Who needs Literature?

I don't ask that to put literature down, but because I'm truly ambivalent about whether I should care that I rarely read fiction, let alone that class of fiction that can or should be classified as literature, anymore. I'm not alone. Razib at Gene Expression posts his own admittedly half-baked theory on why we have literature:

Here's the argument: contemporary mainstream fiction is very different from the storytelling of the deep past because of a demand side shift. Women consume most fiction today, and their tastes differ, on average, from those of men. How do they differ? To be short about it men are into plot, while women are into character. This means that modern literary fiction emphasizes psychological complexity, subtly and finesse. In contrast, male-oriented action adventure or science fiction exhibits a tendency toward flat monochromatic characters and a reliance on interesting events and twists. Over my lifetime I've read a fair amount; but the vast majority of the fiction has been science fiction & fantasy. Many males outgrow this bias, perhaps as they become more psychologically complex and nuanced, but I haven't (though I don't read much fiction in general at this point). I know many other males who are similar; we aren't dumb, and not all of us have Asperger's. We just aren't interested into characterization or character. We are people of exotic ideas, novelty of story arc and exploration of startling landscapes. Contemporary mainstream fiction, high, middlebrow and low, does not usually satisfy these needs.

But ancient fiction; epics, myths, etc., do fulfill these requirements. I didn't seek out fiction in any form before I was 13 or so (I was assigned books in school of course); but I had read Bullfinch's Mythology as well as translations of the Iliad and Gilgamesh. In hindsight I suspect that my interest in these works is due to the fact that they are recognizably High Fantasy. Either they are explicit myths, or, they refer to peoples and places whose lack of banality is due to their distance in time & space (obviously I have never been to the Zagros mountains!). I also have read historical fiction which is sufficiently distant in time, e.g., the whole of Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series.
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If you read Isaac Asimov's biography, In Memory Yet Green, I think you get a sense of why his novels depict flat characters. Though Asimov seems to be a gregarious individual, he was very narcissistic and self-involved. I don't get a sense that he was a socially sensitive soul (though he did resent the anti-Semitism he had experienced or slights from strangers). Asimov wrote something of an apologia for science fiction as a genre of ideas, but I think it reflects the set of values which I've expressed above and which many science fiction oriented individuals embody; plots, not people. (if you want every stereotype of science fiction readers confirmed, check out William Sims Bainbridge's Dimensions of Science Fiction, which is based on surveys at science fiction conventions)

I can identify up to a certain point with the plot vs character dichotomy, though I do enjoy psychological richness in characters, which is probably why I much preferred Philip Dick to Isaac Asimov. But certainly the strangeness and novelty of science fiction settings did much to engage my interest.

But is fiction mainly about escapism and enjoyment? If so, why is it taught in school as a mandatory subject, one that most students have as much enthusiasm for as math. But math is recognizable as a very utilitarian subject, one that lifts careers and national economies. What is the utility of literature?

This article by Brian Boyd reminds me of why the study of literature makes my head ache:

Precisely because who will partner whom matters so much to us, love stories have always flooded the story pool. Any new romance therefore runs the risk of neglect through habituation, the fading of interest in repeated stimuli. But the passionate sexual love of a mature man for a girl is not an overfamiliar love story. As a novel about an unusual love and an unusual murder, Lolita appeals to immemorial interests but from unexpected angles. It surprised and shocked the public when it was first published, and it still does. At over 50 million copies sold, it is surely the most demanding novel ever to sell so well.

Let’s dive into the details of Humbert Humbert’s story to see if they bear out the idea of art as cognitive play with pattern, and to see how Nabokov eliminates habituation and animates attention. Humbert begins:

1

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.


2

I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects—paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

No other novel that I can recall starts with more patterned prose than Lolita. And its initial patterns themselves form parts of other patterns, like Humbert’s self-projection as an artist, a poet, an adoring lover, or his aestheticizing Lolita. But pattern and tantalizing hints of pattern saturate the text. Humbert’s mother is “the granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects—paleopedology and Aeolian harps.” That in itself may be coincidence, or perhaps meaningful pattern; what are the odds of these two subjects containing the adjacent letters a, l, e, o? Is that accident or design, and if design, why?

