… it’s
worth noting here that two years ago the Chronicle of Higher Education,
of all journals, published an essay by Julie Stone Peters, a Professor of
English and comparative literature at Columbia, arguing that
thought-terminating clichés are super-cool because they are politically
effective and because students aren’t smart enough to do any better. No,
seriously:
Not all of our students will be original thinkers, nor should
they all be. A world of original thinkers, all thinking wholly inimitable
thoughts, could never get anything done. For that we need unoriginal thinkers,
hordes of them, cloning ideas by the score and broadcasting them to every
corner of our virtual world. What better device for idea-cloning than the
cliché?
Note here a doozy of a false dichotomy: either applaud clichés
or have a world of people with “whole inimitable thoughts.” Sure, Peters
concedes, sometimes academic clichés “may go rogue” and “might explode on you.”
But that’s the chance she is willing to take. The alternative — expecting
students to think and trying to help them do that better — is so much
more unpleasant. I have to give Peters credit for being willing to say the
quiet part out loud, because this really is how a lot
of professors think.
This might be a good time to remind y’all that, as William
Deresiewicz writes, some interesting groups of people are abandoning
universities not because they disdain the humanities and the liberal arts, but
because they love them
I got an undergraduate degree but never moved on to graduate studies, either in music, biblical studies or theology. That hasn't kept me from reading books by Jason Yust, James Hepokoski, William Caplin, Warren Darcy, Richard Taruskin, Susan McClary, Yoel Greenberg, L Poundie Burstein and others in music. It hasn't kept me from reading N. T. Wright, Emil Brunner, Ephraim Radner, Gordon Fee, V Phillips Long, Esther Acolatse, Susan R Garrett, Jacob L Wright, Esther Hamori, Niels Peter Lemche, John Calvin, Augustine and so on. It has also not kept me from reading Richard Bauckham, Jeremy Begbie, Roger Scruton, Edmund Burke, Solzhenitsyn, the Hitchens brother (Christopher and Peter), Dostoevsky, Kafka, Melville, or Eliot, Frost, Stevens, Dickenson, Denise Levertov and ... a pile of Rumiko Takahashi.
So, sure, I get that people are arguing that you can abandon the university because you love the humanities and the liberal arts. As I'm reading Gordon Graham on art and religion and how and whether they are related to each other the concept that comes to mind is ascetism. There's a kind of devotion to the humanities and the liberal arts that Graham describes as ascetism and another approach that amounts to mysticism. I am not going to attempt to unpackage all of that in what is supposed to be a brief blog post There are those who embrace the arts as a kind of oasis from the vicissitudes of the world and others who believe the arts must hold up a proverbial mirror to society or catalyze change.
I am more skeptical about Deresiewicz' variation of Old Time Art Religion as I get older. What progressives who are dismissed or even demonized as woke-scolds seem to want is for the Enlightenment values of liberalism and free thought and egalitarianism to be more consistently applied, thus a couple of books by Charles W Mills. As art religion goes I have floated the idea that progressives want a kind of Lutheran revolt or a series of Protestant reformations that advocate for what in Protestant thought is called the priesthood of all believers. Defenders of the Great Tradition can be seen, in this openly polemical light, as the arch-clericalists of higher education.
And in a way those who bypass the formal university system from the proverbial left or right may do so for potentially, weirdly, parallel reasons.
What Alan Jacobs didn't write but which I will is to point out that when a scholar contends that the common rabble need to think in cliches that scholars feed them so as to be useful to society that's the kind of thing that gets denounced if it were promulgated by, say, the late Roger Scruton. The culture wars are, if anything, battles over whose cliches prevail. As Douglas Wilson keeps insisting, the fights are over who gets to define the words in the dictionary. "Everybody knows this" would be a thought-terminating cliche here, wouldn't it?
One of the reasons I'm not much for Romanticism is because many of the Romantics abjured "convention". Leonard Meyer dryly and brilliantly pointed out that the Romantics wanted to profess a rejection of convention while they toiled away at disguising how much they relied upon it. In Romantic era music the way conventions were generally disguised was through a few gentle adjustments in harmonies here and there but, portentiously and obviously, to ...
BIGGIE-SIZE EVERYTHING SO THAT THE LISTENER WOULDN'T CATCH ON TO HOW ROTE THE STRUCTURES AND GESTURES ACTUALLY ARE.
You see what I did there and it's goofy in print because the equivalent of biggie-sizing proportions and words in text comes across as, well, the ALL CAPS ERA OF THE INTERNET AND DON'T READ THE COMMENTS FOR ANYTHING YOU SEE ONLINE.
