Epilogue 243 Lie ALL CULTURAL CHANGHS, the transformations de- scribed in this book are themselves subject to change. In our own day the perimeters of culure have altered once again, be- coming more expansive, more all-embracing. The anthropolog- ical notion that culture encompasses all genres and modes of a people's expressive life has sinoe the Great Depression and the Second World War become familiar throughout our society. Above the words “CULTURB! CULTURE! READ ALL ABOUT 117,” the New York Times in 1985 listed examples of the cultural dict available in its pages seven days a week: American Ballet Theatre * Norman Mailer * Cannes Film Festival * Kiss * New York Shakespeare Festival * .. . Santa Fe Light Opera ¢ The Big Chill * Warren Beatty * ... Diane Arbus ¢ Leonard Remstein * Rocky IV * ... Meryl Streep * Miles Davis * NoraEphron + Stcven Spielberg * Thelonious Monk * +» Kiri Te Kanawa * Eugene O'Neill * Stephen Sondheiin + . «» Claude Monet * Woody Allen + Mostly Mozart. If the Tizmes’ concept of culture was not all-inclusive, it certainly incorporated far more than it would have in the early years of this century or indeed only a relatively few years ago. Similarly, in 1986 Connecticut’s Stamford Center for the Arts advertised itself by picturing hands applauding Mel Torme, James Galway, . Leontyne Price, Andres Segovia, Peter, Paul, and Mary, PDQ Bach, and Sarah Vaughan. “Becthoven would like what we're doing in Stamford,” it announced. “So would Louis Armstrong. And James Dean. And Edith Bunker. And Nijinsky.”? Evidence of what appears to be a growing cultural eclecticisin and flexibility is everywhere at hand. The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas was hardly a lonely voice when he proclaimed in 1976: “There has been altogether too much separation of differ-244 puague ent types of music, such as so-called ‘classical’ and ‘tock.’ In the future, people will have to open up their cars and their souls éo: many kinds of sounds. There's no reason why a person can’t be, ardendy into rhythm-and-blues and chamber music as weil— they're so different, yet beautiful human realities.” Thomas was’, echoing what a number of jazz artists had been saying for some: time. “Soon it'll all be just music,” Duke Ellington predicted.) “Jazz’ is only a word and really has no meaning,” he declared. . “To keep the whole thing clear, once and for all, I don’t believe in categorics of any kind.” When the saxnphonist Charlie Parker was asked about the differences between jazz and European “arc” music, his answer was characteristic: “There is no boundary line ~ to art.” “We never labeled the music,” the drummer Kenny * Ctarke told an interviewer. “It was just modem music... We wouldn’t call it anything, really, just music.” In his memoirs, Dizzy Gillespie was willing to recognize only twa categories of music: “there’s only good and bad.”? wh The overlapping of culcural categories became so common that it was hardly surprising to find former opera singer and actress Maria Fisher, founder of the Washington, D.C., Becthoven So- day, raising funds tor die Thelonious Monk Foundation, named in honor of the late jazz pianist. No more surprising was a 1987. recording by San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet that induded a‘ scherzo by Charles Ives, an arrangement of the jazz saxophonist _ Omette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman,” a modemist version of the © American hymn “Amazing Grace,” and Bela Bartok's Quartet | No. 3. “At this late date in our musical history,” the critic John Rockwell wrote, “interesting new compositions can come from any source, conventionally classical or otherwise.” In terms of quality and innovation, be concluded, “genre distinctions mean next to nothing.” In her essay “One Culture and the New Sen- sibility,” Susan Sontag attempted to sum up the cultural shift: Onc important consequence of the new sensibility (with its aban- donment of the Matthew Arnold idea of culture) has already boc alluded to—namely, that the distinction between “high” and “low” culture seems less and less meaningful . . . For it is impoctant to understand that the affecdon which many younger artists and intellectuals feel for the popular arts is not a new philistinism (as hhas so often been charged) or a species of anti-intellectualism orfypege ee some kind of abdication from culture . . . It reflects a new, more open way of looking at the world and at things in the world, our world, I¢ does not mean the renunciation of all standards . . . The point ix that there arc new standards, new standards of beauty and _ tyke and taste, The new sensibility is defiantly pluralistic.