I have gotten a great deal out of blogging and I'm glad my readers have as well. So I venture to share some thoughts about music, art and life in general. I just ran across an article in the Wall Street Journal about one of those "progressive" projects that one tends to shake one's head at. Even Homer Gets Mobbed: A Massachusetts school has banned ‘The Odyssey.’ I'm not sure if that is behind the paywall, but this will give you an idea:
A sustained effort is under way to deny children access to literature. Under the slogan #DisruptTexts, critical-theory ideologues, schoolteachers and Twitter agitators are purging and propagandizing against classic texts—everything from Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dr. Seuss.
Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular—especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm,” as young-adult novelist Padma Venkatraman writes in School Library Journal. No author is valuable enough to spare, Ms. Venkatraman instructs: “Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived at a time when hate-ridden sentiments prevailed, risks sending a subliminal message that academic excellence outweighs hateful rhetoric.”
This is a project that has been going on for a very, very long time, of course. But recently it has come to the fore. An example: way back when I first attended university, in 1971, the text for my German language course contained quite a few examples of actual literature: Goethe and other authors. When I entered graduate school many years later, in 1995, studying for a doctorate in musicology, I had to do another German course to fulfill the language requirement. I was amazed to see that the new textbook had eliminated every trace of literature and replaced it with samples from everyday life: advertisements, excerpts from news stories, that sort of thing. So this is nothing new. But the arrogant ruthlessness with which the project is furthered is more astonishing than ever.
In my view it is all based on a cluster of badly mistaken ideas about psychology, economics, moral philosophy and aesthetics. So when it comes to this kind of thing, I am a reactionary! Right now I am half way through re-reading the Odyssey in the Fagles translation and the idea that Homer is to be tossed out in favor of a mess of half-baked politically correct garbage is absurd. Mind you, if you want generations of dimensionless morons, this is just the thing. As so often, one asks oneself, is this kind of policy simple idiocy or is it actual evil? The quote comes to mind that "they" prefer us poor and stupid because we are easier to control. So often the progressive project seems nothing more than a naked grasp for power. They are going to tell us what we can read and what we can think. That should be enough to make anyone's blood boil!
But, on the other hand, when it comes to art, I am anything but a reactionary. My tastes, when it comes to sketching for example, run to Kandinsky-esque abstractions. While I love a great deal of older music, my tastes in contemporary music run to Morton Feldman, Steve Reich and Sofia Gubaidulina over Philip Glass, John Luther Adams and others who seem to be rehashing things we have heard many times before. In my own compositions I do not look back as I find that aesthetically impossible. I really do think that one has to find a new path.
I think that we have to look at the progressive project and ask ourselves, is this really "progressive" in any real sense? Or is it just the fevered dreams of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley become hideous reality? Behind all the buzzwords and rhetoric, is there much worthwhile in social justice and critical theory? Not that I can see.
But I am all in favor of real progress: the ascent of the great majority of humanity out of poverty in the last few decades, the new progress in returning to space from people like Elon Musk, the astonishing advances in technology that might connect humanity in new and productive ways (or cause us all to waste much of our time updating our FaceBook pages--your call!), the remarkable advances in medical technology that enabled us to create several vaccines for the coronavirus in mere months when it took a decade to do so for other diseases a few decades ago. Yes, in a thousand ways, we are progressing and advancing.
But there are still musty old ideas from dead philosophers and economists that threaten to strangle our mental freedoms. Ban Homer? Go ban yourself instead.
So that's me, a progressive reactionary. Here is Sofia Gubaidulina, another one:
young adult fiction authors ...
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded of the old article in Tablet about sumptuary codes that I think, maybe, you linked to here a few years ago, and how what seems to be happening in our era is that rather than having sumptuary laws about consumption or purchase there are sumptuary codes within industries about what amounts to guild participation.
Ironically, perhaps, post-Marxist leftists may agree with some conservatives that the progressive/neoliberal "left" and "center" have been distilled into a self-interested caste of managers.
https://www.thebellows.org/against-the-managers/
https://www.thebellows.org/the-left-has-become-a-guild/
I.e., Theodor Adorno's scathing remarks about what has since been identified as the New Left in the United States seems to have been on point, that identitarian politics has turned out to be something where people who go to grad school can wield social justice as a tool to argue for forgiveness of student debt (whose? theirs in many cases); the creation of jobs (which as one black Swedish Marxist put it, amounts to `God forbid I have to work at Walmart after having gotten an M.A. in comparative literature'); and reparations (although reparations were disastrously ineffective for Native Americans in the United States in the mid-20th century, I have not seen that come up in contemporary advocacy for reparations). There are openly Marxist writers who have argued that the progressives who want to cancel the arts are 1) doing so with an openly self-interested set of goals and 2) they're doing something that anyone with some background in the arts cultures of the early Soviet Union realize wasn't even characteristic of the Leninist period, the vitriolic "cancel culture" regarding the Western canon didn't kick into high gear in the USSR until basically the Stalinist era and the paradoxically short-lived period of official socialist realism.
I'm very slowly working through the book Composing the Party Line, which is about the history of socialist realism and music compositional paradigms in Poland and East Germany during the Stalinist and post-Stalinist phases of the Cold War.
Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany
ReplyDeleteDavid G Tompkins
http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/titles/format/9781557536471
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/30146
Also going to start Pauline Fairclough's new biography on Shostakovich and am currently also slowly going through ...
Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity under Lenin and Stalin
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300217193/classics-masses
When my brother and I were talking about the young adult fiction activists who insist on what seems to be a requirement that you can't write about any group of which you are not a demographic distillation, or how it seems that fiction writers have taken up an ideal that fiction must address social and economic realities and the harmful nature of capitalism, my brother joked, "Oh, so American young adult fiction is Zhdanov era socialist realism now."
Sometimes ...
There is so much that can be learned from a look at the history of music and art in the Soviet Union!
ReplyDeleteThe real tragedy is that this sort of book-burning happens mostly in the public school system, as was the case with the dimwitted teacher from the present story who was so “proud” of booting Homer from her high school’s curriculum. When this sort of nonsense comes up in private schools, administrators quickly stomp it out, for fear of losing all their paying students. So, while the working-class kids at the free public high school in Lawrence, Massachusetts, may get only watery slob with zero intellectual merit, rest assured that the students at $60,000-per-year Phillips Andover Academy one town over are all continuing to wrestle with Homer and Shakespeare. And people wonder why entrenched hierarchies remain in place.
ReplyDelete