The Little Red Blog

Swift-Boating Taylor

Who among us has not wondered what conservative pundits think of Taylor Swift?

Wonder no more. Mark Hemingway, at The Federalist, has weighed in on the matter from his lofty perch on the political Right. Though he bears no animosity towards Ms. Swift, Hemingway does not approve of the mega-phenomenon she has become or the dire implications her popularity has for the state of American culture. His essay is titled “Taylor Swift’s Popularity Is a Sign of Societal Decline,” and Hemingway prefaces it by asking, “Audiences and elite tastemakers alike have decided Taylor Swift’s narcissistic lyrics and cliched music are a cultural triumph — but why would we celebrate this?”

Hemingway is no fuddy-duddy, mind you, no stuck-in-the-mud curmudgeon complaining that the kids are playing their hippity-hoppity music too darned loud. He is of an age to appreciate classic rock, i.e., back when it was good. He speaks highly of the Beatles, for instance; he compares Swift’s efforts unfavorably to the Fab Four’s “Eleanor Rigby,” and concludes that the latter is “a thousand times more sophisticated than anything Swift has ever done. More importantly, it is just two minutes and six seconds long and still one of the catchiest pop songs in history.” ¹

I will spare you further details of Hemingway’s extensive tirade and cut right to his conclusion:

The over-the-top celebration of Swift’s success says volumes about the stagnation of pop culture. At some point, we have to recognize that even if you embrace the limits of pop music, the distance between middlebrow entertainment and the lowest common denominator is enormous. Our need for shared artistic connection cannot be allowed to overwhelm a duty to also collectively seek out music that takes us places and challenges us with insights into the human condition, revelations about ourselves we didn’t know (or maybe didn’t want to know), and otherwise produces insights into the problems of others. And I, for one, already know enough to know Taylor Swift just doesn’t have it in her to do that.

It’s a shame that Taylor Swift’s success has made it impossible for Mark Hemingway to listen to “Eleanor Rigby” in peace; or, worse, to enjoy the stylings of the late Burt Bacharach, whose music, Hemingway wrote back in February, “didn’t just span six decades, it transcended them.” Bacharach’s “contribution to popular music was incalculable,” enthused Hemingway. Taylor Swift is but a musical novice compared to the composer of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”! ²  

Allow me to suggest that a more telling sign of societal decline than Taylor Swift’s popularity is the continued existence of The Federalist, for which both Mark Hemingway and his wife Mollie lie write on a regular basis. From Obama’s birth certificate to COVID conspiracies to 2020 election denialism, the Hemingway marital duo has helped The Federalist earn its reputation over the past decade as one of the nation’s leading purveyors of alternative facts, fearmongering, and demonization of those who have the temerity to disagree with it.

I think Taylor Swift will survive Hemingway’s disapproval.  

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Taylor Swift's Popularity Is A Sign Of Societal Decline (thefederalist.com)

¹ How Swift’s work measures up to “Yellow Submarine” or to the saccharine “She’s Leaving Home,” Hemingway does not say. While we’re on the topic of bad pop songs, however, let us not forget the execrable mess that was the 1968 pop hit “MacArthur Park”. Written by Jim Webb, who for a while was one of the best pop songwriters of his time, and recorded originally by Richard Harris, this crime against humanity topped the charts in Canada and Australia and rose to #2 in America. Unexpectedly, the song was later redeemed by Donna Summer’s (and Giorgio Moroder’s) brilliant 1978 disco version, perhaps the single best thing to emerge from the disco era.

² I do not want to denigrate Burt Bachrach, even though “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” spoiled three minutes of the otherwise brilliant film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Bachrach wrote many fine songs: “The Look of Love,” for one, and “Always Something There to Remind Me,” for another. It is not his fault that Mark Hemingway has chosen to bash Taylor Swift for no reason I can discern. Requiescat in pace, Burt.

What Hath Taylor Swift Wrought?

Saturday Lecture: The Hidden Curriculum

{Robert Kegan’s 1994 book ‘In Over Our Heads” explored ‘the mental demands of modern life.’ There should be a companion volume on modernity’s emotional demands. The pace of social, cultural, and technological change has been more than many of us can handle; we have, in many ways, created a world for which some of us, at least, are ill-suited. Like generals preparing to refight the last war, we dutifully prepare young people to navigate our own past rather than their present, much less any foreseeable future. Luckily, young people don’t listen to most of what we say anyway.} 

Robert Kegan (from In Over Our Heads):

There exists an intellectual discipline I have come to think of as ‘the psychology of admiration’. The root of admiration is ‘wonder’ (from the Latin ‘mirar,’ to wonder), and wonder is as two-sided and as dialectical as human beings themselves. Wonder is ‘wondering at’ and it is also ‘wondering about’. ‘Wondering at’ is watching and reverencing; ‘wondering about’ is asking and reckoning. ‘Wondering at’ is Eastern, receptive, contemplation as an end in itself; ‘wondering about’ is Western, acting upon, a means to an end. ‘Wondering at’ is aesthetic, the inspiration of the humanities, anima, blessed by a feminine god; ‘wondering about’ is analytic, the inspiration of the sciences, animus, blessed by a masculine god. We need not champion or choose one of these ways over the other. We need not favor the analytic or the aesthetic, regard science as evil or a savior, castigate or canonize the stirrings of the human heart. We can draw deeply from both kinds of wisdom.

The social sciences in contemporary culture are at a crossroads. Will they continue to be essentially a puny force, founded on no civilization of their own, borrowing from and buffeted by the powerful civilizations of science and the humanities? Will the social sciences continue to be reminiscent of Freud’s hapless infantile ego, appearing to be a player in personality but in reality swamped by the contending forces of conscience and desire? Or will the social sciences grow up and, like the mature ego, become capable of integrating the contending powers, thereby creating a third, original force that can play a role in human personality and contemporary culture? Such an integration in psychology would realize the promise of the word itself—‘psyche’ and ‘logos,’ spirit and reckoning.

The psychology of admiration can be applied to the study of the relationship between two fascinating phenomena, one psychological and one cultural. The psychological phenomenon is the evolution of consciousness, the personal unfolding of ways of organizing experience, ways that are not simply replaced as we grow but subsumed into more complex systems of mind. The cultural phenomenon is what we could call the ‘hidden curriculum’: the claims or demands the culture makes on the minds of its constituents. ¹

The fit or lack of fit between what the culture demands of our minds and our mental capacity to meet these demands is crucial. Do we unknowingly expect the contemporary teenager to develop the order of consciousness required to participate in a Traditional, rather than a Modern, world? Moreover, what are the mental demands that the ‘hidden curriculum’ makes on adults in their private and public lives? What implicit demands accompany parenting, partnering, working, living with diversity, or adult learning? There is, it may be, a remarkable commonality to the complexity of mind being called for across these different areas; together, these demands create the consciousness threshold of Modernity. Worse, postmodern expectations—prescriptions for adult living—constitute a qualitatively even more complex level of consciousness.

The mismatch, for at least some portion of our lives, between the complexity of the culture’s ‘curriculum’ and our capacity to grasp it has practical as well as theoretical implications. Understanding this may provide a clue to the sources of stress in contemporary living; it may also bring about a new conception of the consciousness thresholds individuals may have to reach to satisfy contemporary expectations of love and work.

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¹ Cultural 'demands' include various types of knowledge which individuals are either explicitly or implicitly expected to possess—norms, mores, values, social niceties, etc.—and which are taken for granted as “common sense” by people who have absorbed them; for those not accustomed to the dominant social paradigm, however, they are anything but. Example: the members of the British band The Beatles were John, Paul, George, and Ringo, and they are always listed in that order. Listing them incorrectly would be like saying that the Holy Trinity consists of the Spirit, the Son, and the Father, or that the Chicago Cubs' immortal infield trio was Evers, Chance, and Tinker: technically correct, but culturally unacceptable. 

One of America's best-known cultural Norms

The Great Refusal: Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Perverse Modernism Has to Go!

{In her 1994 book 'Hole in Our Soul,' culture critic Martha Bayles did not reject Modernism in its entirety, only the Perverse aspects of it, like the Rolling Stones.}

“The West is the only civilization to have created a form of art whose sole purpose is to attack morality.” (Martha Bayles)

“It is mostly in the arts that the dream of radical change still perpetuates its cruel hoax.” (Martha Bayles)

We have met the enemy and it is what Martha Bayles (Hole in Our Soul) labeled ‘Perverse Modernism’. While that awful contagion has long infected the creative arts and modern culture in general, Ms. Bayle’s particular concern (writing in 1994) was with the damage it had done, and was doing, to American popular music:

Something has gone seriously wrong with popular music, both with its sound and with the sensibility it expresses. [Its] anti-musical, antisocial antics would be laughable if they weren’t so offensive. Just as assaultive as the lyrics and images of contemporary popular music are many of its sounds. From the shrieking clamor of thrash metal to the murky din of grunge, from the cheap, synthesized tinsel of pop ballads to the deadly pounding of computerized rhythm tracks, popular music seems terminally hostile to any sound traditionally associated with music.

Perverse Modernism, according to Bayles, began in France in the 1870s with Arthur Rimbaud, who took it upon himself to “personify the idea of the poet as social outlaw.” Rimbaud, in the words of one critic, was a product of “the hysteria of the late nineteenth century, an age recently deprived of religious faith, demoralized and embittered by war, and becoming dissatisfied with social utopianism, science, and the cult of art as an end in itself.” While still in his teens, Rimbaud “took symbolism to the very edge of perversity,” only to perversely abandon his project shortly thereafter; he ceased writing poetry and left Europe to live out the remainder of his short life in Africa, denouncing the very idea of poetry as “disgusting” and “absurd”. ¹

Rimbaud aside, Perverse Modernism, wrote Bayles, has unleashed its “anarchistic, nihilistic impulses” in a variety of guises.  It has appeared as ‘Decadence,’ as ‘Futurism,’ as ‘Dada’ and ‘Surrealism,’ as the ‘Theater of Cruelty’ and as the ‘Theater of the Absurd’. While it has sometimes displayed “a strong affinity for totalitarianism,” it is quintessentially “anarchistic, hell-bent on disrupting the systematizing power of all organization, social as well as political.” ²

To return to the ostensible subject of Ms. Bayle’s Hole in Our Soul, the same nihilistic impulses were eventually (you’ll never guess when) “grafted onto popular music, where they have encouraged today’s cult of obscenity, brutality, and sonic abuse. ³ The [pivotal moment] came in the late 1960s, when the counterculture went sour, and popular music began attracting people who were less interested in music than in using such a powerful medium for culturally radical purposes.”

Those “culturally radical purposes” apparently included making truckloads of money, given who it was Bayles singled out for their cultural villainy:

“The harbingers of this break [with tradition] were the Rolling Stones, who relished the blues but did not hesitate to make it over in the image of the stale perverse modernism that some of their members had picked up in British art colleges. The Stones enhanced their musical reputation by shocking the public and being arrogantly rude to their audiences—behaviors now accepted as part of rock.”

I cannot speak to the virtues of British art colleges, but it seems to me that the Stones were guilty only of “shocking” the staid and easily shocked British establishment; moreover, they were not “arrogantly rude to their audiences” but rewarded said audiences with intense and lengthy performances that brought, one might say, plenty of satisfaction.

After the Stones, however, the deluge:

“More drastic were the changes wrought by American performers like Frank Zappa, the Velvet Underground, and the New York Dolls, all steeped in perverse modernism, whose late 1960s stage shows resembled the ‘happenings’ of Andy Warhol more than they did concerts. (Indeed, the Velvet Underground made its name touring with Andy Warhol.) Then, in the 1970s, an even more dedicated contingent of cultural radicals climbed aboard the bandwagon, and the strain known as ‘punk’ effectively turned rock into a species of performance art. The Sex Pistols became famous for attacking music along with everything else. Today, the punk legacy persists wherever noise, shock, and ugliness are cultivated for their own sakes, and wherever the fires of adolescent anger and aggression are stoked in ways that are almost totally destructive.”

Ms. Bayles’ failure to mention the Clash, the Ramones, the Cramps, Alice Cooper, or Patti Smith (among others) is disappointing. Regardless, there is no point in arguing over matters of taste, musical or otherwise; besides, Ms. Bayles was not just complaining about music she disliked, she was making a significant statement about—I don’t know what, but it couldn't have been good. Cultural debauchery? Philistinism? Why we can’t have nice things?

Whatever the perceived problem might have been, Bayles offered the solution:

[We need] a shift in public taste, brought about by the usual combination of things we cannot control and things we can, including the old-fashioned tools of persuasion, debate, and education. We need to trace the roots of our present predicament to their true sources in the larger culture, and we need to change our tune about artistic matters. We need to follow the historian Jacques Barzun, who recommends learning to say, ‘It is because I understand this work of art that I dislike it.’

I give Ms. Bayles credit for not entirely dismissing modern popular music (she liked the Beatles!) and for championing what she called “the Afro-American musical idiom” (blues, jazz, and gospel). I also appreciate that she wasted no time denouncing the corrupting influence of comic books or Mad magazine, or the deterioration of television’s standards of decorum (from Ozzie & Harriet to Married with Children was truly one giant leap for mankind). What is unforgiveable, however, is the following:

“Bob Dylan’s first album of original material, ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,’ contained four songs that became instant protest classics: ‘Masters of War,’ ‘Ballad of a Thin Man,’ ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,’ and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’.”

Anyone who botches Dylan’s discography that badly simply cannot be taken seriously.⁴

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¹ My favorite Rimbaud quote is this: “‘I’ is another.”

² Ms. Bayles does not mention that Perverse Modernism arose around the same time that Western societies were constructing what Max Weber called an “iron cage” of bureaucracies, industrial regimentation, and mass production—developments against which the Perverse Modernists were almost certainly reacting.

³ “Sonic Abuse” is an outstanding name for a band.

⁴ For the uninitiated: “Ballad of a Thin Man” appeared on Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album, released two years after Freewheelin’. It was both musically and lyrically miles removed from Dylan’s earlier “protest” material. Martha Bayles gets points, I suppose, for saying that Dylan’s turn to electric rock music “reclaimed the distinctive sound of the Afro-American idiom from both the incipient distortions of early rock and the prettiness of popular folk.” But there is, I repeat, no excuse for misplacing “Ballad of a Thin Man”.  

Harbingers of Doom, circa 1969

Saturday Lecture: Culture or Politics?

Claes Ryn, from “How Conservatives Failed the Culture” (1996):

Many self-described American intellectual conservatives have a thinly veiled disdain for philosophy and the arts. Even among academics, indifference to what lies beyond broad ideas and popular culture is common. The ruling assumption of the now dominant strains of intellectual conservatism seems to be that the crux of social well-being is politics: bad politicians ruin society; good politicians set it right. Nothing fascinates conservatives more than presidential politics. For social problems to be effectively remedied and for worthy objectives to be achieved, "our" candidate must win the next election, our people man the government. 

Many supposedly intellectual conservatives seem to consider ideas and culture from afar, as it were, feeling no deep personal need for or intimate connection with them. Some are in a way attracted to the arts or even to philosophical speculation but see no significant and immediate connection between these and the life of practice. Ideas and the arts are mainly pleasant diversions. Many others have only slight interest in philosophy and culture for their own sake. More or less consciously, they tend to assess either thought or imagination from the point of view of whether it advances or undermines the political cause that they assume to be incontestable. Does the book, lecture, play, movie, or song help or hinder the cause? Although such works may enlighten or entertain, they do not strike these individuals as having intrinsic and independent authority. Works of thought and imagination are for them not intriguing and potentially unsettling forces that might trigger painful self-examination and unpredictably reconstitute one's own accustomed views; making sense of them is not so much a matter of soul-searching as of locating them on the political spectrum. 

Much of the present conservative interest in "the culture" is due to a growing awareness of the political impact and propaganda potential of the mind and the imagination. It has also become politically opportune to bemoan cultural sleaze. Although it can certainly be salutary for well-educated and aesthetically discerning politicians and other public figures to comment on a harmful cultural and academic situation, the fact that such a task has fallen to, or been seized by, politicians and political intellectuals is a sign of the failure of intellectuals and artists. Criticisms of cultural, intellectual, and moral decadence that politicians address to large audiences are likely to be simplistic and heavy-handed. They may also feed the spurious and dangerous notion that the key to social health is political action. 

The Speaker of the House, a person with some credentials as an intellectual, has complained, on good grounds, about a lack of shame in American society. ¹ Public discussion of the Speaker’s concern showed wide support for promoting shame by having political and civic leaders set moral and other standards and start campaigns to elicit the desired reaction. It seemed out of place to point out that shame of the kind that formed part of an older Western morality is not so easily manufactured. It had origins deep within the personality of Western man, as shaped by the long moral, religious, aesthetical, and intellectual history of his society. Shame of that type could not be replaced through civic boosterism.

Does it need to be said that the views about culture, truth, and morality that are put forth by intellectuals who live and breathe political strategy and tactics are no real alternative to the thinking now dominant in academia and beyond? Only an authentic revitalization of will, imagination and reason would deepen and enrich human existence as an end in itself, not serve a particular political agenda. A characteristic of a creative civilization is that you cannot fully predict where it might lead in thought, art, ethics, and politics. Many purported conservative intellectuals currently concerned about "the culture" seem to know exactly what will be the political-ideological consequences of "improving" it: more "capitalism," "democracy," and "equality." Perhaps in some future Washington administration there will be appointed a "culture czar." A more appropriate title might be "commissar." 

Rather than submit to a reign of conservative political correctness, a cultural and intellectual movement worthy of the name would take its chances with poets, artists, philosophers, and men and women of conscience. 

How Conservatives Failed the Culture (nhinet.org)

About the author: Claes G. Ryn - Department of Politics - Catholic University of America 

¹ At the time of Ryn’s essay, the Speaker of the House who was concerned over our “lack of shame” was Newt Gingrich, whose picture you will find in the dictionary under the word “shameless”. I will not speak to Ryn’s assertion that Gingrich possessed “some credentials as an intellectual,” other than to say that intellectual credentials are not always what they appear to be and that oftentimes on closer inspection such credentials turn out to have been forged. I’m just saying.

Life in the Interregnum

{The following is from Chris Hedges and is excerpted from his 2017 essay ‘Antonio Gramsci and the Battle Against Fascism’. In the five years since the essay appeared, the American political Right has become increasingly demagogic. Since we are dealing today with what President Biden calls ‘semi-fascism,’ perhaps it’s time to brush up on our Gramsci?}

What if they gave an interregnum and nobody came?

Chris Hedges:

We have reached a moment in human history when the reigning ideology has lost its credibility. All of neoliberalism’s promises have proven false. The abolishment of national residency requirements for corporations has been used to legalize corporate tax boycotts. The middle class—the bedrock of any capitalist democracy—is withering away and has been replaced by an angry, disenfranchised working poor. Workers are forced into two or three jobs and 70-hour workweeks to stay solvent. Medical bills, student loans, subprime mortgages, and credit card debt trigger crippling bankruptcies. The corporate managerial class, meanwhile, collects billions in bonuses and compensation and uses its money and lobbyists to destroy democratic institutions.

As these lies become transparent, we are thrown into what Antonio Gramsci called an interregnum—a time when the reigning ideology has lost efficacy but has yet to be replaced by a new one. “The crisis consists,” Gramsci wrote, “precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, [and] in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Hence political mutations such as Donald Trump, or in Gramsci’s time Mussolini.

Mass culture is a potent and dangerous counterrevolutionary force. It creates a herd mentality. It banishes independent and autonomous thought. It destroys our self-confidence. It marginalizes and discredits nonconformists. It depoliticizes the citizenry. It instills a sense of collective futility and impotence by presenting the ruling ideology as a revealed, unassailable truth, an inevitable and inexorable force that alone makes human progress possible.

Mass culture is an assault that, as Gramsci wrote, results in a “confused and fragmentary” consciousness or what Marx called “false consciousness.” It is designed to impart the belief to the proletariat that its “true” interests are aligned with those of the ruling class, in our case global corporatism.

We are a product not of nature, Gramsci wrote, but of our history and our culture. If we do not know our history and our culture, and accept the false history and culture manufactured for us, we will never surmount the forces of oppression. The recovery of memory and culture in the 1960s by radical movements terrified the elites. It gave people an understanding of their own power and agency. It articulated and celebrated the struggles of working men and women and the oppressed rather than the mythical beneficence of the oppressors. It exposed the exploitation and mendacity of the ruling class. ¹ And that is why corporatists spent billions to crush and marginalize these movements and their histories in schools, the culture, the press and in our systems of entertainment. “Not only does the people have no precise consciousness of its own historical identity,” Gramsci lamented; under fascism, “it is not even conscious of the historical identity or the exact limits of its adversary.”

The question must be asked: is the people learning?

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Antonio Gramsci and the Battle Against Fascism (truthdig.com)

¹ Hedges is being far too generous in his assessment of the Sixties, perhaps mistaking intentions for achievements.

Bits & Pieces

Good news! David French believes the culture wars are, if not exactly over, definitely on the decline. “We’ve passed ‘peak woke,’” French writes. “I think we’ve seen the peak (for now) of left-wing institutional intolerance and illiberalism regarding race, sex, and religion.” 

French bases his optimism on “the demonstrated inability of cancel culture to truly ‘cancel’ most of its targets. My friend Bari Weiss, for example, is now far more influential and widely read than she was before her New York Times ordeal. Andrew Sullivan is thriving at Substack after being forced out at New York.”

Moreover, French continues, “Key institutions are opening themselves up to dissenting voices. It’s incredibly heartening to see my friend Tish Harrison Warren, a devout orthodox Evangelical, now share space in the Times with Ross Douthat. In many spaces there is actually a hunger for a diversity of views.”

In other words, so long as David French’s friends have platforms, the culture wars are a non-issue. The fact that those ‘wars’ were manufactured for political gain by the political Right is apparently not worth discussing, nor is the fact that Republican controlled state legislatures are currently busy ‘canceling’ books, curricula, and teachers’ opinions in the public schools.    

Culture Wars End With Consequences - by David French (thedispatch.com)

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According to David Kamioner, liberals simply can’t take a joke. Sure, they once produced actual comedians like Woody Allen and George Carlin; and sure, “Tina Fey is adorable (okay, so I have a crush on her) and brilliant. When she strays into politics she generally puts the jokes above ideology.” For that matter, “Bill Maher is the closest thing we have today to a Will Rogers or Mort Sahl, in that his takes on topical subjects are not only witty but cut through BS to get to the heart of a matter. ¹ That’s why few skewer the left like Maher. He rips them apart with slashing comedic gusto.”

What is more important, however—at least to David Kamioner—is that Dave Chapelle, who “has taken on, both on his former show and his sold out live performances, about every left wing trope including that holy of holies the transgender movement,” has been subjected to “the usual hysterical pushback from the PC left, which accused him of all the isms and seems particularly offended that Chapelle is a black American, a Muslim, and chooses to live in a small Midwestern town and not in NYC or LA.” 

So—that’s it? The Left doesn’t like, and has criticized, Dave Chapelle, and therefore has no sense of humor? That seems like—and please pardon this reference—a rush to judgment. I could just as easily claim that the Right has no sense of humor because Greg Gutfeld exists or because conservatives take Dinesh D’Souza seriously.

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¹ For those of you too young (or too old) to remember Mort Sahl, consider this: after John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, “Sahl's comedy would often reflect his politics and included readings and commentary about the Warren Commission Report, of which he consistently disputed the accuracy. He alienated much of his audience, was effectively blacklisted, and more of his planned shows were cancelled. His income dropped from $1 million to $13,000 by 1964. According to [a biographer], the excessive focus on the Kennedy assassination details was Sahl's undoing and wrecked his career. Sahl later admitted that "there's never been anything that had a stronger impact on my life than this issue," but added that he nonetheless "thought it was a wonderful quest." And here we thought the cultural Marxists and Social Justice Warriors invented cancel culture!

