DG Hart on Aaron Renn on evangelicalism and elites

I had heard of Aaron Renn over the years and have generally heard about ideas that I consider bad ideas.  The idea that there’s positive world, neutral world and negative world is untenable to me as a Christian.  In apocalyptic and eschatological terms the current age has always been negative world.  Christianity is not the same thing as Christendom West or East, and so I just can’t take Renn’s categories seriously. When Renn wrote that there is no cultural script for marriage I have to scoff at this proposal because I was part of Mars Hill Church for about eight or nine years and have read evangelical and Reformed writers across about twenty-five years and there’s hardly anything they’re more concerned about than promoting a marriage and family script, unless we’re talking about some variation of political theology.

 

That Renn is on the right isn’t even especially hard to infer.

https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/the-curse-of-the-right

But as with McCarthy, Trump’s flaws risk discrediting many of his ideas, and harming some of his followers and supporters.

haiku 6-30-2026

on internet prolegomena, in three movements

       (a parable on 21st century Anglo-American conservative Christian blogging

                  regarding cultural issues)

I.

The church organist 

has been preluding too long.

Let's hear the hymn now.

II.

Of the writing of

prolegomena there is,

verily, no end.

III.

Prelude on prelude, 

always hearing a prelude

but never a fugue. 

The Bad Faith of the Honest Broker Revisited: Ted Gioia presents music as a way to transcend the binary impasse in 2026, having defined music in terms of binary impasse in 2019's Music: A Subversive History

To read Ted Gioia in May 2026 would lead you to believe that he is sure that the history of the world can be understood in terms of binary conflicts and that this terrible state of affairs can be ameliorated by music, at least a little bit.

 

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-to-tell-if-youre-living-in-a-8ee

How to Tell If You're Living in a Binary Crisis

And how to get out of it

Ted Gioia

May 11, 2026

…

Somebody should write a global history of binary conflicts—because no force has exerted more influence over human affairs.

Rome collapsed while its citizens fought over the colors blue and green. That sounds crazy, but it’s absolutely true.

I believe this is the single most significant fact about Roman history.

1.      The conflict between Blues and Greens lasted for a thousand years.

2.      During that period, each color enjoyed periods of dominance, and could have used its power to make tangible improvements and fix a broken system.

3.      But they rarely did this—because were obsessed with punishing the other color team.

They won’t teach that in history class. But they should. It ought to be the first lesson.

…

How can you tell when you’re living in a binary collapse? Here are seven warning signs:

1.      All conflicts are channeled into a single binary opposition between two teams. There is never a third team—if someone tries to create it, one or both of the two teams will work fervently to destroy the third option.

…

 

Naturally, in a Substack article published by Ted Gioia the answer to the great problems of the human condition comes from the arts.  We need a Romanticism 2.0, as Gioia has been saying for a few years, and we’re going to get one.  Yet I have been reading Ted Gioia’s work off and on for about ten years so I can’t quite forget that back when he published Music: A Subversive History with Basic Books in 2019 he had a chapter titled “Music History as a Battle Between Magic and Mathematics”.  Ted Gioia’s whole conception of music history has too often been predicated on the literal sell of the kind of binary impasse he suggests music can defuse.  Take this passage from the subversive history I discussed a few years ago:

At a certain point in Western history, music became a quasi-science. Or, to be more precise, those who theorized about music managed to impose a scientific and mathematical framework that would marginalize all other approaches to the subject. We can even assign a name, a location, and a rough date to this revolution. The alleged innovator was Pythagoras of Samos, born around the year 570 BC. The impact of the Pythagorean revolution on the later course of music is still insufficiently understood and appreciated. I believe he is the most important person in the history of music — although his `innovation’ has perhaps done as much harm as good — and I will make a case for that bold claim in the pages ahead. Yet he is often treated as little more than a colorful footnote in cultural history, a charming figure who appears in anecdotes and asides, but not the mainstream narrative of cultural history. […]

Pythagoras’s attempt to define and constrain musical sounds by the use of numbers and ratios continues to shape how we conceptualize and perform songs in the current day, and even now we distinguish between melody and noise. Music, as it is taught in every university and conservatory in the world today, is explicitly Pythagorean in its methods and assumptions. And even when musical styles emerged from the African diaspora that challenged this paradigm, threatening to topple it with notes that didn’t belong to scales and rhythms that defied conventional metric thinking, the algorithmic mindset prevailed, somehow managing to codify non-Pythagorean performance styles that would seem to resist codification. (p. 48-49, emphasis added) 

Ted Gioia’s own history of music can easily be read as a triple binary impasse in which the paradigms of White-Science-Man vs Black-Magic-Woman is used to explain all of the world’s musical history.  Science vs magic, Europe vs Africa, male vs female, Ted Gioia embodies the worst elements of neo-Orphic thought about music.   Music can’t provide a way beyond the binary impasse as Gioia sketches it out if we use Gioia’s own history as the paradigm through which to understand music because his own understanding of music is so ostentatiously mediated through binary impasse.

At one level this is hardly surprising coming from a historian of blues and jazz, but at a more foundational level Gioia’s intellectual and ethical failure is predicated not on ill-will but on not being able to grasp that the history of neo-Orphic theologies of music have trafficked in essentialist paradigms since roughly the time of Schleiermacher, a point that gets touched upon by theologians now and then. Jeremy Begbie has registered a constructive complaint that Schleiermacher’s picture is helpful but partial.  Philip Stoltzfus' Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics, and God in Western Thought is more directly critical by noting that Schleiermacher’s art mysticism was neo-Orphic and that his form of neo-Orphic theology or art mysticism has been the norm for the last two centuries.  

 

Ted Gioia, by his own account, never studied music theorybooks.

At some point during my teenage years, I decided I wanted to be a jazz musician. But I didn’t have a coherent plan.

I just spent a lot of time at the piano. And when I wasn’t sitting at the keyboard, I listened to jazz—on records and in concert. I also read jazz magazines and books at the local public library (which had a subscription to Downbeat).