And with good cause.
Susan McClary's Conventional Wisdom is an easy book for conservatives and defenders of The Great Tradition to rip on but if they have never read the book one of her arguments was that convention does not have to be viewed as intrinsically bad, uncreative, stultifying or unusable for musical art. Wasn't high modernism the moment in classical music where every conceivable convention was damned and rejected and how much of that music do people actively seek out? What if conventions have, you know wisdom to them?
I am inclined to agree and I think that gently recalibrating and recontextualizing schemas and conventions to newer vocabularies is worth trying out. To put this the way a could-have been student of theology and biblical literature might, we can make it too easy to slam the German nationalist cheerleader Johann Gottfried Herder and ignore that he was an aesthetic pluralist, too, and a translator who advised Germans to stop doing lame and tepid knock-offs of "classical" literature and art and to trust more in the possibilities and potential of their own regional folklore. Black composers who have explored how to develop African diaspora folk musics in the context of classical music are, perhaps ironically, simply doing what Herder would've advised every musician try. Was Herder capable of being jingoistic? Yeah ... but everyone is when they take a nationalist path going to be vulnerable to that temptation.
Jaroslav Pelikan pointed out that intra-traditional critique is part of tradition. Something else that is part of tradition (at least Protestant tradition!) is to translate ancient biblical texts into the vernacular so that everyone can read and understand the truths and values and narratives of the sacred texts. Partisans of art religion and art mysticism who think Art can do for Religion what religious dogmas can no longer do tend, in my experience, to be incompetents on dogmatics and religious literature as a matter of choice, and so do not realize that if you look at the history of sacred song you will find a propensity to translate not just the sacred texts but to translate those texts into vernacular musics as well as vernacular languages.
My composition teacher knew I wanted to explore how to write ragtime sonatas and blues sonatas and to mix Thelonious Monk with Haydn and his advice was that I not go to grad school or to be very careful where I went because even in the early to mid 1990s the dominance of integral serialism in graduate and post-graduate music studies was still looming large. I took my teacher's advice. Finding ways to synthesize ragtime and blues and slide guitar riffs with sonata forms and fugues has been a decades-long journey for me, one that I am now pretty sure I couldn't have possibly taken if I had actually gone to grad school in music.
But here's the thing, I don't disbelieve in academic studies of musicology. I think music theory and meta-theoretical work on music is vital. Why? Because whether you examine your theories or not they inform the defaults of how you think. New Testament instruction talks about how you should not be conformed to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. There are kinds of Art Religion I simply regard as worldly wisdom. When I hear people say blues and rock "Broke all the rules" of classical music I am tempted to think those kinds of people who wield that thought-terminating cliche have not spent any time very deeply engaged in "classical music" from the fifteenth through twenty-first centuries. In a similar way I regard it as a thought-terminating cliche whenever anyone says that blues and jazz and rock riffs and harmonies and rhythms are incompatible with "large-scale form" or "musical argument" because those kinds of partisans are advertising their antipathy toward and ignorance of the possibilities of the musical material. These are the kinds of conventions that, on paper, the Romantics were against but partisans of Romanticism and a new Romanticism paradoxically embrace precisely the thought-terminating cliches about musical styles and possibilities that Romantics from the 19th century would reject on paper ... but then ... as Leonard Meyer put it, Romanticism in music was about disguising the reliance on convention in practice while castigating convention as rhetoric.
One of the main reasons why I don't think we need a new Romanticism. We've got enough racist and essentialist claptrap from Romanticism 1.0 that we don't need 2.0. Art Religion was one of the worst things about Romanticism 1.0 and its partisans tend to not even get what it was religion did and does for which Art is supposedly a substitute ... but that's a set of ideas to be saved for another time.
Meanwhile, I think it can be taken as given that black Pentecostalism gave us rock `n roll like Anthony Heilbut said back in the 1970s and that the black Pentecostal street preacher and guitarist Blind Willie Johnson made music that is just as worth hearing almost a century after his death as it was when he first recorded it.
Maybe not all students will be "thought leaders" but what putative (and often self-selected) thought-leaders can try to do is say, "Hey, let's explore possibility X."
If that's not happening in universities that doesn't mean it can't possibly happen in universities. Just because people foreswear the higher education path does not ensure they have enough of that proverbial genius to "break all the rules" on pure artistic visionary magic. At some point revolutionary praxis involves some actual theory, and a lot of would-be revolutions based on theory have floundered in music. It might be beneficial to go make the new music and theorize post hoc like, you know, has tended to be the norm in all centuries except maybe the 20th.