Nabokov has been called the greatest prose stylist in English, and not, I think, for the likes of Humbert’s patterned prose, but for his mastery of the psychology of attention, his capacity to shift our imaginations so quickly. Lolita’s name supplies the first word of Humbert’s text, and the last; his attention is obsessively on her, and he cannot introduce her name without caressing each syllable with lips and tongue. But even as he lingers on her in the second paragraph, the sudden images of Lo with different names and in different circumstances flash her into our mind’s eye: “Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. . . . Lola in slacks. . . . Dolores on the dotted line.” Nabokov knows how to catch our attention and fire our imagination by unexpected details and shifts.

Or notice the saccadic jump in attention, without sensory detail but with the surprise revelation of “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” Or the shift again from summary to “I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture postcards.” Everyone sits up here, because Humbert suddenly breaks frame, as it were, and because of the sudden concreteness: the mere idea of passing around these polished postcards activates motor, tactile, and visual areas of the brain—as neuroscientists have only recently established.

Along with Ulysses by Joyce, Lolita is one of those books that I tried to force myself to read on more than one occasion, only to throw down in either utter boredom or disgust. After asking myself why I should consider it my intellectual duty to comb a sordid tale about an obsessive pedophile for some rich treasure trove of meaning and coming up blank, I'm left with the options of either considering myself a dunce or writing off the whole puffed up literary enterprise as some sort of confidence racket.

But pattern and tantalizing hints of pattern saturate the text.

So its just about pattern recognition? Is that it? Is there any need for conveying meaning or truth in literature, or has it become merely an aesthetic exercise? It takes a well developed aesthetic sense to notice these intricate patterns of prose, and probably an even more developed sense to care so much about them, but my question still remains: what is the utility of such a well developed aesthetic sense? Does it improve me in any way? Given that there are so many other vehicles to indulge one's curiosity, is anything truly lost to the individual or to society when works like Lolita are ignored by the masses?

To underscore the downside of an overly developed aesthetic sense, Rachel Donadio warns that it can create a divide between lovers:

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about ... their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”

Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)

Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”

Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.” Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”

OK, so I've finally stumbled on literature's utility - it helps men to get laid.

Giving Guidance to the Angels means never having to say you are sorry

Yesterday, the NYT, in its news pages, presented a glowing article about a pair of French economists, Emmanual Saez and Thomas Piketty, whose seminal ground breaking research shows that income inequality is a very bad thing indeed, and that, therefore, we need a 90% marginal tax rate on top earners. Their main points:

• Income inequality has become morally offensive
• This inequality is correlated with a steep reduction in marginal labor tax rates for high earners
• The increase in inequality is particularly pronounced in the Anglosphere
• The so-called Buffet rule, which would invoke a 30% tax rate on incomes above $1 million, "... would do little to reverse the rich's gains."

Therefore, according to Mr. Saez, "Absent drastic policy changes, I doubt that income inequality will decline on its own."

Previous income inequality studies had a fairly short timeline: direct data had only been collected since 1970. Saez and Piketty extended that horizon by researching income tax archives all the way back to 1913. According to their research, inequality dropped after WWII, and remained relatively low until the 1970s, when it started to increase. "From 2000 to 2007, incomes for the bottom 90% of earners rose only about 4%, once adjusted for inflation. For the top 0.1%, incomes climbed about 94%. ... In 2010, the top 10% of earners took about half of overall income."

That has led the two economists to renew their calls for higher rates on the rich. Along with Peter Diamond, an emeritus professor at MIT and a Nobel laureate, Mr. Saez has estimated the "optimal" tax rates for the wealthy -- getting the most revenue from those most able to surrender it -- to be between 45% and 70%."

