Contra Spiritum Saeculi

It is the first of January, the Octave Day of Christmas which is the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord and also New Years Day. This means that it is once again time for my annual “full disclosure” essay, a tradition I have borrowed from one of my favourite opinion columnists, the late Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel. In this essay I talk about myself and outline my basic convictions such as underlie all my writings.

I am a male Canadian, who grew up on a farm in Western Manitoba, studied theology for five years after high school, and has lived and worked in Winnipeg, the provincial capital ever since.

I am a life-long Canadian patriot. I say patriot rather than nationalist, because a patriot is someone who feels towards his country, its traditions and institutions, and people the same kind of affection he feels towards his home and family, whereas a nationalist is a zealot for an ideal vision of what his country ought to be, which may or may not have any anything to do with his country as it is and historically has been, and who may do terrible damage to his country in the name of that ideal. In Canada, the Liberal Party identifies itself as the party of Canadian nationalism, and their nationalism is the toxic cancer that has been killing the country I love for over half a century. My Canada is the Dominion of Canada, a British country built on a foundation of Loyalism, governed by a British parliamentary monarchy, with the British Common Law and all its prescriptive rights and freedoms and, in the English-speaking part of the country, British culture as adapted to the northern part of North America. The vestiges of this Canada lingered on in the farms, villages, and small towns of the rural area in which I grew up and while some of the responsibility for the erosion of this Canada belongs to Americanization, the Liberal Party deliberately targeted the old Canada for disappearance with its nationalism project. Renny Whiteoak, the hero of Mazo de la Roche’s epic Canadian Jalna saga, expressed his and his creator’s contempt for this project by dismissing all the talk of nationality with the question of what exactly was wrong with being a colony anyway. While the Dominion of Canada had been much more than a colony since Confederation in 1867, what de la Roche was getting at through her mouthpiece Renny, was that there was nothing wrong with Canada as she was before the Liberal nationalist project, a sentiment I certainly share as I share her cynical contempt for a project that had as its aim the rejection and replacement of everything that had traditionally and historically been Canada.

I prefer the word Tory over the word conservative to describe my convictions. Both words can refer to the members and supporters of the Conservative Party but this is not what I mean when I apply either word to myself. Conservative, when used today in North America in a sense other than the partisan, suggests an old-fashioned liberal – someone who believes in individual rights and liberties, limited government by elected representatives, low taxes and free markets. While this older kind of liberalism has its good points, unlike today’s liberalism of egalitarian social engineering, wealth redistribution, and soft totalitarianism masked with a smiling face and compassionate words, which has no redeeming characteristics whatsoever, I mean something more than this when I call myself a conservative.

I use the word Tory in Samuel Johnson and T. S. Eliot’s sense of the term – someone who is a royalist, a high churchman, and a classicist.

We live in a depraved age and it is in keeping with the degenerate spirit of the times that democracy, the rule of the people, is now ubiquitously thought of as being synonymous with freedom and legitimate government. Monarchy is regarded by those who think this way as an outdated and archaic holdover from the past that, if its survival is to be tolerated, must be confined to a merely ceremonial role. As someone who has been a royalist for as long as I can remember, I can see all of this for the malarkey it is. Democratically elected governments intrude into every corner and aspect of their citizens lives in ways kings and queens never dreamed of doing and historically people have been much freer under royal rule than under the dominion of a government which being of the people can do whatever it likes to the people, for it is the people doing it to themselves. Furthermore, democracy places power in the hands of those who can be trusted with it the least – ambitious, power-seeking, politicians. The only way to make government by elected politicians tolerable to those under it is by placing those politicians in the humbling position of being servants or ministers of a royal master, which is why monarchy is even more important in an era of democracy than ever before. Politicians can govern only as representatives of whose who elected them – those who live and can vote in the present day. It is kings and queens, whose position does not depend on popular election but is rooted in tradition, prescription and historical continuity, who represent the whole of their society, including past and future generations and so, it is monarchy and not democracy, that makes all the other elements of government legitimate. As usual, the spirit of the age gets everything completely backwards.

I grew up in a family that, when it attended church, attended the United Church, but had an evangelical “born again” conversion experience when I was fifteen, and was baptized as a teenager in a Baptist church. I was later confirmed an Anglican. When I say that I am a high churchman I mean this in the original sense of that expression, someone who believes in the Church as an organized institution, its institutional authority, and the importance of its organic and organizational continuity with the Church founded by Jesus Christ through His Apostles. In this too, my convictions run contrary to the spirit of our age, which values a vague and undefined spirituality but despises organized religion.

Which is not to say that there is nothing valid in the condemnation and criticism of the institutional Church one often hears. Fundamentalists frequently accuse the ecclesiastical leadership of the mainstream churches of abandoning the theological and moral truths that Christianity has taught for two thousand years and more often than not these accusations are correct. To give up on and withdraw from the institutional Church, however, in the fundamentalist manner, is to depart from the truth in another way, by falling into sectarianism and Donatism. There are many contemporary trends in the Church I deplore. The unbelief, masquerading as theology under the name liberalism, which rejects or reinterprets beyond recognition any traditional Christian doctrines that the liberal considers himself too enlightened to believe in today and replaces them with progressive political, social, and environmental activism is one of these. The abandonment of reverence and a sense of the sacred and a holy for a familiarity that comes close to blasphemy in much of the “personal relationship with Jesus” kind of evangelicalism is another. I would insist, however, that these are problems to be confronted and dealt with in the Church, rather than reasons to withdraw from it.

I derive this view of the institutional Church, from both an anthropological argument, that religion as an institution is fundamental to all true community, and, more importantly, the theological argument, that Jesus Christ Himself founded the Church as an institution which, collectively indwelt by the Holy Spirit, would continue His Incarnational Presence on earth as His Body after His Ascension, and which He promised the gates of hell would never prevail against.

I am a Protestant high churchman, like those prior to the Oxford Movement of the 1830s such as Dr. Johnson, and as such I do not regret the Reformation, with its necessary clarification of the Pauline doctrines of grace and justification and its recover of the position of highest authority for the Holy Scriptures as the Word of God, but I do lament the tendencies that later developed in Protestantism of making the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures a private and personal matter between the individual believer and God, contrary to the inspired words of St. Peter, to make the talk where someone gives his interpretation of the Scriptures the central element of communal worship rather than the sacrament of Holy Communion, to neglect the writings whose canonicity was less firmly established than the sixty-six books recognized by all Protestants but which were nevertheless read as Holy Scriptures throughout the Church from the first century onward, and to neglect a fifteen hundred year tradition of Scriptural interpretation, from the Church Fathers through the medieval doctors, apart from which no man can hope to understand the Holy Scriptures, the sources of the truth into which Christ promised that the Holy Spirit would guide His disciples, for that promise was made to the Church collectively, and not to the individual believer.

In classicism, as in royalism and high churchmanship, I set myself against the Zeitgeist. By classicism, I mean the idea that music, literature, and the visual arts exist with beauty as their end, and that beauty like truth and goodness is not whatever we decide it to be, but rather has real existence in itself as part of the established order of things as they are, and that therefore there are non-subjective standards whereby music, literature, and the visual arts can be and ought to be judged. This is not a very popular idea today, especially among artists and, counter-intuitive as this might seem, among art critics. This is because the opposite of classicism, romanticism, which is the belief that an inner well within the artist is the source of all true art and that the artist must follow his inner light rather than external, established order, came to dominate the arts in the nineteenth century, and was taken to the nth degree in the modernism and postmodernism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In identifying with classicism, therefore, I am not merely expressing a preference for Titian and Poussin, Haydn and Mozart, Dante and Shakespeare over Picasso, Schoenberg and Maya Angelou, I am saying that there is something fundamentally wrong and depraved with the latter.

In going, as a Tory, against the spirit of our forward thinking age in all of these things – royalism, high church traditional Christianity, and classicism – I am a reactionary, a term which is used as a label of abuse by those who believe in the false doctrine of progress, i.e., the doctrine that man has an infinite capacity to reshape and improve the world so as to create Paradise for himself on earth, but which I wear as a badge of honour, a habit I picked up from one of my favourite historical writers, John Lukacs.

As a reactionary, a man of the right – indeed, the far right in the truest sense of that expression, one which does not include Hitlerism which, properly understood, was an ideology of the left – I see most contemporary trends as being for the worse rather than the better. This is most evident in the realm of morality where all the old commandments and taboos, which served constructive social and civil purposes are being jettisoned in favour of a set of petty, banal, obnoxious, and increasingly ridiculous rules, designed to micromanage our personal relationships and communications with others so as to prevent us from hurting the feelings of a growing list of groups of people whose feelings are officially protected.

All of this nonsense comes from the idea of equality, one of the chief demons of the age. In the United States, right-liberals, i.e., conservatives, and left-liberals or progressives, argue over “equality of opportunity”, favoured by the former, versus “equality of outcome”, favoured by the latter. In the Tory tradition of Dr. Johnson and Evelyn Waugh, I reject both concepts, and all forms of the idea of equality, as a sick, evil, and depraved perversion of true justice. Justice, being rooted in the order of things as they are, is, like that order, hierarchical rather than egalitarian. I hope that it is not arrogant boasting to word it this way, but I have more sense than to believe in the equality of individuals, much less such drivel as the equality of classes, the sexes, religions, cultures, and the races, either as a description of the way things are or of the way things ought to be made to be. One does not have to subscribe to some crackpot ideology about how one’s own race or sex is superior to the others – which, by the way, is a fair description of the nominally egalitarian feminist and black advocacy movements – to recognize the folly of egalitarianism. Few things get my dander up more than the way these stupid and patently false ideas are shoved down all our throats by educators, clergyman, the media both news and entertainment – not that there is much of a difference anymore – and the government. None of these really believe this nonsense, however much they might lie to themselves and others, as is evidenced by the way they will not allow anyone to disagree with them but seek to utterly ruin the lives, careers, and reputations of anyone who in even the mildest way points out that their emperor has no clothes.

The only other absurd notion as protected against the observation of reality as egalitarianism is liberal individualism taken to its ultimate extreme in which reality itself is declared to be for each of us what we decide it to be for ourselves. If Bruce Jenner decides he is a woman, who are you or I to disagree? All the rest of us are expected to agree that he is a woman, just as if we were living out George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in which the inhabitants of Oceania, at war with one rival power one day, declare that they have always been at war with the other the next.

That this new morality represents some kind of quantum leap forward in human enlightenment is a proposition that no truly sane and intelligent person could entertain for a second. Give me back the old Victorian morality, I say.

It is a time-honoured New Years tradition to make resolutions of self-improvement on this day and so I make it my resolution for 2016, to grow even more out of step with the times in which we live, and I encourage all of you to do the same.

Happy New Year,
God Save the Queen!

Bach to Beethoven: Music and Culture, the High and the Low

The creative aspect of human nature, which according to Dorothy Sayers is the very essence of the image of God in man, expresses itself in art. While the word art immediately brings to mind physical works, like painting and sculpture, that we experience through the sense of sight there is an art that is at least as old as either of these which is audible rather than visual. That art is the art of music.

What is music?

Music is created by the deliberate arrangement of sounds, whether produced by instruments, voices, or a combination of both. That is not a definition of what music is but a description of how it is made. It is easier to describe how music is created than to define what it is. For to say “music is the deliberate arrangement of sounds” would not be correct. That definition would also apply to speech which is not ordinarily considered to be a form of music. It does not help to define speech as “the deliberate arrangement of sounds produced by the human voice” because singing is an element of music produced by the human voice and some forms of music consist of unaccompanied singing.

Can we distinguish music from other forms of arranged sound such as speech by its function?

If we understand “function” in its utilitarian sense this would be very difficult to do because music is composed for a multitude of different uses, perhaps more so than any other art. Some music is written for use in worship to glorify God. The purpose of some music is to relieve the monotony of drudge labour. Other music is written to pass down a people’s history, legends, and myths in a way that is easy to remember. Some music is written to be listened to by an audience in a concert hall. Other music is written to be danced to.

If we think of function in terms of ultimate purpose, apart from the question of use, then music, as a form of art, has the same ultimate purpose of other arts, the creation of beauty. A painter arranges colours and shades on his canvas in such a way that whether he is depicting a person or place or telling a story in picture, the resulting work is beautiful to the eye. Likewise, a musical composer, seeks to arrange sounds in a way that is beautiful to the ear.

