by Rick Bayan
(August 2002) A few evenings ago I found myself alone in the soothing brown shadows of our den, with only the glowing television screen for companionship. I had felt especially lethargic for the past several days; my head seemed to be enveloped in a cloud of fuzz and witlessness. In that feeble state I accepted whatever delights or horrors our TV would send me. Let me make a more specific and depressing confession: I was watching a day in the life of Anna Nicole Smith, televised for our viewing pleasure. Even worse, I was enjoying it.
The former pinup model and presumptive heiress had grown hefty in her young widowhood. I watched as she engaged her cozy entourage in a shove-it-down, take-no-prisoners pizza-eating contest. I watched her run to the bathroom midway through the contest, then vehemently deny her best friend's accusation that she had barfed behind closed doors. (The audio equipment had picked up some faintly incriminating sounds.) I watched the two of them squabble like feral cats and make up. I watched Anna Nicole get her ankle tattoos touched up at the parlor, then cajole her melancholy purple-haired assistant into accompanying her on a hellacious roller-coaster ride. (The purple-haired assistant barely survived.)
I didn't think too hard about what I was watching while I watched it. But somehow I felt comforted by its honest stupidity. The program captured the casual, semi-articulate utterances of genuine unscripted conversation; it captured the flabby reality behind the sleek celebrity facade, behind all our facades. Anna Nicole seemed so dim and childish, so plump and vulnerable and forlorn, that I began to find her weirdly endearing.
After the spectacle was over I glanced down at a row of books nestled against the base of the bookcase. (The abode of a true book-lover never has enough shelf space.) The great domelike head of historian-philosopher Oswald Spengler, his brow rumpled by decades of solemn cogitation, confronted me from the back cover of his magnum opus, The Decline of the West. I've never ventured beyond a sampling of random passages from this dour and difficult Germanic masterpiece, but I know Spengler believed that cultures have definite life-cycles, like all biological forms from mollusks to mathematicians. They grow and aspire to reach fulfillment. They bear fruit. When they exhaust their potential, they decline and die. This cultural cycle is natural and irreversible, like the progression of the seasons (but without the annual springtime resurrection). Fallen leaves never return to the branches; bald men don't grow new hair. Spengler, ever the pessimist, essentially believed that the West had gone bald, that it had entered its final season. Our hearts would be filled with dread and the consciousness of creeping mortality. Though he didn't know it at the time, some of us would be easing our dread (and probably accelerating our collective decline) by watching the likes of Anna Nicole Smith on our home screens.
Pop culture has already replaced Western civilization as the main attraction in our great communal circus-tent. Colorful lights and images flash all around us; monstrous amplifiers boom thunder at our tingling ears. How can Herodotus, Horace, Titian or Mendelssohn hope to survive in the infernal rumpus room of pop? How do they compete with Elvis, Madonna, Britney or whoever happens to be emitting sparks at the moment? Their prospects seem hopeless. Their names already induce a vast collective yawn among our contemporaries, even those with pretensions to enlightenment. Give us another two generations and those once-illustrious names will be reduced to footnotes for plodding Ph.D. candidates.
The dominant culture of our time isn't being produced by serious Western artists, poets and composers. No, it's the film directors, pop novelists, screenwriters and songwriters -- not to mention the profit-motivated moguls in their office towers -- who are happily driving our civilization like a hijacked Greyhound bus. And we seem to be enjoying the trip.
How did it happen? Why did we cheerfully abandon the civilization of Homer, Handel and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? And why did we abandon it for MTV... for video games... for privileged peeks into the lives of aging rock stars and pinup models? Can we salvage it with cultural duct tape, or should we let it crumble like a condemned mansion and move on to more congenial precincts?
I'll try to spare you a thesis, because I haven't done the research. (I'm too fond of generalizing to bog myself down in particulars.) I haven't pondered the Decline of the West quite as exhaustively as Herr Spengler, but I've probably pondered it more than is healthy for a human animal marooned in our times. (Spengler dropped dead of a heart attack at fifty-five; I don't want to press my luck.) I'll be briefer than Spengler, I promise you.
So why did we do it? Why did we desert our noble European cultural heritage so readily, so guiltlessly?
First (and most obviously) we fell prey to the seductions of glitzy new media that didn't exist in Beethoven's time. By the early twentieth century Western civilization was like an aging mistress: growing a bit plump about the waist and ankles, too stout and dowdy to thrill our wanton bones. Though gravely beautiful in her prime, she had always been difficult; she demanded our sustained attention (too many notes! too many words!) when we would have preferred to unwind. Then we discovered movies, radio, TV and commercial pop music. Suddenly the old frescoes and symphonies and epic poems no longer stirred us. We became pleasure-seeking missiles, and the giddiness of pop reminded us of good sex. (Interesting that we started conjugating more freely around the time we stopped conjugating Latin verbs.) The new media sexualized our culture, probably forever; we could no longer respond to the matronly virtues of the old masters. So we went for the easy babe with the long legs and flashy smile. We climbed into bed with pop.