® Ie is pechaps 000 carly to assess the dimensions of the “defi- ance” or the full extent to which this rhetoric has been translated into action. But there can be little doubt that it is more than mere rhetoric. The pluralism describod by Sontag fias been prac- ticed for decades by those jazz musicians who have reached out, with a minimum of fuss ot comment, to embrace the themes, the techniques, the idioms of any music they found appealing. As carly as the second decade of this century, the stride pianist James P. Johnson, who was to have a major influence upon Fats Waller and Duke Ellington, was paying little attention to the boundary lincs: “From listening to classical piano records and concerts . . . I would fear concert effects and build them into blues and rags . . . When playing a heavy stomp, I'd soften it right down, then Pd make an abrupt change like I heard Bee- thoven do in 2 sonata.” When the pianist Earl Hincs discussed the formative influcnces upon his music, he included bod) the Baptist church and Chopin. When Gil Evans was asked if the Sketches of Spain score he wrote for Miles Davis, which was influenced by the Spanish composers Joaquin Rodrigo and Man- uel de Falla, was classical or jazz, music, he responded: “That's a merchandiser’s problem, not mine.” In recent years such nomi- nally “classical” composers and performers as Gunther Schuller and the Kronos Quartet have followed the same pattem.‘ The blurring of cultural classifications has been accompanied by the efforts of producers and performers of drama, symphonic and operatic music, and other forms of high culture, to reach out to their audiences in ways not known since the nineteenth century. Although there have becn intermittent attempts thoughout the ewentieth century to make Shakespeare accessible ‘once. more to a larger public, the endeavor first gained force in the productions of such directors as Joseph Papp in the i96cs. By the 1980s a production of The Comedy of Errors featuring juggling, acrobatics, rope walking, tap dancing, unicycling, and baton twirling was greeted by critics not with disdain bur with24 enthusiasm. When Kandy Nelson, onc of the featured actor. . insisted chat "Steep ou aye Orn Peed OY what we're doing,” the New York Times coosulted the English . Elizabethan scholar A. L. Rowse, who agreed, observing that’ “it’s a play thar noods to be filled out with acrobatic fun, juggling : and the like ... The thing we must remember about Shakespeare ‘ is that he was so very open-minded. He was very much interested in production, and I think he would be quite sympathetic to an acrobatic version of The Comedy of Errors." In the world of opera the attempt to attract the heterogencous audiences of the past has taken the form of “supertitles”—trans- lations or paraphrases of the libretto projected onto a stage screen to allow audiences greater access to forcign-language operas. The financial difficulty many symphony orchestras have experienced in recent ycars has led to an enhanced understanding of the need - to reach out to more people. “We did a survey recently and the average age of our audience was well over so years,” Edward Q. - Moutton, the general manager and president of the Columbus, Ohio, Symphony Orchestra revealed. “We're cither fast beoom- ing a dinosaur or we'd better get to the yuppics prety fast. T think we've been a linde smug.” In the 1980s the New York Philharmonic began a community outreach program with con- certs in such Harlem locations as the Abyssinian Baptist Church and the Apollo Theater. “Ie’s a part of our mandate and policy to be a cultural institution for all of the city and ics inhabicants,” the philharmonic’s director of educational activities announced. “Historically, people have not come, perhaps because it’s unfa- miliar territory or they may have felt they were not wanted. Those perceptions are pretty longstanding, and ies up to the institution to try to break. down those barriers. Similarly, Edward Kresky, et chabeman ofthe New York State Council on the Arts, insisted that muscums had to become more responsive as well. “Our museums have to reach out more into ethnic arts than they have in the past. There has to be more of a move into the community . .. We have had a great growth in numbers of instinutions. We need equal growth in the numbers of audiences if the organizations are going to survive. Some of the poople we're secking to reach have never had the experience of taking their children to concerts or museums. There are eco-Zl nomic hurdles, but if they'll go and feel comfortable with things they are attuned to ethnically, hopefully they will broaden their interests into other areas.” Interestingly, the urge to reach out to a broader audience has led some muscums to focus on the very objects that muscums at the tum of the century rejected with such finality. The Metropolitan Muscum of Art’s extensive collections of plaster casts, which had been slowly crumbling into decay in a storchouse under Manhattan’s West Side Highway, were rediscovered by such institutions as the Quecns Muscum in New York, which in the 1970s ‘and sp8os began to restore and exhibit them along with Princeton and Camcgie Mellon Universities and the New York Academy of Art. Ironically, since the casts were made before the effects of pollution took their coll on the originals, they contain more detail than the genuine works of art. Beginning with the exhibitions of industrial products and machines in the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and cul- minating most forcefully in the work of such artists as Andy Warhol since the 1960s, the once firm line between the unique products of high art and those of industrial or