The Snobbery of Classical Music

     I am well aware that most others do not share my zeal and enthusiasm for Johann Sebastian Bach or Jan Dismas Zelenka. Not many people are connoisseurs of my instrument, the classical guitar. And most people's phones probably aren't filled with the lute music of Sylvius Leopold Weiss, like mine is. And then there are classical composers such as John Hebden, that not even most classically trained musicians have heard about, but I have, and now you have too. 

     My point is this. In a world full of pop music, R&B, and rap, my own musical preferences stick out like a sore thumb. And I can't even pretend to be some kind of hippie enjoying the music of Jimi Hendrix and coming across as the cool but non-judgmental authority on where the real music is at. No, I'm in the world of classical music, which means I have the right to call myself a snob. 

     Now, classicists like myself (whether in the field of music, or painting, or literature, or whatever have you) do often come across as snobs. This is a stereotype to be sure, but one not entirely without basis. For instance, Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind has been ridiculed as the epitome of classicist snobbery. Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death gained similar opprobrium. (And Postman embraced the accusation of Luddism.) Musical classicism can often be seen in a similar vain. Theodor Adorno's "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening," is one such snobbish musical expose that manages to drive a wedge between popular art and classical art. Heaven forbid that you like the music of John Coltrane! You fetishist freak! (Adorno hated jazz in particular.) And then there is the snobbery of music composers themselves, such as Arnold Schoenberg, who, when asked if he was a Bolshevist, defended himself by saying he was in fact a monarchist. Sure thing Mr. Schoenberg. Bring back the monarchy! That's not snobbish at all.

     The heights of musical and artistic snobbery can be found in the "formalist" theory of art expounded by Clive Bell. (I put "formalist" in quotations because formalism has been explained in many different ways, and accusations of formalism were often used in the Soviet Union as a way a censoring Western music, making "formalism" a kind of slur with no consistent usage.) Bell's theory of art aesthetics was that art is supposed to give the audience a unique emotion which can be found only in art. To the extent that art gives a person normal feelings such as sadness, happiness, joyousness, anger, longing, pity--in short any emotion that can be felt outside of art--then what is taking place is not really art. In order to be art, the emotional response is one unique to art. 

     What a way to alienate audiences! If an art critic is able to get this aesthetic emotion from a piece of art, but the general audience is not, the message is clear: there is something defective in the audience. They are uncouth, unsophisticated, ill-educated, incapable of these "higher" emotions. "Art" and "music" became elitist. Popular art, by definition, was no longer art. 

     To be perfectly fair, I am not criticizing any of these authors so much as pointing them out as examples of where this image of the snobbish classicist comes from. Their actual arguments should be considered on their own merit. I personally enjoyed reading Clive Bell's theory of art, as it explained many of my own reactions to classical music. Where Bell errs, however, is in creating a litmus test that excluded popular art from the art world. While his theory could have been used as a means of assisting the general audience in accessing art, it was used instead as a means of enforcing artistic elitism. 

     For myself, I have never bemoaned the death of classical music (or any classical artform for that matter), and I have never found modern music to be any kid of serious threat to the music that I know and love. Nor have I ever considered modern music to not be music, as, for instance, Ben Shapiro has said about rap music. I do not share the pessimism of classicists, and I hope I do not share their snobbery, though I am certain I can come across that way at times. 

     The fact of the matter is, if you feel like you've been snubbed by the musical elites, it's because you have, just like you've been snubbed by the literary elites, and the art elites. And the best thing that classicists like myself can do to regain some respect with the public at large is stop being so blasted judgmental. 

     Classical pianist Charlie Albright wrote a short but well stated op-ed for CNN a couple years ago on this topic. As he puts it, the best thing we can do to save classical music is to let it die, by which he means that we need to kill the snobbery, the sterility, and the artificial rules that current classical decorum requires. This isn't to say that we should lower our standards in music, but we definitely need to lower our egos. 

     This was not the blogpost I originally set out to write. I wanted to write about how strong the classical music tradition is today. In fact, I think classical music is alive and stronger than ever. But I felt I needed to write this first. How can I show my love and appreciation for popular art if I don't disavow the classicist snobbery which pits classical and popular art against each other? Consider this my disavowal. In hope in the near future to talk about the current state of classical music, which I am very optimistic about. 

     

This is the Age of Anxiety, Not Fear.

     Many people think that we live in an age of fear. We do not. We live in an age of anxiety. Certainly, there are any number of things to be fearful of nowadays. There's COVID, of course. There's political uncertainty. There's terrorism. There's government overreach. There's global warming. There's housing costs. There's poverty. There's food insecurity. The list goes on. 

