giving every paper back when I was an instructor.) But I am not shocked by the fact that someone facing five hours a day of student papers--five hours a day of the grading that English teachers do loathe--they have dodged the duty in such an extreme manner, in part because there is so much dodging of the task. Thus do colleges see full-time instructors dump the job of teaching "theme"-intensive composition on student Teaching Assistants, adjuncts, etc. and other lower-ranking, more disposable, personnel who cannot refuse the charge. The Assistants, who are apt to teach just one class a semester, have only so many papers to deal with (and anyway look forward to not teaching comp when they graduate), while the adjuncts' situations often vary, frequently working rather less than full-time, so they are likely to have a lot less than 125 students actually turning in papers regularly. Meanwhile, as Sinclair writes, teachers who did not destroy papers often "skimmed and skipped through every paper"--and it would be harder to prove this never happened, the more in as standards are less clear. (Just what counts as a really satisfactory or unsatisfactory examination of the paper? Where does one draw the line between a fast read and a skim? Etcetera. Besides, going into the job with even the best will in the world someone getting through a mountain of papers is likely to be a bit less thorough as they weary of the task.)
However, what seems to me worth pointing out is that Sinclair concludes from this that the system has put them in a very difficult spot (remember, they had to spend all day teaching, and after that prepare for the next day's courses, the associated paperwork, etc.)--and that here as elsewhere the "overworked, underpaid, underequipped" can only put forth the effort demanded of them by their bosses for so long before something gives.
Very, very, few would be so lucid and so frank as Sinclair about the matter today, either bashing the teachers for their lapses in "convenient social virtue" (in a way they would never bash, for example, people in business or those professions they really did respect as professions)--or vociferously denying that such lapses existed at all, because those who presume to speak for "society" are rather less inclined to cut teachers any slack than they are bankers.
In discussing this he refers to a survey of conditions in the profession of the National Council of Teachers of English which took into account their "theme" reading--which is to say, how much reading of student papers they had to do. This survey "found that the average teacher had four hours of 'theme' reading to do every day, while the average high school teacher had five hours," as a result of being "required to take care of 125 pupils per teacher." Many responded by simply not doing the work. Some went so far as to destroy "the great bulk of them unread and [give] credit without reading."
I do not have knowledge of any English teacher I have ever met, at the high school or college or any other level, doing anything like destroying papers, or even being able to do this, given just how much monitoring they are often subject to. (I remember getting every paper back, remember giving every paper back when I was an instructor.) But I am not shocked by the fact that someone facing five hours a day of student papers--five hours a day of the grading that English teachers do loathe--they have dodged the duty in such an extreme manner, in part because there is so much dodging of the task. Thus do colleges see full-time instructors dump the job of teaching "theme"-intensive composition on student Teaching Assistants, adjuncts, etc. and other lower-ranking, more disposable, personnel who cannot refuse the charge. The Assistants, who are apt to teach just one class a semester, have only so many papers to deal with (and anyway look forward to not teaching comp when they graduate), while the adjuncts' situations often vary, frequently working rather less than full-time, so they are likely to have a lot less than 125 students actually turning in papers regularly. Meanwhile, as Sinclair writes, teachers who did not destroy papers often "skimmed and skipped through every paper"--and it would be harder to prove this never happened, the more in as standards are less clear. (Just what counts as a really satisfactory or unsatisfactory examination of the paper? Where does one draw the line between a fast read and a skim? Etcetera. Besides, going into the job with even the best will in the world someone getting through a mountain of papers is likely to be a bit less thorough as they weary of the task.)
However, what seems to me worth pointing out is that Sinclair concludes from this that the system has put them in a very difficult spot (remember, they had to spend all day teaching, and after that prepare for the next day's courses, the associated paperwork, etc.)--and that here as elsewhere the "overworked, underpaid, underequipped" can only put forth the effort demanded of them by their bosses for so long before something gives.