This still does not distinguish music from all forms of speech. For beauty can be created through the arrangement of words too. This is the goal of the literary arts and especially of poetry. Perhaps it is impossible to define music and poetry separately however. They have been closely associated with each other since the days of Ancient Greece, they share common elements such as rhythm and metre which are often spoken of as “the music” of poetry, and what are lyrics, after all, other than a form of poetry?

The overlapping relationship between poetry and music suggests that music, like speech, is a means of communication, a language. Since music affects our emotions, our feelings, it is possible that the best way to define music is to say that like speech, it is a form of communication through arrangements of sound, but whereas speech is primarily directed towards human reason, music is directed towards our emotions, our feelings. A possible challenge to the accuracy of this definition may exist in the fact that some forms of music are written to inspire reflection and contemplation, both of which are actions of the rational mind. The kind of reflection that good serious music inspires, however, is not the same sort of reflection that a well-written treatise inspires. The latter speaks directly to our reason, offering us proofs of what it asserts, and inviting us to pass judgement on whether or not its thesis is sound. Contemplative music speaks to our reason indirectly. It first inspires an emotional response and then invites us to contemplate that response, its immediate source in the music itself, and its ultimate source in the meaning conveyed through the medium of the music.

Music, like other art, is an important component of culture. Culture is the shared way of life of a community, society or people group. It unites the members of these social groups, giving them a sense of a shared identity. It binds more than just the current members of a society, however. When it is passed on from generation, to generation, we call it tradition, and it serves to unite the past and future generations of a society with the present generation. It is through the passing on of culture in tradition that a society’s greatest achievement, its civilization, is transmitted.

Social cohesion within a community is usually not the first thing we think of when we think of music. We recognize that various forms of ethnic and folk music are musical expressions of the culture of particular people groups but we seldom think of the larger categories of music which are more widely listened to in these terms.

If anything we think of such music as having the opposite effect. Musical tastes divide families, communities, and societies. In any given large community in the Western world, you are likely to find fans of country, jazz, rock and pop music as well as classical music aficionados, and some poor misguided souls who think that the cacophonous noise that is called rap is a form of music. Musical tastes frequently divide members of the most basic social unit, the family – rock music in particular has an infamous reputation for creating a generation gap within families. Where music does create social unity nowadays is among the cult followings of various bands and musical icons.

Perhaps ironically, in all of this Western music does continue to express something significant about Western culture, societies, and civilization. What it expresses is how completely liberalism – the idea that the individual is more important than the family, community, or society – has triumphed in Western countries. It also shows how easy it is, in a society atomized by liberalism, for charismatic figures to form large cult followings out of the masses of alienated individuals.

Culture exists in many layers. Local culture gives identity to local communities and when several of these comprise a larger society their local cultures share elements which make up the larger culture of the society as a whole. Depending upon the size of the society there might also be a regional level that is intermediate between the local and the societal. There is also a level of culture that transcends the particular society. We call Canada, Great Britain, the United States, the countries of Europe, and a few other societies “Western” because these societies all share in what we call “Western civilization” – the tradition of achievement which began in the Graeco-Roman civilization of classical antiquity and came down to us through medieval Christendom. There is therefore a sense in which we can speak of a “Western” culture which all these societies share in.

There is another sense in which we can describe culture as being multi-layered. Matthew Arnold, the insightful 19th Century inside critic of liberalism, in his Culture and Anarchy, wrote that culture is “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world”. Clearly this is not a description of a society’s culture as a whole. What Arnold is talking about is what is usually described as “high culture”. High culture is a level of culture that exists within the culture of societies which have achieved a high degree of civilization. High culture contains high moral and aesthetic standards and has an elevating effect upon its society and that society’s broader culture.

Or at least that is what traditional high culture is like. That which has been produced under the label “high culture” over the last century has progressively moved further and further away from the description. The reasons for this we shall shortly explore. First let us consider the nature of the musical element of high culture.

The label we most commonly attach to Western high culture music is “classical music”. What do we mean by the term “classical”? There are many whose first thought upon hearing the word “classical” is “old”. This could be because this is how the term tends to be used with regards to other forms of music. “Classic rock” and “classic country” are both virtually synonymous with “oldies” in either category of music. It could also be because most of the really big names among classical music composers lived or were at least born before the 20th Century. The word “classical”, however, does not properly mean “old” at all. It refers to outstanding quality and if it has any necessary temporal connotation it is of “timelessness” not “age”.

The term “classical” points to one of the most important elements of traditional Western high culture. Classicism in the arts is a striving for excellence that emphasizes form, structure, and order in accordance with high standards derived to some degree from Graeco-Roman civilization, especially the culture and philosophy of 5th-4th Century B.C. Athens. Among the traits regarded as characteristics of excellence in classicism are unity, simplicity, balance, harmony and restraint.

Not all “classical music” is classical in this technical sense of the term. Classicism has been influential at various points in the history of Western art music, but most notably in the style that developed in a particular period in the 18th Century. This period – the Classical Period proper – extended roughly from the time of Johann Sebatian Bach in the early 18th Century to that of Ludwig von Beethoven in the early 19th Century. Bach was the greatest composer of the Baroque period which immediately preceded the Classical Period. Beethoven embodied the transition between the Classical and the Romantic of the 19th Century. The period between Bach and Beethoven saw the careers of the two geniuses who with Beethoven were the first Viennese School of music – Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang A. Mozart.

Western art music contains a lot more music than what was composed in this era. The plainsong tradition in Christian liturgy extends well back into the first millennium of the Church and polyphonic liturgical music was composed in the late Middle Ages. J. S. Bach composed at the end of the Baroque period which also produced such giants as Antonio Vivaldi and George F. Handel and saw the birth of opera. The Romantic period in the 19th Century saw the work of Johannes Brahms, Frederic Chopin, and Franz Shubert to name just three. In addition most of the great opera composers – Wagner, Rossini, Bizet, Gounod, Verdi, etc. – composed in the 19th Century and in the case of Puccini in the early 20th. Why then do we refer to all Western art music as classical?

Since the real answer probably has something to do with the decline of precision in the English language I am going to give a plausible sounding ex-post facto justification of the usage. The music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven exemplifies everything that art music aspires to be. Earlier forms of music such as the concerto reached near perfection at the pen of these masters as did the new form, the symphony, which they introduced. Their music is unmistakably beautiful, both inspired and inspirational, and is enduring and timeless. It therefore lends its name to art music as a whole.

If the music composed in this era is all that art music should be what about the “classical music” composed today?

