The Importance of Being Earnest
BROOKS, DAVID
Ideas The Importance of Being Earnest By David Brooks Irving Howe was on the warpath. The year was 1954, and Howe saw the forces of depravity closing in. He saw the great maw of middle class...
...He investigated the Great Books series, the educational radio programs, the Book of the Month Club, and called middle class culture "the danger . . . the enemy outside the walls...
...Psychiatry was an imperial profession in those days, with psychiatrists and the psychiatry-minded feeling competent to speak on all sorts of issues...
...It probably would have been worth tolerating middlebrow earnestness if we could have back some of that middlebrow faith and idealism...
...For example, while the middlebrows were earnestly trying to climb up the cultural ladder, many highbrows demonstrated their sophistication by climbing down...
...We all must rally round...
...It undercuts the very premise of the middlebrow, which is that culture and character are things worth being serious about...
...The middlebrow magazines of the 1950s were incredibly high-minded and pompous...
...You don't see as many people consuming culture as if it were an exercise machine (Read philosophy 20 minutes a day and have a better soul...
...At the center of middlebrow there was an admirable faith that the quality of one's character was in one's own hands...
...It is hard to work up much faith in the secular faiths that were so evident in the 1950s...
...the swamp...
...Archibald MacLeish in the 50s and the New Leftists in the 60s were both serious and earnest, even while arguing for radically different worlds...
...We have lost our concern with ends because we have lost our touch with reality because we are estranged from the means to reality which is the poem-a work of art," wrote the ur-middlebrow poet Archibald MacLeish in the Atlantic...
...And they did...
...And the idea drew on the Unitarian tradition of self-mastery...
...Academic theorists need to show that they can see through and deconstruct high ideals...
...The horror of it was almost too much to contemplate...
...Middlebrow culture made it impossible to distinguish between who was serious and who was not...
...David Riesman explained Thorstein Veblen's rebelliousness as a projection of father-hatred...
...The highbrows didn't only undermine the Saturday Review...
...They had located a force that threatened to destroy civilization, and that force was dubbed "middlebrow" (Virginia Woolf's term...
...Dwight MacDonald was disturbed by the way Life mixed the high with the low: An editorial hailing Bertrand Russell's 80th birthday ("A Great Mind is Still Annoying and Adorning Our Age") ran opposite a photo of a mother arguing with a Little League umpire ("Mom Gets Thumb...
...In July 1956, Henry A. Davidson, M.D., wrote a piece called "Our Mouth Centered Culture" in which he argued, without a touch of irony, that "we are deep in an oral stage of our culture...
...Now we have gone off in the other direction...
...As Delbanco writes, "The idea that man is a receptor of truth from God has been relinquished, and replaced with the idea that reality is an unstable zone between phenomena (unknowable in themselves) and innumerable fields of mental activity (which we call persons) by which they are apprehended...
...Richard Hofstadter explained the ultraconservatives as a collection of people whose hostility toward their parents "cannot be admitted to consciousness...
...It comes in the 1970s, with the popularization of irony...
...He maintained that the mouth is a symbol of security, since we spend the most secure moments of our lives suckling at our mother's breast...
...There were six-page spreads devoted to the abstract expressionists, long treatments of British painters called the Kitchen Sink School, and generous attention given to even obscure painters such as Charles Burchfield and Stanton MacDonald-Wright...
...A single stroke of paint, backed by work and a mind that understood its potency and implications, could restore to man the freedom lost in twenty centuries of apology and devices for subjugation," wrote the painter Clyfford Still...
...These intellectuals preferred a world in which High Culture was high (their milieu) and everything else was low...
...Those quotation marks discredit the idea that it is possible to have faith in anything...
...But the highbrows who waged rhetorical wars with the middlebrows didn't appreciate the good that was enmeshed in the ludicrous...
...Psychiatry can plumb the depths of the human mind-that are hard to take so seriously today...
...The hipster was an "American existentialist" who divorced himself from society, who cut himself off from his roots, who lived solely for the present as an outlaw...
...Let the masses have their Masscult, let the few who care about good writing, painting, music, architecture, philosophy, etc., have their High Culture, and don't fuzz up the distinction with Midcult," MacDonald concluded...
...No wonder there is this vague anxiety running through the body politic, this sense of helplessness and cynicism...
...It corrupted everything with its moralizing, and bought off true artists with lures of wealth...
...Such thuggery can lead to isolated truths, in pursuit of Mailer's ultimate goal, an "orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it...
...Meanwhile, the artists and novelists, who were treated as oracles in the fifties, are now denizens of their own seminar-circuit ghettos, virtually ignored as truth-tellers by the mainstream culture...
...Delbanco is talking about his own small academic milieu (religious faith is doing fine among three-quarters of Americans...
...They began to argue that rich perceptions and character development could be achieved by release rather than by self-discipline, by antisocial behavior rather than by civic do-goodism...
...So there's little hope of finding some Great Cause just around the corner...
...The cultural trendsetters of the 1950s revolted against middlebrow in its totality...