The Unfunny Left (lifezette.com)

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Joe Lonsdale does not like “the largely negative mood of the current historical discourse,” including episodes of the TV show ‘Picard’. “It’s not totally clear,” writes Lonsdale, “why so many hold our past (and even the present) in such extreme contempt, but there is probably a combination of factors:

1. The West “won,” and some feel guilty about that;
2. There are far more written records of the West’s mistakes and crimes than those of other civilizations;
3. In its decadence, the West has become bored and enjoys self-criticism;
4. Attacking the past is a good pretext to seize political power today.”

Irrational guilt, literacy, boredom, and the lust for power: those are what Lonsdale would have us believe motivate our contemporary historical discourse. By the same token, one could speculate, never having met Mr. Lonsdale, that he is motivated by overweening pride, Western chauvinism, ignorance, and a desire to control the historical narrative for political advantage.   

Lonsdale’s defense of Western civilization includes an innovative ranking of historical horrors in which the “An Lushan Revolt” of the 8^th century and the “Mongol Conquests” of the 13^th century caused death tolls proportionately higher than those of the twentieth century. For that matter, and following Steven Pinker, Lonsdale points out how lucky we are not to be governed by either Aztecs or Kiowas. Putting modernity in perspective, Lonsdale ranks World War I only sixteenth in his table of twenty-one global horrors, while ranking World War II ninth, just behind “The Annihilation of the American Indians” and the “Atlantic Slave Trade”.

In fairness, I should allow Lonsdale to make his point:

It’s absolutely fine to teach and learn about the beauty and wisdom that comes from other cultures. What isn’t fine is to teach that our own is evil and immoral. Our children will be bereft of the foundation they need to understand why our country works; why it is that people from all over the world want to be here; and how we can apply these values to make our future even better.

We should be biased toward pride in our civilization, and we should harness that pride in order to build new things. If we teach children that our past is evil and irredeemable, then they’re going to think our future is, too.

Solving problems is hard, and retrospective moral judgment is very, very easy. But we should have high expectations for ourselves, because we can be great. We should do the hard thing.

The word “nihilism” comes from the Latin nihil—nothing. If we continue to indulge the historical nihilism that ignores the unique and positive qualities of the West and of our country, that’s exactly what the future holds: nothing.

Well—the future always holds something; as conservatives are fond of noting, genuine nihilism would be self-contradictory and self-defeating, which is why it is rare if not non-existent. In any case, there is no such thing as “historical nihilism”; there are simply differences of opinion regarding which aspects of history should be emphasized, who should be praised and who criticized, and what lessons should be drawn from the past.

In Defense of Us - The American Mind

The Theocrats Are Coming

"Cultural Christianity in America is dying.” *  (Ben Dunson)

Nothing escapes the notice of Ben Dunson, founding editor of the brand-new American Reformer, who detects everywhere the signs of cultural Christianity's demise: “Blue laws have disappeared, pornography pervades our culture, and Christian views on sexuality and the family are increasingly attacked in the public square. Gone are the days in which a sitting U.S. President (Ulysses S. Grant) could write to America’s Sunday School students: ‘Hold fast to the Bible as the sheet-anchor of your liberties; write its precepts in your hearts and practice them in your lives. To the influence of this book we are indebted for all the progress made in true civilization’.”

Gone are the days! Who among us does not fondly remember “blue laws” or the inspiring words of Ulysses S. Grant (“I have not yet begun to drink!”)? Why, it seems like only yesterday that protestors were forcefully cleared from the streets of the nation’s capital so that an American President could pose proudly, unread Bible in hand, in front of a church the doors of which he had never darkened. Christianity as “photo op” and the Bible as political prop: such are the godly foundations of our culture.

Writing at First Things, Ben Dunson warns that we do not miss our holy water until the cultural well runs dry. While acknowledging that "There are evils, abuses, and hypocrisies in every human society,” he insists that “The old Protestant establishment in this country did much to promote human flourishing and to restrain destructive ideologies in the public square.” But look at us now, post-Christianity: “We are now at the point where, if one hopes to maintain a position in politics or business, one may not publicly maintain that men cannot become women, or that homosexuality should be condemned.” Nonsense on stilts! Why, we might as well claim that dogs can become cats, or that lions will lie down with lambs, or that virgins can give birth to gods!

Alas, Dunson reminds us, “The Christian who holds fast to the teachings of Scripture will never be loved in this world. It won’t matter how winsome he is, nor how many of the valued causes of the world he adopts.” Therefore, Dunson concludes, it is not the approval of the world Christians should seek, but power:

What we urgently need in order to renew Christian culture, then, is the courage to provide godly leadership in troubled times, to seek goodness and truth in the public square. This might look like taking Netflix to court for peddling child pornography; or passing a constitutional amendment similar to the one in Hungary ¹ that requires “children to be raised with a Christian interpretation of gender roles,” and provides governmental and societal support to help families put this into practice; or seeking extensive financial damages through the courts for the irreparable disfigurement brought about by transgender surgeries. ² In the end, it will mean taking back political and judicial power from those who seek to further degrade our nation.” 

In his introductory piece to the premier issue of American Reformer, Dunson touches all the Right bases: he quotes Tocqueville and Tolkien, references Richard Weaver (Ideas Have Consequences), briefly discusses “wokeness” (“a pseudo-religion of intense fervor and devotion”), praises Christopher Rufo for exposing Critical Race Theory, and approvingly quotes Theodore Roosevelt: “Weasel words from mollycoddles will never do when the day demands prophetic clarity from great hearts. Manly men must emerge for this hour of trial.”

