How to Tell a Barbarian, Part II

     The philosopher Epicurus has given his name to a kind of gross, sumptuous hedonism which he himself never espoused.  Even his detractors, who were many, conceded that he was upright, patriotic, and modest, even austere, in his personal habits.  Epicurus, after all, preached more the avoidance of spiritual anxiety than the pursuit of pleasure, and the pleasures he valued most highly were those of the mind.  Lucretius gives us a really splendid picture of it, envisioning a few friends sitting by the riverside in the summer, enjoying a simple meal, the beauty of the day, and intellectual conversation.  Epicurus died in terrible pain -- strangury, caused by bladder stones he could not pass.  But he also died calmly, uncomplaining.  Epicurus was not a barbarian.

     His philosophy did, however, pose a threat to the life of the mind, one that his fiercely loyal follower Lucretius could not see.  That is, if the avoidance of pain is all there is to life, and if no object of the intellect may be admitted unless it can be proved by what can be seen or heard or touched, then even the moral judgment that enjoying lentils and cheese with wise friends by the river is a good thing, and that drowning roast peacocks in Falernian while dabbling with slave girls and boys is a bad thing, must be ruled out.  Epicurus was a good man, but Epicureanism tends not to produce good men.  Cicero, who loathed the philosophy, saw it.  Virgil, who was attracted to the philosophy, saw it too.  It marked no advance for Greek civilization, but a slippage back towards barbarism.

     So here's a second mark of the barbarian: the habitual relapse into easy gratification; the inability to sustain for long a noble and self-transcending quest.  Washington at Valley Forge was not a barbarian.  The Roman legions, by this definition anyway, were not barbarian.  Are we?  The other night I was with a group of Christian homeschoolers watching a Memorial Day ballgame at a minor league park.  After the game and before the fireworks display, we were regaled by a dozen or so teenagers from one of the local schools, who had gotten up a routine called "Project Peace."  The kids meant well, but even if the song they were singing had a recognizable structure to it, or identifiable notes, they couldn't sing it.  It was part rapped out, part wailed, while the kids, in loose T-shirts and baggy pants, pranced about the infield in what was evidently some imitation of a dance.  We were adjured to "love everyone," and that would bring about "peace on earth."  There were a few political sentimentalisms which I let go in one ear and out the other; not an easy thing to do, given the decibels.

     Yes, the kids meant well, but there was no order to their thought -- really, there was no thought at all, only the weak reliance upon slogans they had picked up at school or from mass entertainment.  There was no order to the music, no order to the dance, not much order to their dress, a kind of slackness in the posture, and a self-gratifying assurance that they could teach their elders a thing or two about war and peace.  Before and after their performance the stadium speakers blared at us, with commercials and bad pop music, so that you could only hold a conversation with the person next to you, if you tried hard.  Flash, shriek, bang, blare, glitz, boom.  That was, as I said, before the fireworks.

     I know that in Tudor and Stuart England people enjoyed tying bears to stakes and setting hounds at them, then betting to see which would kill which.  And that a man's head might not always be attached to his body, but might be stuck on a pole, for deterrent effect.  On the other hand -- ordinary people were apparently capable of sustained intellectual effort.  Shakespeare's groundlings understood quite a deal more than we suppose.  People not only sat through the sermons of Launcelot Andrewes; they bought them when they were published.  Members of the middle class who had a little money made Sidney's Arcadia a popular success.  And I've been listening to the polyphonic music of Thomas Tallis lately -- on a CD called Spem in alium, with David Willcocks directing the Saint John's College Choir.  Check out the haunting Cum transisset Sabbatum, with its blending of simple, long-held soprano tones and more hurried tenor and bass melodic phrases.  It has struck me that that is the sort of thing that Shakespeare would have heard in London when he attended services on a feast day.  Perhaps -- someone who knows more about liturgical history can advise me here -- perhaps he might have heard the polyphony of Tallis or Byrd or Bull on any Sunday, in one of the bigger churches of London.  What is most impressive to me about the singing -- usually unaccompanied; these are compositions for the human voice, with Spem in alium pulling off a forty-part harmony -- is the unearthly sound of the children; the soprano parts were sung by boys.  Now that's something.  We have nothing comparable: children were an essential part of works of the highest artistic caliber. 

