My food analogy may well be imperfect. I wonder, however, if the “explosion of fine dining and more widely available wholesome food” mentioned by Western Dave is not a combined effect of bourgeois interests and an emerging niche market rather than a widespread refinement of taste.

Dave C says, “it is more difficult now for the intellectual elites (in the academy or outside) to confront persistent anti-intellectualism from a position of (assumed/presumed) power.” Quite true, I think, and this accounts in part for why intellectual elites have suffered a failure of nerve and inability to withstand sloppy criticism from the gallery. Charges of snobbery and elitism find such receptive ears, ya know. So expertise is now mostly irrelevant, even when some TV news channel goes in search of an authority to buttress a story.

Western Dave’s appeal to pragmatism, namely, that only humanities types can be expected to possess the necessary wherewithal to recognize certain (criminal) human behavior patterns, is a wise observation, but then, I would never have expected a technocrat to do that anyway.

Finally, the interaction of cultural canon with realpolitik is an awfully big nut to crack, and Prof. Burke’s four initial objections already put me in a tailspin. For example, I’m pretty unclear what distinguishes nonnuanced canon from nuanced canon. The degree of proscription? Considering how completely canon of even the most conservative sort has been ignored as irrelevant or useless, this seems pretty far off the central issue.

However, a few problems that I can see with this proposition:

1) It’s not clear to me that there is any ground on which a non-nuanced canon of “great books” can actually satisfy some of the more aggressively hostile dismissals of academic humanists because those aren’t really motivated by a rejection of the specific content of academic humanism, but instead by deeper social cleavages. E.g., potentially, it doesn’t really matter what the eggheads decide they like, certain kinds of hostility towards them precedes any specific critical commitments. So an English Department could en masse convert to an exclusive diet of Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens and Faulkner and find themselves no more beloved than when they were also speaking about the experimental novels of late 19th Century Filipino millennarians.

2) It’s also not clear whether you can get any kind of meaningful cultural credit for having a non-nuanced canon unless you also adopt a non-nuanced command-driven practice of interpretation, e.g., that instruction largely insists of a lecturer telling students what a great work says, why it is great, and then testing students for knowledge of content and for the ability to repeat a concise description of the greatness of canon. Since you mention Weimar, I can’t help but think of the next step: this is, in some sense, how the Nazis approached aesthetics: the interpretative interior of praise-worthy art and architecture didn’t matter, only that you acquired, displayed and declared “greatness”.

3) It’s also not clear to me that the people who feel the most populist anger about reports of cultural studies scholars studying comic books, pornography or video games actually feel any real affection for “Great Books” canons, and in fact see those as the tool of another, more unspecified, group of snobs and gatekeepers. Look at the sort of discourse that surrounds Sarah Palin, where cultural elites spend a certain amount of time looking for “gotchas” where she bluffs at knowledge of very traditional canonical touchstones and then receives a lot of sympathy from a certain kind of populist who also feels persecuted for not knowing who Hamlet is or remembers hating The Mill on the Floss when they were forced to read it. In a way, the fight over the Great Books canon is more of an intramural scrimmage between two fractions of the cultural elite. The wider fight is over whether there is in fact ANY specialized knowledge or expertise which enhances how we read or use or make culture.

4) On this last point, though, this is definitely a place where the “crisis of the humanities” comes back to roost in our own nests–because from another direction, many humanists have spent the last thirty years either subverting that idea themselves OR in creating a dense rhetorical and expressive practice intended to signify expertise without really believing substantively that there could be such a thing. So on some level, I think you are very much right. The tricky move is that we have to both engage a wider public from a different vantage point and yet in such an engagement convince them that there is something about our knowledge or practice which gives us expert insight or legitimate authority about culture.

Do we NEED a non-nuanced canon (or a command-model of greatness or a Big Stick of “indisputable” quality) politically, even though it may not suit our own personal, intellectual, educational, or even moral agendas?
If not… then what simple sound-bite do we have to replace quality or the canon in the barroom brawl of American politics and statehouse budgeting?