But here’s what I didn’t do:

·         I didn’t get a music degree.

·         I didn’t take any lessons after the age of 18—and never had a single jazz lesson.

·         I didn’t try to get gigs.

·         I didn’t network with influential people in the music business.

·         I occasionally glanced at a music textbook, but never really studied one.

·         I didn’t learn anything about music technology (except how to plug in my Fender Rhodes).

I noted this a while back, and it reminded me of an observation made by the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski on the problems of the autodidact:

https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393060546

Main Currents of Marxism

Lescek Kolakowski

Copyright © 2005 by Leszek Kolakowski

Copyright © 1978 by Oxford University Press

ISBN: 978-0-393-32943-8

Page 127

 

While Marx’s criticism was unjust and dishonest in some respects, he was intellectually far superior to Proudhon, who had all the faults of a clever autodidact: self-assurance, unawareness of the limitations of his knowledge, incomplete or desultory reading, lack of skill in selecting and organizing material, and the hasty condemnation of authors whom, for the most part, he did not properly understand.

Ted Gioia can be thought of Kolakowski's Proudhon.  Gioia's autodidacticism has revealed that he isn't capable of producing a subversive history of music because his understanding of music is arguably the most conventional of post-Romantic conventional wisdom.

 

Still, Ted Gioia can be regarded as a person of goodwill even if many of his ideas about music history and culture don't rise to the level of idiosyncratic crackpot. Moving beyond a binary impasse does sound like a good idea in theory, as well as in practice, but Gioia’s whole career of publishing, whether in his books or in his Substack, reveals a performative contradiction at the heart of his work—he sells us on one binary impasse on top of another as the way to think about music, yet wants to back up and claim that music could be what allows us to transcend the binary impasse. 

POSTSCRIPT

One of the worst parts of Gioia's pitting magic against mathematics is that it shows how blinkered his grasp of the materials has become.  I recently finished Annette Yoshiko Reed's book Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism and in her conclusion she pointed out that one of the challenges of contemporary readers and scholars is to grasp that demonology was the cutting edge science of the ancient world from ancient Babylon up into even the Hellenistic period. Gioia's dualism of magic against science is predicated on an anachronistic post-Enlightenment dualism that does not pay enough attention to the territories of science and religion, territories that overlapped far more significantly in the ancient world than Ted Gioia's set of binary impasses can allow for. The binary impasses Gioia wants music to help us liberate from, then, are paradoxically the binary impasses he keeps imposing upon his understanding of music history. 

comparing Jessa Crispin on the garden of American heroes to Philip Jeffery in 2019 on the US history of arts policy as foreign policy (not domestic) catalyzing a crisis in the 1990s that came to be known as "culture wars"

https://theamericanscholar.org/what-is-an-american-hero-anyway/

What Is an American Hero, Anyway?

Lists of great artists say more about the list-maker than the artist 

By Jessa Crispin | October 24, 2025

…

The rise of diversity in the arts coincided with the fall of the so-called “high” arts in public spaces and in universities. In the 1990s, arts and music education started disappearing from public schools, attendance at opera houses and symphonies began to decline, and university humanities departments went into budgetary crises. This had more to do with the end of Cold War-era funding, which had gone toward literary magazines, the visual arts, and arts education. But some saw conspiracy instead of coincidence, as if the reason why the “Great Books” curriculum lost favor was directly attributable to the rise of gender studies departments.

 

For example, New York’s Lincoln Center ended the longstanding Mostly Mozart Festival in 2023, which programmed classical compositions from around the world, and replaced it with “Summer for the City.” The new roster included a celebration of hip hop, “the world’s first LGBTQIA+ mariachi group,” and other musical acts whose primary selling points were related to identity. The reasons for programming decisions like this are complex, but some critics saw a direct correlation. Cicero is being replaced by Sandra Cisneros. Mozart is being replaced by SZA. Cultural collapse is imminent.

 

And for people trapped in cultural grievance, the hope is that through “elite replacement”—not to be confused with the “great replacement” conspiracy—we will make art great again. The problem with the culture, some believe, must be the wokeness of it all, the dominance of women and other previously marginalized voices—even in spaces that used to be safe for white men: The story of our Founding Fathers, for example, is now being told by Hamilton. Thus, Project 2025’s plan to put conservatives in charge of the institutions that maintain our cultural production. The problems of American culture, however, go much deeper than that, and “elite replacement” doesn’t really work if there’s no Leonard Bernstein waiting in the wings with a big vaudeville hook to drag Lin-Manuel Miranda from the stage.

…

The Garden of American Heroes seems like an attempt to end this conversation about the canon, any suspicion against greats of the past, and any accusations that the United States might still be racist, sexist, or otherwise unfair to its citizens. These are the good ones. There are no others. The canon is closed.

…

There’s a certain amount of acid snark I expect reading anything by Jessa Crispin, and she delivers.  Now I do think there are two elements at play here.  The garden of American heroes list, now that I have looked at it, is at least moderately diverse if the list of heroes includes the likes of Roger Williams, Jonathan Edwards, Barry Goldwater, JFK, Ronald Reagan, Woody Guthrie, Duke Ellington, Johnny Cash, Whitney Houston  all made the list.  Having Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis on the list makes sense and they are all jazz legends who made remarkable music.  Ray Charles made it.  I suppose if Crispin thinks the list of heroes is bland that’s how she is about these things. I’d probably replace Lauren Bacall with Lucille Ball but that’s me.

 

But Crispin’s claim that diversity in the arts began to emerge in the 1990s has an element to it that can be confirmed from the right side of the aisle of those who discuss American arts policy. I’m reminded of Philip Jeffery’s long-form essay on how the end of the Cold War revealed a crisis of purpose in American arts policy.

 

https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/a-cultural-agenda-for-our-time

…

During the mid-20th century, culture policy was foreign policy. Before the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, the agencies that executed American culture policy were the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. The State Department's primary contribution was a series of art and music tours around Europe. In 1946, it purchased 79 contemporary paintings, including works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, and Arthur Dove, for an art show that went to Prague, Brno, and Bratislava, but the show was canceled before completion.