It, alas, is all that it should not be. The same downward progression can be seen in Western art music as can be seen in Western art in general. 19th Century Romanticism gives birth to the more rebellious Impressionism which is succeeded by a series of avant garde movements in the Modern Period in the early 20th Century and then collapses into the nihilism of Postmodernism after World War II. What Pablo Picasso, Henry Matisse, Gustav Klimt, and Marcel Duchamp were to the visual arts in the early 20th Century, Arthur Schoenburg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern were to art music. Jackson Pollock has his musical counterpart in John Cage.

What is the cause of this decline?

It depends upon whether we are looking for a cause within the culture or within the societies to which the culture belongs.

Within the culture the explanation is that romanticism was taken to its extreme and then beyond. Romanticism is a rebellion or reaction against the order imposed by classicism in the name of individual expression. It can be progressive – looking towards the future, or reactionary – looking towards the past, but either way it resists the structure and forms of classicism and places its emphasis upon the inner light guiding the individual artist.

Classicism and romanticism need each other. The structure, forms, and order of classicism and the internal inspiration of romanticism balance each other out. Inspiration and genius can result in timeless masterpieces of beauty as in the case of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Adherence to form, when inspiration is lacking, merely produces the formulaic, whereas resistance to structure and order, if taken so far as to actually overthrow the structure and order, results in chaos.

Which is exactly what happened. The rebellion of early Romanticism evolved into outright revolution, order collapsed, and chaos ensued.

What about the societal cause of this collapse? Culture reflects the moral and spiritual condition of the society and civilization to which it is attached. What changes in Western societies and civilization are reflected in the downward death spiral of Western high culture?

The weakening of the position of the Christian Church is one of the changes which is clearly reflected here. The building of cathedrals and churches in architecture, the painting of altarpieces and other religious art to decorate these buildings, and the composition of settings of the Mass and other sacred music, are historically and traditionally the heart of Western high culture. The secularization of Western societies has cut at that heart severely.

The triumph of Whiggery – liberalism and democracy – is also reflected in the decline of high culture. In many Western countries royalty and aristocracy have been eliminated altogether. In the United Kingdom both survive in seriously weakened form. Here in Canada the monarchy has survived as a weakened institution but it would be very bad joke to apply the term “aristocracy” to our Senate. Our constitutions have become dangerously unbalanced in favour of the principle of democracy.

Other than the Church, Western royalty and aristocracy were the most important patrons of high culture. It is the nature of high culture that it is produced by a symbiotic relationship between a civilization’s social/political elites and its artistic elites. It is the nature of human societies that they will always be led by elites. The nature of the elites, however, depends upon the constitution of the society. In the Modern era democracy became the dominant principle in Western constitutions. As a result, the social/political leadership in Western societies has passed from royalty and aristocracy, even in societies that retain them, to new elites of politicians and bureaucrats. Economic leadership has passed from aristocracy-emulating bourgeois businessmen to corporate managers. The spiritual leadership has passed from the clergy of the Christian Church to intellectuals. The artistic leadership has passed from skilled craftsmen, apprenticed in their art from their early youth, working within established traditions, to nihilistic, navel-gazing, narcissists.

The current state of high culture is exactly what one would predict would be the result of a wholesale transfer of leadership from people with good taste to the kind of people noted for their bad taste – or utter tastelessness. Crucifixes in jars of urine, canned feces, and cadavers on display make one wish for the days when Picasso, Matisse, and Dali were making art look bad, while the kind of contemporary classical music one finds on government-sponsored radio stations makes Schoenburg’s atonal compositions sound harmonic.

Such art and music is “high culture” in name only. It does not and cannot do what high culture is supposed to do – elevate the general culture of the society which produces it.

If we say that it is high culture’s purpose to elevate a society, its culture, and its civilization what do we mean by “elevate”?

Human beings and beasts together comprise the category of living beings called animals, from the Latin word animus denoting breath or spirit. Human beings share many characteristics with other animals. We eat, we drink, we breathe, we sleep, we copulate, etc. We also have traits which set us apart from other animals and enable us to live on a higher plane than other animals. Yes, we can abuse those traits and in so doing arguably place ourselves at a level lower than the other animals. When used properly, however, they can create civilization.

Human culture involves all human activities, those we share with the beasts, and those which belong to us alone. Culture includes rules which dictate that some of the activities we share with the beasts be done completely in private and only discussed in public if absolutely necessary, other of the activities we share with the beasts are also to be done in private but can be discussed in public in a polite manner, whereas other activities we share with the beasts – such as eating and drinking - can be done in public, even communally, provided we follow customs which minimize our resemblance to our bestial cousins. These rules are called manners or etiquette and they differ from culture to culture.

High culture elevates a society’s culture, by drawing its attention upwards, away from the aspects of our existence which are merely animal, and focusing it on higher values. It is our attempt to live according to these values which produces the human achievement we call civilization.

Music, as mentioned earlier, is a kind of language which speaks to the emotions. It moves our passions within us. Beethoven’s choral setting of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in the final movement of his 9th Symphony, for example, inspires within us the feeling to which it alludes. Music can communicate feelings of happiness and of sadness – and of lust, rage, and a host of other kinds as well.

Which is why music can be degrading as well as elevating. This brings us to the topic of “low culture”. There are two very different meanings to the expression “low culture”. One is non-pejorative. In this sense “low culture” is simply the necessary complement of “high culture”. Within the culture of a civilization, high culture is deliberately produced to maintain a high level of civilization, and is oriented towards higher values which transcend the boundaries of the society. Low culture is the rest of the civilization’s culture and tends to be oriented towards expressing the particular identity of the society to which it belongs rather than towards universal higher values. Each draws from the other and complements the other. Such flow, T. S. Eliot has pointed out, must exist for if they are isolated from each other they become separate cultures rather than parts of a single culture.

The other sense of “low culture” refers to culture which has the opposite effect to that which high culture is supposed to have – rather than elevating it degrades. Both kinds of “low culture” are more commonly referred to as “popular culture”. The abbreviated version of this label, “pop culture” refers only to the degrading kind. The musical element of popular culture is called “popular music” and here too “popular music” does service for both non-classical Western music in general and degrading music in particular.