...He saw the great maw of middle class commercialism- magazines, publishing houses, movie studios...
...Middle class Americans were trying to educate themselves...
...Sometimes they abused this authority...
...But pervasive irony punctures secular faiths, and it makes idealism itself seem ridiculous...
...All of the stuff we now dismiss as trashy Gail Sheehy reductionism was in the 1950s treated with utmost respect and seriousness...
...It probably has something to do with the loss of secular ideals...
...They were so revolted by middlebrow piety that they set out to ridicule and undermine it...
...The second victims are those who think it would be nice to be idealistic about something...
...But they didn't understand that this was a Pyrrhic victory...
...They were creating a new form of consumer culture...
...We must roll up our sleeves...
...Academics have burrowed into specialization and people outside the academy give them little authority to speak on broader matters, unless (like Doris Kearns Goodwin) they are good on TV...
...The Harvard Business Review published essays like "The Executive Neurosis...
...The people in the 1950s had just seen the Nazis and the Holocaust...
...In 1955, Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization began its career as a cult classic, with its call for "polymorphous sexuality" that "would lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family...
...Everybody wants to prove he is on to the game...
...It's also a democratic creed...
...A person's leisure time was considered consequential...
...their own authority and the standards they held dear were victims of collateral damage...
...Mailer seemed to mean this quite literally...
...Such a person would have richer perceptions and a fuller life...
...Edmund Wilson apparently felt qualified to talk on subjects such as economics on which he clearly knew nothing, and people seemed to listen...
...Mailer developed a character called the hipster, who was antithetical to the middlebrow in every way...
...They were committed to a series of secular religions-Art can save your soul...
...These arrivistes were reading the Saturday Review and the New York Times Book Review and tromping with their moralistic steps over everything that was sacred and subtle...
...The treatment of art, for example, was particularly cloying...
...Irony folds in on itself, and we become ironic about our own irony, ever and ever more detached...
...By the 1970s, a movie critic, Pauline Kael, was considered among the most important cultural critics of the age, and she was praising nudie slasher movies like Carrie and Body Double...
...Writers frequently claimed that America's social problems derived from the fact that Americans were not in touch with their artistic geniuses...
...Next to the middlebrow culture of the fifties, ours seems an age of cynics, an age with relatively few things to be idealistic about...
...The New Republic published a column called "A Psychiatrist Comments" in which psychiatrists would offer their professional views on politics and social situations...
...But intellectuals of that age didn't flinch...
...Nobody uses words like truth and art in the upper case these days...
...That postwar earnestness was frittered away...
...Irony is the ultimate rejection of the middlebrow...
...Cultural essays might mention Freud's castration theory...
...Virginia Woolf called the middlebrow "sticky slime" and "a pernicious pest...
...You don't see as much pretentious attitudinizing about "Art," but at a high cost: The hierarchy of high and low culture has been scrambled beyond recognition...
...Those evils do not allow an ironic sensibility...
...Howe surveyed the landscape and saw the broken souls of his colleagues: "Writers today have no choice, often enough, but to write for magazines like the New Yorker- and worse, far worse...
...It is whatever is lower that we take to be more real," Denis de Rougemont once wrote, in a phrase the sums up the current mode...
...Today, middlebrow earnestness is hardly in evidence...
...Editorials in magazines like the Saturday Review carried such painfully earnest headlines as "The Future Belongs to the Educated Man" and "Art: Giver of Life and Peace...
...The academic theory that has grown up in this era treats people, ideas, and everything else as the product of chance and "civilization" as a series of ideological deceptions...
...Indeed, if you page through the magazines of the past 40 years, the big cultural break comes not in the 1960s, with the New Left...
...the choices you made would affect the quality of your character...
...Hollywood types need to show that they are hard-boiled players...
...Harper's magazine presented an essay by a Frenchman named Raymond Leopold Bruck-berger grandly titled "An Assignment for Intellectuals" which it summarized as follows: "A French soldier-priest suggests that American writers are shirking their duty-not only to their country- but to Truth...
...It was the genteel tradition and middle class cultural aspiration...
...Culture," Emerson wrote in 1867, "implies all which gives the mind possession of its own powers...
...This creed drew on the long-standing Emersonian faith in high culture...
...The middle classes were going to museums and joining the Book of the Month Club, admiring "literature" in the form of Thornton Wilder and Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea...
...At first it seems to release you from the stultifying moralism of the middlebrow...
...But in a world corroded by irony, nobody wants to appear idealistic...
...Leslie Fiedler was writing about comic books...
...Intellectuals at mid-century looked around and decided that the middlebrow influx was the major threat to the culture they admired...
...And two years later Norman Mailer published an essay in Dissent called "The White Negro," which helped shift the elite definition of what it meant to be a cultivated person...
...There is also a whiff of the World War II mobilization propaganda in middlebrow prose...
...Like the middlebrows, the early anti-middlebrows were strikingly earnest...
...they demand idealistic resistance...
...And now we learn that there is something worse than middlebrow pretentiousness, and that is its absence...