     Yes, I know that the Nazis liked Wagner.  I am not saying that a taste for great art inoculates one against evil, or even against a certain barbarism.  I am saying that barbarism goes along nicely with "art" that fails to elevate one's soul above the passions of the passing hour (Christian rock, perhaps?), and usually those are the grosser passions, too.  If you enjoy Shakespeare, you may still be a barbarian.  But if you do not have the capacity, because you do not have the intellectual and emotional discipline, to love virtue, then you will probably also shirk the attention that Sidney and Tallis and Shakespeare demand.  You'll fall back upon the easy fix.  So did the Royal Shakespeare Company recently, giving the world a Bottom who swived the fairy Titania, and did it with jouncing and asinine braying.  Come to think of it, that would have been better than Project Peace.  Maybe better than much of what passes for church music, too.  Someone's braying, Lord, kumbaya.

Comments

[Rob G]

Great post, Tony. It echoes many sentiments expressed in the recent book by Roger Scruton called 'Culture Counts,' which I've just read, and would recommend highly to all.

I'm a great fan of Renaissance polyphony, and have several discs of Tallis' music. The CD I've purchased most recently, and which has spent much time in my player, is this one, which includes several Tallis pieces and is very much worth picking up:

http://www.classicstoday.com/review.asp?ReviewNum=10661

[labrialumn]

I would imagine that their dress was very orderly indeed - teenagers are very sensitive to such things - but not a fashion that you or I appreciate. Likewise their dance, which was very much specified complexity - to a form we do not like.

I share your personal musical preferences, and I agree that taste (a different thing than preferences), must be cultivated. But let us not ourselves be barbarians by that older definition where "the barbarian thinks that the customs of his tribe are the laws for all the world."

I still think that the distinction between barbarian and savage of very important, and that the orcishness of savagery is what we are facing in these latter days of the Decline of the West.

A local Catholic Church for Whitsun sang an Alleluia by Thomas Tallis. my choir has in another year, sung a 'soft-shoe shuffle' about praying down the holy spirit, as something other than the Third Person of the Trinity, but as a human adrenaline/hormonal thing. There -is- a place for taste, even if we mustn't confuse our personal preferences with taste, as barbarians do.

[W.E.D. Godbold]

We're all born barbarians, no? It's the primary job of the family to turn its barbarians into citizens. It's the primary job of the Christian family to encourage its barbarians to become citizens of the Kingdom of God. (Baptism goes a long way towards this, of course. Not much is gonna happen without the Holy Ghost.)

[Phil Smoke]

"the habitual relapse into easy gratification; the inability to sustain for long a noble and self-transcending quest"

That sounds almost as much like a definition of our American culture as it is a definition of barbarism. Their are grosser pursuits like drunkenness and sex, but I think this issue is actually most apparent with entertainment. Many of my fellow college students don't walk to class without their iPod on, and don't sit in their room without their television on. And much Christian preaching is quite dependent on entertainment.

[Alyozhik]

Well...

Tallis certainly wasn't a barbarian, and I'll admit that Spem in alium is masterful. But doesn't it smack of liturgical Epicurianism? Is that kind of worldly pathos really conducive to prayer?

[Bill R]

Tony's point, of course, is that we are indeed slipping toward barbarism on many levels, and that civilization doesn't continue without sustained effort. There is little correlation between technological sophistication and civilization, or even between wealth and civilization. Civilization in fact seems at core to be a shared understanding of an ongoing, generational obligation of citizens, and not merely the expectation that the rights one enjoys by reason of civilization will continue to be respected. At its basic level, this shared understanding is founded on procreation: the assumption that most folks will get married, at a fairly young age, and bear children (not just one child) who will in turn produce grandchildren. At a more sophisticated level, this shared understanding is that some, or even many, gratifications will be delayed (possibly indefinitely) for the greater good of one's family, community, and country. Where this understanding is no longer shared, or worse mocked, civilization declines and barbarism ascends.

[Alyozhik]

More to the point: when masters like Tallis and Rachmaninov undertake the liturgical arts, the results are often amazing. But when we're talking about church, isn't ethos more important than taste or polyphonic ingenuity?

I guess my real question is: How would you describe the ethos of Tallis or Barber?