According to Mr. Diamond, "... whom [President] Obama nominated to the Federal reserve and Republicans blocked[,] 'Our finding is that the debate should be between the pre-1986 Reagan tax rate, which was 50%, and the rates that existed from Johnson to Reagan, which were higher." [Note: by "higher" the reporter, whose job description apparently excludes even superficial research, meant to say 91%.]

Since I am not a reporter, I am not at risk of betraying the profession by, well, reading the actual study. Also, as merely a glorified heavy equipment operator, and not an intellectual, I am not in the business of providing guidance to the angels, and therefore perhaps less willing to mistake my policy preferences for objective truth.

So, despite my lack of reportorial professionalism and academic credentials, I am going to take on the anointed elite to see if Saez and Piketty's argument is vulnerable to the predations of the hoi polloi.

From the introduction (citations omitted; edited slightly for wordiness; emphasis mine):

While there have been many discussions both in the academic literature and the public debate about the causes of the surge in top incomes, there is not a fully compelling explanation. Most explanations can be classified into market driven changes vs. institution driven changes. The market driven stories posit that technological progress has been skilled-biased and has favored top earners relative to average earners for CEOs as well as Winner-Take-All theories for superstars. [These] pure market explanations ... cannot account for the fact that top income shares have only increased modestly in advanced countries such as Japan or Germany or France which are also subject to the same technological forces. The institution driven stories posit that changes in institutions, defined to include labor and financial market regulations, Union policies, tax policy, and also more broadly social norms regarding pay disparity and in particular tolerance for executive pay, have played a key role in the evolution of inequality. Simply put, under that view, the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions ushered new eras in the United States and United Kingdom that favored the rich and significantly increased their bargaining power while other countries were less affected.

Whether you call it "reason", "science", or "rational inquiry", analytical thinking is abundantly effective at organizing systematic observations into an overarching schema. However, there are two significant limitations to that approach. First, and most obvious, not all phenomena are amenable to systematic observation: art, for instance. That doesn't mean art doesn't exist; rather, it means that definitive statements about art, which is primarily subjective, are essentially impossible.

Second, and less readily apparent, all analytical thinking aims to create a model of reality. Since the model is not reality itself, analysis must make decisions about which phenomena to include, and which to exclude. We all do this whenever trying to solve any problem: if I am trying to discover the source of a noise in the front end of my car, I am not going to spend much time observing the seat belts. Consequently, the challenge of useful analytical thinking is to include all phenomena that can have a "significant" impact on the analyses.

Now, one would think that such esteemed intellectuals as Saez and Picketty would understand this and, furthermore, that they would provide some indication that they had considered, and excluded, certain phenomena that might, just might, have some impact on their findings.

In the highlighted sentence above, the market explanation is seemingly shown as inadequate because of the contrasting inequality between the US and England on one hand, and the obviously more enlightened European-socialist economies on the other. Since they are alike in all other respects, then the explanation for greater income inequality within the Anglosphere must be down to that one area: tax rates and other policies which put Progressives on the side of the angels.

Not so fast. Even before flipping to the second page, they have not considered two factors which probably go well beyond the realm of the merely salient.

There is one thing, besides a hatred of the poor that only Satan could love, that the US and England share, which the other advanced economies do not: English. So What? S&P might ask. As it happens, English happens to be the language for the vast majority of the world's various entertainment offerings. Best selling books, blockbuster movies, popular music, are all far more likely to come from the Anglosphere than the rest of the world, combined. I think the fancy economics term for this is "network effect", and it is non-trivial: think Microsoft.

And by ignoring, whether blithely or otherwise, network effect, S&P then compound the problem by confusing a group characteristic for its composition. The characteristic is wealth. Upon that characteristic, they impose a presumed composition of the group sharing that characteristic, and it is that composition upon which their analysis rests: the wealthy are CEO-ish. Their whole notion of economic responses to confiscatory taxation presumes that essentially everyone who is wealthy is someone who is paid for some sort of executive position.