mass art grew less and less distinc. “Painting a soup can is noc a radical act,” the critic Robert Hughes wrote in 1971. Warhol’s radicalism resided in his adaptation of “the means of production of soup cans to the way he produced paintings, turning them out en mase— consumer art mimicking die process as well as the look of con- sumer culture.” As John Russell observed after the artist’s death in the winter of 1987, Warhol embraced kitsch “and walked away with all that it had to give,” turned his back on the idea of art as something unique, and “was interested above all in the demystification of art.” The art historian Kirk Varnedoe, ap- pointed head of the Muscum of Modern Art’s department of painting and sculpture, announced an exhibition entitled “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture,” scheduled for the spring of 1991. The purpose of the show, Vamedoe declared, would be to examine the close relationship of such expressive forms as comics, graffiti, and advertising to modemist innova- tion: “The founding premise of Modernism was to call into question the distinction between high and low art, from Cubist collage on. The show cuts the distinction between modem and Contemporary, and raises basic issues of the relationship of mod-ato ¢m art to society. Built into our charter is the notion of crossia borders and beating down standard hierarchies.”” 3 An examination of university curricula from the’ 1916086 < reveals the same picture of change. Courses and studies in : for cxample, began to indude groups and subjects ‘emt igf nored or af least largely neglected: workers, immigrants, women, blacks, popular and mass entertainment, leisure activities, the’ culture of the home, workplace, and public arena. Movies, radios. popular novels and magazines, even comic strips, became part of; the materials studied by students and scholars endeavoring t3 understand American culture. When Professor E. D. Hirsch and: his associates compiled the list “What Literate Americans Know,” for Hirsch’s 1987 book, Cultural Literacy, they included Saint Thomas Aquinas and Fred Astaire, Beethoven and the Beatles:- Chaucer and Ty Cobb, classical music and Currier and Ives; Dante and Disney, B = mc* and Duke Ellington, Goethe and. Grandma Moses, Hamlet and “Home Sweet Home,” Henry! James and Jesse Janes, King Lear and King Kong, Henry Wads- worth Longfellow and Joe Louis, Karl Marx and the Marx Broth- ers, Mozart and Mother Goose, Othello and “O, Susanna,” Pi- casso and Pinocchio, the Renaissance and Babe Ruth, Socrates and swing, Tchaikovsky and Tarzan, William Wordsworth and Mac West. The argument was not that all of these were of equal aesthetic worth but that all of them were part ofa cultural matrix that defined “culturally Literate” Americans at the close of the twenticth cencury.s : As cultural categories softened and overlapped, formally de spised genres began to be conceived and spoken of in tones once limited to more ethereal expressive forms. Thus when computer technology made it possible to transform old black-and-white movies into color movies, a coalition of outraged directors, screen writers, theatrical unions, cinematographers, and critics denounced the development as “barbarism.” “God knows every motion picture is not a work of art,” the director Sydney Pollack declared, “but if we are to say that motion pictures are an art form, it seems only logical that there is an artist responsible, and T can’t see why that artist should be afforded fess protection than an artist in any other field.” Testifying before Congress, the actor, writer, and director Woody Allen rejected the notion that public7 cpu 249 ference was a valid argument in favor of “colorization.” “It would be clearly irrelevant if every person in the United States wanted The Maltese Falcon in color. The moral here is, you should not be able to take an artist’s work and change it without his approval.” The analogies used reveal the changes that have taken place in conceptions of culture, If the public wanted Hamlet to live at the end, Allen asked, should Shakespeare’s play be changed? “Ir’s so absurd. You can’t have a culture like that.” When the businessman Ted ‘Turer defended his right to “color- ize” by remarking, “The last time I checked I owned those films,” a columnist quickly rejoined, “If Ted Tuer . . . bought the Mona Lisa and painted a mustache on it, would it be enough for him to say, ‘Last time I checked 1 owned that painting?” Even this brief and inadequate summary of current tends makes it evident that the transformation examined in this book has not been all-encompassing, Culture remains a dynamic pro- cess, a constant interchange between the past and the present. Nevertheless, as significant as these recent developments have been, it would be premature to announce the arrival of the Age of Cultural Ecuncnism. It would be a mistake to conclude that the cultural transformation described here was merely onc point in an ever-revolving cycle of change which we have by now— happily or unhappily—moved well beyond. In fact, for alll of the recent developinents, the major transformation that took place at the turn of the last century helped to shape attitudes and establish categories which continue to affect profoundly our un- derstanding of and our reactions to culture, If the cultural values and attitudes traced in this study are no longer as dominant as they were, their presence continues to be felt whenever and wherever culture is discussed. This certainly has been evident in the reaction to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. 