Whereas classical music involves many forms – fugue, sonata, concerto, symphony, opera, to name just a few – composed in styles that tend to coincide with long historical periods, popular music generally is limited to a single form – the song – composed in a multitude of genres such as folk, country and western, jazz, rhythm and blues, blues, rock and so forth. This is true of popular music in both senses of the term. The overwhelming predominance of the song form, however, can be regarded as a step towards the music of degradation. Songs are easier to follow than instrumental pieces and are usually considerably shorter. Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 1 – the shortest of his four horn concertos being only two movements long rather than three, runs slightly over 10 minutes in length. There are a handful of popular songs that are of comparable length – folk rock singer Don McLean’s ballad “American Pie” was just under 9 minutes long – and these tend to be among the most enduring of popular songs, but most are well under the length of the average concerto movement, to say nothing of the average symphony movement. Popular songs are well suited for the age of fast food and junk food , TV channel surfing, and interac transactions.

It is the second meaning of “popular music” that we will focus on. What do we mean by degradation? How can music be degrading?

Degradation is the opposite of elevation. We defined the elevation which is the purpose of high culture as lifting human existence as far above the level of the beast as possible and orienting it towards higher truths and values to be reflected in the accomplishments of civilization. The opposite of that would be to attempt to reduce human existence to as close to the level of the beasts as possible. There are at least two other ways in which music can be degrading. It can be morally degrading – which is very close to the previous meaning of degrading. It can also be aesthetically degrading which refers to a drop in artistic quality.

The well-being of a community or society and of its members requires rules which forbid behavior in which a person pursues his personal interests in such a way or to such an extent that other members or even the community itself are harmed. Such rules require the individual person to limit and control his desires and passions. The connection between the two – rules governing society and people governing their own passions – and between the both and civilization is foundational to morality. Plato discussed this at length in his dialogue The Republic.

That which encourages people to unleash their passions and to rebel against legitimate authority is morally degrading. This is pretty much the defining characteristic of rock music.

Rock music began as “rock ‘n’ roll” shortly after the end of World War II. The original rock ‘n’ roll groups combined elements of country music and rhythm and blues to create catchy, songs that were fun to listen and dance to. Teenagers were the target audience and the lyrics of these songs typically expressed an adolescent perspective on topics of interest to teenagers. Some fundamentalist preachers denounced rock ‘n’ roll from the pulpit but their warnings were largely ignored because the rock of that era was relatively innocent and was, above all other things, fun. The preachers succeeded only in convincing most people that they were a bunch of wet blankets preaching the message that it is wrong to have fun.

This was the first step in the moral degradation of rock music. The relatively – but not completely – innocent and fun rock ‘n’ roll immunized all subsequent rock music from the criticism the first generation faced. “It’s just kids having fun. What’s wrong with that?” became the standard reply to all criticism of rock music. Implicit within that response is the intellectually indefensible assertion that “what is fun must therefore also be innocent”.

The subsequent development of rock music has shown the fundamentalist critics of the earliest rock stars to have been speaking with the prophetic voice of Cassandra. In the 1960’s the mask of innocence was dropped. Rock became the music of the sexual revolution, telling young people to follow wherever their urges led them rather than to control their urges and behave responsibly and well. While some might argue that the increasing corruption of the political establishment lent a degree of credibility and merit to rock’s message of rebellion that message was directed as much against parents, teachers, the Church and its clergy, policemen and indeed all legitimate authorities at all levels of society. Rock eventually developed into countless numbers of subgenres, some of which were relatively benign, while others promoted drug abuse and other self-destructive behavior, and preached evil messages like nihilism and even Satan worship. At one time there were rumors going around about “backwards masking” – that rock musicians would hide objectionable material in their songs which could only be heard by playing them backwards. One wonders why they would bother since the lyrics played straight forwards are bad enough.

A similar downward trend over the same period in time can be seen in pop music. “Pop music” is not, as one might think, just a shorthand way of saying “popular music”. It is a genre of its own – although perhaps it should be called the anti-genre because of its tendency to absorb and assimilate other genres of popular music. To borrow an image from another element of pop culture it is the Borg of popular music. Pop music is similar to rock – they are generally categorized together in record stores – and it is difficult to say where the line between the two should be drawn. Perhaps the best way of describing pop music is to say that it is assembly line rock music. It is music manufactured for sale to the general public like any factory produced product.

This makes pop music a better gauge of the decay of morality than rock music since it is supposed to reflect the mainstream of popular culture. Fifty years ago, a pop star would have been a cleaner, slightly more polished, version of a rock star. If we look at the pop music of the last two decades, however, two trends have come increasingly to stand out among the leading acts – a) the prostitute and b) the effeminate pretty boy. Both trends are examples of moral degradation.

That the first trend is morally degrading should be fairly obvious. Progressively younger female pop stars performing to progressively younger audiences, dress increasingly provocatively and sing increasingly sexually charged lyrics in performances that would seem to be more appropriate for a burlesque stage or a strip club.

What about the second trend? Male pop stars are being made to look and sound more and more like girls every day. Yes, “made” is the right word, because the performers of pop music are as factory assembled as the music they sing. For they are as much the product as their music. Probably even more so.

Roger Scruton, in an insightful article about youth culture for City Journal 13 years ago, commented about how in pop music the traditional relationship between music and those who perform it has been inverted:

In effect, we witness a reversal of the old order of performance. Instead of the performer being the means to present the music, which exists independently in the tradition of song, the music has become the means to present the performer. The music is part of the process whereby a human individual or group is totemized. (Roger Scruton, “Youth Culture’s Lament”, City Journal, Autumn 1998)

This is why one cannot defend the pretty boy trend in pop music by pointing to the historical use of castrati in traditional music. However barbaric the custom may have been, castrati were made to serve the needs of the music rather than to be idols for worship.

For thousands of years societies have regarded manliness as a praiseworthy trait to be encouraged among males. The Greek word for courage – the first virtue mentioned in Aristotle’s Ethics – was andreia, a word derived from the Greek word aner, which means “man, husband”. The very word “virtue” which we use to describe praiseworthy characteristics is derived from vir, the Latin equivalent of aner. This usage reflects the high premium Western societies have historically and traditionally placed upon manliness. In the kind of male pop stars it is now churning out the pop music industry appears to be promoting epicenity, the exact opposite of manliness, as a trait to be emulated by males. This too is a form of moral decay.

