The Life of the Mind

A lot of us here at In the Agora are fans of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, and it was with delight that I read Jonathan Rose’s “The Classics in the Slums”, a fascinating look at how proletarians, housewives, and minorities can derive meaning and richness from the Great Books. You might think that this is a touch patronizing of me, but it is not; even if you take my statement in the worst way possible, it is surely still worse to argue, as some humanities professors (but, I suspect, far from all) did, that proletarians, housewives and minorities were not only incapable of reading the classics, but that doing so would be positively harmful to their class consciousness.
Rose discusses that argument, and others, in the course of his well-crafted and fascinating piece. (His work is an interesting companion piece to fellow City Journal contributor John McWhorter’s Doing Our Own Thing.) The most remarkable phenomenon, though, is the one he does not mention: The conversion of vast swathes of the population of the Western world from active participants in cultural life (think, for instance, of the Grimleythorpe Colliery Band) into mere consumers of whatever crud MTV throws at us. The process hasn’t turned couch potatoes into wholly passive consumers of culture: When people gripe about having ninety channels and nothing to watch, or when they change the channel, they’re clearly not being passive. But the idea that they could form, say, a string quartet or a reading group and create their own culture either doesn’t occur to them or they lack the wherewithal to carry it out.
But don’t feel too smug, o readers who think they’re hipper-than-proles. Not many of you read good books all that frequently either, at least if reading surves are accurate; I know that I surely don’t. Neither can I play the violin nor even disucuss poetry. My knowledge of high culture, then, is probably somewhat lower than that of certain mechanics and coopers in Victorian Britain, and yours likely is too.