     I do not deny that people today live in fear, or that sometimes this fear can be excessive. But yet, I do not think fear is the predominant emotion of our age. That title goes to anxiety.

     What is the difference between fear and anxiety? The best explanation I have ever read comes from a book about existentialism-- the title and author of which I have unfortunately forgotten--which I read some 12 years ago. Here was the explanation. Fear is walking along the edge of a cliff afraid you might fall off. Angst, or anxiety, is walking along the edge of a cliff afraid you might jump off. 

     Note the distinction.

     Fear is fundamentally a reaction to outside forces that we do not control. Fear is a response to external danger. This danger might attack us, or befall us. It might "come for" us. We fear what might happen to us or our loved ones. Look at the list I wrote at the beginning of this essay. Note that all those items I mentioned are external threats. 

     Anxiety, on the other hand, is a reaction to an internal threat. We get anxious when we believe we will create our own downfall. People have anxiety before a test because if they fail, there is a real sense in which they caused their own failure. We get anxious before a performance because a mistake is tantamount to giving other people the opportunity to mock us due to our failure. We feel responsible for the outcome. Anxiety is a response to internal danger. Anxiety is fear of what we might bring upon ourselves.

     A person confronting death at the hands of another lives in fear. A person confronting death at his or her own hands lives in anxiety. We are fearful of accidents. We are anxious of mistakes. 

     I read recently (in an article in the May 2020 Atlantic) that people develop phobias in early to mid childhood, like fear of snakes, fear of spiders, fear of heights, etc. But they begin to develop anxiety around adolescence. This makes perfect sense. Phobias are reactions to external objects, and children who rely heavily on external sources of support and care will react to negative external experienced. In adolescence, however, these children confront a new keen self-awareness, the loss of control over their own bodily development. They grow into bodies that they do not understand and yet must identify with. Adolescence is a period where children are threatened by themselves, and therefore must be a period of anxiety.

     And in case you think my whole theory of anxiety is armchair psychology, you're wrong. This is armchair and google psychology. Look at what the top result on google said when I asked it what the difference was between fear and anxiety. "Anxiety is a generalized response to an unknown threat or internal conflict, whereas fear is focused on known external danger." (Emphasis added) Boom! Take that doubters!

     Now that I have proven my distinction beyond the need for any further googling, let's continue. Why do I say we live in an age of anxiety and not fear? One short, but unsatisfactory answer, would be to say that we live in an age of egotism and narcissism. We're obsessed with self-image, and so we are always concerned for presentation, which is a matter of anxiety.

     While this may be true in itself, I do not think it is complete. Egotism is a problem, but I think it leaves out all the exogenous forces that are acting upon us to increase our anxiety. I believe we actually live in an age of anxiety because we have been molded into decision-makers and test-takers. We've lost faith the our institutions. Indeed, our institutions have lost our trust. Many of us feel a weight of responsibility not just for our own decisions but for the decisions of all humanity,

     Let me give an example. Fox News used to have a slogan they used mostly on radio broadcasts. The slogan was, "we report, you decide." Now, on the surface, this seems like a great moto. News media shouldn't be telling people what to believe, should they? But stop and think for a second about the added pressure this places on the individual consumer. The subtle message is this: you are responsible for what you believe, even though we just told you what to believe. Do you see the imbalance? 

     The whole point of the news is to tell you what the world is like. You can't be everywhere. You can't investigate everything. You don't have resources and tools at your disposal. You depend on external actors to bring you your information. But right at that moment that you need the most assistance, that "moment of truth" if you will, that moment when you determine the facts--it is precisely at this moment that the news agency withdraws and disavows all responsibility. You decide! Sure, we just gave you our version of events, but your belief is your responsibility.

     I use Fox News because this was their slogan, but the same applies to any other news organization. The airwaves are flooded with information, usually of the contradictory variety. It is nearly taken for granted now that our news agencies are as dishonest as our politicians. And as these institutions disavow the decision making processes of determining the facts, they whisper into your ear, "You decide." The fear of false information is now transformed into the anxiety of you believing false information. You are forced to take an active role, and therefore you are forced to accept personal blame when you believe in false information. 