The degradation that is most obvious in pop music, however, is the aesthetic kind. Music, like architecture, painting, sculpture and literature is a form of art, the quality of which can be judged by aesthetic standards. There are different ways in which art can be aesthetically poor. On the one hand art can become clichéd, i.e, it can lose its aesthetical value by being pointlessly repetitive. On the other hand, artists may out of fear of the cliché, produce art that has no merit other than originality. The latter is the pitfall into which avant garde artists – musical and otherwise – are prone to fall. The former is the pitfall into which pop culture – including pop music – falls.

It is in the very nature of pop music to be kitsch. Pop music is music that is manufactured like any other assembly-line product to be sold cheaply in large quantities for mass consumption. Without Thomas Edison’s invention of the technology for recording and replaying sound and broadcasting and receiving sound in the late 19th Century there could have been no pop music. These technologies made it possible for music to be mass produced. Mass production, i.e., the fast production of a good so that it can be sold in large quantities at a low unit price, can be both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing in that a wide variety of goods are available and affordable to more people than ever before. It is a curse in that quality of that which is produced inevitably suffers. Some things should never be mass produced and culture is one of them.

Whereas other forms of popular music and classical music are the creations of artists whose music may or may not be recorded and sold pop music is the creation of record companies. The companies create both the pop star and the music the pop star performs. One group of specialized technicians comes up with the image for the pop star, another group comes up with the music, and the final product is assembled by yet another group of technicians in the recording studio.

The result is the most clichéd form of music ever made. There is novelty – pop music rises and falls with the waves of fashion like no other – but no originality.

Unfortunately pop music seems to be a black hole which sucks in other forms of popular music. Before World War II a number of distinct popular music genres developed – country and western, jazz, rhythm and blues, etc. In recent decades most of these genres have tended to develop a “pop” feel to them. Take country music for example. Compare country music made today, with the music of Hank Williams Sr., Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, George Jones and Waylon Jennings. Then compare it with music currently being released under the label pop. Which does it more resemble?

Is there a solution to any of these downward trends?

Not that I am aware of, but there is at least a consolation. The same advancements in musical recording technology that have made pop music possible, have also made possible high quality recordings by superb orchestras of the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Shubert, Brahms, Grieg, Wagner, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, and Mahler. There is over a lifetime’s worth of good listening in these recordings, and these works continue to be performed in the standard repertoire of concert halls and opera houses around the world.

Here I Stand

One of my favorite op-ed writers used to be Charley Reese whose tri-weekly column, filled with old-fashioned common sense and conservatism continued to be syndicated by King Features for several years after his career at the Orlando Sentinel ended in 2001. Much to the loss of the reading public he gave up his column and went into full retirement a couple of years ago. He believed that an opinion writer should make a full disclosure of his convictions to his readers, and around New Years each year would write a column containing such a disclosure.

This essay will be along those lines.

I am 34 years old, was raised in rural Manitoba and live in the capital city of Manitoba, Winnipeg. My formal education after High School was in theology at Providence College and Seminary in Otterburne. I am a patriotic Canadian.

Theologically I am an evangelical Protestant and a small-c catholic. I am a Protestant in that I affirm the supremacy authority of the Bible and the soteriological doctrines of the Reformation (note the nod to Luther in the title of this essay). I am an evangelical in that I stress the importance of personal faith in Jesus Christ as revealed in the Gospel. I am a catholic in that I affirm the ancient creeds – Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian – shared by all major branches of historical/traditional Christianity as the basic doctrines of Christian orthodoxy.

Politically I am a Tory in the original sense of the term – a supporter of the monarchy and the Church. This does not mean I endorse the present Conservative Party. Being a true Tory, I revere royalty, and despise politicians and bureaucrats. As a classical conservative, I believe in an organic rather than a contractual society, regard the family rather than the “individual” as the basic unit of society, and believe in the need for a strong but non-intrusive government. Government should be strong enough to enforce the law and preserve the security of the country. It should not, however, become “big government” which intrudes into the authority of other social institutions such as the Church and family or into people’s personal lives. With regards to government and other social authorities I believe in subsidiarity – that all matters should be handled by the smallest authority competent to handle them. With regards to government and people’s private lives I affirm the “harm principle” – that human laws should basically prohibit actions which are directly harmful to other people and their property. I affirm this as a general principle, the way it is found in the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, not as the individualistic absolute that is found in the liberal manifesto of John Stuart Mill.

I am a High Tory not a “Red” Tory. I despise all forms of socialism – National Socialism (Nazism), Communism, Proudhonistic anarchism, Fabianism, the welfare-state (or rather “The Servile State” as the prescient Hilaire Belloc dubbed it before its creation). Socialism has been tried by countless societies and it has always failed. Selling itself as a “spread the wealth and prosperity” movement, it only ever succeeds in spreading human misery and magnifying it exponentially. I reject “socialism on paper” as much as I reject “socialism in practice”. Socialism’s ideal world – a classless society where property is owned in common – is as ugly to me as socialism in actual practice.

Which is part of the reason I reject capitalism as well as socialism. Capitalism is far more effective than socialism in weakening and eliminating social classes and the hierarchical principle in society.

I do not reject everything in capitalism. I affirm private property and private enterprise as institutions of society. I affirm economic freedom over government planning. I affirm the principle of competition. Capitalism is more than these things however, which would all be found prior to capitalism.

Capitalism is a set of values which is subversive of traditional society, of family, community, religion and any other “rooted” institutions which bind successive generations together and give a sense of permanency to human life and society. Capitalism values quantity over quality, consumption over production, and change over permanence. Its effect upon aesthetics and culture has been devastating. Capitalism has given us the world of concrete and steel buildings, of asphalt and smog, of pop culture and modern and post-modern art. For this we should annually burn an effigy of Adam Smith.

I believe there is an obligation upon the upper, privileged classes to contribute to society as a whole and that there is a Christian moral obligation upon the Church to see to it that the needy are provided for. I reject the welfare-state as being a fulfillment, in whole or in part, of these obligations. It is rather a rejection of these obligations. The welfare-state involves the wealthy voting away their moral responsibilities and obligations to the poor and placing them upon the state and it involves the poor voting to themselves the wealth of those more privileged than themselves. It kills the spirit of charity and creates an underclass. It is loathsome to the core.