None dare call it theocracy, but Dunson’s intentions are clear: “State legislatures,” he asserts, “through their control of the budget of state universities, can do much to remove harmful ideologies, as has been shown in Idaho.” Propping up the latest strawman just to knock it down, Dunson adamantly insists that “Public schools should be prohibited from teaching that white schoolchildren are racists (unknowingly perhaps) simply by virtue of the color of their skin.” The real problem with today’s “Cancel culture,” it seems, is that it is canceling the wrong things; Dunson and others on the Right are all in favor of canceling Critical Theory, “woke” ideologies (like evolution or global warming), public health directives, human beings trying to cross the border, access to the ballot, and more.

In the end, Dunson comes right out and says it: “Political power can and should be used to promote what is good and to punish evil (see Romans 13:1-7).” Of course, someone will have to define “good” and “evil,” and, in Ben Dunson’s America, that can only be done by people who rely upon the Bible, and upon Ben Dunson’s interpretation of it, for those definitions.

At the risk of sounding like a left-wing Rod Dreher: Christian theocrats are serious about this, and they are coming for the rest of us.

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*Some would argue that "cultural Christianity" is an oxymoron--not because Christians are not cultured, but because, as Tertullian long ago declared, Athens has nothing to do with Jerusalem.            H. Richard Niebuhr's classic Christ and Culture addressed the issue at some length and in some depth; Niebuhr opened his book by observing that "The debate on the issue is as confused as it is many-sided".   

¹ Dunson’s suggestion that American Christians look to Hungary as a role model should be taken seriously. The very first issue of Dunson’s American Reformer includes an interview (reprinted from Chronicles) with Hungarian President Viktor Orban. Orban and Hungary have also been touted recently by Tucker Carlson on Fox News. The American Right is making no secret of its increasingly authoritarian leanings, authoritarianism being the logical alternative when winning elections (at the national level, at least) is increasingly less likely.    

² So much for the traditional right-wing advocacy of “tort reform” regarding medical malpractice claims; a botched back surgery is no basis for a lawsuit, but “irreparable disfigurement” from “transgender surgeries” is grounds for “extensive financial damages”.

Don’t Rejoice in the Collapse of Cultural Christianity | Ben C. Dunson | First Things

Weasel Words and Mollycoddles: Introducing American Reformer - American Reformer

                                          The American flag as God designed it

I Can See Real Clearly Now

{The title of today's post is a clever reference to the fact that I have once again mined RealClearPolitics and RealClearPolicy for items of interest.}

You can add Ryszard Legutko to the list of Eastern European intellectuals in vogue on the American Right, a list which already includes Zygmunt Bauman, Leszek Kolakowski, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, among others. The allure of such thinkers is that they have lived under Communist totalitarianism, therefore, their insights about freedom and their warnings about the slippery slopes of liberalism must be taken seriously.

At American Greatness, Emina Melonic reviews Legutko’s The Cunning of Reason: Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols. She finds it invigorating, albeit imperfect. Ms. Melonic praises Legutko for teaching us that “Freedom does not exist in a collectivist society, and the only way that it can exist is if we reject collectivism and affirm the idea of community.” If that distinction—between “collectivism” and “community”—proves problematic, we can simply use the Russian term sobornost’ and nod our heads wisely.

Melonic approvingly notes, “Legutko points out that liberalism has enacted tyranny as opposed to freedom.” How so? In part, at least, by advocating for so-called “rights” that in fact impose liberalism’s decadent values on the society. “As Legutko points out: ‘The most notorious examples of the liberties gained in Western societies in recent decades [are] the public use of vulgar language, public media’s public broadcasting of explicit sex and violence, euthanasia, same-sex marriage and the right for homosexuals to adopt children, [and] almost unlimited rights to abortion.’”

That seems a fair assessment of liberalism’s recent “accomplishments”. Legutko could have added other examples of liberalism’s tyranny: e.g., biological men are allowed to pose as “women,” to use women’s bathrooms, and to compete in women’s sports; marijuana has been effectively legalized; all white people are suspect; academia is in thrall to Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory; and Big Tech has dropped its mask and has revealed itself to be Big Brother.

Ms. Melonic concludes, “Ryszard Legutko succeeds in dismantling current ideologies that seek to destroy the order of things. He thoughtfully and elegantly provides a critique of our own society through a prism that is both philosophical and historical and is genuinely calling on the reader to consider both the possibilities and limits of freedom.” 

Does the experience of living under totalitarianism qualify Legutko et al to critique liberalism, or does it predispose them to see tyranny lurking everywhere? That, I suggest, would make for an interesting essay.   

Free and Captive Minds › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

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At RealClearPolitics, Charles Lipson offers a modest suggestion of his own: we should eliminate “women’s sports” and let men and women compete against each other on equal terms, because “separate but equal” arrangements are inherently unjust. Lipson’s real purpose, of course, is to belittle the idea of allowing trans women to compete against cis women: “Put simply, if there are good reasons for holding separate competitions at all, then transgender women should not compete against other women.”

The issue seems very important to Charles Lipson, who probably was up in arms decades ago when the trans woman Rene Richards dominated women’s tennis. ¹ Or perhaps he was traumatized by Billie Jean King's thrashing of tennis legend and "male chauvinist pig" Bobby Riggs. I await Lipson's polemic against the use of "weight classes" in boxing and wrestling, handicaps in bowling and golf, and other attempts to even competitive playing fields. 

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¹ Rene Richards did not dominate women’s tennis, even though conservatives at the time insisted she would.

A Gold Medal Question: Should Women's Sports Even Exist? | RealClearPolitics

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Finally, at Persuasion, Zaid Jilani sees signs that the woke tyrants may be on their way out the door and that Cancel Culture may be coming to an end. “Young Americans may return us to a culture of compassion and forgiveness,” Jilani writes; such a “return” would be quite a trick, given that no such culture ever existed in America (or, likely, anywhere else).

Jilani, mind you, is writing about the same America that has the flimsiest social safety net of any advanced nation, that has more people in prison and keeps them there longer, that has retained the death penalty, and that spends more on its military than its major rivals combined; where, in all that, does Jilani find any hint of “compassion and forgiveness”? We do not pledge allegiance to a flag representing "compassion and forgiveness for all," and any suggestion we do so would be defeated overwhelmingly if put to a national plebiscite.

