I think it is, and it’s an important method – perhaps less consciously manipulative than advertising and outright propaganda, but all the more influential because of that.

The problem with it is that the ‘high end’ writers and their interpreters to the rest of us seem to be promoting ideas and views that are damaging to the basic ideas on which our society is built – a kind of cutting off the branch while we sit on it.

Obviously, our society is and always has been continually changing, and it’s never been easy to figure out what way it’s heading. The question is whether the current tendency to divorce ourselves from any ideas and morality pre-mid-twentieth-century is going to produce a culture so different from what went before as to constitute the fall of a civilization which preceeds the rise of another? And if it does, can we do anything about it (assuming we want to because we think our civilization has things worth preserving).

By ‘morality’ I don’t mean ‘religion’, although obviously religions teach morality, and Christianity had an immense influence on our culture. I mean that of the range of moral philosophies available, some of the more modern one have views on utilitarianism and the over-emphasis on the rights of the individual wouldn’t fit well with some of the enlightment philosophers who helped construct the society we live in. And that’s without postmodernism and whether there is any reality other than that we contruct for ourselfs. I’m putting this badly. I can’t bear to read a lot of this stuff so I don’t think I’ve got my mind wrapped around it well enough to really critique it properly.

Of course, criticisms and mockery of the current state of affairs has always existed. I’m currently working my way through Gilbert and Sullivan’s DVDs – some for the first time, most not. Last night’s was “Pirates of Penzance”, which I must have seen or heard dozens of times, but this was the first time I noticed the degree to which G&S mocked that central Victorian virtue, duty. I’d mostly watched it for the comic reversals and word play.

Now, I’m not going to say that civilization is going to fall because some long-dead entertainers mocked duty and people nowadays don’t feel a need to do their duty anymore. But it is one example of the ways in which our society has shifted since Victorian times. We don’t hire child chimney sweeps. We don’t ostracize unwed pregnant women (unless, of course, they have 14 babies and toddlers, no job and went to considerable and expensive lengths to get pregnant). We rarely put unwanted children in orphanages (although foster care and abortion are hardly the best solutions. And we don’t talk about duty much.

I wonder whether Jane’s weaker students would understand duty enough to get what was being mocked in ‘Pirates’?

Robert is right in one way, though. If these writers don’t have respect and monetary success, it’s because what they’re selling doesn’t appeal enough to the vast majority. Yeah, academic presses will publish them, other academics will require them in classes (maybe) and eventually some of their memes will make it into general circulation.

The adversarial nature of the relationship between high culture and the culture at large isn’t all one-sided. Of course American culture has always had a strong streak of anti-intellecualism. But what about the anti-regular-folksism of the intellectuals? It’s certainly there, and obvious. It’s not the people in Nebraska who invented the term “fly-over land.”

The reason the people who generate the high art feel there isn’t a place for them in general society is that they don’t like the place they have and they haven’t earned the place they want. From my perspective, they want respect, and wealth, and special treatment, seemingly, for being essentially free-lance critics of everything around them. Nice gig if you can get it.

Even those who are earnestly trying to explain us to ourselves are falling short of being able to effect change. Why? Americans believe they know best, and they could, if they wanted to, do what the other guy is doing, and probably better. So why listen to some writer? Either he’s an egghead with no connection to real life, or he’s a regular guy who doesn’t know anything more than me. (grammar deliberate)

I criticize other people all the time, but I don’t publish my criticism nor would I expect thanks for them if I did. By the time a chunk of narrative makes its way from high art into general culture, it’s entirely divorced from the person(s) who generated it in the first place. That makes it more palatable, and thus easier for people to integrate. Why isn’t this an acceptable method for transmission of ideas?

Putting high-end writers in greater proximity to the end result of the process by valuing what they do, would give them greater control and influence, and I’m not sure that’s good for anyone. Right now, the filtering, mutation and softening that takes place during the process of transmission to the culture as a whole has a moderating influence. Or maybe it just makes it all wierd.

I doubt we’ll ever lose those people, valued or not. They seem compelled to do what they do. If they were happy, would they still be who they are and produce as creatively? I personally think we need to keep them cranky. As you point out, writers in residence do not produce quality.

But that’s a discussion for another day.

“High end” evidently means “beloved of academics,” which to my way of thinking is a long way from first rate. At this point I ought to refer to an article titled “Why Academics (or was it “Intellectuals?”) Love Marx” and suggest that a taste for liberal democracy might imperil one’s “high end” status, but there’s a technical difficulty here.

But no, I don’t think you can build a deferential free society, and that’s what you’re talking about. You want people who have no use for these writers to take them seriously anyway. It’s not money. Plenty of us have worked jobs which didn’t pay well but satisfied us. These people have that. They even have the adulation of the English Lit departments. That’s not enough either. The “place” we’re talking about is the tugging of the forelock when the Great Man passes, even when you don’t think much of him, and that’s FAR too high a price to pay for the good opinion of anyone who can be so purchased.

As far as writers in residence on campus, HP Lovecraft wanted a WPA project for maintaining “gentlemen.” I think we’ve found it. They’re not starving on the streets. Some of them aren’t even tax-supported. They write less than they would otherwise, and I don’t have to read any of it. As long as they don’t give a stipend to an author I read, I don’t see the problem.