I am a social conservative in two senses. In the first, and primary sense, I believe that authority in traditional institutions like the family and the Church should be preserved, and where it has been lost, restored if possible. In the second sense, I believe that the customs, morals, and values of Christendom, which have come under attack in the Modern Era, and especially in the decades after WWII, should be preserved where they have been retained, and restored where they have been lost. I do not believe, however, that government legislation is the best vehicle for preserving/restoring either traditional authority or those customs, morals and values. Government in its contemporary form, democratic bureaucracy, is particularly ill-suited for that purpose, having proven itself to be the social progressive’s most consistent ally and most effective vessel in bulldozing down the old social and moral order.

I am not a pacifist, nor do I believe in “conscientious objection” or “non-resistance”. I believe with Socrates and Alasdair MacIntyre that patriotism is a virtue and have nothing but contempt for the abuse of sacred texts in which verses are pulled out of context and used as a justification for the vice of shirking one’s duty to one’s country. I am not however, an enthusiast for war, and cannot off the top of my head think of a war within my or my father’s lifetime that was not a wicked waste of time, lives, and resources.

I do not believe in progress in any of the following three senses: 1) The prevailing idea of the Modern Age from the “Enlightenment” to World War I that through reason mankind would continually improve itself, 2) the idea connected with classical liberalism and capitalism that through new discoveries and technological advancement science will solve all problems that come man’s way, or 3) that through the use of state power a better world can be socially engineered through the elimination of discrimination, poverty, inequality, and ignorance. All such ideas are doomed to failure because they look for the source of human suffering outside of human nature. The primary source of human misery is evil in the human heart which comes not from inequality, lack of education, or poverty but from the fallenness of human nature. Human nature cannot be changed through political means. Mankind is a fallen being, exiled from Paradise because of sin, who must look for a spiritual answer to his condition in the grace of God.

I am a reactionary. While that word is largely used as a term of opprobrium by progressives (reason enough to claim it as a self-label) I use the term to mean someone who sees through the “you can’t turn the clock back” rhetoric of progressives. Imagine a person driving down a highway who sees a road that he thinks might get him to his destination faster. He takes the road but soon realizes that it ends at the edge of a cliff where a bridge used to be but which has collapsed. Keeping on the road, continuing in the direction he is going, will lead him to disaster. The only sane thing for him to do is to turn around, go back to where he got on the road, and get back onto the highway. The reactionary wishes for his society to make that kind of decision when necessary. The progressive allows for motion in only one direction – the direction which will take society over the metaphorical cliff. This does not mean that the reactionary tries to artificially recreate an era from the past. Rather he looks to the past for inspiration, seeking principles that can be re-applied and institutions and traditions that can be recovered in forms appropriate for the present.

I believe mankind is a limited being living in a limited world with limited resources. I do not possess the faith of the technological progressive (who frequently considers himself to be a “conservative”) in an infinite human capacity to find replacement resources and develop technological solutions to his problems. The present generation owes it to posterity to responsibly conserve essential resources for the future and not to recklessly use them up, blindly and naively believing with Mr. Micawber that “something will turn up”. In this, I agree with the ecologists.

I am also in aesthetical agreement with the ecologists that we should not uglify our environment by littering, polluting the air, rivers, lakes and oceans, and turning the planet into one giant megalopolis of concrete, steel and asphalt.

Having said that, I have no use for political environmentalism, the “Green” movement. Like all other obnoxious save-the-world, do-gooder movements, the environmentalist movement is far more about social engineering, socialism, and big intrusive government than about finding genuine solutions to ecological problems. Privately owned resources are always kept in better condition and conserved better than resources held in common by the community, yet the Greens are overwhelmingly biased in favour of more common resources, with greater government control. I am skeptical of many of the environmental doomsday scenarios like “global warming” that political environmentalists have been warning us about in recent decades, but I am far more skeptical of the environmentalists proposed solutions to the problems. If the rise of almost 1 degree Centigrade in the average global temperature over the last century indicates that the industrial output of greenhouse gasses has created an imminent threat of melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels then agreements to cut back on the rate of greenhouse gas emissions of the kind that are constantly being proposed are not going to help one iota.

I hold contemporary fads and fashions in scorn and I loathe political correctness.

I have no sympathy with any form of feminism. Societies differ in what roles they assign to men and to women, but the fact that they assign different roles to men and women is a universal. The differences in the specifics of gender roles from one society to the next are derived from differences between the societies in terms of their traditions, organization, and economy. Constant from society to society however, is the fact that gender roles are based upon the fundamental and permanent biological difference between the sexes – women get pregnant, give birth to children, and nurture children with their bodies, and men do not.

Liberal feminism seeks to eliminate this universal and reduce men and women alike to “individuals”. Radical feminism interprets everything society has done to support women in their vital role in society, from marriage in which men are made to support and take responsibility for the women who bear their children to society’s sending its young men out to fight its wars while protecting its women and children, as an attempt by the “patriarchy” or “male power structure” to oppress women. Post-modern feminism tells individuals they are to define for themselves what it means to be a “man” or a “woman” (whichever they chose, their biology being irrelevant if they so choose it to be).

In contrast I believe in patriarchal authority and in chivalry. With the exception of combat service in the military, I do not believe the state should pass laws saying “this occupation is reserved for men, this occupation for women”. Combat service is an exception because society, in the interests of its own survival, has a stake in protecting its women and children. Men and women are quite capable of separating into gender-appropriate roles suitable for their society at its stage of development on their own. Or rather they would be if government would abandon its foolish policies and programs aimed at producing equal representation of men and women in all occupations and all levels of society and/or at reducing men and women to generic individuals..

I am an anti-anti-racist. While I think that the idea that one person should be considered “better” or “worse” than another because of a morphological trait such as skin color, eye color, or hair color to be extremely silly, I don’t think I have ever encountered anyone who actually believed that idea. Physical traits like skin color are trivial but race is not trivial. The word race is derived from a French word denoting lineage and ancestry and when we apply it to groups of people who are identified by physical traits like skin color, we do so because the particular set of physical traits that distinguish that group indicate their descent from a common ancestral population.

We should never make the mistake of regarding “race” and “society” as being synonymous but we need to recognize that identifiable descent from one generation to the next is an essential element of society. Every society requires continuity across the span of generations, a sense in which the present generation is descended from the last and all previous generations and consists of the ancestors of the next and all future generations. Without this sense it is not a society, just a bunch of random people who happen to live in the same territory at the same time.