Regardless, Jilani thinks that Cancel Culture is the modern-day equivalent of the Salem witch trials (also an outstanding example of traditional American compassion and forgiveness), and he welcomes its demise. According to him, “Hypersensitivity may simply be a fad that is starting to burn itself out. Moral panics about such pressing topics as Halloween costumes may have consumed students at America’s most elite campuses during the mid-2010s, but no social or political trend lasts forever.”  Ah yes, the great “Halloween costumes moral panic” of the mid-2010s: it definitely happened, and it was all-consuming! I believe Halloween was cancelled on campuses for several years because of the all-consuming panic.

Jilani continues:

Gen Z, on the other hand, has grown up immersed in the internet and social media. To them, the barrier between what’s personal and what’s public is fluid, and many Americans of this age don’t find it particularly unusual to broadcast everyday life and thoughts to the entire world. A puritanical mindset that seeks to persecute people over the expression of their beliefs is hard to reconcile with a world where so much of what was once private is now public. The teens in this generation have also had to deal with the ever-present reality of their peers being dogpiled for their social media posts. Gen Z has first-hand knowledge of this Panopticon-like environment and how suffocating it can be.

As has always been the case, one’s attitude about all this depends, as they say, on whose ox is being gored; or, in this instance, on whose culture is being canceled. The entire “cancel culture” brouhaha has been cooked up by people who would go to court in a heartbeat to defend the right of private religious schools to fire teachers for “getting” pregnant (but not for “getting someone else” pregnant), for cohabitation, for being gay or lesbian, or for any number of moral “offenses”. They want professional athletes fired for kneeling during the national anthem. They are kindred spirits to the people who mercilessly hounded left-wing professors and screenwriters in the Fifties, prompting Arthur Miller to write The Crucible in response to the prevailing McCarthyite "cancel culture"; and I, for one, have not the slightest sympathy for them.

The End of "Cancel Culture"? - by Zaid Jilani - Persuasion

Today's Curmudgeon

There is a new curmudgeon in town: his name is Alexander Zubatov. An attorney by profession, Zubatov moonlights as a polemicist, his polemics having graced the pages of The Imaginative Conservative and The Federalist, among other publications. Zubatov is an alumnus of Yale University, though he boycotted his 20-year class reunion there to protest “woke” shenanigans on campus (to my knowledge, the reunion proceeded without him).    

The following should serve as an introduction to Zubatov’s oeuvre. In “How Do We Save Our Souls from the Modern World?” Zubatov laments the decline/demise of “high culture,” by which he does not mean the turned-on culture of the Sixties. “Mass culture” has not had a thrashing this severe since the heyday of Neil Postman and Walker Percy. Have at it, Mr. Zubatov:

Mass culture is largely a twentieth-century development, and it found its first and firmest stronghold in the U.S. Its causes can be debated and range from greater mass liberty, literacy, cosmopolitanism, and spending power to the increasing inaccessibility of high art, culminating in Modernism, but above all, it is a manifestation of our growing existential vacuum. While high culture is meditative, requiring time and contemplation to work its magic, in our accelerating society, hardly anyone has the time or desire to read Proust’s 4,000-page masterpiece or even a one-page poem that might require hours, days or months of immersive musing to resonate. We have lost the capacity for this kind of immersive contemplation, and expect communication to be brief, punchy and immediately impactful.

Mass culture caters to this craving for instant gratification. It has less in common with art than it does with amusement parks, sideshows and circus acts. It stands in relation to art in something like the relationship that pornography bears to romance. It offers quick highs, cheap thrills, big bangs, and a lot of action, violence, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. The problem is not sex and violence and the like per se, but that, in the context of mass culture, these become ends in themselves, conveying no deeper value.

Porn, drugs, junk food, much of the internet and technology enabling instantaneous communication, video games and mass culture of all sorts that skips right to the punchline are what the Nobel-prize winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen referred to as “supernormal stimuli” that exaggerate natural effects we have evolved to crave. When we are routinely subjected to such stimuli, we screw up our reward system, unbalancing us and leading to addiction. In essence, we begin to crave more and more until we are finally left benumbed. ¹

The predictable result of mass culture—dressed in jeans, G-strings or drag, Big Gulp and a grease-stained carton of fries in hand—unceremoniously barging in on the ball, pumping up the volume, putting on some twerkable tunes and getting a good old food fight going, with the whole shebang cheerily chaperoned all the while by those who were supposed to be serving as gatekeepers and guardians, is that art and high culture are well on their way to being thoroughly devalued. If Hamlet and Real Housewives or Beethoven and Beyoncé are conceived of as no more than alternative pastimes, a mere matter of “different strokes for different folks,” then we are at a point where the distinction between art and entertainment has effectively vanished, and with it, our last great refuge and potential source of individual and collective meaning and purpose without which man is little better than a pig wallowing in the small tract of mud within which it happens to find itself plopped. ²

It is hard not to admire Zubatov’s all-encompassing, all-purpose vitriol and the take-no-prisoners swagger with which he dispenses it. Though he is associated with today’s political Right, Alexander Zubatov seems to be a curmudgeon for all seasons, and we can never have too many of those.

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How Do We Save Our Souls From the Modern World? ~ The Imaginative Conservative

 ¹ I sympathize with the “supernormal stimuli” thesis and with concerns about the dangers posed by the phenomenon itself. Modern society is a high-speed, hyperactive, humanly manipulated environment in which citizens are constantly exposed to demagogic imagery and emotional overload, often in the name of “entertainment” but always in pursuit of profit. 

² “It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,” said John Stuart Mill, to which Jeremy Bentham replied, “Not if you're a pig.”

Books Report: "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (1985)

{Note: this week, The Little Red Blog (“TLRB,” but not to be confused with The London Review of Books) is taking a break from Russian history. Instead, I will be discussing, and recommending, a few of my favorite books, beginning with Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.}

In addition to having been the inspiration (I assume) for a classic hit song by the Marvelettes, Neil Postman was an educator, a social and cultural critic, and an author. His best-known book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, was published in 1985; a new edition was issued in 2005, after Postman’s death, and included a preface from his son, Andrew Postman.

