Recently looking back on The Big Lebowski I encountered Graham Daesler's essay about that movie, which also takes up the matter of the Coen brothers' broader body of work. Over its course Daesler waxes poetic about his subject, which makes for an entertaining read--and if, as tends to be the case when writers wax poetic, he seems to me to give those of whom he writes more credit than is really due them, he is not without insight, or alertness to the limitations of, the movies and filmmakers he writes about, remarking in particular the Coen Brothers' misanthropy. The charge can seem easy given that misanthropy pretty much characterizes their whole generation of "indie" moviemakers, but it certainly seems not just warranted here, but fundamental to their choices of characters, and what they do with, or rather, to, them, with an evident sense of superiority and sense of self-satisfaction (presenting a parade of "dimwits, yokels, rubes, phonies . . . only to wreak havoc on their lives" in a manner Daesler compares to "kids collecting ants so they could incinerate them with a magnifying glass") in narratives in which meaning is pointedly elusive.
All that seems exemplified by the Coen brothers' 1991 film Barton Fink. That movie, "built around a protagonist who learns nothing and gains nothing, replete with red herring clues and meaningless symbolism" on the way to an ending Daesler describes as enigmatic, is "[t]he closest that Hollywood has ever come to making a Dadaist movie." I might add that it is particularly hard to escape the politics implicit in the Coen brothers' postmodernism in that movie--those of the hard right, all too evident in their deeply unpleasant caricature of a left-wing intellectual in the eponymous "learns nothing and gains nothing" protagonist.
Naturally this was very appealing to the critical community--but less so to me, which, I suppose, is how Big Lebowski, incoherent as that movie also is and mean-spirited as it can also be, made a sufficient impression on me that I had something to say about it all these decades later.
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
Of Corporate Anthems and the Insanity of the '90s
Back in November 1999 there was a Ford Motor Company commercial which had Charlotte Church singing over a lavish two minute music video glorifying the global automotive colossus and its then-subsidiaries Aston Martin, Jaguar, Lincoln, Mazda, Mercury and Volvo in a manner befitting the title "Global Anthem."
Seeing that commercial at its first airing I thought it was proof that the world had lost its mind.
The passage of a quarter of a century since has only confirmed me in that opinion--as has the fact that in all of the commentary I have seen, as people gush over the sheer technical virtuosity of the production and the expenditure of money and the number of people who saw it, and all the records it approached or broke in the process of becoming an historic global media event, I saw no evidence of apprehension of its social or political significance in the mainstream. How in those days when the utterly unhinged New Economy euphoria (or more accurately, marketing scam) with all its "market populist" idiocies was approaching its climax, people gawked in awe at what a quarter of a century before than Norman Jewison showed us in that film where sports fans rose for the corporate anthem, Rollerball--the media elite (and the idiots who let them do their thinking for them) with teary eyes embracing what had such a short time ago been repellent dystopia. And I think now as I did then of how very, very '90s all this was--the era's irony, as usual, absent when we needed it most, with all that says about the usefulness of irony as a response to the world's troubles.
Seeing that commercial at its first airing I thought it was proof that the world had lost its mind.
The passage of a quarter of a century since has only confirmed me in that opinion--as has the fact that in all of the commentary I have seen, as people gush over the sheer technical virtuosity of the production and the expenditure of money and the number of people who saw it, and all the records it approached or broke in the process of becoming an historic global media event, I saw no evidence of apprehension of its social or political significance in the mainstream. How in those days when the utterly unhinged New Economy euphoria (or more accurately, marketing scam) with all its "market populist" idiocies was approaching its climax, people gawked in awe at what a quarter of a century before than Norman Jewison showed us in that film where sports fans rose for the corporate anthem, Rollerball--the media elite (and the idiots who let them do their thinking for them) with teary eyes embracing what had such a short time ago been repellent dystopia. And I think now as I did then of how very, very '90s all this was--the era's irony, as usual, absent when we needed it most, with all that says about the usefulness of irony as a response to the world's troubles.
