A few evenings ago I found myself alone in the soothing brown
shadows of our den, with only the glowing television screen for
companionship. I had felt especially lethargic for the past several
days; my head seemed to be enveloped in a cloud of fuzz and
witlessness. In that feeble state I accepted whatever delights or
horrors our TV would send me. Let me make a more specific and
depressing confession: I was watching a day in the life of Anna
Nicole Smith, televised for our viewing pleasure. Even worse, I was
enjoying it.
The former pinup model and presumptive heiress had grown hefty in
her young widowhood. I watched as she engaged her cozy entourage in
a shove-it-down, take-no-prisoners pizza-eating contest. I watched
her run to the bathroom midway through the contest, then vehemently
deny her best friend's accusation that she had barfed behind closed
doors. (The audio equipment had picked up some faintly incriminating
sounds.) I watched the two of them squabble like feral cats and make
up. I watched Anna Nicole get her ankle tattoos touched up at the
parlor, then cajole her melancholy purple-haired assistant into
accompanying her on a hellacious roller-coaster ride. (The
purple-haired assistant barely survived.)
I didn't think too hard about what I was watching while I watched
it. But somehow I felt comforted by its honest stupidity. The
program captured the casual, semi-articulate utterances of genuine
unscripted conversation; it captured the flabby reality behind the
sleek celebrity facade, behind all our facades. Anna Nicole
seemed so dim and childish, so plump and vulnerable and forlorn,
that I began to find her weirdly endearing.
After the spectacle was over I glanced down at a row of books
nestled against the base of the bookcase. (The abode of a true
book-lover never has enough shelf space.) The great domelike head of
historian-philosopher Oswald Spengler, his brow rumpled by decades
of solemn cogitation, confronted me from the back cover of his
magnum opus, The Decline of the West. I've never ventured
beyond a sampling of random passages from this dour and difficult
Germanic masterpiece, but I know Spengler believed that cultures
have definite life-cycles, like all biological forms from mollusks
to mathematicians. They grow and aspire to reach fulfillment. They
bear fruit. When they exhaust their potential, they decline and die.
This cultural cycle is natural and irreversible, like the
progression of the seasons (but without the annual springtime
resurrection). Fallen leaves never return to the branches; bald men
don't grow new hair. Spengler, ever the pessimist, essentially
believed that the West had gone bald, that it had entered its final
season. Our hearts would be filled with dread and the consciousness
of creeping mortality. Though he didn't know it at the time, some of
us would be easing our dread (and probably accelerating our
collective decline) by watching the likes of Anna Nicole Smith on
our home screens.
Pop culture has already replaced Western civilization as the main
attraction in our great communal circus-tent. Colorful lights and
images flash all around us; monstrous amplifiers boom thunder at our
tingling ears. How can Herodotus, Horace, Titian or Mendelssohn hope
to survive in the infernal rumpus room of pop? How do they compete
with Elvis, Madonna, Britney or whoever happens to be emitting
sparks at the moment? Their prospects seem hopeless. Their names
already induce a vast collective yawn among our contemporaries, even
those with pretensions to enlightenment. Give us another two
generations and those once-illustrious names will be reduced to
footnotes for plodding Ph.D. candidates.
The dominant culture of our time isn't being produced by serious
Western artists, poets and composers. No, it's the film directors,
pop novelists, screenwriters and songwriters -- not to mention the
profit-motivated moguls in their office towers -- who are happily
driving our civilization like a hijacked Greyhound bus. And we seem
to be enjoying the trip.
How did it happen? Why did we cheerfully abandon the civilization
of Homer, Handel and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? And why did we
abandon it for MTV... for video games... for privileged peeks into
the lives of aging rock stars and pinup models? Can we salvage it
with cultural duct tape, or should we let it crumble like a
condemned mansion and move on to more congenial precincts?
I'll try to spare you a thesis, because I haven't done the
research. (I'm too fond of generalizing to bog myself down in
particulars.) I haven't pondered the Decline of the West quite as
exhaustively as Herr Spengler, but I've probably pondered it more
than is healthy for a human animal marooned in our times. (Spengler
dropped dead of a heart attack at fifty-five; I don't want to press
my luck.) I'll be briefer than Spengler, I promise you.
So why did we do it? Why did we desert our noble European
cultural heritage so readily, so guiltlessly?
First (and most obviously) we fell prey to the seductions of
glitzy new media that didn't exist in Beethoven's time. By the early
twentieth century Western civilization was like an aging mistress:
growing a bit plump about the waist and ankles, too stout and dowdy
to thrill our wanton bones. Though gravely beautiful in her prime,
she had always been difficult; she demanded our sustained attention
(too many notes! too many words!) when we would have preferred to
unwind. Then we discovered movies, radio, TV and commercial pop
music. Suddenly the old frescoes and symphonies and epic poems no
longer stirred us. We became pleasure-seeking missiles, and the
giddiness of pop reminded us of good sex. (Interesting that we
started conjugating more freely around the time we stopped
conjugating Latin verbs.) The new media sexualized our
culture, probably forever; we could no longer respond to the
matronly virtues of the old masters. So we went for the easy babe
with the long legs and flashy smile. We climbed into bed with pop.
Meanwhile, the artists themselves -- the serious painters, poets
and composers -- did something even more unthinkable: they abandoned
the quaint bourgeois notion of communicating with an audience.
Dependent on critics for their reputations, they began to produce
perversely cryptic art that required the services of professional
interpreters. While we commoners gawked blankly at the latest
abstract painting or indecipherable verse, the critics supplied the
meaning. (It's not just a urinal borrowed from a public men's room;
it's a savagely ironic commentary on the subjectivity of objects, or
the objectivity of subjects. Or whatever.) The artists were
elevating the critics to the status of an occult priesthood, always
ready with preposterous rationalizations of this or that incoherent
ink-blot. The critics obviously liked this development. We commoners
liked it less, especially when it became apparent that the artists
were slyly tweaking our noses. An already difficult mistress was
growing more demanding, more spiteful and less attractive than ever.
The educated upper-bourgeoisie still paid lip-service to the high
arts (especially the performing ones), because their patronage
carried the unmistakable whiff of social respectability. Theirs was
a world of polite applause. But lately the folks who have upheld the
banner of high culture seem to be more interested in pretty food,
California wines, lifestyle issues, and renting an exquisite villa
in Provence or Tuscany. They've become pleasure-seeking missiles
too.
We can't even depend on academia to keep the lamp of Western
civilization burning through the next dark age. In fact, it's the
current generation of liberal arts scholars -- bless their
left-leaning hides -- who have most loudly denounced the products of
the Dead White European Male mind. With ostentatious open-mindedness
they declare that a Yoruba tribal mask is the equal of the Sistine
Chapel ceiling. (Hey, even Olympic diving judges make allowances for
degree of difficulty.) There's no stopping the multiculturalists;
their embrace of non-Western art, genial enough on the surface,
serves a political agenda that won't stop until Western Christendom
and its agents have been toppled like the statue of an old tyrant.
Meanwhile, we yawn in our dens and change the channel.
Then there's the delicate matter of demographics: people of
European ancestry simply don't seem to procreate with much
enthusiasm. As the United States and even the nations of Western
Europe grow progressively less European in their ethnic make-up,
general interest in distinctly European art-forms will continue to
wane until they're finally shoved into the attic of history. How can
we expect an increasingly Afro-Hispano-Arab-Asian populace to muster
an interest in fugues and sonnets, especially when WE can't? It's
like expecting a Texan to enjoy sitar music or a Frenchman to play
the banjo.
Do I sound like a foaming-at-the-mouth xenophobe? I hope not.
(After all, you're looking at the grandson of Armenian immigrants.)
But I can't help remembering that the Roman Empire was at least
partly undone by a growing foreign element (what Toynbee called the
"internal proletariat") that didn't buy into the old Roman
verities. They refused to melt into the pot. As the traditional
WASPocracy fades in America, and as new immigrants forever alter the
complexion of European societies, we'll be hearing our songs sung to
strange and bewildering new rhythms. We're so open-minded, and so
fearful of being branded as racists, that I fear we'll simply lie
down and expire rather than question where our culture is headed.
In any conflict of cultures, the more energetic team is generally
the winner. Western civilization has grown sterile and anemic. Our
serious artists produce either obscure minutiae or repellent dreck
-- sometimes both. Even the popmeisters -- the glib commercial heirs
to Bach and Beaudelaire -- have been growing repetitive and short of
ideas lately, after less than a century at the top: look at the
profusion of new musicals based on OLD musicals; look at the copycat
sitcoms, the microengineered (and instantly forgettable) pop music,
the flimsy movies puffed up with special effects and ear-shattering
Dolby sound, the manufactured media personalities devoid of any
recognizable personality of their own. (Can anyone out there do an
impression of Tom Cruise?) Look at the rise of
"reality"-based TV shows: the triumph of true-life
banality over manmade banality. Look at Anna Nicole Smith.
Yes, I watched Anna Nicole. I even enjoyed the show, God help me.
I plead guilty as charged. Let the ghosts of Dante and Dr. Johnson
haunt me until I unplug the TV. But I can't help believing, with the
earnest dome-headed Dr. Spengler, that we've entered the bleak
November of the West. There's no going back.
When I was younger and less cynical, I actually felt impelled to
fight the unraveling of our culture. I wanted to fly the banner of
Western civilization in the face of effete charlatans and barbarians
alike; I longed to fight the indecipherable poets, the paint-spatterers,
the harsh and unmelodious composers. I needed to confront the
turncoat humanities professors, the dweebish philosophers quibbling
over symbols and semantics, the rude rappers, the surging wave of
incivility that threatened to engulf the land. But one can go mad
fighting the inevitable.
The Pandora's Box of contemporary culture has unleashed a cloud
of demons into the air, and there's no stuffing them back inside.
We're threatened from within, and there's little we can do but watch
the eerie spectacle unfold. Something tells me we could use a
thorough cleansing by the more genial and barbaric subcultures
growing in our midst. (It's the seditious professors who pose the
real threat.)
We're threatened from outside, too -- by a vast tribe of medieval
fanatics, demonically motivated and eager for Western blood.
Meanwhile, we lounge on our sundecks while our children fiddle with
video games. The band is still playing aboard the Titanic, and we're
lulled by the music.
Can we contain the barbarians? Should we even try? Can we absorb
our enemies, as China absorbed its Mongol conquerors, by converting
them to the superiority of our ways? (We could try to spread Reality
TV -- and Anna Nicole Smith -- throughout the Islamic world.) But in
the end, we have to look at the alarming decrepitude of our culture
-- both serious and popular -- and decide whether we want to repair
the house or let it fall to ruin. I have no power to determine which
way we go, and I've never been handy with tools. But I'm a sucker
for lost causes, and you can bet I'll be watching with interest from
the brown shadows of my den.