 

More successful were State Department-funded concert tours for musicians like Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie. Historian Michael Kammen wrote that jazz tours in particular "achieved undeniable popularity wherever they went, and they were perceived as the music of individualism, freedom, pluralism, and dissent — fundamental qualities obliterated by communism." The contrast with communism was key, and it also motivated the CIA's involvement in culture policy. The CIA famously backed the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international organization launched at a 1950 conference in West Berlin to organize anti-communist intellectuals. The CCF held conferences, published journals, and sponsored exhibitions in 35 countries; Raymond Aron, Sidney Hook, James Burnham, Arthur Schlesinger, Irving Kristol, Bertrand Russell, and many others were involved at various points in its formation and operation.

 

An agenda of "individualism, freedom, pluralism, and dissent" meshed well with the ethos of mid-century American criticism. Leading liberal intellectuals in New York established academic cosmopolitanism as anti-communism, and a number were involved in the CCF. Art critic Clement Greenberg set the tone for mid-century criticism — he demanded that art remain abstract and independent from the political realm and avoid being "about" anything. "Art for art's sake" was the prevailing doctrine. The instincts Eliot described as la poésie pure migrated into painting with the emergence of abstract expressionism, lauded by Greenberg for its focus on the individual artist's process and technique.

 

Rumors of CIA involvement with the CCF began to spread in the mid-'60s and were eventually confirmed in a 1966 New York Times report. This led policymakers to establish new agencies dedicated openly to carrying out a national cultural agenda, rather than continuing to promote cultural freedom covertly.   …

…

 

In this telling of American arts policy history, the crisis of the 1990s was victory, which is to say the Cold War ended and the fact that American arts policy was an extension of anti-Soviet foreign policy rather than focused on domestic policy the way it was during New Deal WPA projects led to the shift Crispin alludes to:

 

Our Cold War cultural policy did its job as long as the Cold War lasted. But it didn't take long after the fall of the Soviet Union for it to become incoherent to the point that we forgot we had a cultural-policy agenda. Supporting a mixture of academic avant-gardism and individual expression tailored to promote the idea of a free society as opposed to a planned one not only stopped looking like a public priority, but in the late '80s and early '90s it looked like an absolute waste of public resources.

 

As soon as there was no international culture war to fight, a domestic one began over Robert Mapplethorpe's erotic photography (especially one self-portrait with a bullwhip) and Andres Serrano's piece "Piss Christ" (a photograph of a crucifix submerged in what Serrano alleged was his own urine). The NEA had issued a grant to the Institute of Contemporary Art to display a Mapplethorpe exhibit, and a grant of $15,000 through an affiliate to Serrano for "Piss Christ," inevitably raising the question of why the public sector was putting money toward something so offensive and inaccessible to most Americans, or why the public sector should fund the arts at all.

 

Ergo decades of conservatives talking about abolishing the NEA and NEH. Jeffery’s counter-proposal was that the United States should consider having a coherent domestic arts policy. 

…

Both sides of that culture war completely missed the specific, historically contingent character of the NEA's function. Both saw it as a question of whether the government should support arts per se. To one side, the NEA was synonymous with pure waste, something that government has no interest being involved with; on the other side, the agency was synonymous with art itself, as if artistic priorities were necessarily the cosmopolitan academicism and personal self-expression (both equally removed from the experience of boorish Kansans who happened not to appreciate seeing their Lord in urine) promoted by Schlesinger, Greenberg, and Eliot's description of Valéry. Both sides conceded the triumph of what Eliot described as legitimate modernism, and both missed the fact that the United States has a particular cultural policy. The NEA and NEH were never meant to be neutral promoters of pure art; they had an agenda for a particular moment.

 

But this is not the only cultural agenda America could possibly have. The current approach was tailored to be effective in a particular global moment that has now passed. Before the Cold War, the most significant federal intervention into American culture was the Works Progress Administration, a flagship New Deal agency. The WPA's approach to culture was, in many ways, the opposite of what the government later adopted during the Cold War. Its goals were, like later iterations of culture policy, tailored for its own particular historical moment, of course. But those goals were oriented toward the domestic realm, not the foreign.

…

That was 2019.  Still, I think I have “a” case that people on the left and right have considered that the 1990s became a period of culture war and crisis in the humanities and liberal arts in the post-Cold War era even if there are inevitably debates about what the reasons for that were and what they entail.  I tend to be conservative myself and from what I have read of progressive and liberal artists and arts partisans Trump’s second administration is probably the last one within which people would want the United States to suddenly decide it is vital to make a firm and powerfully enforced domestic arts policy.

 

For someone like Crispin such an arts policy probably should never come from Trump’s second administration.  It’s also hard to shake a sense that if the garden of American heroes was conceived during a Biden or Obama administration it might get a chilly reception from Crispin anyway. Americans want to have their cake and eat it, too, when it comes to arts patronage and artistic autonomy, or at least the kinds of journalists and writers who write about the arts seem to want some ideal in which the artist can get the money and do whatever.  That has been rare and even in the fine arts the position of being paid to basically write whatever you wanted because your benefactor liked whatever you did anyway only describes, so far as I know, the career of Franz Joseph Haydn.  

 

And that leads me to another thought, about Crispin’s line about how the canon is closed. That is precisely not what anyone defending the garden would say, let alone anyone defending a Great Tradition in an art.  You never actually say that the canon is closed!  I’ve seen this over the course of a decade or two in conversations about classical music and I say we should let that field be a guide.  If I go by comments from someone from the Future Symphony Institute the canon has never been closed.  It’s just that, well, nobody’s been worthy of canonization since Richard Nixon resigned, okay?  Closed canons are for observers of religious traditions and Art is Art. 

 

It could be that these days the one thing worse than not having a unified domestic arts policy would be having one with the guy we currently have in the Oval Office.  If the American art canons in literature and music are anything to go by, we're better off with the post hoc situation we've had where if people admire Whitney Houston that gets recognized after the fact as it was with Ellington and Davis and Armstrong. There's usually never an Esterhazy in American arts production (and Joe would probably concede that his forebears in the Esterhazy clan bankrolling Haydn's symphonies was more cultural achievement than his writing the screenplay for Showgirls).

The 2020s form of "where are the evangelical intellectuals?" question, and the question of whether there is or can be an evangelical elite in the United States, a sampling from Mere Orthodoxy, Old Life and Aaron Renn's Substack and First Things article

https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-promise-of-a-christian-small-magazine

January 26th, 2026

By Jake Meador

 

... Really, the best way to read Schaeffer is not even to regard him as an intellectual himself, so much as someone who attempted to relate to intellectuals in the same way that someone like Hudston Taylor related to the Chinese. In other words, Schaeffer was less an intellectual himself and more a very sensitive and shrewd missionary to readers of the intellectuals.

 

That reminds me … of something from years ago …

https://mereorthodoxy.com/francis-schaeffer-and-christian-intellectualism

and how D. G. Hart wrote a response to Meador’s older piece saying:

 

https://oldlife.org/2016/08/23/was-francis-schaeffer-an-intellectual/

 

I wasn’t reading Time in 1960 but fifteen years later I was reading Schaeffer and the better description of the apologist is not as missionary to intellectuals but missionary to would-be intellectuals.  …

 

Francis Schaeffer as a missionary to would-be intellectuals is pretty blunt but probably also very true.  

some thoughts on twenty years of reading Mere Orthodoxy: think of it as a bicycle with two gears and one of them can be read as grad school variations on a William Wallace II theme

I think I have been reading Mere Orthodoxy since 2005, which would mean I’ve been reading it off and on for it’s whole two-decade run.

 

So when I see a title like this …

https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-it-is-difficult-to-talk-about-ethics-of-the-body

I know that it’s never been difficult for any contributor or editor at Mere Orthodoxy to talk about the ethics of the body because that is functionally one of the only two things they ever talk about.  Marriage and concerns about marriage have been all over M. O since its beginning.

https://mereorthodoxy.com/forsaking-all-others
https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-case-against-in-vitro-fertilization
https://mereorthodoxy.com/kelly-loving-act
https://mereorthodoxy.com/gay-marriage-by-judicial-decree 
https://mereorthodoxy.com/special-feature-why-i-am-opposed-to-gay-marriage

Variations on this track can be found at the Theopolis Institute, which has some overlap with Mere Orthodoxy. 

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/what-obergefell-did-not-and-could-not-do/

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/obergefell-and-the-wisdom-of-the-old-law/

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/obergefell-the-illicit/

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/what-does-the-church-have-to-do-with-obergefell-a-response-to-shafer-stoner-and-farrow/

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/the-pointy-end-of-the-sexual-revolution/

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/obergefell-and-the-parts-whole-relation/

 

The other big track has been to assess the state of contemporary conservatism in the United States.

https://mereorthodoxy.com/after-nationalism-what-next-for-american-conservatism

https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-populism-is-a-problem-for-the-intellectual-right

https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-should-evangelicals-respond-to-the-vanishing-mainline

 

If the first track was set down by Matthew Lee Anderson the other track has, probably, been best articulated by Jake Meador.  That other track is some variation of political theology in light of the prospects of whatever comes next for American political life and the role evangelical Christians and socially conservative Christians are thought to (or expected to) play within the shifting terrain of pax Americana.

 

"That is why you fail" some thoughts on the failure of Rawlsian contractarian liberalism to have produced a cohesive vision for the arts during and after the Cold War, by way of thinkpieces about the state of the arts in the new Trump administration

It may be necessarily characteristic of this new administration that it has begun with artists (and writers on the arts) contemplating the essential role the arts can/may/should/must play during these times.  Jonathan Blumhofer had a somewhat long piece at ArtsFuse this February in which he concluded:

https://artsfuse.org/305462/arts-commentary-art-music-and-the-new-age-of-anxiety/

...

Knowing this, let us contend with the future bravely. However late the hour and however long the road ahead, the cause of standing for justice, knowledge, and freedom isn’t yet doomed. Along the way, let the arts comfort, inspire, instruct, and help lead. That’s what they’re here for.

 

At ArtsJournal Michael Rushton had a response:

https://www.artsjournal.com/worth/2025/02/art-in-turbulent-times/

...

 

Arts organizations do not need to “respond” to the election of Trump in their programming, any more than they would have needed to respond to the election of Harris. Museums and orchestras have unique roles in our cities in their abilities to provide the public with great art – lots of people can organize political protests about Trump, can hold meetings, can try to persuade people to vote the other way the next time. But only your orchestra has the ability to perform Mahler’s Fourth; nobody else can.

 

“Let the arts comfort, inspire, instruct, and help lead. That’s what they’re here for.” But they’re not. And, as we have seen only recently, those exact same words can be said by the most despicable political actors.

 

The arts won’t save you from the political situation you hate.

 

This rejoinder has a point worth considering but, first, we have to deal with a question.  If the arts are not around to comfort, inspire, instruct and help lead then what are they for?  What are the arts good for if they don’t do these things? Blumhofer concedes that the arts have some civic religious, cultic purpose even if it’s by way of #Resistance during the second Trump administration.  Rushton’s point that the arts have served despotic regimes is worth considering but it begs the question of why, whether and how arts in the service of despotic regimes would be worse (however we even define that) than arts made in free societies.  You can conceive of “free” in scare quotes even if I hadn’t just provided them in this sentence.

 

Yet Rushton’s response is still salient simply for its timing.  Would artists and arts communities be writing the same way about how artists and the arts can speak truth to power if Harris had won?  No, they probably wouldn’t be.

 

Whose Beauty will Save the World? Doubts about Rod Dreher and other bids by Christians to "re-enchant" the world through the liberal arts. Romanticism 3.0 is probably not what we actually need.

https://www.bradeast.org/blog/my-latest-a-review-of-rod-dreher-in-ct

https://www.christianitytoday.com/2024/10/make-christianity-spooky-again-rod-dreher-living-wonder-review/

…

There are three major elements to Living in Wonder: a metanarrative of decline; an overarching diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription; and a set of practices for the individual reader. I began above with the third, so now I will focus on the first two.

Dreher argues that the contemporary West is disenchanted. This term can mean many things, but Dreher defines it as “the evaporation of a sense of the supernatural within the world, and its replacement with a belief, sometimes unacknowledged, that this world is all there is.” A disenchanted society is materialistic, rationalistic, individualistic, and hedonistic. It is unspooky. It is not open to the transcendent, the divine, the mysterious, the inexplicable. It is closed off by design.

How did we get here? By a lengthy series of social, cultural, economic, scientific, and intellectual transitions, beginning in the late Middle Ages. We lost a sense of “the givenness of things,” to use Marilynne Robinson’s phrase. We began to think things are what we make of them rather than gifts from God to be cherished and stewarded. We strapped nature to a chair and tortured her for secrets. Alluding to Yuval Noah Harari, Dreher writes that “the story of modernity is of humankind exchanging meaning for power.”

We got power, all right. But was the exchange worth it? Dreher suggests not. In fact, he says, the tradeoffs are so drastic that, while we can’t go back, we can’t stay where we are, either.

…

 

The rise of technocratic utilitarian reason wielded to develop comprehensive mastery over nature and society, by chance?  Where, oh where, have I heard that thesis before?  Maybe Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had some book about kinda sorta suggested that since the age of Enlightenment instrumental reason and technological application outstripped other aspects of civilization in some book  called Dialectic of Enlightenment?

 

more on the back and forth between Alan Jacobs and Brad East, why I find it easier to take the former more seriously than the latter

https://blog.ayjay.org/one-more-enchanted-evening/

 

Alan Jacobs has had a back and forth with Brad East in the last week or so about enchantment vs. disenchantment.  I am hardly in a place to insist but I do think that for as much Jacques Ellul as Alan Jacobs has read I hope he read Matthew T Prior’s book Confronting Technology: The Theology of Jacques Ellul. For anyone who isn’t already committed to eventually getting through eighty books on exorcism, diabology, exousiology, spiritual warfare, the reception history of the Enoch literature and Genesis 6 references to The Watchers, Prior’s book distinguishes exousiology (a theology of powers and principalities a la Walter Wink) from demonology (I better not have to explain that topic here at Wenatchee The Hatchet of all places!) whether of the Merrill Unger variety or some other) in Christian thought. 

 

Alan Jacobs is interested in playing with an upgraded demonology a la Jacques Ellul’s The New Demons?  Alright.  A new variation on powers and principalities?  Okay!  Robert Ewusie Moses’ Practices of Power: Revisiting the Principalities and Powers in the Pauline Letters should be on Jacobs’ reading list (if he can carve out time for it).  I would suggest that the book builds upon what strikes me now as a skeletal idea in James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power about Christ overcoming powers and principalities with a specific eye toward white supremacism as one of those powers.  Given the history of white Euro-American Christians regarding BIPOC folks as either having demons, being demons or being subjected to demons I trust Alan Jacobs has at least some inkling of the delicacy involved in rehabilitating demonology as an element of Christian discourse.  I don’t for a second reject the proposal since I’m a professing Christian and digging into the reception history of demonologies and how they developed in the Second Temple period as nascent Judaism grappled with serial imperial occupation was something I was hoping to do grad work in.  But I didn’t manage to do that.  Instead I just tried to keep up with a smattering of books written on those topics.  I haven’t pulled that off but there’s a big old reading list you can peruse if you like.

 

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/01/updated-version-of-reading-list-from.html

 

So if Alan Jacobs really wants to explore the way Christians and Jews have written about demonology in the last two and a half centuries … I got a recommended reading list.  I am openly sympathetic to the idea that Christians in the United States can and should regard racial supremacist dogmas as demonic but that’s not really what I intended to get at in this post.  No, I’m thinking more broadly about the years I’ve spent reading Alan Jacobs and Brad East and how, lately, I tend to lean more Jacobs than East.  Why?

 

I recall a rambling piece that was published at one point in Mere Orthodoxy which is currently available at East’s blog.  The title is so routine among theological metacultural punditry I don’t even need to quote it since it’s right there in the html but …

 

https://www.bradeast.org/blog/2019/07/against-pop-culture.html

Against pop culture

Jul 3, 2019

Christians love pop culture these days. But the subset of Christians who love pop culture the most is pastors, writers, and academics. Pop culture as a mode of "engagement"; pop culture as a means of "reaching" this or that group; pop culture as a way of "relating" to students: all these and more are celebrated and commended and practiced in churches, classrooms, and websites every day. "Finding the gospel in [pop culture artifact X]" is a ubiquitous and representative genre. Christians love pop culture, and Christians with an audience want fellow Christians to love pop culture.

Why is that? Why should Christians like, love, or "engage with" pop culture?

I don't think there are very many, or perhaps any, good answers to that question.

…

 

So … then there’s this year’s peroration from the same Brad East on how the Jedi in Star Wars are like Catholics and the wizards in Harry Potter are Protestants.

 

https://www.bradeast.org/blog/catholic-jedi-protestant-wizards

Catholic Jedi, Protestant Wizards

Aug 12, 2024

A recent visit to Orlando brought home to me how different the respective aesthetic visions of Star Wars and Harry Potter are. A thesis came to me: Jedi are Catholic and Wizards are Protestant.

 

What was that about there not being many or any good answers to the question about why Christians should like, love, or “engage” with pop culture? I wouldn’t say Alan Jacobs is exactly a poptimist but he’s not anti-poptimist in rhetoric or method.  East has soap-boxed against Christians being poptimists while then, a few years later, turning around and doing pretty much the kind of thing you’d think he wouldn’t think is a great idea.  Now I’ve made no secret here at Wenatchee The Hatchet I love animation and comics and anime and manga.  I’ve written tens of thousands of words about Batman: the animated series.  I’ve had over the years comparing thoughts with Ethan Hein about songs by Stevie Wonder and David Bowie and John Lee Hooker among other things.  I even recently wrote a piece called “Cross Over Instead” suggesting that if, in the last few centuries, mainstream classical music has never taken the guitar seriously maybe classical guitarists should take that as a hint that we will never be welcome in mainstream classical music and reach out to every kind of guitarist playing every kind of music so that, should classical music as “civilization” die the miserable death its would-be defenders claim it’s constantly in danger of, we guitarists will not suffer much loss for that. 

 

If I wanted to I could probably write 20,000 words about manga by Rumiko Takahashi.  I’m not sure if I will but I  sure could.  So I’m probably firmly in the poptimist category of criticism even if I have written extensively on how Beethoven shifted his developmental episodes into the transitions of the first movement of his final piano sonata; and on the first half of Nikita Koshkin’s formidable and rewarding 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo guitar; and more recently I’ve begun a slow-going and I hope thorough analysis of the solo guitar sonatas of Wenzel Thomas Matiegka. I haven’t touched that project since February 2024 and Grand Sonata II is a very big piece with a lot going on it, both in terms of how much Matiegka appropriates and transforms themes by Haydn and what he does across his three-movement work.  Which is to say that I can toggle back and forth between classical guitar and cartoons and manga fairly comfortably.  If Brad East is worried that kids these days are too glued to their screens I am just not sure I share that worry because in my experience, to be blunt, old people glued to their screens and imbibing paranoid conspiracy theories are not coming off as much better off than people scrolling through TikTok videos watching the antics of their favorite influencers. 

 

When Jacobs writes: 

… Can you bind the strong man? I can’t. Which makes it strange to me how small a part Jesus plays in the current discourse about enchantment, even among people who claim to be Christians.  …

I’d say that Emil Brunner’s quip about liberal Protestantism eliminating the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as mediator was the whole point of The Mediator.  Germanophile highbrow art asceticism or lowbrow trance-seeking mysticism, the old Pythagorean and Orphic impulses, may have been cultivated and assimilated in Christian patristics but we live in the days of Ted Gioia where this dualism has to be held up as irreconcilable and insoluble as if faith traditions haven’t spent millennia demonstrating and arguing otherwise.  When I read Philip Ewell and John McWhorter (both black atheists) differing on questions about classical music, I enjoyed reading both of them for the insights they have and grumbling at the insights they most assuredly do not have, which they might have picked up if they were willing to dust off some books by James Cone. 

 

Christians can contribute to aesthetic debates within contemporary culture as good-faith contributors whether or not Christendom exists.  Jacobs has read his Jacques Ellul so he knows there have been Christians in the last century who have taken this approach.  My soap box in the last ten years at Wenatchee The Hatchet has included a concern that if Christians want to be taken seriously it would behoove us to explore potential theoretical and practical solutions to issues and problems that people who are not the least bit Christian would actually want solved.  In my case, as a classical guitarist and hobbyist composer who loves Thelonious Monk and Haydn in comparable measures, the various highbrow/lowbrow and white/black dualisms entrenched in musicology and history are things that I believe need to be overcome.  I agree with Philip Ewell on that basic issue even if he would not agree with me about maybe much of anything else, least of all Christian dogmatics.

 

I hope I can say I’ve staked out a consistent and coherent position about taking “high” and “low” equally seriously.  I don’t want to say that insipid music is made by insipid people and it isn’t worth taking seriously because, well, too many Christian cultural pundits forget that Romans 12:16 is still in the New Testament no matter how much they inveigh against pop culture.  Do you know people who like Taylor Swift songs?  Be willing to hang out with them.  I find Katy Perry annoying myself but I don’t have to make an issue of that if I’m hanging out with someone who likes to listen to her.  I’m sure there are plenty of people who would be baffled as to why Oshii’s Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dream is one of my favorite movies, and who’d want to read my case for why, if there’s a Maison Ikkoku anime remake it should be 1) more faithful to the source material and 2) Saori Hayami would rock as Kyoko Otonashi.   And I could still turn around and write more about cross-referencing Aquinas’ discussion of intra-Trinitarian forms of relationship with John of Damascus’ discourse on perichoresis as a way to recalibrate conceptions of musical time as they’ve been presented by Adorno, Zuckerkandl, Rochberg, Scruton, Yust and others.

 

I get that for polemicists who want to polemic there need to be dualisms but all too often the dualisms seem too convenient and sometimes I even suspect they get wielded in bad faith. 

It was the back and forth of Alan Jacobs and Brad East that spurred me to write 

metacultural speculation is not cultural production, some thoughts on reading exchanges between Brad East and Alan Jacobs on culture

The Bad Faith of The Honest Broker (on the sham dualisms in Ted Gioia's rhetoric)

When I started reading Ted Gioia’s work years ago it was initially through his trilogy of books on Work Songs, Love Songs and Healing Songs.  I got around to his writings on jazz and blues and found that more interesting. I also read Music: A Subversive History and that has been the point past which I have found it increasingly impossible to take him seriously.  I still read him, though, because he is a lucid writer and in part because I may have a weakness for feeling obliged to keep track of the pronouncements of men given to pat and patently dubious dualisms.

 

There can be any number of tells that you’re reading the work of a fan of dubious dualisms. One of them can be a sweeping invective against an entire category of people that moves to discussing someone’s life and work who, on closer inspection, might not easily fit into the category introduced in the initial ad hominem. Such is what we find from The Honest Broker in the following:

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/a-2000-year-old-argument-over-the

 

Economists have strange opinions about musicians. For example, Adam Smith claims in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that music ranks among the “most frivolous professions.”

At different points in his book, he compares musicians to buffoons and prostitutes. Even slackers who can only make the head of a pin get more respect from him.

Mr. Smith especially hates opera singers—which is interesting, because they were the most highly paid performers in those days. During the 18th century, opera singers earned more than the most successful composers.

So Smith pursues a strange view of economics. He loves the marketplace—except when it rewards musicians.

He insists, contrary to all evidence, that a song must be worthless because it “perishes in the very instant of its production.” In other words, a transformative musical experience possesses no value, no matter how powerful.

And it’s not just Adam Smith who thinks so. Even today, some economists will tell you that music has no economic value.

 

The sheer bad faith of Ted Gioia’s polemics in his Substack blogging impress me, not positively, but they do, at least, impress me.

 

That eighteenth century philosophers had a low view of music was the norm rather than the exception.  Calling Adam Smith an economist for the sake of an ad hominem introduction without situating him in his time is, by now, fairly boilerplate rhetoric from Gioia, which is unfortunate. As careful as he can be about blues and jazz history he reliably proves himself feckless on many other topics.

 

In the past Ted Gioia painted Augustine of Hippo as some terrible guy whose De Musica reduced music to numbers in Music: A Subversive History, an exemplar of the worst traits of the Pythagorean impulse in music.  Then in a Substack post he’d abruptly remember that Augustine of Hippo was a North African Christian bishop and adduce from that that Western harmony has roots in Africa.   You’d never know De Musica was one of the first great treatise on music from Gioia’s book because he presented it in his book as something bad but when he needs or wants to make a flamboyant rhetorical point about Western harmony being influenced by non-European writers and thinkers all of a sudden Augustine’s influence is taken for granted as both salutary and formative.  I’ve read De Musica. There’s a reason Augustine apologized in Book VI for the punishing tedium of the writing in Books I through V!  An academic edition of the Latin text of De Musica editor Martin Jacobson had no qualms writing that Augustine’s work is considered a historically important but punishingly tedious and technical treatise.

 

Whereas Gioia hand-waved away Augustine’s treatise as reducing music to number and being part of the big bad Pythagorean anti-magic take on music I found the treatise tedious but also promising.  Augustine took as given that music exists in performance but we perceive it and understand it with our memory. Rather than pull a Roger Scruton and dispense with Augustine’s thoughts as informed by a cosmology that has been discredited by science I suggest that we take the half-way good ideas in Augustine’s thought which tell us that music and cognition are intertwined. In an era in which we can even discuss proprioception and the ways in which the senses interact with the brain a potential neo-Augustinian retrieval based on using his ideas about memory and musical perception rather than neo-Platonic or neo-Pythagorean cosmologies could potentially show us that Augustine’s De Musica still has some potentially helpful ideas to give us.

 

Additionally (HT to Phoenix Preacher contributor Dr. Duane Arnold for this) Carol Harrison’s work on Augustine’s evolving thought about music would be vastly more worth your time than anything Ted Gioia has said about him even if you have doubts about Augustine as philosopher, theologian and thinker.  Ted Gioia’s Augustine is essentially a sock puppet for whatever point he wants to make at exactly the time of the point he’s making.  I now suggest that Gioia has pulled  a similar stunt with the work of Adam Smith. Even if we take as given that Adam Smith was an “economist” the fact that an eighteenth century philosopher might have doubts about how powerful and sublime music actually was can be considered normative among philosophers and humanists going back a few centuries before anyone began to talk about ‘economics”.

 

There were doubts about the possibility that music had “timeless value” going back to the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries. The core problem music had was that it existed for so long as it was performed.  Once the performance was over the music was over.  It might be likened (and was) to the beautiful smell of a beautiful flower.  Music without text was music that had no propositional content and displayed no mimetic capacity.  In eras in which the capacity of an art to mimic nature was prized music was going to be found wanting, and so it was.  If you want to read about the shift from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries in European philosophy with respect to music being weak or strong for lacking mimetic content there’s a book you can get.

 

The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics

John Neubauer

https://archive.org/details/emancipationofmu0000neub/page/n5/mode/2up

https://www.amazon.com/Emancipation-Music-Language-Eighteenth-Century-Aesthetics/dp/0300035772

 

Leading humanists from the fourteenth through sixteenth century regarded music with skepticism. It was a discipline that called for a huge amount of time, attention, physical training and for all those demands of the discipline it was tough to justify musical training when that was “all” the trained musicians had to offer in most cases. They were not advancing any scholarly disciplines and were not of use to the societies of their day in other respects.  The most beautiful piece of music was not like a work of architecture, a painting, a sculpture, a well-researched book.  A musical work such as a dance lingered in the room much like a fart and dissipated in a similar way.

 

A dense but valuable survey of humanistic and ecclesiastical skepticism about music was published years ago.

The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470--1530

By Rob C. Wegman

https://www.routledge.com/The-Crisis-of-Music-in-Early-Modern-Europe-1470--1530/Wegman/p/book/9780415964746

Right off the bat Ted Gioia impugns economists as implicitly inimical to the value of music when it was the leading humanists and philosophers (and not just clergy) of fourteenth through eighteenth century Europe who had some doubts about the value of music if “timeless verities” or the capacity to emulate Nature was concerned.

But what does that matter?  Gioia has a point to keep making:

…

So we shouldn’t be surprised that the CEO of Spotify recently made a claim very similar to Adam Smith’s. He insisted that the cost of making music is “close to zero.”

But here we encounter the same contradiction that undermines Smith’s view. Many musicians tell me that they need to spend ten thousand dollars or more to release a professional recording.

So how can music cost nothing if it requires so much investment (and I’m not even counting the time involved in practice and developing mastery of a musician’s craft)?

I have a different view of the value of music. I believe music is a source of enchantment and a change agent in human life. So in my economics, a song can possess great value.

I suspect that many of you feel the same.

…

Naturally Gioia has to go back to ancient Greece to see how they “solved” the problem of whether music was precious or worthless.  At this point I am going to skip Gioia’s take on Plato and the Greeks because he’s moving to a foregone conclusion:

…

In other words, songs aren’t just means to an end—like a manufacturing process—but are complete in themselves. Just by existing, they do something magical, even without proving their exchange value in a marketplace.

As such, they rank higher than any mere consumer product, destined to be used up (and hence not achieving remembrance).

This is how I perceive music. This is probably how many of you cherish music, too.

Anybody who loves music, knows how powerful these songs are. They really are like drugs—Plato wasn’t wrong in comparing them to intoxication. Aristotle wasn’t wrong in claiming that they are dangerously exciting.

…

The effects of drugs wear off.  That does not make drugs of no value but it does mean, to stick with the analogy Gioia has offered, people keep going back to get a new fix.  As the use of drugs go not all drugs and medications are good for you.  It was because philosophers regarded the impact of music as both evanescent and yet real in its moment that they expressed doubt about the long-term value of music and reservations about the kinds of things people would do while listening to music.  If a doctor prescribes the wrong kind of drug to a patient it harms them. The use of music in the workplace to blunt the tedium of any number of jobs would fit into Ted Gioia’s work on work songs, for instance. Muzak has a use, however mildly it registers as a kind of social and market narcotic. 

 

Gioia is not unusual in trafficking in glib dualisms but he is unusual in the zeal with which he presents his dualisms as the only options in writing about music. His rhetoric depends on the most sublime rather than the most quotidian examples he can find. Would Gioia say there’s something intoxicating about “Baby Shark”? How about the hold music you listen to waiting for a customer service representative to talk to you about an order?  What about hold music while waiting on the phone to set up an appointment?  I remember a day when I was on hold and the music I heard while being put on hold was Kind of Blue.  Gioia can go on all he wants about the magic and power of music and write as though the corporate suits and economists don’t know the value of music.  So what?  I could hear “So What?” as hold music over the course of my life and Miles Davis’ music can have all its magic and verve used to be a substitute for abject silence while I’m waiting for someone to talk to me about something.

 

The bad faith lurking within Gioia’s dualism is he pins all the magical power he believes music has on the music itself and not on the plethora of social, cultural and literally ritual contexts within which music has historically had a role. Let’s do a thought experiment.  Suppose that Mahalia Jackson singing “Take My Hand Precious Lord” is used as hold music (may it never be so but work with me here). Would hearing her singing as hold music effect you the same way it would as watching her and hearing her sing the same song at Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral?  No and I would think the reason is too obvious to have to point out. That Ted Gioia can’t factor these kinds of contextual ritual variables into his dualism suggests he thinks like a corporate suit even when he’s attempting to inveigh against corporate suits.  His wind-up is to this pat dualism, the kind of rigid either/or he has made his bread and butter at his Substack for years:

…

We have two camps, and you really need to pick a side:

(1) The dominant view in the economy treats music as something of little consequence or value. You shouldn’t even have to pay a penny to hear it. And if it can be replaced by an AI track—or even a podcast or twerking video or some other form of ‘content’—that’s perfectly fine. That’s because musicians don’t create sufficient value to deserve better treatment.

Or you can align yourself with the other view:

(2) Music is our most trusted pathway into a world of beauty and enchantment. It transforms our lives in a way that everyday products of consumption can’t replicate. And even though it is intangible, it endures longer than these consumer goods. At the end of your life, you will still turn to your beloved songs for comforts, long after other products have worn out and lost their value.

…

Guy L Beck would probably say that Ted Gioia is an advocate of the idea that music is a Window that opens up to a divine realm.  If you’ve never heard of Guy Beck I’m telling you about Beck right now.

https://sunypress.edu/Books/M/Musicology-of-Religion

Musicology of Religion: Theories, Methods, and Directions

By Guy L. Beck

Hardcover : 9781438493114, 368 pages, May 2023

Paperback : 9781438493107, 368 pages, November 2023

 

Beck summarized two ways of approaching music and explaining it, with the central metaphors being that music is a Window and that music is a Mirror.  The Window of music is what Ted Gioia endorses, it is seen as his most trusted pathway into a world of beauty and enchantment; it transforms his life in a way that other things can’t. It is “timeless”.  It is literally magical.  The Mirror, by contrast, reflects the world around it.  Art is a Mirror in general but music is viewed as a mirror that reflects the means of production and can tell educated people about the base and the superstructure of given cultures.  Unsurprisingly the Mirror metaphor is preferred by sociologists and critical theorists and anthropologists who are hesitant to endorse the Window because in order to believe in the Window version of music you kind of have to affirm some supernal realm toward which music could be that Window which you can see through or which can be opened. 

 

The way Beck approaches the history of musicology, however, is more coherent, competent and responsible than the glib dualisms Ted Gioia keeps selling his readers via Substack. In our day Ted Gioia’s blogging about music via Substack may be the single easiest example to choose of what Philip Stoltzfus described as the vice of most neo-Orphic partisans of music, a propensity to peddle the glibbest of glib dualisms predicated on surmises about gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class and so on.

 

Because I reject the dualism Gioia presents as being historically, philosophically and literarily irresponsible and dubious I don’t have to pick a side in his would-be fight.  I would be better off thinking about whether Wolverine could beat Batman in a fight. Or I could wonder whether Brock Samson could stand the slightest chance in a fight against Ranma Saotome or Yor Briar. Would Emperor Palpatine be able to defeat Sakura, Lum and Shinobu in a scenario fight?  All of those are pure fantasy fights but more plausible on their own absurdist terms than the two camps Gioia says we have to choose between.  Clearly he’s over-egged the pudding to the point where the only “real” and “moral” decision to make is the one he’s been trying to lead you by the nose to favor through his essay.

 

The problem is that the dualism Ted Gioia presents is a sham.  If he knows his two camps constitute a false dichotomy he can't honestly call himself The Honest Broker.  If he doesn't know his dualism is a house of cards the problem still stands. After all, the most honest broker in the world can still, honestly, sell you junk bonds.