But thanks to the network effect, that is nonsense. Confining ourselves to that voracious beast, the top 1%, at any given moment, a substantial number of them are athletes and entertainers (which is really two words for the same thing). There are at least as many of those as there are Fortune Top 500 CEOs. Moreover, even understanding that the composition of that top 1% is far from monolithic doesn't go far enough. Most entertainers lucky enough to hit it big don't do so for long. The subset of the category "wealthy" that is composed of entertainers is fairly constant over time, but the members of that subset do not.

Speaking of time. While I am not going to quibble over whether top executives take home a higher multiple of average wage earner pay than they once did, homogenizing the category "wealthy" into one easily demonized group ensures that S&P, as well as all other Progressives, ignore the certainty that no small amount of that multiple is due to the far higher compensation of entertainers now than, say, the 1970s.

So, even before getting to the meat of this seminal groundbreaking study, there are two good reasons to suspect that, through ignoring what very much needs attention, S&P have produced a result that, regardless of the mathematical ornamentation, should be rejected out of hand.

Similarly missing, or, perhaps more accurately, waved away is the notion of opportunity cost. S&P insist that a uniform tax system (i.e., all income treated the same, regardless of source or nature) sufficiently ruthlessly imposed, will so reduce the gains from high salaries or elaborate fringe benefits that people will not go to the bother of bargaining for higher pay. VOILA! equality.

Glaring in its absence is what must happen instead. The wealthy, just like the rest of us, can do only two things with money: spend or save it. By engaging in ruthless taxation, the economic value of the talents of high wage earners accrues to the government, rather than the individuals themselves. That, in turn, must mean that essentially all of the spending and investing that the wealthy would have done instead becomes government spending. All of those employed as a direct consequence of the rich spending their ill-gotten gains must lose their jobs, never mind the knock-on effects.

I could go on, but this has already long gotten past the cut-to-the-comments point. In a recent Thought Mesh thread, I suggested that the sine qua non of Progressivism (the presumption of sufficient knowledge to conclude that their policy preferences are equivalent to how the world should and will work) means that Progressives must more frequently, and thoroughly, purvey ideas that are either divorced from reality, as here, or completely fraudulent (Gleick, Rather, Group of 88, et al).

But to everyone who is not a Progressive, that presumption of knowledge is the disease of self-appointed intellectuals who might have extensive and well founded knowledge within their own specialty, and from that conclude their temperamental preferences are equivalent to social imperatives.

Note the emphasis on "might." At the risk of throwing my shoulder out of whack due to unjustifiably vigorous self congratulation, I think my assessment of S&P's seminal groundbreaking paper shows that they can reach their conclusion only by ignoring every element of reality that might contradict The Narrative.

Just so here. Behind a cloak of flashy, but trite, mathematical formalism, S&P produce a seminal groundbreaking result that flatters the self-regard of Progressives without putting themselves through the bother of properly identifying global cultural trends, understanding the nature some particular group, or the opportunity costs of replacing the monetary decisions of individuals with the tender mercies of an increasingly bloated government.

But it must be OK. After all, it the NYT thought it was just fine, and so does the Obama administration.

Why?

The Age of Ego-Casting

In the Age of Egocasting, Christine Rosen offers a very detailed and insightful history of popular media and the trend towards greater personalization. I share the author's concern over some of the effects that this trend is having on our individual psyches, particulary in regard to the Tivo phenomenon, as expressed in this section:

TiVo Nation
The enthusiasm for TiVo is at times absurd. “TiVo is the greatest thing since wheat,” former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Steve Young enthused. “TiVo is the most amazing thing ever invented!” says Rosie O’Donnell. Documentary filmmaker Pete Jones recently declared that, “TiVo has changed my life more than children. It’s the only thing in my life that I can count on week after week.” During a question and answer session at an electronics show in 2003, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell described TiVo as “God’s machine.”

