Lowest Common Denominator
By Jonathan Yardley
Sunday, June 30, 1996
The essential premise of this collection of essays -- "that American society, for some time fallen into disarray, has somehow begun sliding down a long, steep chute into nullity" -- is both unoriginal and unexceptionable. Social commentators and other swamis, yours truly among them, have in recent years made something of an industry out of identifying and lamenting this phenomenon; precisely what the editors of this collection believe they have contributed to the general breast-beating is difficult to ascertain.
Dumbing Down consists of a foreword by the editors; a selection from various sources, most originating in New York City, providing "Some Leading Indicators" of our cultural funk; an introduction by John Simon; and 22 essays, some original and some not, by luminaries possessed of varying degrees of luster. Inasmuch as most readers of the book are likely to come to it in sympathy with its general premises, we are left with an exercise in preaching to the choir; this tends to make both the preachers and the choir feel wonderful, but whether it does anyone else any good is questionable.
Amid all these cries and lamentations, one mildly and not very persuasively dissenting voice is permitted. It belongs to Anthony DeCurtis, a contributor to Rolling Stone, who in "I'll Take My Stand: A Defense of Popular Culture" is not likely to make many converts but does offer, as an aside, the observation "that many skeptics about popular culture succumb to one of its more obnoxious aspects -- the reduction of complicated aesthetic issues to a hit parade -- when setting forth what they think should or shouldn't be part of the curriculum or the canon, or even when just expressing their convictions about what is worth knowing."
This is quite true, and there is quite a lot of it in Dumbing Down. The usual potshots are taken at the usual targets by some of the usual marksmen. The decline of the spoken and written language; the collapse of education at all levels into trendiness and emptiness; the dominance of advertising and the mass audience; the coarsening of discourse and the cheap exploitation of sexuality -- it is not that these complaints are without legitimacy but that we have heard them so many times before, and for the most part more effectively argued.
There are three exceptions. Ken Kalfus, a freelance science writer, shows how the reduction of all aspects of culture to mere entertainment has spread to those citadels of celestial science, the planetariums. At the storied Hayden Planetarium in New York, he finds a "baleful confusion of science, fantasy and pop culture [that] reflects what's happening in many of the hundreds of planetarium domes that . . . dot the entire American landscape." He says that "while producing new, expensive, glossy entertainments, many science museums and planetariums have slighted science, if they haven't abandoned it altogether," and he argues that these entertainments have nothing to do with science at all. He is absolutely right.
Similarly, in "The Trivialization of Tragedy," Jonathan Rosen makes the unfashionable but equally accurate claim that the Holocaust Museum in Washington has less to do with the Holocaust than "with contemporary American culture, which has a habit of trivializing tragedy and adapting it for personal use." It was the intent of the museum's planners, he writes, "to graft a European-grown flower of evil onto the prickly body of multicultural America," and he adds:
"Increasingly, Americans feel it is necessary to house history in buildings instead of books, which is unfortunate, since the more that history is embodied in buildings, the more historical events are turned into theatrical or symbolic moments stripped of the larger context that makes history valuable. As the written word itself is devalued, written records, however well researched and secure, are viewed as impermanent."
There is no real difference between this and the evolution of planetariums into "Star Trek" amusements: History and science, which once existed to instruct and enlighten, now have been perverted into instruments of diversion and, worse, "self-esteem." The galaxies become shows to amuse us, and the Holocaust becomes an agent of the "unearned identification" with the experience of others that is now essential to the fantasy life so many Americans so happily inhabit.
The unspeakable experience of those who were driven to their deaths in the Holocaust is thus reduced to little more than a variation upon the "victimization" that too many Americans have come to fancy as their own experience. This is subtly and wittily dissected by Paul R. McHugh, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, who shows how the storytelling that is essential to psychiatric treatment can become, in the hands of "zealots and charlatans," a medium of falsification and evasion. Too often these days, persons ostensibly acting as agents of mental health are more concerned with advancing their own causes or interests than with healing their patients; the so-called recovered-memory phenomenon is perhaps the most blatant example of this tendency to twist patients' testimony into "stories" that suit the practitioners' convenience instead of the patients' needs.
In these three essays as in many of the others, there is an underlying complaint about the decline of standards and the rise of self-delusion or what Armstrong Williams calls "empty self-esteem." As individuals we are more concerned with how we feel about ourselves than with actual accomplishments upon which genuine self-confidence can be based. As a culture we are more interested in consuming and being amused than in wrestling with difficult problems. This is, the editors and some contributors correctly note, a cultural curiosity that many have exploited and encouraged for profit. Among these, it might be suggested, are those who have made careers out of damning it, yours truly perhaps among them.
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