This does not mean that a person or family cannot be successfully integrated from one society into another or that a society should be completely closed to newcomers. It is unhealthy for a society to be completely closed on a permanent basis but it is even more unhealthy for a society to be so open that it eliminates continuity in its core identity from one generation to the next.

The category of “nation” is more helpful than the category of “race”. Both categories depict a group of people that have a common identity that persists across the generations. The identifying traits of a nation, however, are primarily cultural – language, religion, customs, and manners.

Anti-racism is a fundamentally dishonest movement that has capitalized, since World War II, upon people’s legitimate sense of moral outrage over the atrocities of the Third Reich. It seeks to break up people’s sense of identification with their ancestors, posterity, and larger society by treating all expressions of such natural loyalty and affection as being no different from the hate-filled ideology that brought about the Holocaust. It points to examples of where state power was used to treat people unjustly because of their ethnic identity to justify using state power to reeducate and reprogram people away from traditional loyalties to one’s particular kin, community, and society which are passed on in the home, towards a universal loyalty to mankind and the world. It supports using state power to silence and punish people who resist anti-racist indoctrination, not for acts of violence, but for the expression of their views. It seeks the people who are least likely to win much public sympathy (admirers of Hitler for example), pretends that these represent a realistic and grave threat to society, makes a public spectacle out of exposing and/or silencing them, and then pats itself on the back about how it has saved society from becoming the next Nazi Germany. Meanwhile it has trampled over traditional rights and freedoms, made a mockery of traditional standards of justice, and intimidated the public into erroneously believing that its views are the only legitimate views to be held on matters of race, ethnicity and our common humanity.

A society should be “multi-cultural” only in the sense that it allows and encourages local and regional variations to develop within its broader culture. Multi-culturalism in its more usual meaning, however, is the official attempt by the government to create an artificial and unnatural diversity by importing immigrants by the thousand to millions from backgrounds different from each other and from the society they are entering. This kind of multi-culturalism breaks up the social cohesion of local and regional subcultures and demands that every local community and culture abandon its distinct core identity and become a microcosm of the larger multi-cultural society. This is as evil as the kind of nationalism which seeks to eliminate local and regional identities which it regards as rivals and threats to its own.

I am an elitist in two senses of the term. First, I believe that it is inevitable that in every human society and organization a small minority will rise to forefront, assuming leadership and making the actual decisions for the society or organization. Robert Michels called this the “Iron Law of Oligarchy” and adequately demonstrated its veracity in his Political Parties. Vilfredo Pareto demonstrated that in every field of human endeavour a minority would excel, this minority being the elite in that field, a political elite being the minority that excels in the field of assuming power in society. This is classical elite theory and it is a description of reality that is born out by history, every day observation, and statistical analysis.

Secondly, and more importantly, I am an elitist in the sense that with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and more recently Anthony Ludovici, Evelyn Waugh, and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne I believe that society needs aristocracy.

An elite, however, is not necessarily an aristocracy because the people that excel at obtaining power are not necessarily the same as the people who excel at exercising power. In a society where the democratic principle dominates the constitution it is inevitable that the two will not be the same. We can see this today in the Western world where the democratic principle has triumphed over all balancing competing principles. The actual ruling class (not necessarily the same as the nominal ruling class) in each Western society is using its power treacherously, not to govern its society but to tear it apart and dissolve it into a transnational New World Order. This is the exact opposite of what an aristocracy would do.

I hesitate to say anything about the arts here, because there is always a danger of mistaking one’s tastes, which are in large part personal and subjective for universal standards of what is good and beautiful. Today, however, the greater danger is to accept the widespread idea that the beautiful and good are entirely subjective matters and that there are no external and universal standards by which art and taste can be judged.

Art is the creative expression of a society’s culture. It is therefore an indicator of the health of a society’s culture. The subjectivism, relativism, and even nihilism that is found in so much contemporary art and art theory is a reflection of the collapse of social and cultural continuity and cohesion into atomism and alienation in the societies producing such art.

Against the barbaric aesthetic nihilism of the day I assert the classical standards of clarity, order, and balance. The best architecture, drama, literature, music, painting, and sculpture throughout Western history has been that which has followed the light of the standards established in Greco-Roman civilization. Classicism recognizes man’s limitations, prescribes forms and ideals through which excellence can be achieved. In saying this, I do not mean to identify the current morass with romanticism, classicism’s traditional antithesis, or to blame romanticism for such morass. While romanticism is inseparably tied to erroneously and naively optimistic views of man, his nature, and his limitations, it is by no means nihilistic. It has a reactionary as well as a revolutionary side and actually serves the interests of the classical ideal of balance by providing balance to classicism itself, balancing the classical universal with the romantic particular, and classical order with romantic creativity.

I do blame, however, commercial capitalism and the triumph of the democratic/bureaucratic state for much of the cultural decay that is reflected in the poor condition of the arts today.

Commercial capitalism has brought about the replacement of traditional popular culture (the customs and habits of the general populace of a society reflected in folklore, folkmusic, etc.) with “pop culture”. “Pop culture” finds its primary expression in new media opened up by technology like radio, cinema, television, and the internet. Like all other creations of commercial capitalism pop culture is manufactured to be sold to the greatest number of people at the lowest price. This appeal to the lowest common denominator inevitably gives the product the characteristics of vulgarity and cheapness –which are the primary characteristics of contemporary pop culture.

If commercial capitalism has had a deleterious effect upon popular culture and the arts which reflect it, the growth of the modern state and its increasing democratization and bureaucratization have had a deleterious effect upon high culture. Democratic/bureaucratic “big government” began at the start of the twentieth century to take over the role of the aristocracy as the supporter of high culture and its artistic representation. The result has been an extraordinarily long dearth of excellence in the fine arts and a proliferation of mediocrity.

It is traditionally the role of the aristocracy to encourage, promote, and subsidize high culture and artistic excellence. This is by far the most important element of noblesse oblige – the moral obligation upon the upper, privileged classes to contribute to the rest of society. It is a role that democratic/bureaucratic government is not suited to fill. Ever since government took over the funding of the arts, artists have been answerable only to bureaucrats who are notoriously tasteless people. This is akin to being answerable to nobody, and they have developed the unhealthy habit of producing aesthetically unappealing garbage (in some cases literally) and expecting to be paid out of the public treasury for it.

These are the convictions that I hope to express more fully in my essays throughout this year.

Happy New Year.