Far from the madding celebrity crowd, TiVo zeal also runs high. One man told Knight-Ridder news service, “Omigod, you can have my TiVo when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!” “I’ve converted. It’s my new religion,” another said. “I was a Jew, but not anymore. I’m now a TiVo.” A TiVo spokesperson described how devoted users send in photographs of TiVo snowmen, jack-o-lanterns carved to resemble the TiVo logo, and, in perhaps the most chilling image, a snapshot of an infant dressed up as the unique, peanut-shaped TiVo remote control. “There’s such a unique emotional connection between people and this product,” a TiVo spokesperson told the Contra Costa Times, in a comedy of understatement.

TiVo enthusiasts on one community listserv unabashedly refer to themselves as the “TiVo Army,” adopting military-style ranking based on the number of hours of TV they have stored on their devices (0-19 is a private, 20-199 a lieutenant, and so on, until you reach 5000 hours and are deemed a colonel). After their names, many contributors to the listserv include detailed listings of the models and hours programmed on each of their TiVo units. Many TiVo users on the forum own more than one TiVo, which appears to be common among users. A writer for the Chicago Tribune noted that he and his wife each have their own TiVo, so that he can watch ESPN’s SportsCenter upstairs and “my wife can be downstairs zipping through hours of home-designing shows,” prompting one to wonder what, exactly, they ever do together in their leisure time.

Speaking to Newsweek in 2003, TiVo’s CEO, Michael Ramsay, noted the device’s “amazing evangelical following.” “People say it changes their lives and helps them manage their children’s time. What we have tapped into here is really a lifestyle phenomenon where people believe that TiVo is ... giving them more control and more choice. And that’s a good thing in this busy day and age.” One man, interviewed by the New York Times, even credited TiVo with an improvement in his son’s academic performance. “Before we got the TiVo, my son was getting C’s and D’s in school because he was staying up late to watch his shows and going to school half-awake.” With TiVo, however, he’s now getting more sleep and his grades are improving. TiVo undoubtedly changes children’s experience of television. One blogger, whose daughter was three months old when the family purchased their first TiVo, “gets quite confused when we are watching a non-TiVo TV, and she asks to watch ‘a kids’ show,’ and we have to explain that this TV won’t do what ours at home does.” She thinks the television is broken. Another mother whose child has grown up watching DVDs said of her four-year old, “She just takes for granted that you can always cue up the song or scene that you want, or watch things in whatever order you want.”

In a survey of their subscribers, TiVo found that 98 percent of them “couldn’t live without” their TiVo and “another 40 percent said they would sooner disconnect their cell phone than unplug their TiVo.” It is butler, boyfriend, playmate, and therapist manqué.The company’s goal is to make TiVo the “focal point of the digital living room,” although it hastens to add that this “doesn’t make the television the centerpiece of our homes.” In fact, television has become the centerpiece of many American homes. One company is now manufacturing a hi-tech television mirror so that we can watch TV during our daily bathroom routines. Another recent
advertisement pictured a family gathered around the fireplace, although not in a traditional scene of family conviviality. Rather than looking at each other, their gazes are all fixed on a point above the fireplace: they are staring at the large, flat-screen television that now dwarfs their hearth.

If our advertisements are any guide, we are using devices such as TiVo less as efficient, multi-tasking, modern assistants than as technological enablers that help us indulge in excesses of passive spectacle. TiVo does not free us to watch less TV by eliminating waste; it seduces us with more TV by making television a more perfectly self-centered experience.

Clearly, if most Americans were polled as to what activities they should spend more time doing, it is unlikely that a majority would say "TV watching". We would mostly all agree that we should watch less. Everyone is intimately familiar with the addictive quality of TV, even without the remote control and the DVR. Yet what should we be doing with this time? Are these media addictions truly bad, or are we merely reacting to that inbred Puritan conscience in the American psyche that tells us to make a good accounting of every hour in our waking lives?

