Elites need to be honest about highbrow culture
The egalitarian lie diminishes us all
Housekeeping
Paid subscriptions are currently paused while Substack helps me sort something out at the back end. Hopefully they will be back on soon!
There is a poetry session this weekend, 11th August 19.00 UK time. I’ll be talking about sixteenth century poetry in general and we’ll read a few poems together.
I enjoyed doing this interview with very much. He asked so many good questions. Largely about literature with a section on late bloomers for the first fifteen minutes or so.
Elite culture and the secret highbrows
Our elites are lying to us. All taste is equal, we are told; whatever you enjoy is just as valuable as whatever anyone else enjoys. Many elites now profess to enjoy the sort of ordinary recreations that make them seem unsnobbish and approachable, like football, television, and seeing friends and family. They are no longer highbrow snobs.
But in private, they give the lie to this egalitarian idea. According to the forthcoming book Born to Rule, written by sociologists Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves, although entries in Who's Who since the 1950s have far fewer references to opera, literature, and art, many elites confessed in interviews that they still enjoy those “highbrow pleasures”.
Just as everyone now in public life makes us go through the dreary ordeal of being told about their working class grandparents as a decoy for their upper-middle-class status, elites are disguising their cultural preferences. They are lying to you about what they think is important so that you will like them
Friedman and Reeves call this a “symbolic market for ordinariness”. The public has a higher opinion of those who are seen as open and accommodating. Rather depressingly, Friedman and Reeves’ research suggests that people really do prefer those elites who deflect their privilege, whatever the real truth, which is why admitting to enjoying Shakespeare in public is like admitting to having gone to private school. It is not elites that we object to so much as elitism.
This began in post-war Britain. Around 1950, the proportion of elites who expressed only highbrow recreations in Who’s Who began to decline. Then came the rise of “ordinary pastimes” like football, cinema, and being with your friends and family. What this means in practice, of course, is that elites are now omnivores. They enjoy highbrow culture and ordinary culture.
Nonetheless, elites are just as snobbish as they used to be. One of my favourite passages of Born to Rule was when Friedman and Reeves showed that while selections on Desert Island Discs have shifted from mostly or entirely classical to mostly or entirely popular music, the popular choices are still mostly made of only acclaimed works. Elites used to talk about inherent qualities of the music; now they talk about what it means to them personally: this makes them seem more accessible. But they still make sure to pick critically acclaimed pieces. “Today’s elite omnivore,” Friedman and Reeves write, “may simply be a new kind of snob.”
Thus we have abandoned the notion of good taste in highbrow culture without actually becoming more egalitarian. And the elites still get to go enjoy the very best works that civilisation has to offer.
Friedman and Reeves call it “snobbery” not to believe that “one person’s taste is as good as the next.” This is misguided. We need to be able to say that Mozart and Beethoven are better than most other music irrespective of personal taste. The idea that all taste is good taste has taken hold because we still equate taste in art with worth as a person. And so fewer people are allowed to have “good taste” for fear that it implies other people are inferior.
What the elites are most guilty of is insouciance. Who’s Who entires now frequently have supposedly humorous entries for recreations, things like “Gluttony, sloth” (John Cleese) or “Collecting money” (Benjamin Zephaniah). It’s easy to be flippant like this when you can say whatever you want and still go home and enjoy Mozart. John Cleese’s ersatz irony is just there to make his elitism cuddly. (God bless Allegra Stratton who includes “memorising poetry” in her recreations.)
The counterweight to this philistine supremacy too often comes from people who are snobbish in other ways, such as Ryan Ruby who claimed on Twitter recently that reading Lolita is a moral test. This is absurd. You cannot assess a person’s moral worth based on their taste in fiction. It also leaves room for actual professors of literature to go around telling people that Taylor Swift is Mary Shelley’s equal. That might be comforting and popular but it’s silly to suggest that the creator of Frankenstein and the writer of Shake It Off are culturally equivalent.
Because of fears that any sort of enjoyment of “high culture” will be seen as akin to the sort of outrageous pronouncement of superiority that Ryan Ruby made, too many elites are not prepared to be honest with the public that books like Lolita are indeed better than many other books.
We are lying to people that personal taste is the only measure of artistic quality. And that lie is keeping them away from seeing, hearing, and reading the greatest works. This is not the democratisation of the arts but the diminishment of them. It is the culture at large, and those people who are influenced away from exploring the greatest works, who suffer from this.
Some art is better than other art. We all know that. We all know that the paintings in the National Gallery are better than the ones in village halls. We know that French cuisine is better than McDonalds. We know that watching soap operas is not the same as watching actual opera. We know that watching the films of Murnau and Hitchcock is better than watching pornography and snuff movies. The idea that all taste is good taste is a convenient fiction that helps elites feel less guilty about their status.
