From Joe Strauss to Joe Six-Pack

In this week's NY Times, columnist David Brooks notices a big change in our culture between the 1950s and now. If he's right, it's rather sad. Read what he says:

"It was not a great moment for cultural optimism. I was emptying some boxes in my basement the other day and I came across an essay somebody had clipped on Ernest Hemingway from the July 14, 1961, issue of Time magazine. The essay was outstanding. Over three pages of tightly packed prose, with just a few photos, the anonymous author performed the sort of high-toned but accessible literary analysis that would be much harder to find in a mass market magazine today.

The Hemingway hero, Time's essayist wrote, adheres to a personal code. Conduct "is a question of how the good professional behaves within the rules of a game or the limits of a craft. All the how-to passages - how to land a fish, how to handle guns, how to work with a bull - have behind them the professional's pride of skill. "But the code is never anchored to anything except itself; life becomes a game of doing things in a certain style, a narcissistic ritual - which led Hemingway himself not only to some mechanical, self-consciously 'Hemingway' writing, but to a self-conscious 'Hemingway' style of life."

The sad thing is that this type of essay was not unusual in that era. If you read Time and Newsweek from the 1950's and early 1960's, you discover they were pitched at middle-class people across the country who aspired to have the same sorts of conversations as the New York and Boston elite.

The magazines would devote pages to the work of theologians like Abraham Joshua Heschel or Reinhold Niebuhr. They devoted as much space to opera as to movies because an educated person was expected to know something about opera, even if that person had no prospect of actually seeing one. The newsweeklies would have six-page spreads on things like Abstract Expressionism. There was a long piece in 1956 in Time, for example, about the Kitchen Sink School of British painters, as well as analyses of painters who are not exactly household names, like Charles Burchfield and Stanton Macdonald-Wright.

That doesn't happen today. And it's not that the magazines themselves are dumber or more commercial (they were always commercial). It's the whole culture that has changed.

Back in the late 1950's and early 1960's, middlebrow culture, which is really high-toned popular culture, was thriving in America. There was still a sense that culture is good for your character, and that a respectable person should spend time absorbing the best that has been thought and said. The middlebrow impulse in America dates at least to Ralph Waldo Emerson and the belief that how one spends one's leisure time is intensely important. Time spent with consequential art uplifts character, and time spent with dross debases it.

It's true there was a great mood of take-your-vitamins earnestness about the middlebrow enterprise. But it led to high levels of mass cultural literacy, to Great Books volumes on parlor shelves and to a great deal of accessible but reasonably serious work, like Will and Ariel Durant's "The Story of Civilization."

Middlebrow culture was killed in the late 50's and 60's, and the mortal blows came from opposite directions. The intellectuals launched assaults on what they took to be middlebrow institutions, attacks that are so vicious they take your breath away. Clement Greenberg called the middlebrow an "insidious" force that was "devaluing the precious, infecting the healthy, corrupting the honest and stultifying the wise." Dwight Macdonald lambasted the "tepid ooze" of the Museum of Modern Art and the plays of Thornton Wilder. Basically, these intellectuals objected to the earnest and optimistic middle-class arrivistes who were tromping over everything and dumbing down their turf.

At the same time, pop culture changed. It was no longer character-oriented; it was personality-oriented. Readers felt less of a need to go outside themselves to absorb works of art as a means of self-improvement. They were more interested in exploring and being true to the precious flower of their own individual selves. Less Rembrandt, more Me. Fewer theologians, more dietitians.

As a result, we are spared some of the plodding gentility that marked middlebrow culture. But on the other hand, serious culture matters less now than it did then, and artists and intellectuals have less authority.

Today more people go to college. They may be assigned Rimbaud or Faulkner or even Hemingway. But somehow in adulthood, they tend to have less interest in that stuff than readers 40 years ago."

WHAT happened to us? Is David Brooks right? And could we reverse things?