There are several arguments that can be made against these technologies. One is that they rob the viewer of communal experiences. We could be engaged in joint activities with family members, friends or community members. The original broadcast TV model, while keeping people at home more, at least fostered an atmosphere for joint family viewing, and provided shared mass audience experiences for the nation as a whole. The new media technologies, by allowing the individual to break free of the restrictions of schedule and content, destroy this communalizing function of broadcasting, it is argued. The more that we retreat into our self-selected domains of interest, the less we are conditioned to identify with the larger community.

While I have some sympathy for this argument, I feel that it is a tad overwrought. I believe that for most people media obsessions tend to be self-correcting. The alarmist scenario would paint a picture of a nation of isolated Narcissi, entranced by their psychic image in their electronic reflecting pool of choice. This scenario does not account for the lack of novelty or ultimate satisfaction that such a monotonous diet provides. Media diets cannot be sustained without novelty, and the individual must look beyond himself to find the elements of surprise and wonder that alone can satisfy his need.

The author delves into a second, perhaps more esoteric consequence of self-directed media techlology:

The Shallow Critic

Questions about the erosion of cultural standards inevitably prompt charges that the critics are unduly pessimistic or merely hectoring. After all, most Americans see no looming apocalypse in the fact that some of our favorite pastimes are watching television and downloading music from the Internet. Aren’t our remote controls, our TiVos, and our iPods simply useful devices for providing us with much-deserved entertainment? “Americans love junk,” George Santayana once noted. “It’s not the junk that bothers me, it’s the love.” But few Americans have ever shared this sentiment. We like our cheesy reality TV shows and our silly sitcoms. We love the manufactured drama of The Wire and The Sopranos. What could be wrong with technologies that make our distractions more convenient? But as the critic Walter Benjamin once noted, “the distracted person, too, can form habits,” and in our new age of personalized technologies, two bad habits are emerging that suggest we should be a bit more cautious in our embrace of personalized technologies. We are turning into a nation of instant but uninformed critics and we are developing a keen impatience for what art demands of us.

In his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin argued that technological change (particularly mechanical reproduction) fosters a new perspective he called the “progressive reaction.” This reaction is “characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert.” Benjamin compared the live stage actor to the film actor to demonstrate this point: “The film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing.”

Today, an increasing number of us consume culture through mediating technologies—the camera, the recording device, the computer—and these technologies are increasingly capable of filtering culture so that it suits our personal preferences. As a result, we are more willing to test and to criticize. As we come to expect and rely on technologies that know our individual preferences, we are eager as well to don the mantle of critics. And so we vent our frustrations on Amazon.com and are in turn ranked by others who opine on the helpfulness and trustworthiness of our views. We are given new critical powers to determine the fate of television plot lines; recently, the show Law & Order: Criminal Intent allowed viewers to vote on whether a character should live or die (the masses were lenient—53 percent said the character should survive). Programs such as American Idol encourage a form of mass criticism by allowing millions of viewers to phone in their choice for a winner.
But although our media for viewing culture, particularly TV, encourage us to be critics, they do not require much critical judgment or even focused attention. As Benjamin suggested, “the public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.” Benjamin correctly feared that this avid but absent-minded criticism would lead to a lowering of culture and a public increasingly vulgar and simple-minded in its ability to understand art. “The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”

This brings us to the second tendency fostered by our personalized technologies: an impatience for what art demands. The more convenient our entertainments, the weaker our resolve to meet the challenges posed by difficult or inconvenient expressions of culture. Music and images are now delivered directly to us, and we consume them in the comfort of our own homes. You can see reproductions of major works of art by perusing the Internet; even literature has been modified for easy consumption. As critic Dubravka Ugresic has noted, “we can find it on CD, on the Internet, in interactive computer games, in hypertext.” But to what effect? As Benjamin argued, “one of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later.” This is the difference between the canvas and the screen. “The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations,” Benjamin wrote. “Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped the scene than it has already changed.” The qualities of the canvas—uniqueness, permanence—are the opposite of the screen, which fosters "transitoriness and reproducibility.” And the canvas cannot be consumed in one’s home, at will. It requires that we venture forth into the world that lies beyond convenience.