Very, very, few would be so lucid and so frank as Sinclair about the matter today, either bashing the teachers for their lapses in "convenient social virtue" (in a way they would never bash, for example, people in business or those professions they really did respect as professions)--or vociferously denying that such lapses existed at all, because those who presume to speak for "society" are rather less inclined to cut teachers any slack than they are bankers.
"Overeducated"
I think we have all heard people toss around the term "overeducated"--usually as an epithet--but I suspect that few have given much thought, or even any, to what is in back of it.
Obviously to call someone overeducated is to say they have been given more education than they ought to have had. Sometimes the word is an insult of someone else's intelligence--as in, yes, they have an advanced degree, but really they are quite stupid and the education was wasted on a person of such limited faculties. However, it seems to me that it is much more common for the speaker to mean something else--something which frankly gives away society's hypocrisy about respect for education to reveal what people who talk this way tend to be really thinking, two things in particular:
1. Society is, must and always will be a hierarchical thing, and the lower orders ought not to have knowledge beyond what will make them useful to their "betters."
2. Knowledge that is not of immediate practical utility--which in this society is equated with its monetary return to themselves or their employer--is of no value.
In short: people, especially the poor, but not necessarily just the poor, should be given enough education to enable them to do their jobs, but no more, and intellectuals who would seek knowledge for any other purpose are be despised.
I leave it to you to infer from this the politics of those who throw around terms like "overeducated."
Obviously to call someone overeducated is to say they have been given more education than they ought to have had. Sometimes the word is an insult of someone else's intelligence--as in, yes, they have an advanced degree, but really they are quite stupid and the education was wasted on a person of such limited faculties. However, it seems to me that it is much more common for the speaker to mean something else--something which frankly gives away society's hypocrisy about respect for education to reveal what people who talk this way tend to be really thinking, two things in particular:
1. Society is, must and always will be a hierarchical thing, and the lower orders ought not to have knowledge beyond what will make them useful to their "betters."
2. Knowledge that is not of immediate practical utility--which in this society is equated with its monetary return to themselves or their employer--is of no value.
In short: people, especially the poor, but not necessarily just the poor, should be given enough education to enable them to do their jobs, but no more, and intellectuals who would seek knowledge for any other purpose are be despised.
I leave it to you to infer from this the politics of those who throw around terms like "overeducated."
Why Does Popular Culture Do Such a Bad Job of Depicting Intelligence?
Over the years I have more than once remarked how badly popular culture depicts intelligence--and had something to say about why it does so.
Right now it seems to me that, apart from the extent to which pop culture simply imitates other pop culture, or the reality that intelligence is rarely an ostentatious trait that lends itself to dramatic convenience, it reflects two fundamental aspects of how society treats intelligence:
1. Relentlessly referencing intelligence as a legitimator for inequality, with this epitomized by the constant portrayal of society's elite as geniuses.
2. Equally relentless anti-intellectualism.
Thus we end up with a society which despises intellectualism yet holds up the apparent intellectualism of the elite (so commonly presented as hyper-articulate, ultra-cultured, with a multitude of interests making them a polymath's polymath, etc.) is held up as proof of their inherent superiority with an expectation of the public deferring to it.
Of course, there are ways of finessing such contradictions. One is that point 1 comes before point 2, the propaganda on behalf of elite superiority coming in ahead of the detestation of intellectualism, and this easily enough. After all, the principal reason for the fear and hate shown intellectuals is the association of intellectualism with dissent--of which there is rarely any in the elite discussed here. Instead their intellectualism is made to seem a mere overflow of supposedly superabundant mental powers, and therefore harmless in itself, while affirming the idea that they are more than ordinary human beings. Besides, the rich and powerful are conventionally excused every sin and every crime in a hierarchical society--they the "unbound but protected"--with this going for the sins and crimes of intellectualism. It is those intellectuals in the other category, of and from and for the bound but unprotected, the more in as many of them do challenge the claims of the powerful (their claims to having a monopoly on intelligence, the social order which so privileges them), who are the real target of anti-intellectual sentiment.