"You Must Be Doing it Wrong!"
In the society we live in everyone is supposed to be striving for "success," and in doing so driving for "the very top." (Every student should be aiming for Harvard, everyone should be aiming for a place in the three commas club, and so forth.)
Yet anyone not completely detached from reality (admittedly, not being completely detached from reality makes it very hard to accept the "conventional wisdom" of this society) knows that there is very little room at the top, and even many, many rungs down from the top. There is in fact so little room that an individual can be doing everything "right," and yet getting nowhere, because the opportunity that no man makes makes all the difference between middling, even paltry-seeming accomplishment and "the commanding heights."
Yet in spite of this reality the conventional tendency is to assume that those on the commanding heights did the right things, and others didn't.
You're not a billionaire? Then you must have been going about it the wrong way, they decide, and start second-guessing every decision you have ever made in your life--never mind whether they are themselves billionaires.
The stupidity and obliviousness of this kind of response are staggering--and par for the course where the cult of success is concerned.
Yet anyone not completely detached from reality (admittedly, not being completely detached from reality makes it very hard to accept the "conventional wisdom" of this society) knows that there is very little room at the top, and even many, many rungs down from the top. There is in fact so little room that an individual can be doing everything "right," and yet getting nowhere, because the opportunity that no man makes makes all the difference between middling, even paltry-seeming accomplishment and "the commanding heights."
Yet in spite of this reality the conventional tendency is to assume that those on the commanding heights did the right things, and others didn't.
You're not a billionaire? Then you must have been going about it the wrong way, they decide, and start second-guessing every decision you have ever made in your life--never mind whether they are themselves billionaires.
The stupidity and obliviousness of this kind of response are staggering--and par for the course where the cult of success is concerned.
"Ya Gotta Have Faith." But Faith in What, Exactly?
It is a commonplace that people need "faith," but the statement is as ambiguous as it is banal.
Today it seems that when most hear the word "faith" they associate it with religion. Religion is, of course, usually exclusive--famously, often to the point of extreme intolerance. Yet those saying "ya gotta have faith" do not often seem to be recommending belief in a particular religion, at times seeming to imply that even something as hazy as the idea that "the universe always has a plan" will suffice.
It is, in short, a commendation of if not religion then religiosity, in the view that the world is an ordered place in a way not necessarily perceivable with the senses or recognizable through the exercise of reasoning from that sensory data--which may well indicate the opposite of any such ordering--with the implication that this ordering is somehow benign ("Whatever is, is right") and a denial that reason is a sufficient basis for humans getting along in this world.
Putting it bluntly, to speak of "faith" in this way is to champion an irrational, anti-rational and highly conservative stance in a shorthand fashion that, I think, goes right over most people's heads, with this perhaps its attraction for many, the fact that the statement is so ambiguous and so banal that few give a highly debatable position any consideration whatsoever making them feel the freer in asserting it.
Today it seems that when most hear the word "faith" they associate it with religion. Religion is, of course, usually exclusive--famously, often to the point of extreme intolerance. Yet those saying "ya gotta have faith" do not often seem to be recommending belief in a particular religion, at times seeming to imply that even something as hazy as the idea that "the universe always has a plan" will suffice.
It is, in short, a commendation of if not religion then religiosity, in the view that the world is an ordered place in a way not necessarily perceivable with the senses or recognizable through the exercise of reasoning from that sensory data--which may well indicate the opposite of any such ordering--with the implication that this ordering is somehow benign ("Whatever is, is right") and a denial that reason is a sufficient basis for humans getting along in this world.
Putting it bluntly, to speak of "faith" in this way is to champion an irrational, anti-rational and highly conservative stance in a shorthand fashion that, I think, goes right over most people's heads, with this perhaps its attraction for many, the fact that the statement is so ambiguous and so banal that few give a highly debatable position any consideration whatsoever making them feel the freer in asserting it.
The Age of Austerity and the Assault on Britain's Libraries
Reading United Nations' Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Professor Philip Alston's report on his visit to Britain and assessment of what the "age of austerity" the Tories and New Labour inflicted on the country (which, to its credit, outraged the British government and gutter press) I remember being struck by his references to the country's libraries. This was a matter not just of their making books and other reading material available to the public, but their affording particular amenities of special importance "to those living in poverty . . . including . . . a safe community space," and "access to a computer"--the latter of special relevance in a time in which the government was making access to much of the social safety net online-only through its replacement of a half dozen earlier programs with the "digital by default" system of "Universal Credit," even though those who need that system most are exactly the people least likely to have personal Internet access. The result was that, as Alston put it, Britain's "[p]ublic libraries are on the frontline of helping the digitally excluded and digitally illiterate who wish to claim their right to Universal Credit," and indeed the country's libraries had to deal with "claimants who arrive at the library, often in a panic, to get help claiming benefits online," with the City Library in Newcastle (a city of some three hundred thousand) alone obliged to assist almost two thousand such claimants in the August 2017-September 2018 period alone.
Of course, this was as the libraries saw their resourcing shrink. Apparently the whole process so far has seen the funding of Britain's libraries slashed by over half and a third of the libraries themselves shut down, with all that this especially means for access to their services outside the more urbanized areas--even as the uses to which libraries are being put grow. (Not only are they safe spaces--they are now "warm spaces" as well.)
The situation seems describable as collapse--all as I suspect that the pain Keir Starmer (who experienced as he in in discarding solemn pledges needed no time whatsoever before his promise that there would be no return to austerity turned into a promise of austerity that he seems almost certain to keep, with warmth in winter one of those things he has explicitly promised to take away from many) means to inflict on the British public's more vulnerable members will be felt in this area as in many others in the months and years ahead.
Of course, this was as the libraries saw their resourcing shrink. Apparently the whole process so far has seen the funding of Britain's libraries slashed by over half and a third of the libraries themselves shut down, with all that this especially means for access to their services outside the more urbanized areas--even as the uses to which libraries are being put grow. (Not only are they safe spaces--they are now "warm spaces" as well.)
The situation seems describable as collapse--all as I suspect that the pain Keir Starmer (who experienced as he in in discarding solemn pledges needed no time whatsoever before his promise that there would be no return to austerity turned into a promise of austerity that he seems almost certain to keep, with warmth in winter one of those things he has explicitly promised to take away from many) means to inflict on the British public's more vulnerable members will be felt in this area as in many others in the months and years ahead.
"Yesterday's Revolutionary, Today's Reactionary"
Considering my experience of Thackeray's Vanity Fair my thoughts turn to what Professor Ron Singer has to say of the classic novel, namely that yesterday's revolutionary becomes tomorrow's reactionary. Professor Singer had in mind the telling of the story--the later "aesthetic stricture requiring objectively, purely descriptive fiction" with which Thackeray's very "talkative" narration is out of line, but one may wonder if that is not the case politically given how, as Singer explains, the book was seen as socially subversive as well. Still, if allowing that a work of two centuries ago can seem more conservative today than it did at the time, it does seem to me that some of Thackeray's contemporaries still come across as having more "edge" that way than he did. If Dickens, getting his history from Thomas Carlyle and loaded with English prejudice against a country "less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident" could see in the French Revolution little but the guillotine that has so dominated conservative (and thus, mainstream) imagination of the event down to Ridley Scott's Napoleon, his empathy for the downtrodden and hatred for their oppressors and consequent disgust for the Old Regime comes through, as does a sense of history as tragedy, so much so that one should never forget that before the first guillotine blade fell France was the kind of country which sentences "a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards," while the conventional stress on Madame Defarge as the villain of the story (rather than the Marquis St. Evrémonde and those he represented) seems exceedingly simple-minded--all as Dickens' virtues rather than his failings have served to make him unfashionable with the makers and unmakers of respectable opinion these days. For now, at least, I do not think anything remotely like that can be claimed for Vanity Fair.
On the Conservatism of Journalists
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.
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.
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.
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