You don’t have to like these things to appreciate that difference. You shouldn’t judge people based on their taste. No one should be made to feel bad about what they do or do not enjoy. No-one should feel shamed to read books they don’t like. But nor should we continue lying to the public about the fact that, yes, Bach is better than almost everything else every composed. It simply isn’t fair on those people who will miss out on Bach—whose music the elites are still enjoying. The best works of Western civilisation should be promoted to as many people as possible.
At a time when only half of British people read for pleasure, we need elites to promote the value of the wonderful culture they are enjoying in private. If Shakespeare and Mozart are good enough for them, they are good enough for everyone else.
I agree with you that egalitarianism of taste is misguided; at the same time, I think part of the problem is that a lot of people (not you!) fail to make certain key distinctions.
1. People fail to distinguish "is this GOOD?" from "do I ENJOY this?". I think Henry James is a remarkable writer: I have read several of his books, and I can see the sheer intellectual and artistic force behind them. At the same time, I personally find Henry James a crashing bore. I can see the brilliance in his works, but it isn't a kind of brilliance that appeals to me at all. I hope I will never read another Henry James novel in my life: I would much prefer to read (say) Ian Rankin, even though I do not consider him a "greater writer" than James - not even close.
2. People fail to distinguish "is this good?" from "is this admired by elites?". Plenty of works that were initially despised by elites and have been supported "only" by popular favor, have belatedly received admiration across the board. I am old enough to remember when (for example) Tolkien was despised by literary critics, and Sergio Leone by film critics. I not only enjoyed but also admired (cf. distinction 1 above) both of them from early on, and I feel that my taste has been vindicated by their belated canonization.
Conversely, works admired by elites have sometimes not stood the test of time. The work of Wagner's that was most beloved by the elite audiences of his lifetime was Rienzi, which Wagner himself repudiated and which is (justifiably) hardly ever performed nowadays.
3. Relatedly, people fail to distinguish "is this a highbrow genre?" from "are these works valuable?" There are a lot of really terrible operas (cf. Rienzi ...), there are a lot of really terrible avant-garde movies. In the case of opera, the worst have been mostly weeded out of the repertoire, but as the repertoire expands to include new works or revivals of forgotten old works (which, I emphasize, I think is a good thing!), a significant number of those are not very good.
Conversely, there are plenty of works in genres that have traditionally been perceived as lowbrow which only needed sustained critical attention for their worth to be seen. From that perspective, it is a good thing that elites are paying more attention to (e.g.) popular music, or television, and even if it comes out of a kind of false egalitarianism, it may nevertheless have salutary effects.
4. One needs to distinguish "is this good?" from "is this easy to appreciate?". This is, to my mind, the root of the problems you identify. Some great works are easy to appreciate - I would challenge anyone with even a minimal familiarity with Western music not to love the first movement of Mozart's 40th symphony at an immediate hearing. But others need a lot more education and background: Mozart's string quintets are phenomenal, but you need to have the trained ear to hear what is going on in order to get anywhere with them. And that is not even to mention the works that are even more challenging, because they make innovative use of language or sound or visuals, or because they come from an unfamiliar time or place.
But the kind of egalitarianism which flattens everything into "all tastes are equal" discourages people from getting the education. Why struggle to learn the language of Chaucer, or to understand harmony and counterpoint, if you can get something just as valuable by listening to or reading or watching the works you were going to listen to or read or watch anyway? For those of us who believe passionately that there are works that are simply better than others, our biggest problem is to persuade people that that effort is indeed worthwhile.
And while there can't be a single solution to that problem, constantly insisting on differentiating good works from bad, as you do, Henry, is surely essential. But also, while insisting on this, encouraging people to cultivate their OWN tastes, to make their OWN differentiations. Ask them to distinguish "good" from "enjoyable", and if, having made that distinction, they still think that certain works they like are "good", challenge them to tell you WHY ... That way they will not simply be replicating the tastes of certain social or intellectual elites, but thinking critically and seriously about the works they know as well as those that, through education, they may come to know.
I think it's important not to overemphasize the tastes of cultural elites, whose tastes are highly subject to the forces of trends, signaling, and historical happenstance which are at best irrelevant to the ultimate quality of a work, and instead focus on the artistic evaluation of working artists and craftsman within the medium in question. After all, these people are pretty uncontroversially the experts in their medium, and we see their tastes diverge from those in cultural elites in pretty radical ways.
Using music as an example, it's true that you'd be hard-pressed to find a working musician, especially a working composer, who didn't hold Bach in extremely high regard. But the trends in elite listening tend to begin and end with the baroque, classical, and romantic periods, with no regard for the genius of later composers like Shostakovich, Holst, or Stravinsky. And this is still only restricting ourselves to the broader western classical canon! If we move even farther from the tastes of cultural elites and closer to the tastes of musical elites, you can find this same reverence held for artists of all sorts of traditions: for Ellington and Coltrane, for the Beatles, for James Brown, and so on. All that is to say, I think it's shortsighted, and even harmful to the notion of promoting great art, to use elite tastes as a signpost when we have the words of working experts to work off of instead.