*The phrase is actually from a play by Johst; my sincere apologies for Godwinizing: my lame excuse is that I’m a historian of Germany, and so it’s hopefully understandable that I see Weimar everywhere.

Then you send me on an errand to identify a supposed Golden Era. I don’t believe in that halcyon past any more than you apparently do, so there is no need for me to rise in defense of it. My point, supplementing Edmundson’s, is that we’ve turned our attentions away from canon, which is say, the past (golden or not). His starting point was those few still reading; mine is the general population. Restated by way of analogy, our collective ability to cook and our tastes for fine dining (to say nothing of our health) are considerably diminished in an era where fast and prepared foods (populist fare by definition) are the rule.

Since I don’t think we’ve lost our collective OR expert ability to recognize quality, and that a good deal of “popular culture” is actually quite excellent, I have no desire to hoist that monkey because I don’t see that there’s really much of a problem, or at least not the problem that Edmundson perceives. I think the question of how to talk about quality within literary criticism is an interesting one, mind you, but it’s one of many interesting questions and can be explored in a relatively leisurely way.

Edmundson thinks otherwise. My thought is that if you’re going to excoriate other people for failing to hoist monkeys but aren’t willing to demonstrate proper monkey-lifting techniques, then you’re the one with the problem.

You might want to consider the basis of your intuition that some past “us” used to regularly devote most of their cultural attention to what you view as wholesome, quality stuff: what exact historical moment and which exact historically real public are you thinking about? Here’s a story to consider which might begin to complicate your assumptions.

he thinks the work of judging the quality of culture is important, that he thinks contemporary readers do not do this work, but that he doesn’t really give any guidance about how it ought to be done other than the inference that it once was done properly.

Americans feels so much impatience in their needs (intellectual or otherwise) that to recognize a problem conjures the implicit responsibility to solve it, and quickly! So Prof. Burke at the end of the blog post calls for a system of evaluation then admits it’s too big a task. Nice trick hoisting that monkey onto someone else’s back.

Back to the issue at hand: failure to judge/critique/evaluate/analyze. I find it blunderingly obvious that outside the academy, where students are compelled to read from prescribed lists, the general public has moved on to other cultural offerings that have largely displaced the canon (which some of us still hold dear) but yet require little or no real engagement. Although one can cook up quite an elaborate thematic treatment of Lady Gaga or Harry Potter or Freddy Krueger, these presentations arrive predigested and merely titillate the senses rather than feed the soul. Whereas there exists no commandment that one’s soul must be nourished by wholesome, quality stuff (eat your beets!), the tsunami of populism that has accompanied the electronic age (commencing with radio) has driven cultural values inexorably down to the point that great books (and other media) no longer exhibit much gravitational pull on our attentions and in fact seem positively alien, since they don’t goose us every few pages or minutes. Many of us have simply lost the capacity to hear history speak to us, much less fit ourselves into the context it provides.

I’m not trying to restate Edmundson, but his complaint makes far more sense to me than does turning his argument back onto him.

But let’s leave aside the culture war stuff, and here’s what I still think remains:

That he thinks the work of judging the quality of culture is important, that he thinks contemporary readers do not do this work, but that he doesn’t really give any guidance about how it ought to be done other than the inference that it once was done properly.

So I think my objection to him (and some other critics like Mark Bauerlein) remains: that they imply that a kind of work which is profoundly difficult both in technical and philosophical terms is in fact easy to do, that there are no authentically skeptical questions about the value of that kind of critical effort which might be asked.

I also think, honestly, that if I were to complain of the narcissism of others that I would either work very hard to demonstrate that I had found a way to overcome that tendency, or confess with some humility that I, too, am a child of my place and time. I don’t think he does either. To do the former, he has to demonstrate how his view of contemporary readers is not just a stereotype that conveniently confirms his own contrasting virtues. I really think one obligation of an intellectual is to be suspicious of our own perceptions.