Benjamin feared that our impatience would eventually destroy the “aura” of art and eliminate the humility we ought to bring to our contemplation of it. But we haven’t destroyed art’s aura so much as we have transferred it to something else. Aura now resides in the technological devices with which we reproduce art and image. We talk about our technologies in a way (and grant to them the power over our imagination) that used to be reserved for art and religion. TiVo is God’s machine, the iPod plays our own personal symphonies, and each device brings with it its own series of individualized rituals. What we don’t seem to realize is that ritual thoroughly personalized is no longer religion or art. It is fetish. And unlike religion and art, which encourage us to transcend our own experience, fetish urges us to return obsessively to the sounds and images of an arrested stage of development.

If I had limited sympathy for the first argument, I have even less for this one. Rosen's critique drips with the condescension of elitist snobbery. It is a snobbery borne of the inflated sense of importance of the overly intellectualized artist, that creature of modernity who sees his role as the originator and mediator of culture and meaning in society.

Rosen's concern is that the individual consumer of art has gotten uppity. He doesn't know his place. He doesn't know that he is not informed enough to pass judgement on the work of the artist. The Mountain no longer comes to Mohammad to receive the blessings of the artist. With the new technologies, the Mountain stays home and fancies himself a prophet, putting his needs for enlightenment up for bid to a host of sychophantic, mercenary priests.

The key to understanding this critique is precisely in this conflation of art to religion. For the "High Church" artist, that artist who creates work that is demanding, difficult to digest and requires the presence of an informed viewer at the location of performance, art is a sacrament. The artist sees himself as a shaper of souls. He imparts meaning, a meaning inaccessible to the individual left to his own devices. He offers a salvation, of sorts. An aesthetic salvation, a cultural uplift. However, as practiced by the artistic priesthood of the 20th & 21st centuries, it is strictly a religion of aesthetics and tastes. It is not a religion of morality.

To what end does this religion of art acheive? Or to put it more bluntly, why do we need art? Does art transmit meaning unattainable by other means, or is it merely a medium for pleasure? Can one live the "good life" without art? Is the unartistic life worth living? In my own opinion, yes. The one quality that every human life must possess to make living it worthwhile is meaning. Meaning must be discovered by each individual, it cannot be imparted by an external source. We find meaning in our relationships, in family and community, and in religion. Art can impart meaning, but only by echoing fundamental human truths. Moral truths. Art cannot create truths, it can only represent them.

The 20th century artistic priesthood sought to create new truths devoid of meaning or morality. By abandoning representational form, by dehumanizing art, the priesthood inserted a personal agenda of their own. Art became a projection of the artist's ego. A monochrome canvas was imbued with great esoteric meaning. An ordinary object was transformed into a great work of art by the will of the artist. Modern day Midas's, artists could create artistic gold from their mere touch.

A perfect example of this is a work by the late German "conceptual" artist Joseph Beuys. Entitled "American Hare Sugar" it consists of sugar packets that he collected from a diner in Minneapolis. Another of his works, entitled "Noiseless Blackboard Erasers", consists of 3 blackboard erasers of the same manufacture as one he used to erase the blackboard that he used during a lecture in Minneapolis.

Rosen would chastise us for being impatient for what art like this demands of us. The meaning is there for the individual with the patience and desire to venture forth into the world that "lies beyond convenience". If you are not too embarrased to ask what that meaning is, there is certainly someone skilled in the art of freeform exegesis to draw the abstruse associations and convoluted connections to some political or social cause celebre. But it is an empty exercise. It is meaningless in any fundamental way. It provides no enrichment, entertainment or betterment.

Good art is still being produced, but in the most part it is produced via the popular, comercialized media channels of consumption. The common man and woman still has a firmer grasp on the true and the meaningful than the priestly elites of the artistic establishment, and it is their tastes, while responsible for producing much of the "junk"that is the daily throwaway fare that entertains them and keeps them sane, that will also recognize and reward the rare masterpieces that seed the cultural heritage of mankind.