Promulgators of conventional wisdom that they tend to be, artists are rarely equipped to question such things--and as a result of the conventional wisdom being complete idiocy generate complete and utter crap of the kind discussed here on a constant basis.
Right now it seems to me that, apart from the extent to which pop culture simply imitates other pop culture, or the reality that intelligence is rarely an ostentatious trait that lends itself to dramatic convenience, it reflects two fundamental aspects of how society treats intelligence:
1. Relentlessly referencing intelligence as a legitimator for inequality, with this epitomized by the constant portrayal of society's elite as geniuses.
2. Equally relentless anti-intellectualism.
Thus we end up with a society which despises intellectualism yet holds up the apparent intellectualism of the elite (so commonly presented as hyper-articulate, ultra-cultured, with a multitude of interests making them a polymath's polymath, etc.) is held up as proof of their inherent superiority with an expectation of the public deferring to it.
Of course, there are ways of finessing such contradictions. One is that point 1 comes before point 2, the propaganda on behalf of elite superiority coming in ahead of the detestation of intellectualism, and this easily enough. After all, the principal reason for the fear and hate shown intellectuals is the association of intellectualism with dissent--of which there is rarely any in the elite discussed here. Instead their intellectualism is made to seem a mere overflow of supposedly superabundant mental powers, and therefore harmless in itself, while affirming the idea that they are more than ordinary human beings. Besides, the rich and powerful are conventionally excused every sin and every crime in a hierarchical society--they the "unbound but protected"--with this going for the sins and crimes of intellectualism. It is those intellectuals in the other category, of and from and for the bound but unprotected, the more in as many of them do challenge the claims of the powerful (their claims to having a monopoly on intelligence, the social order which so privileges them), who are the real target of anti-intellectual sentiment.
Promulgators of conventional wisdom that they tend to be, artists are rarely equipped to question such things--and as a result of the conventional wisdom being complete idiocy generate complete and utter crap of the kind discussed here on a constant basis.
P.G. Wodehouse and "The Supercilious Stare"
Wodehouse characterizes the Supercilious Stare as uniquely English, and "the highly-strung foreigner" among Englishmen like those invading soldiers especially sensitive to it. I suppose that most Americans would not disagree with his characterization, given American stereotypes about England, and especially of the sort of English person that was Wodehouse's point of reference. (It is not England's working-class folks who find themselves among people in evening wear at strange dinner parties in tweed suits.) Still, it seems to me that as with many of those things we think as being uniquely of one culture or another, we can easily find much the same thing elsewhere, and maybe all over the world--England's more privileged social strata having no monopoly on The Supercilious Stare, a thing frequently encountered by native and new arrival alike on the other side of the Atlantic as well, and for much the same reason, the enforcement of social norms protecting privilege. This is all the more the case in that it is so often deployed when anyone utters a protest of things as they are among mindless devotees of the status quo who, as the privileged have so often been known to do, regard the aggrieved as insane and therefore not worth bothering about.
The Impressionability of Lucien de Rubempre--and of Artists
In discussing how artists perceive and cognize the world, and what it means for their art, Upton Sinclair (among others) laid great stress on the "impressionability" of artists. Interestingly, in portraying Lucien Chardon/de Rubempre in Lost Illusions Balzac made impressionability a cultural aspect of the character--and his fate. Seeing his brother-in-law and lifelong friend Lucien off to Paris, David Sechard worried about "his friend's unlucky instability of character . . . so easily led for good or evil." Ultimately it was not good that he was led for--but for the purposes of this discussion it is that instability that matters, and which Sinclair saw as the key to the way in which artists portray the world, with this not least the case with their politics. Impressionable beings that they are, those who are more free, open, active, better-resourced and socially "respectable" are the more likely to succeed in swaying them--and it is, of course, those in favor of things as they are whose propaganda is necessarily most pervasive and most affecting on that level.
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