Three Dead Critics: Harold Bloom Part 2

Because the Harold Blooms of the world did not concede that the best of popular culture was entirely worthy of the 'A-word' (meaning art of course), we're now long since living in a world where the 'A-words' are 'anything at all you like,' and because literary critics were so slow in realizing that Welles and Bergman were creators who deserve an equal, maybe even superior, place alongside Whitman and Strindberg, let alone David Chase or Matthew Weiner, we can't be surprised that more contemplative, 'higher', art that challenges people to find deep meaning in life has no more value to most people than culture products that are clearly meant to do little more than entertain their audience. Even the quote/unquote 'postmodern' world of 'art is anything goes' is now dying, and perhaps we're now moving into a world where the 'A-word' is 'Anything that promotes my values.' And by not conceding that a gifted writer of differing identity can bring a valuable perspective purely by virtue of their lived uniqueness, he lent legitimacy to all his enemies who claimed that the perspective of the traditional geniuses is all the same by virtue of their white male privilege.

Now please understand, this is not to mean that there's no value in commercial entertainment or even that commercial entertainment can't be art, it most certainly can and one can find all kinds of artfulness in the lowest of lowbrow places. But the nature of commercialism is that the vitamins get watered down by all manner of business concerns. On TV, when you're producing 20 to 26 episodes a season, there is absolutely no way for all of them to be of consistent quality. In Star Trek you have to deal with the conundrum of Picard, the most principled leader on television, unwittingly coming destroying the earth for the Borg, and in the same show you have to watch Dr. Crusher have an affair with a lamp. One could make the same distinctions for divergence in quality for All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore, NYPD Blue, and The West Wing.

Realistically speaking, that will happen all the time in art as in any facet of life, and one has to accept as a necessary component of living that most potential in this life is untapped, and even those who generally fulfill their potential do not fulfill all of it. Just as an example from recent Western life, I saw a twitter feed just today where a hundred people complained how insane it is to think that there was nothing good on TV before The Sopranos, as though Prestige TV sprang fully formed like Athena from the head of David Chase. Obviously, that's not true in the slightest, for fifty years, there were lots of great shows before we got to The Sopranos. but the revelation of The Sopranos was due to the difference in how it was produced: due to HBO's limited number of episodes per season, and therefore its ability to allocate more of its budget to every episode, its business model based on catering precisely to people who craved more imaginative production rather than finding a common denominator between every demographic,  because of all that and more, there was so much less crap amid the gold, and HBO was merely waiting for great writers like David Chase and David Milch to come along and wring every bit of artistic potential from this new model. But even in the cases of Chase and Milch, the vast reservoir of their potential laid untapped. Chase was a journeyman TV writer and failed moviemaker who struck gold in his mid-50s, and by the end of The Sopranos' run was so burnt out that he never made another show. Before Deadwood David Milch had NYPD Blue, the pressure from which gave him a heart attack, and after two other failed New York police dramas he came to HBO to do Deadwood, it was immediately hailed by critics as one of the greatest shows ever made, but after three years and little audience, HBO did not renew the show with the promise of two movies, it took thirteen years for one movie to materialize, by which time David Milch was suffering from dementia. Whether or not Harold Bloom sees TV as an equivalently prestigious art form to the novel, which itself was not considered much of an art until Henry James fought for its prestige, the creators suffer from all the same setbacks as any other kind of artist.

So at least in that sense, Harold Bloom was the guardian who fell asleep at the gate. By his ilk refusing to regard anything which smacked of popular culture as worthy of serious consideration, who can be surprised that so many current millions regard anything that smacks of high culture as unworthy of serious consideration? The 'arts' as they've been practiced for three-thousand years are now a cultural backwater which have little to do with contemporary life as most people live it, and this is less than 200 years after Beethoven and Tolstoy and Goya and Keats and the resurrection of Shakespeare and Michelangelo and Bach, the era when people realized that the contemplation of art and its transcendent metaphysics did more to free them from the mental dictatorship of religions than any political action, and now, not even two-hundred years later, we are in danger of placing ourselves into new mental prisons, based on the idea that various forms of science will protect us - be they not well-thought-out social sciences like intersectionality which believes that the underprivileged of the world remain so because of a silent conspiracy of systemic forces that with enough effort can be cast off like a shirt, or Randian objectivism, which believes that potential of the individual is all that matters and that therefore the potential of the potentially great will be the best service to the earth - and if their service to the earth isn't good, that's OK too. Or be those beliefs based on hard science and the trans-humanist belief that greater scientific and statistical-data analysis will eventually liberate us from the limitations of being human. All these various hard and soft scientisms fall apart as nearly every belief system in history has that the human condition is a prison from which there is escape. It is a most definite part of the human condition to search for an escape route, but the only escape from being human is temporary and illusory, and that escape is the arts. The details of how the arts can provide that must obviously be a podcast for another day and another theme.

But now we live in the 21st century. And just after the 19th century, the era when culture's widespread triumph facilitated a near-universal adaptation of enlightenment principles and the widespread emergence from the long mental choke-hold of monotheistic dogma, came the century when culture lit a match to the very world that built it to its greatest height. On one side, the side of fascists and imperialists, came the idea that those nations who had not yet developed their culture to a similarly visible extent are inferior by their very nature, and therefore should either be exploited as slaves or eliminated as pollutive threats; on the other side, the side of communists, and yes, the vast majority of socialists too, came the idea that culture is the greatest tool humanity has yet invented to facilitate humanity's belief in its own material liberation and equality and freedom from exploitation, and therefore culture must be used, and invariably used, as a weapon of propaganda, and those millions who might be powerful use it in any manner other than propagandistically are threats who must be eliminated. So let there be no doubt, there are many great dangers to the belief that culture can save us, just as there are to any other system of belief, and when it came to culture's more destructive properties, critics like Harold Bloom might as well have stuck their heads into a sewer. Its all well and good to say that such beliefs are a misuse and perversion of culture, but all things of this world will be misused all the time, and there is no choice but to be vigilantly mindful of our values' misuses and take as many precautions as we can against them.

And in the place of what we've mistakenly termed 'high culture', we now have a new culture, a popular culture, filled with electronic art forms still so new that they've barely grown past infancy - and at the first sign that the voice of the people may demand something other than what intellectuals proscribe for them, the most gifted academics, or at least the most privileged ones, fled from popular mediums almost entirely, and without the input of people who understand the long history of art's uses and misuses, billions now subsist on mass entertainment without realizing that their greater say in world affairs requires them to contemplate what entertains them more deeply, like, just to take two obvious examples, why they exult in the most desensitizing depictions of violence, or why they love the very real humiliations of reality television ... I certainly don't believe in censoring people's entertainment, but I do have to imagine both to a certain extent desensitize people to suffering, and that if a critical mass are introduced to works that interrogate why they love those kinds of degradation, our cultural empathy might just increase. As hard as it is to believe, in a democracy whose maintenance depends on the intelligence of the general public, contemplation of our reasons for enjoying violence and humiliation is what might make the difference between a democratic society that thinks conscientiously enough to stay together, and a society that so misunderstands itself that it breaks down.