     Neil Postman referred to our age as an age of information glut, a time when we have so much information thrown at us that we have no way of sorting it out, and yet we are told that we must sort it out. And we sort it out with MORE INFORMATION! (See Postman's book Technopoly, chapter 4) 

     As individuals, we are continually placed in the exam room. "Come to the right conclusion!" we are told. And if we are wrong, if we do not reach the right conclusion, the problem is with us. If you can't synthesize the information, that's your problem. The result of all this is anxiety. The individual is continually told to confront the possibility that they might be broken. They might be wrong. They might fail to reach the right conclusion amid the information glut. 

     In previous epochs, philosophers made it a note that individuals should not have to solve all of society's problems themselves. John Stuart Mill was confronted with the question of whether his utilitarian calculus made moral life impossible since an individual would need to do an intense moral analysis for every action they took. Mill's answer was to say that we have societal norms for precisely this reason. We follow our norms in our day to day lives, reserving out moral judgment for cases of improvement, not reinvention. "[T]here has been ample time [to form a moral code], namely, the whole past duration of the human species." (See Utilitarianism, Chapter II)

     And yet, moral codes, no less the news trustworthiness, are but one more item we are asked to continually reconsider. Moral traditions are important not because the past contained some kind of eternal moral truth, nor because the past moral traditions were even good. They are important because these moral traditions took moral weight off the individual. When matters are settled, so also settles our anxiety. Today, the moral landscape is constantly shifting. As soon as one grasps the current "politically correct" moral language, it is immediately made obsolete. With bureaucratic precision a new politically correct language is promulgated. 

     The real danger of a postmodern age isn't degeneracy; it's intense anxiety. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has a wonderful example he uses to illustrate today's predicament. In the past, when the father told his daughter they were going to visit grandma, he'd say, "Look, I don't care whether you like grandma or not. You're going to visit her." Today, however, the postmodern father says to his daughter, "You don't have to visit grandma. Just know that she loves you very much and will be very disappointed if you don't visit." (See this interview from 25:23 to 28:04)

     This example from Zizek perfectly illustrates the difference between fear and anxiety. In the past, the daughter feared the father, but she was never forced to hold an opinion about her grandma. Today, the father does not wield fear, but the daughter is made to feel anxiety over the moral failure of not caring about her grandma. As Zizek puts it, what masquerades as a new form of freedom is in fact a new form of anxiety.  

     Now do you see how "we report, you decide" is a nefarious motto? What appears to be offered as a form of autonomy is in fact a new form of authority. The individual, who has no means of investigating the facts, is told it is their responsibility to determine the facts; while the new agency, which has the investigatory means, divests itself of responsibility. 

     Which brings us to politics. Since COVID hit us early this year, I've heard all sorts of people telling us "Don't live in fear," as though COVID were something we were afraid of. In fact, people are not living in fear at all. They are living in anxiety, because they sense that COVID is something that we can control, and therefore if it spreads, that's on us. That's our responsibility. And now that COVID is taking over 3,000 lives every day in America alone, that sense that this is our fault is only growing. 

     I cannot help but feel that the overwhelming sentiment of our age has been misdiagnosed. We are living in anxiety, not fear. But why is this important? Well, let's just consider this one item. Anxiety is closely tied to responsibility, while fear is not. The anxious person senses they are the cause of their own success or failures. This responsibility can feel crippling and debilitating, but it can also be intense and motivating. On the other hand, the person who lives in fear often neglects the nature of their own responsibility. This relationship to responsibility speaks to the current age. Far from degeneracy or idleness, many people of our time feel immense responsibility, and recognizing this in other people might just be the difference between finding mutual opportunities to work together or dismissing one another and exacerbating the current political rifts in society.

     I want to end this on a personal note. I am a naturally anxious person. I have sensed the growing anxiety in public discourse, and I fear it is getting worse. (See what I did there?) Am I wrong about any of this? Sometimes I wonder whether or not I am projecting my own experience onto society at large, but how would I know unless I first overcame my own anxiety and just put this out there? After all, the problem with anxiety is not that things are out of our control. The problem with anxiety is precisely that these decisions are in our control. Learning to live with that anxiety means, in some sense, learning to live with the constant risk of making a terrible mistake. 

     Be kind to your neighbor who disagrees with you. Chances are, they feel the weight of responsibility too. 

Can I Call Myself a Conservative Any Longer?

     I was born and raised Republican, but I left the party several years ago shortly after my dad left the party. I'm having trouble remembering exactly when that was, and my reasons for leaving the party were my own. I won't speak for my dad, but I know his decision was a bit of an inspiration for me.

     Despite the fact that I've been drifting away from the Republican platform for some time, and hold some views that would be downright shunned in some Republican circles, I've always thought of myself as being conservative. I still do, in fact. Of course, I also consider myself progressive in some regards, so what do labels tell you? Absolutely nothing!

     My progressivism stems, in large part, from certain policy issues. I'd be perfectly happy under a single-payer healthcare system, for example. Also, boo to Citizens United! But my conservativism stems largely from my views of institutions and societal cohesion. I'm not a libertarian conservative. Concern for the free market is not my strong suit. Rather, it is my strong concern for the preservation of cultural, religious, societal, and governmental institutions that drives my conservativism. Perhaps I am best described as a Burkean conservative. I have a great amount of concern for what Michael Novak termed "intermediary institutions." These are institutions that exist between the individual level and the governmental level--institutions like the family, schools, churches, fraternal organizations, etc. (Note to self: Read more Michael Novak.)

     But lately, I cannot help but feel that conservativism as we know it is becoming unmoored from it's foundations in Burkean philosophy. Conservatives have been beating the drums of individualism and corporatism and ignoring institutional integrity. The corporatism of Milton Friedman has eaten away at conservatism's core. Central to Friedman's philosophy is the belief that institutions do not have responsibility; only people have responsibility. His worldview gutted institutions of their moral function, placing moral responsibility on the individual while at the same time allowing institutions (corporations) to operate free of moral concern. In one swoop, Friedman's philosophy created both an excess of individualism and an excess in corporatism, and this continues to today where conservatism pushes bootstrap philosophy on individuals while offering tax cuts to the rich (I pay more taxes than Donald Trump) and corporate entities (Amazon pays zero taxes to the federal government). 

     This is not my conservatism. Friedman's philosophy destroys institutions like the family by robbing them of their moral function. At the same time, conservative moral norms can be used as a battering ram against individuals who, as the sole owners of responsibility, must also be at fault themselves whenever they fail to live up to a middle class ideal. 

     When conservatives look back fondly on the American family of the 1950's, they're looking back at an America under a totally different type of conservativism. Yes, you had your McCarthy's. But you had your Eisenhauers. You had a Republican administration which preserved many New Deal norms, that kept taxes high, that expanded social security, that administered affirmative action (I would say using troops to desegregate schools is affirmative action), that warned against a military-industrial complex. These are all considered radical by todays conservatives. Heck, some of these things would be radical to todays liberals! But the difference is, American institutions were strong at this time, and Eisenhauer cared deeply about preserving American institutions. (Oh, and side note: Eisenhauer was the last Republican president to pass a balanced budget.) 

     And that brings me to today, where the "principled conservatives" stand by and allow Donald Trump carte blanche as he attempts to undermine the institution of democratic election itself. Despite the fact that Trump's legal efforts are failing in the courts, that affidavits attesting to voter fraud are being discovered to contain known falsehoods, that "star witnesses" like Melissa Carone are making a mockery of governmental hearings, that the president's own Attorney General William Barr has stated to the public there is currently no evidence of voter fraud that would change the result of this election--in short, despite a complete lack of evidence--Donald Trump created a conspiracy theory that strikes at one of the most precious institutions we have: the institution of free elections. 

     But it's worse than this. Donald Trump has been planning this conspiracy for years. In his victory over Hillary Clinton, he claimed he would have won by more if Hillary didn't get all the illegal vote. For years before this he propagated a racist conspiracy that Barack Obama was not an American citizen, despite the fact that in order to get on the ballot Obama would have had to prove his citizenship to Attorneys General in all fifty states! You see, the frog was put into the pot years ago, and Trump has been slowly turning up the heat so he could arrive at this election at a full boil. 

     I've kept mostly quiet lately about Trump, but I've never kept my views secret. I believe he is a dangerous president, and his attack on free elections is precisely the sort of thing I have worried about. 

     But where does all this leave me? What is readily apparent to me is this: my conservatism is no longer accepted as an orthodox conservativism in American politics. The Republican party is bankrupt of my conservativism. Burkeanism has been abandoned for Friedmanism, and the principled conservatives of today would gladly abandon free elections if it meant keeping their power in office and their MyPillow endorsements on TV. (I'm looking at you, Sean Hannity!)

On the other hand, try being a Democrat when you identify as Burkean conservative! Democrats don't fight for American institutions. They hide behind them. (That, I'm afraid, is a completely different post.) Somewhere along the line, "conservatives" became OK with blatant attacks on our institutions. We see it playing out today to the point where a lone Republican state official in Georgia, Gabe Sterling, has to come forward and condemn the national Republican leadership for their silence in response to threats made against election workers.

     Well, maybe there is one conservative of my ilk left.