[Nick]

I would also caution that this slips a bit too far. I agree with the theme, but I'm wary of the open target. Most of us are middle-upper class with a fairly well defined range of tastes. Most of us grew up listening to classical music (my father was a conductor and a pianist when he wasn't framing buildings with my grandfather). This all leads to a mild level of prigishness. I don't even think I seriously understood what good rock was until I was fifteen because I never listened to it. My father helped eventually point me in the right direction.

I think I'm well known in my opinions on this. Earlier when Dr. Esolen commented on lyrics I and a few others pointed out that the sample was a little on the cherry picked side (I was able to come up with an non-obnoxious top-ten song).

For example, the clothing of the teenagers in question wasn't barbaric because it was long with odd waist-lines, it was barbaric because it was opposed to society and supported a youth cliquishness that wasn't suppressed for that very reason by the elders in the group. The music has some of the same problems (as an aside I listened to a section of Cum transisset Sabbatum and thought "this is what rap should be like").

All of this is said only as a caution. I can imagine the horror of a bunch of home-schoolers rapping about world peace. For that, you have my sympathies.

[Tony Esolen]

Nick, you and I have a running (and friendly) difference of opinion on these matters. If you like, I could have descended from Tallis and mentioned the simple and splendid folk song, a song of comradeship in battle, that the boys at Saint Gregory's Academy sang for me a couple of weeks ago. They didn't sing it in polyphony, and of course in terms of real art it comes nowhere near Tallis. But it also comes nowhere near barbarism. When Sir Philip Sidney wrote to justify poetry -- Alyozhik, you should read his Defense of Poetry; it bears on the issue you bring up -- he did not confine himself to talking about the great Greek classics. He confessed that he could not hear the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens without being uplifted in spirit; it's a noble poem of chivalry and patriotism.

So this is certainly not a matter of "high" art and low art. I find much of what graces our museums to be barbaric by my second definition. But Norman Rockwell, for all his sentimentality -- and he is NOT as sentimental as many people say he is -- is certainly not barbaric.

Alyozhik: I do not want to equate piety with aesthetic taste. I am not doing that. But the slackness and easy sensuality of barbarism in music and worship does not conduce to piety. It is an acid.

As for the dress: any mode of dress that gives undue emphasis to what man has in common with the animals nudges us back towards barbarism. The students at my school recently held a "CEO's and Office Ho's" party. I was driving home when I saw them walking en masse to their destination. Enough said.

[James A. Altena]

The Brilliant Classics CD label, which has succeeded Naxos (the latter having moved up to the mid-price range) as God's gift to budget-minded classical music mavens, has licensed and reissued from the small and pricey Signum label a 10-CD set of the complete works of Thomas Tallis by the "Chapelle du Roi" vocal ensemble. It can be ordered from e.g.

http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/main.jsp

which is the most important U.S. web site for classical music.

However, I would strongly recommend instead the following German web site (it does have English instructions):

www.jpc.de

which offers many imported CDs at 1/2 to 1/3 the price of U.S. competitors (including the Tallis set) with a flat shipping rate of 15 Euros regardless of the size of the order (and orders to the U.S. presently discounted an additional 8% from the list price due to the unfavorable dollar-euro s exchange rate.) I have done business with them for four years now; the service is superb, and if any time is defective or shipped in error they reimburse shipping costs as well.

I have several recordings of "Spem in Alium." The best ones are on the Hyperion label with the Winchester Cathedral Choir (for massive sound to bowl one over) and the Gimell label with the Tallis Scholars (for amazing clarity of the interweaving polyphonic strands).

Among other bargains from brilliant Classics are the complete works of Mozart (170 CDs) and Beethoven (85 CDs), each for about only $100 from jpc. the Mozart set is a mixed bag, but more than worth the money; the Beethoven set is excellent in virtually every way (the performances being mostly licensed from the catalogues of EMI, Decca, etc.).

[Bobby Neal Winters]

James, This is my latest purchase...

Come out Virginia, don't let me wait
You Catholic girls start much too late
aw But sooner or later it comes down to fate
I might as well be the one

well, They showed you a statue, told you to pray
They built you a temple and locked you away
Aw, but they never told you the price that you pay
For things that you might have done.....
Only the good die young
thats what i said
only the good die young x2

You might have heard I run with a dangerous crowd
We ain't too pretty we ain't too proud
We might be laughing a bit too loud
aw But that never hurt no one

So come on Virginia show me a sign
Send up a signal I'll throw you the line
The stained-glass curtain you're hiding behind
Never lets in the sun
Darlin' only the good die young
woah
i tell ya
only the good die young x2

You got a nice white dress and a party on your confirmation
You got a brand new soul
mmmm, And a cross of gold
But Virginia they didn't give you quite enough information
You didn't count on me
When you were counting on your rosary
(oh woah woah)

They say there's a heaven for those who will wait
Some say it's better but I say it ain't
I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints
the Sinners are much more fun...

you know that only the good die young
oh woah baby
i tell ya
only the good die young, X2

You say your mother told you all that I could give you was a reputation
Aww She never cared for me
But did she ever say a prayer for me? oh woah woah

Come out come out come out virgina dont let me wait,
You catholic girls start much too late
Sooner or later it comes down to fate
I might as well be the one,
You know that only the good die young

I'm telling you baby
You know that only the good die young
Only the good die young
Only the gooooooooooooooood
Only the good die young
Only the gooooooooooooooood
Only the good die young
Ooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooo oooooooooo...

(Only the good die young)x2

[labrialumn]

Nick, I agree.
Tony, to my ears, your comments on clothing sounds a little, well, gnostic. "what we have in common with animals"

Matter? flesh? hair? God said "hatov". The demons, on the other hand, encourage a rejection of this creation as something unclean (1 Tim. 4:1-5)

I could fail to distinguish preference from taste and say that Gabrielli was civilized, the war pipes are (splendidly) barbarian, and heavy metal is savagery. I still think that the triple distinction is important.

The guy that wrote "Wild at Heart" is promoting savagery as (feral) manhood. The Boy Scouts had a civilized man in mind as the goal.

The barbarian has different customs than you or I, and his taste is not as developed. Shiny things might be sufficient for him. But he has honor, loves his family, and seeks the good, the true and the beautiful, it is just that his taste has not been educated.

The savage has no such basic Romans 2 morality. Loud clanging charging displays take the place of music. Beauty is despised and actively countered. Women are raped, babies are killed, neighbor's possessions are stolen apart from warfare. There is human sacrifice and cannibalism.

Now that song, Bobby, is savagery. The active hatred of the good, the true, and the beautiful, as opposed to the unsophisticated love of the same by the barbarian.

When the Saxons invaded Rheged in the 7th-8th century, they thought they had wandered into the tales of childhood. They were sure that the stone walls were built by the giants, and the still-working fountains and aqueducts were built by the elves. That is barbarian, not savagery. Putting elephant feces on a statue of Our Lady, on the other hand, is savagery.

[James A. Altena]

Only Labrialumn could misread Tony's comment as one that "to my ears . . . sounds a little, well, gnostic." But then, it comes from the same mind that states Obama is only 6% black, "or so I've heard." A consultation with an audiologist is definitely in order.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>But then, it comes from the same mind that states Obama is only 6% black, "or so I've heard."<<<

That's OK. Tsar Nicholas II was only 1/256 Russian. On the other hand, regardless of his parentage, Barack Obama is 100% jackass.

[Tony Esolen]

L'Abri,

I am constantly writing about the goodness and holiness of the body, not only here but in my articles and books. When we dress so as to direct the attention away from the face and even the general form of the body, towards the inguinal area -- demoting the reality of sex from the engagement of man with woman to the coupling of one tool with another -- then we reduce ourselves to the level of the beast, though that doesn't do justice to the beasts....

[Tim]

Re droopy drawers:
I'm sure we've all heard the origins of the "fashion" stemming from not allowing prisoners belts because of the fear they'd be used as weapons, etc. Hence, emulating that style glorifies the "heroism" of those who question and resist authority (and through their "martyrdom" end up in prison).

I heard of the addition to this message of the fashion from a black guy who works in "the hoods" and knows them and their inhabitants well. The "brothers" who droop their drawers are wanting you, us, to be forced to look at their underwear; it is a way of saying, "kiss my ass."

Such tactics can sometimes be reasonable coming from a truly oppressed population but coming from populations such as middle to upper middle class white males it is pathetic. They are trying to "graft" themselves onto the "heroic" nature they see embodied in those who figuratively and in reality practice stickin' it to the Man (with all its' tragic consequences in what now can not really be deemed with a straight face "an oppressive society"). Our privileged white young men see chest pounding from the gangsta's in the droopy drawers and, in the deep seated desires to become "men with chests," they copy the only examples they see. I think that might be due to the silence of men "with chests" over the last half decade or so. Feminism has really shut us up, methinks. And as such, those chests could not have helped but be weakened through atrophy.

Boys want to become civilized but in the absence of enough visions of admirable, strong, civilized men, they grab hold instead of the pictures that look like the fight of civilized men in barbarians who have, with some historical reasoning for doing so, rejected the civilization of their historic oppressors. Only savagery is left to realize and live. Yikes. I'm glad I was not raised in savagery! And that if I had been, that the savagery of "me and my people" would not be in response to the history of flawed, but civilized "betters." What a trap that would be. I couldn't aspire to better myself because virtues of betterment were associated with those who I cannot, because of my identity, look to for anything but objects to reject and say, "kiss my ass" to!

I wish I could say that the process seemingly in place was one where we were "egalitized" at the higher levels of civilization, but it seems instead were destined, en masse, to be "egalitized" at the lower levels of savagery. Guess the only hope, a sad one, is that there will be, as there has been since the beginning, a remnant. All is not lost, but why must there be so much losing? :-(

[Nick]

All,

I want to be very, very, very careful here. In general I agree with Dr. Esolen. And, if anyone is to be accused of being prigish, I'll have to step up first. I'm just warning against a little less than normal care and an assault against all things modern.

For example, for as much as we love the Renaissance, does anyone else get angry with the depictions of Angels? They are either feminine or made into cute little children. It makes me remember, and I'm remembering it badly, a thought from a very gnostic RPG in which the Cherubs were upset that they, the mighty warriors of heaven, had been reduced to children and weren't going to take it anymore. Every age has its barbarism and the best barbarism is dressed up as art.

As to Mr. Winter's song by Billy Joel I've always had mixed feelings about it. The singer is obviously less than honorable but he seems, by the tone of the song, to be losing the battle. Its also not one of his best lyrical attempts. "Piano Man" does a much better if still limited job. Even then Billy Joel isn't a paragon of lyrical virtue. If I was to get into a spittin' match with James I wouldn't be pulling out any Joel. He'd be tough enough to beat as is.

There is good art out there, its just a bugger to find.

[Sandra Miesel]

What we think of as "cherubs" in Renaissance and Baroque art are derived from classical pagan putti. Real cherubs still turned up as winged heads in solid bright colors, gold, or silver to indicate that they are the Knowledge Angels. Cute child-sized angels (but not putti) were already showing up in 15th C Northern art that was still medieval.

"Barbarian" in the sense being discussed here is more a judgment on behavior than whether their language sounded like bar-bar babble. Stone Age, muchless Iron Age, cultures are capable of creating beauty.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>"Barbarian" in the sense being discussed here is more a judgment on behavior than whether their language sounded like bar-bar babble. Stone Age, muchless Iron Age, cultures are capable of creating beauty.<<<

Indeed, one need not be a barbarian to be barbaric, and nobility of spirit is not a monopoly of the civilized. Often, quite the reverse, in fact.

Let us remember that in its original sense, all "barbarian" meant was non-Hellene. In which case, almost all of us are barbarians in the strictest sense.

[Bobby Neal Winters]

>>>Now that song, Bobby, is savagery. The active hatred of the good, the true, and the beautiful, as opposed to the unsophisticated love of the same by the barbarian. <<<

But a beautiful teaching opportunity, eh? He's using every means at his disposal and twisting everything to his advantage. Yet within it, there is a question we need to ask ourselves:

You say your mother told you all that I could give you was a reputation
Aww She never cared for me
But did she ever say a prayer for me? oh woah woah

[Judy K. Warner]

How could Obama be 6 percent anything? It is mathematically impossible to be 6 percent something, isn't it? One is a half, a quarter, an eighth, a sixteenth, and so on.

*******************

Barbarism, at least the aspect Tony describes in his post -- "the habitual relapse into easy gratification; the inability to sustain for long a noble and self-transcending quest" -- seems like a default position, where entropy leads, what we slip into. It takes a constant infusion of energy from the outside to create something besides barbarism. That energy has for many centuries been provided by Christianity, and where Christiantity is fading away secular democracy soon drifts into barbarism.

[Francesca]

>>How could Obama be 6 percent anything? It is mathematically impossible to be 6 percent something, isn't it? One is a half, a quarter, an eighth, a sixteenth, and so on. <<

"1/16 black" would be "6.25% black," so perhaps the percentage claimed was rounded down. Of course, Obama is neither 6% nor 6.25% black (not that it matters.)

[Chuck]

...demoting the reality of sex from the engagement of man with woman to the coupling of one tool with another -- then we reduce ourselves to the level of the beast, though that doesn't do justice to the beasts....

Reminds me of something Theodore Dalrymple said:

"The first requirement of civilization is that men should be willing to repress their basest instincts and appetites: failure to do which makes them, on account of their intelligence, far worse than mere beasts."

[Francesca]

>> The active hatred of the good, the true, and the beautiful, as opposed to the unsophisticated love of the same by the barbarian. <<

Perhaps the expression, however gauche and unmelodious, of Mark 12:31 by the baggy pants brigade wasn't the best choice in getting the point across. A classically trained, formally dressed youth orchestra might have conveyed the identical sentiments without being accused of barbarism.

[William]

“But if you do not have the capacity, because you do not have the intellectual and emotional discipline, to love virtue, then you will probably also shirk the attention that Sidney and Tallis and Shakespeare demand. You'll fall back upon the easy fix.”

But the easy fix is so easy now: before the age of recording, if you wanted to hear a piece of music, you had to know or find someone who could play it, or learn it yourself. The need to learn before listening influenced taste. It's technology—efficiency—that made the fix easier than ever, to the point that the path up from barbarism is hidden, covered with weeds, and hardly marked for the average high school college student. Still, I know enough about non-mainstream rock that I can say with assurance that there are men and women with real artistic sense trying to build something good with pop music's meager resources.

[Michael]

The use of "fix" is, of course, a hearkening to drug addiction and the applicable highs offered by such drugs. Let us be frank: Tallis, Sidney and Shakespeare offer highs themselves; they are uplifting. To be uplifted by such art is an easy enough fix even next to modern pop culture. The question is whether such a high has depth to it. Shakespeare is not merely uplifting, but he is also edifying. So the implication that one "falls back upon the easy" fix does not suggest that one does not appreciate the classical artists, for it is possible to be easily fixed--uplifted or entertained--by the old culture just as much as the pop culture.

Do I realize that Shakespeare contains truth and that the "groundlings" weren't quite so stupid as the average academic would have me believe? Sure. But just because those groundlings can recognize certain truths doesn't mean they were not likewise entertained by Shakespeare's wit and poetry. I can settle for a fix of Shakespeare as much as I can settle for a fix of Spring Awakening. But it is hard to probe the depth of the latter, because there really aren't any depths to probe: teenagers discover sexuality and struggle with all things appertaining thereto. Okay. Shakespeare's teenagers discover love and sexuality and struggle, but their struggles are through the trappings towards an ultimate realization of dedication begat by such love.

All this only to say that accepting something at face value is a fix whether it be with Tallis or Relient K. Attention is demanded by everythingthing before we can conclude it has no depth. Paul Brunton once said "Study everything; join nothing." As members joined to Christ, we can hardly take seriously the second half of his maxim, but perhaps we ought to study everything and join only what is good. Everything. Specifically, not generally, and not abstractly.

William,

Mass production of recorded material certainly contributes to the availability of a quick fix, but I can just as easily seek out a fix of Bach with these recordings as I can seek out a fix of Rammstein. I doubt Dr. Esolen would mind me pursuing a fix of Bach, perhaps while I'm driving to work, but Rammstein would be frowned upon generically.

[labrialumn]

Francesca, it doesn't matter to me, (my opposition to BHO is based upon his deep commitment to Caesarism, State Totalism, murdering even born babies, and enforcing sacrilege against marriage) and my post was about how race is a nonsense category for all living humans. The reference to Barak Hussein Obama had to do more with how he -is- a racist, a racial-will-to-power emoter, and yet (it is said) gamed the system illegally for taxpayer dollars for tuition assistance. That also shows how silly the reverse discrimination laws are, following the old repressive Jim Crow laws of the former slave States in determining rights and privileges based upon percentages of inheritance in bloodlines.

I feel like recommending _How to Read Slowly_ to a number of people here, especially those who seem to think that ad hominems constitute rational and respectful discourse.

Francesca, the later more 'Dionysian' classical music was considered barbaric by the generation of the baroque, who were likewise considered barbaric by the generation of polyphony. From this of course, but apparently it needs to be made extra-clear to some here, I am not promoting the notion that there is no objective beauty, but rather that we need to follow such objective standards, rather than criticizing and bearing false witness however unintentionally, from our own emotional reactions.

[William]

Francesca,

Ah, but recording has also changed the way many of us listen to the older music: when I worked at a major chain bookstore, we carried multiple lines of CDs that treated the great works of Western art music as mere sleeping aids. My point is that, in today's world, face value isn't as deep as it used to be.

But you are certainly right to distinguish between entertainment value and depth.

-wrb

[Rob G]

Bobby -- I've hated 'Only the Good Die Young' since I first heard it, and it further put me off Billy Joel, a person whom I always considered a mediocre talent to begin with. A week or two ago I had to explain to my 16 y.o. what was wrong with the song.

"You say your mother told you all that I could give you was a reputation
Aww She never cared for me
But did she ever say a prayer for me?"

Maybe she did -- who knows? In the context of the song, however, these lines just seem to be a expression of self-pity, combined with an effort at blame-shifting: "Maybe if your mom prayed for me instead of telling you to stay away from me I wouldn't be such a pr--k!"

I don't buy it.

[Bobby Winters]

Rob G.,

I don't like the morality expressed from the singer's point of view either, but it is absolutely real. The character is pulling out all the stops in his quest. He's lying, he's attacking her religion, and he's attacking her family. He show's contempt for everything of true importance to her, and he's making it sound like he's doing her a favor. And it's all done to a snappy little tune.

Bobby

[Rob G]

"And it's all done to a snappy little tune."

Which I think makes the whole thing even more troublesome. I guess I just don't see it as irony, but as ham-fisted antimorality.

[GL]

I was thinking about the "How to Tell a Barbarian" post last night. We have a three-month-old baby in our house. I use him in a game with the older children in which I give voice to our infant who I have claiming to have contributed to much of the great accomplishments of man. For a few examples, I have him bragging about explaining the laws of general and special relativity to his rather slow friend, Allie Einstein. I have the baby reveal that his good friend Hermie Melville wanted to begin his novel, "Call me Johnny," but that he suggested he start it instead with "Call me Ishmael," adding that he thought that his suggested opening "sounded more exotic." I have him brag that he helped Tommy Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence. You see, Tommy wanted to write, "Well, it's pretty obvious that everyone's the same," but Andrew (our infant) suggested instead that he write, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . . ." He suggested to his friend Frankie Roosevelt that rather than saying, "Don't be scared," he say instead, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Billy Faulkner wanted to title his novel, Billy Bob, Billy Bob," but Andrew suggested Absalom, Absalom! instead. The older kids roar in laughter over the pretend pretensions of a three-month-old infant taking credit for great discoveries in science, works of literature, and political oratory.

This is, of course, a fun way of introducing them to some important human accomplishments in a variety of fields. I hope, of course, that they will in the future read the Declaration of Independence, Moby Dick, etc. I got the idea from the old Bob Newhart routine where he plays a press agent to Abraham Lincoln, helping Abe with his image (keep the beard and the shawl) and with drafting the Gettysburg Address (keep the grabber of "four score and seven years ago," like Charlie wrote it -- which they test marketed in Erie -- rather than changing it to 87 years ago), comparing Abe's suggested change to having Mark Antony say, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I've got something I want to tell you"), etc. See the "Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue" link at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4762522. (You should listen to it. Newhart is hilarious.)

Here is the point: Newhart's humor wouldn't work with an audience who did not know the Gettysburg Address and other things about Abraham Lincoln and did not know Mark Antony's oration from Julius Caesar. Newhart, who recorded the routine in 1960, could rely on there being such an audience. Such knowledge was common. All children learned the Gettysburg Address and Julius Caesar in school. Could he rely on there being such an audience today, at least among younger adults?

I would say that one way to tell a barbarian society is to ask whether it has forgotten its heritage. Does it devalue its past? Such a society is unlikely to give any more care and concern for posterity than it does for its intellectual and cultural antecedents. Such a society is barbarous.

[Rob G]

Roger Scruton has written that modern culture can pretty much be summarized as "kitsch, pop, and porn." It's hard to disagree, IMO.