Meanwhile, the artists themselves -- the serious painters, poets and composers -- did something even more unthinkable: they abandoned the quaint bourgeois notion of communicating with an audience. Dependent on critics for their reputations, they began to produce perversely cryptic art that required the services of professional interpreters. While we commoners gawked blankly at the latest abstract painting or indecipherable verse, the critics supplied the meaning. (It's not just a urinal borrowed from a public men's room; it's a savagely ironic commentary on the subjectivity of objects, or the objectivity of subjects. Or whatever.) The artists were elevating the critics to the status of an occult priesthood, always ready with preposterous rationalizations of this or that incoherent ink-blot. The critics obviously liked this development. We commoners liked it less, especially when it became apparent that the artists were slyly tweaking our noses. An already difficult mistress was growing more demanding, more spiteful and less attractive than ever.
The educated upper-bourgeoisie still paid lip-service to the high arts (especially the performing ones), because their patronage carried the unmistakable whiff of social respectability. Theirs was a world of polite applause. But lately the folks who have upheld the banner of high culture seem to be more interested in pretty food, California wines, lifestyle issues, and renting an exquisite villa in Provence or Tuscany. They've become pleasure-seeking missiles too.
We can't even depend on academia to keep the lamp of Western civilization burning through the next dark age. In fact, it's the current generation of liberal arts scholars -- bless their left-leaning hides -- who have most loudly denounced the products of the Dead White European Male mind. With ostentatious open-mindedness they declare that a Yoruba tribal mask is the equal of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. (Hey, even Olympic diving judges make allowances for degree of difficulty.) There's no stopping the multiculturalists; their embrace of non-Western art, genial enough on the surface, serves a political agenda that won't stop until Western Christendom and its agents have been toppled like the statue of an old tyrant. Meanwhile, we yawn in our dens and change the channel.
Then there's the delicate matter of demographics: people of European ancestry simply don't seem to procreate with much enthusiasm. As the United States and even the nations of Western Europe grow progressively less European in their ethnic make-up, general interest in distinctly European art-forms will continue to wane until they're finally shoved into the attic of history. How can we expect an increasingly Afro-Hispano-Arab-Asian populace to muster an interest in fugues and sonnets, especially when WE can't? It's like expecting a Texan to enjoy sitar music or a Frenchman to play the banjo.
Do I sound like a foaming-at-the-mouth xenophobe? I hope not. (After all, you're looking at the grandson of Armenian immigrants.) But I can't help remembering that the Roman Empire was at least partly undone by a growing foreign element (what Toynbee called the "internal proletariat") that didn't buy into the old Roman verities. They refused to melt into the pot. As the traditional WASPocracy fades in America, and as new immigrants forever alter the complexion of European societies, we'll be hearing our songs sung to strange and bewildering new rhythms. We're so open-minded, and so fearful of being branded as racists, that I fear we'll simply lie down and expire rather than question where our culture is headed.
In any conflict of cultures, the more energetic team is generally the winner. Western civilization has grown sterile and anemic. Our serious artists produce either obscure minutiae or repellent dreck -- sometimes both. Even the popmeisters -- the glib commercial heirs to Bach and Beaudelaire -- have been growing repetitive and short of ideas lately, after less than a century at the top: look at the profusion of new musicals based on OLD musicals; look at the copycat sitcoms, the microengineered (and instantly forgettable) pop music, the flimsy movies puffed up with special effects and ear-shattering Dolby sound, the manufactured media personalities devoid of any recognizable personality of their own. (Can anyone out there do an impression of Tom Cruise?) Look at the rise of "reality"-based TV shows: the triumph of true-life banality over manmade banality. Look at Anna Nicole Smith.
Yes, I watched Anna Nicole. I even enjoyed the show, God help me. I plead guilty as charged. Let the ghosts of Dante and Dr. Johnson haunt me until I unplug the TV. But I can't help believing, with the earnest dome-headed Dr. Spengler, that we've entered the bleak November of the West. There's no going back.
When I was younger and less cynical, I actually felt impelled to fight the unraveling of our culture. I wanted to fly the banner of Western civilization in the face of effete charlatans and barbarians alike; I longed to fight the indecipherable poets, the paint-spatterers, the harsh and unmelodious composers. I needed to confront the turncoat humanities professors, the dweebish philosophers quibbling over symbols and semantics, the rude rappers, the surging wave of incivility that threatened to engulf the land. But one can go mad fighting the inevitable.
The Pandora's Box of contemporary culture has unleashed a cloud of demons into the air, and there's no stuffing them back inside. We're threatened from within, and there's little we can do but watch the eerie spectacle unfold. Something tells me we could use a thorough cleansing by the more genial and barbaric subcultures growing in our midst. (It's the seditious professors who pose the real threat.)
We're threatened from outside, too -- by a vast tribe of medieval fanatics, demonically motivated and eager for Western blood. Meanwhile, we lounge on our sundecks while our children fiddle with video games. The band is still playing aboard the Titanic, and we're lulled by the music.
Can we contain the barbarians? Should we even try? Can we absorb our enemies, as China absorbed its Mongol conquerors, by converting them to the superiority of our ways? (We could try to spread Reality TV -- and Anna Nicole Smith -- throughout the Islamic world.) But in the end, we have to look at the alarming decrepitude of our culture -- both serious and popular -- and decide whether we want to repair the house or let it fall to ruin. I have no power to determine which way we go, and I've never been handy with tools. But I'm a sucker for lost causes, and you can bet I'll be watching with interest from the brown shadows of my den.