In that preface, Postman fils argued for the continued relevance of his father’s concerns. In doing so, he itemized some of the still unanswered questions raised by Amusing Ourselves to Death:

What happens to us when we become infatuated with and then seduced by new technologies? Do they free us or imprison us? Do they improve or degrade democracy? Do they make our leaders more accountable or less so? Our system more transparent or less so? Do they make us better citizens or better consumers? Are the trade-offs worth it? If they’re not worth it, yet we still can’t stop ourselves from embracing the next new thing because that’s just how we're wired, then what strategies can we devise to maintain control? Dignity? Meaning?

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman suggested that America, though it had thus far weathered George Orwell’s dystopic 1984 without succumbing to totalitarian temptations, still faced a looming threat: the equally dystopic Brave New World imagined by Aldous Huxley. Postman explained the differences between the two nightmares:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

“This book,” Neil Postman concluded, “is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.” What if we have met Big Brother and he is us?

A digression: when Donald Trump would conclude one of his deranged rants about the dangers of windmills and wind power—windmills kill millions of birds, the noise from windmills causes cancer, windmills lower your property values—his punch line was always, “And if the wind doesn’t blow, you’re out of luck. ‘I’m sorry, darling, but we won’t be able to watch TV tonight, there’s no wind.’” Trump did not ask his audiences to worry about hospitals losing power for respirators and incubators, and he did not express concern that food would spoil in the absence of power for refrigeration. No; he went straight to the heart of Americans’ deepest existential anxiety—I’m sorry, darling, but we won’t be able to watch TV tonight.

Fifty-seven channels and nothing on? I want my MTV!

Even in 1985, Neil Postman was not a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Television (in practice if not in theory) was widely reviled. ¹ Other critics—including Newt Minow, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission—had expressed concerns about America’s “entertainment-industrial complex”; Minow had complained about the “vast wasteland” of commercial network television, Jerry Mander had offered Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, and Marie Winn accused TV of being The Plug-in Drug. Watching TV was something of a guilty pleasure, much like pornography: we knew it was wrong, we knew it was bad for us, we didn’t want to admit to doing it, but we could not get ourselves to look away, much less to push the “off” button on the remote. Nor was it only TV that came in for a scolding; Neil Gabler’s Life: The Movie explored the impact movies had on American life and on American mores, while highbrow types scoffed at Disneyland and Dollywood. ²

Still, Postman’s warnings, coming in the middle of America’s self-satisfied Reagan era, seemed to strike a nerve:

In America, Orwell’s prophecies are of small relevance, but Huxley’s are well under way toward being realized. For America is engaged in the world’s most ambitious experiment to accommodate itself to the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug. This is an experiment that began slowly and modestly in the mid-nineteenth century and has now, in the latter half of the twentieth, reached a perverse maturity in America’s consuming love-affair with television. As nowhere else in the world, Americans have moved far and fast in bringing to a close the age of the slow-moving printed word and have granted to television sovereignty over all of their institutions. By ushering in the Age of Television, America has given the world the clearest available glimpse of the Huxleyan future.

Postman’s observations about television were grounded in his insights and concerns about technology itself and about the public's passive, unquestioning acceptance of technological change:

What is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion, and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology. This, in spite of the fact that before our very eyes technology has altered every aspect of life in America during the past eighty years. For example, it would have been excusable in 1905 for us to be unprepared for the cultural changes the automobile would bring. Who could have suspected then that the automobile would tell us how we were to conduct our social and sexual lives? Would reorient our ideas about what to do with our forests and cities? Would create new ways of expressing our personal identity and social standing?

Postman did not shy from articulating the larger implications of his critique:

To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple. Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.

All of Postman’s warnings, remember, came before the internet, before Facebook and other social media, before Amazon and Netflix and Google. Had we listened to those warnings, perhaps we could have established some sort of “Office of Technology and Innovation,” with a branch devoted to “Assessment of Social Media”. As it is, we are now attempting to put the genie of social media partway back into its bottle; we will almost certainly not succeed.

Towards the close of Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman offered a series of questions he thought essential to living well in a technological age. The answers would be less important than the fact that the questions would be asked and seriously discussed:

What is information? Or more precisely, what are information? What are its various forms? What conceptions of intelligence, wisdom and learning does each form insist upon? What conceptions does each form neglect or mock? What are the main psychic effects of each form? What is the relation between information and reason? What is the kind of information that best facilitates thinking? Is there a moral bias to each information form? What does it mean to say that there is too much information? How would one know? What redefinitions of important cultural meanings do new sources, speeds, contexts and forms of information require? Does television, for example, give a new meaning to “piety,” to “patriotism,” to “privacy”? Does television give a new meaning to “judgment” or to “understanding’’? How do different forms of information persuade? Is a newspaper's “public” different from television’s “public”? How do different information forms dictate the type of content that is expressed?  

It is never too late to stop and ask what we are doing, where we are going, and why. The best of our cultural and social critics—Postman, Lewis Mumford, Jane Adams, Marshall McLuhan, Wendell Berry, James Howard Kunstler, et al—have provided us ample guidance and left us myriad ideas, tools for re-mapping our “social imaginary” (Charles Taylor); the rest is up to us.

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¹ Thanks largely to cable programming, the quality of television in recent decades has improved considerably; if Postman’s arguments were correct, however, that upgrade simply makes the entertainment trap more effective. The only thing worse than having fifty-seven channels and nothing on is having over a hundred channels plus Netflix and other streaming services, and so much to watch there are not enough hours in the day to take it all in—which doesn’t stop us from trying.

² For a contrarian defense of our modern “bread and circuses,” read James Twitchell’s Carnival Culture. You may also try the same author’s Lead Us into Temptation, a defense of consumer culture more broadly. [The fact that Mr. Twitchell was credibly accused of plagiarism, leading to his resigning from his academic post, does not make his books less interesting.]

Amusing Ourselves to Death - Wikipedia

Neil Postman - Wikipedia

Amusing Ourselves to Death is available at local public libraries everywhere. It is also available online at Internet Archive (Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine)