Pop culture

“Pop culture is created by capitalists intent upon profit, not by humanitarians intent upon educating, improving or ennobling mankind.”

“And who gets to decide what constitutes an improvement? You, I suppose?”

“That’s just the thing. It’s not as if the producers of pop culture have an idea of what ennobles and improves mankind different from my own. They have none at all. They just don’t care about those things. They want to be popular. They want to make a profit. Culture that educates and improves has to also challenge. And most people don’t want a challenge. Pop culture is the cultural equivalent of fast food. Rather than trying to nourish, it bypasses conscience and appeals directly to the palate.”

Theory and practice

When mathematicians, physicists and philosophers say, “Practice is for lesser minds. I concern myself only with theory,” their statement is more than merely arrogance. It represents a conscious decision about priorities. It represents a choice to place intellectual life on a higher plane than material life. It is, in essence, the same decision made by Christians who renounce the kingdom of means for the Kingdom of God, by Buddhists who renounce the world of action for the world of contemplation. The intellectual forms the mathematician or physicist plays with are different from those the mystic plays with. But the belief in the superiority of intellectual life is the same.

Love and desire

“If people were told: what makes carnal desire imperious in you is not its pure carnal element. It is the fact that you put into it the essential part of yourself—the need for Unity, the need for God—they wouldn’t believe it. To them it seems obvious that the quality of imperious need belongs to the carnal desire as such. In the same way it seems obvious to the miser that the quality of desirability belongs to gold as such, and not to its exchange value.”—Simone Weil

A desire comes from nature, and to obey it is to obey nature, to acquiesce in the role of created being. But the neighbor’s desire is as much a part of nature as my own. To satisfy my own while leaving his unsatisfied ceases to be an act of reverence to nature. It becomes instead an act of rebellion against it. Unlike the ascetic’s rebellion, however, it is hard to imagine this being a rebellion on behalf of something higher. Desire can retain its innocence only so long as it is no more imperious than love.

Work

The typical bourgeois endures tedious and unfulfilling work for the sake of extravagant entertainment and sumptuous meals. An existence in which such passive activities are the center and focus is but a pale shadow of what it might have been, had work been its center and focus. It isn’t consumption that satisfies. It’s creation.

One visible effect of the bourgeoisification of the professions is that, over time, the houses of professionals become more and more grand and opulent, while the offices where we perform our work become more and more austere. If work were the center of our life, rather than merely a means, it would be just the other way.

If we expect to find gratification in insignificant things (entertainments and sumptuous meals) and not in significant things (thinking, creating, producing), we will find only an insignificant gratification. Profound happiness will elude us.

The difference between genius and bourgeois is not that genius has more talent, ability or intelligence. It is that for genius work is an end in itself. Genius is gratified by its exercise. The bourgeois refuses to find and exercise his genius. Instead, we find him at the theater and the opera, vainly trying to be gratified by the genius of others. His passivity is a tragedy in its own right, if only he would understand it rightly.

The division of labor efficiently provides for basic necessities, so genius may focus upon developing itself and not be distracted. But it brings with it an unfortunate temptation to sit back and watch others exercise their genius instead of finding and developing our own.

Dirty money

According to Harper’s magazine, the estimated net worth of George Washington, in today’s dollars, is $525 million. The fact that politics is corrupted by money is not a new problem. The new problem is that the people with money are no longer educated in the humanities. The only virtues they know are shopkeeper virtues.