I came across this paragraph the other day while reading Susan Jacoby’s book, The Age of American Unreason. Jacoby, almost 10 years ago, was trying to understand why Americans seemed to be losing their respect for facts and reason.
“I read The Agony and the Ecstasy when I was fifteen and was so fascinated by Stone’s descriptions of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Michelangelo’s sculptures that I sought out reproductions in an art book in a library for the first time. That kind of connection between popular middlebrow culture and high culture is so obvious that it is almost impossible to understand why the idea of a reader’s actually learning something important from such works was dismissed so contemptuously by highbrow critics of the thirties, forties, and fifties. How did Virginia Woolf think a girl in museumless Okemos, Michigan, was supposed to acquire an inkling of what great sculpture might look like? I could not, after all, take the Tube to the British Museum to see the frieze that Lord Elgin swiped from the Parthenon.”
Her description made me smile, because I too read The Agony and the Ecstasy when I was growing up, and it had much the same effect. I was even younger, just 10, and our family was planning to move to Italy for a year. We were immersing ourselves in all things Italian and I stumbled on Irving Stone’s novel, a fat, dense piece of history crammed with information that Stone got from years of research, which he supplemented by working in a marble quarry, to get the details just right. I certainly didn’t understand half of what I read but what definitely came through was respect, awe and admiration for Michelangelo and the tremendous work he put into his art. Great art and artists were worthy of our adoration. As a 10 year old I couldn’t fully respond to most of Michelangelo’s works, but knowing his story made his art familiar and beloved. As we traveled around Italy I would always be excited to see his work, because of the book, which I must have read three or four times.
I’m pretty sure The Agony and the Ecstasy is not a great book—I haven’t re-read it, and don’t intend to; I prefer to see it through my 10-year old eyes. But Jacoby’s insight is on target, I think. It’s a good example of the kind of mid-20th century, middlebrow cultural product that was seen as appropriate for educated people, not only good but Good for You. It upheld the right values and was backed by impeccable research. Jacoby is irritated that real artists and high-brow intellectuals, like Virginia Woolf, held it up to ridicule. They wanted to pull up the drawbridge against the invasion of the masses; but in America, the masses for most of the 20th century wanted to scale the castle walls, and Irving Stone and his like were the ladders they used.
For many decades, Jacoby argues, upwardly-aspiring Americans took for granted that becoming middle class meant valuing the ‘higher things,’ not just classical music and Italian art and Russian novels, but the latest historical discoveries and scientific achievements. A whole industry grew up to help American strivers: the Book of the Month club, the Britannica Great Books, thick tomes like H.G. Wells’ History of the World and Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History, lecture series, and magazines like Life that mixed pictorials about European artists and accounts of new scientific wonders with stories about fashion and Hollywood.
I grew up in this era, and feel the loss in part because my beloved undergraduate college, St. John’s, was a product of the period which has improbably survived more or less intact into our present, very different, times. The St. John’s College Great Books, seminar-based program was designed—is designed—to make the highest, most elite parts of Western culture available to all. Its founders were convinced that anyone who wanted to could, if they put in the effort, read and understand and benefit from the very best products of civilization. Their idea of how democracy should work was not to dumb down, not to deny the existence of a hierarchy of arts and sciences, but to de-mystify it and open up access to all.
St. John’s got started in the late 1930s, and by the time it found its footing in the 50s, it didn’t stand out as something so strange. Pretty much every college had some kind of introductory sequence to introduce young Americans to the high points of (mostly Western) civilization. St. John’s just took the idea farther.
This whole edifice and the assumptions behind it have largely disappeared. Nothing has really replaced it, and so it is not clear anymore what it means, culturally, to be lower or middle or upper class. Everyone is free to assemble their own pastiche of influences, mixing together all manner of pop culture, classics, and material from around the world. Most intellectuals no longer accept that there is any valid distinction between high and low, better and worse. There is no reason to expect that any college graduate now will have read or come into contact with any of the once-iconic ‘great’ authors or artists, or, unless they are STEM majors, with any scientific discipline.
There were certainly drawbacks to the old standards, which could be impossibly stuffy and rigid, but having no standards at all is not necessarily an improvement. Jacoby underscores how this has contributed to the denial of scientific expertise and willingness to accept lies and falsehoods that seems to characterize large chunks of contemporary American society:
“The old middlebrow outlines, by contrast, were unabashed in their proselytizing for the scientific and the rational; while Wells did not tell people they had to abandon religion in order to accept evolution, he did tell them that they had to abandon the idea that the Bible was a factual historical record. Because middlebrow culture placed a high value on scientific discoveries and progress, its degeneration has played an important role in the melding of anti-intellectualism with the fundamentalist war on science during the past three decades.”
Vacuums are abhorred. The loss of confidence in a secular High Culture has made it hard to push back against fundamentalism, conspiracy theories, and junk science.