...It wasn't barbarism or ignorance or nihilism that set off their fury...
...The middlebrow world, on the other hand, mimicked high culture, but it didn't live up to its standards...
...On the one hand, popular magazines devoted an awesome amount of space to art...
...Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a book called The Nature and Destiny of Man, a title so ambitious that nobody would dare use it today...
...Underlying that was the confidence that given the right level of effort and cooperation, no task was too difficult...
...Life magazine carried full-page ads for a four volume set of the classics of mathematical theory, which reduced the most abstract form of intellection into coffee-table publishing...
...People like to believe in something, to have reverence for something...
...That paradoxical phrase applies to middlebrow culture as well...
...The first victims of pervasive irony have been the academics themselves...
...it has been replaced by a pervasive and corrosive irony...
...We have literally enveloped ourselves in quotation marks," writes Andrew Delbanco in his new book The Death of Satan...
...Clement Greenberg called it an "insidious" force, with its capacity for "devaluating the precious, infecting the healthy, corrupting the honest and stultifying the wise...
...In the profoundest sense I cannot create that form unless, somewhere in you, there is a wish to know the present and a demand upon me that I give it to you...
...Journalists need to show that they are not falling for politicians' boilerplate...
...The French intellectual Roland Barthes wrote an essay on professional wrestling...
...The treatment of Freud and psychiatry generally in the fifties was similarly pretentious...
...We must improve our minds...
...Middlebrows treated artists as priests and oracles, and writers and artists themselves were happy to accept this ordination...
...He wrote that the teenage thugs who bludgeoned a 50-year-old candy store owner to death during the course of a robbery "should not be despised...
...We don't feel, as they did, that secular tools are at hand to fashion a moral revival...
...In the magazines of the 1950s, a place like Harvard was invested with tremendous authority...
...An editorial in the New Republic in 1922 said that the colleges of that period gave "exclusiveness to the masses...
...In short, how you spent your leisure time mattered...
...They only saw the clumsiness of it and the onset of commercialism, which follows middle class tastes...
...It is easy to see why the middlebrow institutions grated on highbrow sensibilities...
...The criminal was "daring the unknown," according to Mailer...
...But the academic theory he describes is reflected in secular mass culture...
...Vast institutions that could buy you off, beat you down, crush your spirit...
...Other highbrows, less desperate for attention than Mailer, repudiated the middlebrow in other ways...
...Today, we don't feel so much in control of our moral destinies, either as individuals or as a nation...
...The common question of the past few years is why we feel so bad while economically we are doing so well...
...Degraded culture, on the other hand, would appeal only to the "lower self" and magnify that aspect of a person's personality...
...Playwright Arthur Miller said as much in a speech at Harvard that was reprinted in the Atlantic: "American civilization is only recently coming to a conscious awareness of art not as a luxury but as a necessity of life...
...Kitsch was adopted as a badge of ironic sophistication...
...In these as in so many realms, middlebrows and highbrows had a weakness for the Big Idea and the sweeping conclusion...
...He claimed that the voter's concern for income security, much talked about in 1956, was an attempt to recapture this oral contentment...
...But on the other hand, the seriousness with which Time and its ilk took these painters, and the seriousness with which artists took themselves, is ludicrous...
...Susan Sontag lavishly praised the Beatles in the pages of Partisan Review...
...The fifties and sixties seem akin...
...Nonetheless, don't we feel their loss...
...but then again culture no longer seems so important to us because the connection between culture and virtue has been severed...
...Philosophy can lead to truth...
...Time magazine devoted more space in 1956 to contemporary painting than to Hollywood...
...Looking through the magazines, one finds similarly broad topics, in the highbrow Partisan Review straight down to the quintessentially middlebrow Saturday Review...
...So we all look for the basest motives and speculate on the crassest calculations...
...An insurance salesman who buys the great books series is joining an aristocracy of thinkers, with access to the most important things in the world-an aristocracy that is open to all who are willing to expend some effort...
...Mainstream reporters have absorbed Richard Rorty's point that we can only be ironic about our own beliefs, because it is only an accident that we happened to be born into our culture with our prejudices, rather than into some other one with a different set of beliefs...
...It was assumed that there were certain texts that were sacred to understanding the world, and intellectuals, who had mastered these texts, were granted authority to speak on all sorts of matters...
...Dwight Mac-Donald condemned the "tepid ooze" of the Museum of Modern Art and the American Civil Liberties Union...
...Kitsch was attacked by both as something disgraceful...
...Its unspoken, and sometimes not unspoken, rallying cry is: The nation is in danger of moral decline...
...Leisure time spent with high culture would make you a better person...
...It is difficult to worship anything, to be idealistic about anything, to have any faith in the ability to improve one's character...
...It is hard even to be confident in one's ability to develop standards to measure character...
...If it was spent with works of art that were purifying, then character would be uplifted...
...The big break came later when a debunking irony took over and little seemed serious and no crime was greater than earnestness...
...This is an optimistic creed, because it holds that people are in control of their own moral destinies...
Vol. 1 • April 1996 • No. 30
