A Progressive Reactionary

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: