High culture is being corrupted by a culture of fakes

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Universities are propagating nonsense where the fake intellectual invites you to conspire in his own self-deception.

Roger Scruton

A high culture is the self-consciousness of a society. It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people. High culture is a precarious achievement, and endures only if it is underpinned by a sense of tradition, and by a broad endorsement of the surrounding social norms. When those things evaporate, as inevitably happens, high culture is superseded by a culture of fakes.

Faking depends on a measure of complicity between the perpetrator and the victim, who together conspire to believe what they don't believe and to feel what they are incapable of feeling. There are fake beliefs, fake opinions, fake kinds of expertise. There is also fake emotion, which comes about when people debase the forms and the language in which true feeling can take root, so that they are no longer fully aware of the difference between the true and the false. Kitsch is one very important example of this. The kitsch work of art is not a response to the real world, but a fabrication designed to replace it. Yet both producer and consumer conspire to persuade each other that what they feel in and through the kitsch work of art is something deep, important and real.

Anyone can lie. One need only have the requisite intention – in other words, to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, by contrast, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. In an important sense, therefore, faking is not something that can be intended, even though it comes about through intentional actions. The liar can pretend to be shocked when his lies are exposed, but his pretence is merely a continuation of his lying strategy. The fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he had created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself was a member. Understanding this phenomenon is, it seems to me, integral to understanding how a high culture works, and how it can become corrupted.

We are interested in high culture because we are interested in the life of the mind, and we entrust the life of the mind to institutions because it is a social benefit. Even if only a few people are capable of living this life to the full, we all benefit from its results, in the form of knowledge, technology, legal and political understanding, and the works of art, literature and music that evoke the human condition and also reconcile us to it. Aristotle went further, identifying contemplation (theoria) as the highest goal of mankind, and leisure (schole) as the means to it. Only in contemplation, he suggested, are our rational needs and desires properly fulfilled. Kantians might prefer to say that in the life of the mind we reach through the world of means to the kingdom of ends. We leave behind the routines of instrumental reasoning and enter a world in which ideas, artefacts and expressions exist for their own sake, as objects of intrinsic value. We are then granted the true homecoming of the spirit. Such seems to be implied by Friedrich Schiller, in his Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794). Similar views underlie the German romantic view of Bildung: self-cultivation as the goal of education and the foundation of the university curriculum.

(...)

There is a way of debating that disregards the truth of another's words, since it is concerned to diagnose them, to discover "where they are coming from", and to reveal the emotional, moral and political attitudes that underlie a given choice of words.

Postmodernism postulates that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs and are therefore subject to change. It claims that there is no absolute truth and that the way people perceive the world is subjective and emphasises the role of language, power relations, and motivations in the formation of ideas and beliefs

I disagree with this article.

Here is the crux of it, somewhat past the quoted part:



The school of thought that the author is writing against is called Postmodernism. From the wiki explanation of Postmodernism:



The author never says "Postmodernism" explicitly but does go on at length disagreeing with the tenets of Postmodernism. Since I think Postmodernism is a valuable way to look at things, I therefore disagree with the article which is a screed against it. There are absolute truths in some fields, such as physics and mathematics, but once you get into the squishier fields of biology, sociology or any of the arts, "where they are coming from" (as the author puts it) does influence what is called Truth. I included biology, since it does get affected by this human tendency. Consider species classification. It seems objective but it's actually based on how humans think dividing lines should be drawn, which will be based on culture. We are moving into speciation by genetics which does seem more objective, but even so, the entire concept of "speciation" may just be a cultural construct rather than a biological Truth.

I do agree with the author that Postmodern writers sometimes use "impenetrable syntax" (his words, though he never uses the term "Postmodernism") to give nonsense the veneer of truth. I certainly don't agree with all Postmodern writers about the conclusions they come to when they are "interrogating a text" (their term for trying to figure out what sort of cultural underpinnings a philosopher or author from centuries ago was working with). But I disagree with the author that this is an inherently useless way of approaching historical works. And I vehemently disagree that it poses any danger to high culture. Deconstructing Shakespeare doesn't make his works any less valuable or appreciated or meaningful. And it doesn't prevent any great works from arising in the future.

Foucault's approach reduces culture to a power-game, and scholarship to a kind of refereeing in the endless "struggle" between oppressed and oppressing groups.

Whenever anyone says something is corrupted I just have to wonder if they don't just mean its changing and they don't like it.