1 is possible to evaluate Bloom’s work in terms of the author’s reading —~or misreading-— of dassical philosophy, as Martha Nussbaum has done, or in terms of his documentation in and knowledge of American cul- tural history, which are so perfunctory and shallow that one is tempted to appropriate the phrase a historian of an earlier gen- sration once employed in criticizing a book for having been written “without fear and without research.” Such judgments,250 Epilogue 3 however, risk missing the truth that Bloom’s book is less a scholarly work than a cultural phenomenon which has found deep resonance in contemporary society. Bloom has in effect written a largely autobiographical account permeated by an angst shared by enough readers to have made it the second best selling hard-cover nonfiction book of 1987.'° ” What is particularly striking and most significant about Bloom’s book is how closely his message at the end of this century approximates the jeremiad of the close of the last century. There is the same ethereal, sacred sense of culture, which Bloom defines in Amoldian terms as “everything that is uplifting and edifying,” as “the peak expression of man’s creativity,” as “some thing high, profound, respectable,” as that which “restores ‘the unity in art and life’ of the ancient polis.” : There is the same sense of America’s cultural deterioration, the same conviction that our culture, indeed, our entire civilization; is experiencing “an intellectual crisis of the greatest magnitude,” which for Bloom is symbolized by the state of our young people: “Today's select students know so much Iess, are so much more cut off from the traditions, are so much slacker intellectually, that they make their predecessors look like prodigies of ‘cul: ture.”!2 Vag There is the same sense of the absolute qualitative distinctive: ness of cultural genres, which makes cultural degeneration ¢asy to spot. “There is no relation between popular culture and high culture,” Bloom tells us unequivocally as he laments that “the: former is all that is now influcatial on our scene.” Classical music,’ which once functioned as “the only regularly recognizable dass, distinction between educated and uneducated in America,” 38° the only remaining “class distinction between high and low,” is, “dead among the young.” It has been replaced by rock music’ which Bloom assures us contains “nothing noble, sublime, pro-; found, delicate, tasteful or even decent,” and has “room only for! the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tooqueville, wamed us would be the character of democratic art.” This ‘Sunk: food for the soul,” this “gutter phenomenon,” this “voyage 03: the underworld,” is produced and disseminated by an industry. that Bloom asserts “has all the moral dignity of drug trafficking’ and has helped convert the lives of our youth “into a nonstops!9 Epilogue 251 commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy,” which has effectively removed them from their heritage: “As long as they | have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition ! has to say. And after its prolonged use, when they take it off,/ they find they are deaf.” . There is the same sense that aulture is less something that & than something that was; something created for ctemity in an age before the dominance of specialists, when individuals with vision—*the best minds”—could debate on the highest level “a unified view of nature and man’s place in it.” What is essential about the Platonic dialogues, Bloom insists, “is reproducible in almost all times and places.” Thus the only scrious solution to the problem occasioned by “the undeniable fact” that our young people “are uncivilized, and that the universities have some re- sponsibility for civilizing them,” is to turn once more to the wisdom of the past, the good old Great Books approach, in which a liberal education means reading certain generally recognized classic vexts, just read- ing them, letting them dictate what the questions are and the method of approaching them—not forcing them into categories we make up, not weating them as historical products, bur trying to read them as their authors wished them to be read." There is, as the statement above indicates, the same sense that we can somehow become privy to how the great minds of the past “wished” their works to be read, or heard, or performed, for all time, by all people, in all ciccumstances. In spite of the evidence we possess that so many enduring works of art were created for specific performers by artists perfectly willing to sce them altered or interpreted by other performers; in spite of our increased understanding of the difficulty, if not impossibility, of performing a play or a concerto without infusing it with the spirit and perception of the performing artist; in spite of our recognition of the insurmountable complexities involved in knowing precisely how painters, musicians, or writers desired us to experience their works and our comprehension of how many Producing artists harbored no such concrete desires in the first Place, this cult of the sacred inaltcrable work of art continues into our own time.252 Bpilague | There is the same sense, so well articulated at the turn of the, century by Henry James and Henry Adams, that unity has beet, replaced by multiplicity. “Liberal education flourished when it. prepared the way for the discussion of a unified view of nature! and man’s place in it,” Bloom informs us. The contemporary student finds no such unity: “He finds a democracy of the dis- ciplines which . . . is really an anarchy . . . he finds a bewildering variety of courses . . . Nor does he usually find readily ayailable examples, cither among students or professors, of a unified use of the university's resources . . . So the student must navigate aroong a collection of camival barkers, cach trying to hire him into a particular sideshow.” Bloom assures us that his grandpar- ents, though uneducared by current standards, had the untold benefits of the Bible, with its unified faith and philosophies. In spite of their M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s, later generations, who have had to find their way through the “technical smorgasbord” of contentporary school systems, cannot talk about the human con- dition without uttering “clichés, superficialitics, the material of satire.” The difference is obvious—his grandparents’ generation possessed the unified vision of “the real nature of things,” the “great revelations, epics and philosophies” provided by “the Book,” which Bloom is quick to say need not be the Bible, “but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer,” there is “nothing to sce out there, and even- tually little left inside.” This conflation of education and revela- tion, of discriminating choice and blind acceptance, prooceds from still another conviction Bloom shares with the older jere- miad: that only the minority can fruitfully investigate and discuss the nature of the cultural authority which the majority needs 00 6 There is, finally, the same sense that culture is something caeated by the few for the few, threatened by the many, and imperiled by democracy; the conviction that culture cannot come from the young, the inexperienced, the untutored, the marginal; the belief that culture is finite and fixed, defined and measured, complex and difficult of access, recognizable only by those trained to recognize it, comprehensible only to those qualified to com- it:Uo Epilogue 253 The real community of man, in the midst of ail the self-contradic- tory simulacra of community, is the community of those who sock the truth, of the potential knowers, that is, in principle, of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact this indudes only a few, the true friends .. .6 Bloom’s is not an isolated voice. We have been hearing it for some time now. Historians are told that they should diminish, if not abandon, their studies of thar’ multiplicity of ethnic mi- norities, workers, immigrants, and women, about whose culture and role we still have so much to leam if we are to truly com: prehend the American past, and that they should tum again to the sweeping politically focused narratives that once supposedly gave us a sense of the unified whole, although in fact they focused overwhelmingly upon a decided minority of the population in terms of class, ethnicity, region, and gender. Students of literature are tuld that they must stop tampering with the canon and confine their energies once more to the small list of those worthy of study and perpetuation. Indeed, the Washington Past critic Jonathan Yardley is so convinced that the panthcon of writers worth studying is absolutely finite that he can only attribute ignoble motives to those who would go beyond it: A central fact of life in the humanities departments, the English departments in particular, is that all the really good subjects for study already have been taken—have, in fact, been studied right into the ground. If there is anything left to be said about Haw- thome or Hemingway, Melville or Crane, Longfellow or Frost, it could only be said by a person of such originality of mind as to border on genius . . . With the good subjects for study already taken, they [professors of literature] have done the perfectly seu- sible thing and invented new subjects around which to construct their careers. This means that they must invest chose subjects with academic legitimacy: Hence the rush to cover with glory writers and books that previously had been properly regarded as of minor scholarly interest. In a February 1988 speech before four hundred university pres- idents and deans, Secretary of Education William Bennctt re- ferred to the reconsideration of the cultural canon as “curricular debasemene” and accused faculty of “trashing” Plato and Shake-254 Epilogue '2 speare. All of this furor often obscurcs the cultural conservatism of the many universities in which American art history continues to be neglected, entire genres of American music_are_totally ignored, and non-European culture in general tends to be sus- 7 It also obscures the fact that a great many influential voices continue to advocate the values and standards that prevailed at the beginning of this century. Classical music, the critic Will Crutchfield recently charged, “is more accessible than it ought to be already, because we already have gone fairly far down the road of cheapening and diluting it in order to make it accessible.” When the ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev was questioned about his superb athletic abilities, he interrupted the reporter and de- clared, “I am not an athlete. I am a great artist.” Asked to define “artistry,” the violinist Yehudi Menuhin responded, “I would say that it is a subtle reaction to barbarism and crudity . .. Art, true art, opposes such reactions in the way that I suppose real religion would oppose them, and teaches instead humility, tolerance, honor, respect.” “his sacred spirit animates not only artists of an older generation like Menuhin but younger ones like the pianist, conductor, and musical director James Levine of the Metropol- itan Opera, who in the mid-r980s adamantly opposed the use of the increasingly popular English superutles: “Over my dead body will they show those things at this house. I cannot imagine not wanting the audience riveted on the performers at every moment.” But, as Levine was to learn, in the universe of sacral- ized culture even the defenders of purity have difficulty being pure enough. Levine soon found himself under attack by the critic Donal Henahan for placing the artistic fortunes of the Metropolitan Opera in the hands of the “spectacle merchants,” by presenting opera not primarily as a musical art form but as “sumptuous stage designs,” “empty spectacle,” and “conspicuous consumption” of an “artistically dubious sort.” The opera world was in trouble, the tenor Jon Vickcrs insisted in 1987, “because it’s being invaded by those techniques that are corrupting our socicty—big PR, the personality cult, techniques that create hys- teria but do not elevate man. They degrade our art . . . We cannot compromise . . . We mustn’t smear the line between art3 Epilogue 255 and entertainment.” “You cannot bring art to the masses,” he proclaimed. “You never will.”"* The debate, then, goes on, and it is important to understand that it is not primarily between those with standards and those whose rampant relativism has robbed them of all discrimination, as the defenders of “Culture” would have it. The debate, of course, can deteriorate into a mere battle of vanities. The afi- cionados of any cultural genre—no matter how lowly a place it is accorded in the hierarchy of culrure—can become stubbornly elitist and insular in their conviction that the sun shines brightest in their own cultural backyards. Nevertheless, it is possible to close one’s cars to this parochial cacophony pf competing elites and focus upon the real debate, which is between those on one side who “know” what culture is and what it is not, who have a map of its fixed perimeters and a profile of the identity of its creators and its followers, who perceive culture to be something finite and fragile, which needs to be conserved and protected from the incessant Philistinism that threatens it, and those on the other side who, possessing no map and litde liking for fixed and unmovable fences and boundaries, believe that worthy, cn- during culuure is not the possession of any single group or genre or period, who conceive of culture as neither finite nor fixed but dynamic and expansive, and who remain unconvinced that the moment an expressive form becomes accessible to large numbers of people it loses the aesthetic and intellectual criteria necessary to classify it as culture. To say that there is both nonsense and wisdom being articulated by both camps is to state the obvious, but that should not blur the crucial distinctions between their positions. We have in recent decades begun to move gradually but de- cisively away from the rigid, class-bound definitions of culture forged at the dlose of the nineteenth century. The contemporary debate is a reaction—often an extremely angry one—to this de- velopment. If the debate is to be fruitful it nceds to be rooted not merely in the web of our immediate acsthetic and social predilections but in the matrix of history, which can allow us to perceive more clearly what shapes culture has assumed in the American past, which may in turn allow us to understand better256 = Epilogue 74 both the possibilities and the effects of the types of cultural boundaries we embrace. More than two decades ago the novelist Ralph Ellison worried that the chance for empathy and identi- fication with those of other backgrounds was being “blasted in the interest of specious political and philosophical conccits.” Those writers and scholars who constructed “prefabricated Ne- groes,” which they then superimposed upon the black commu- nity, Ellison maintained, were shocked and even indignant “when someone thrusts his head through the page and yells, Watch out there, Jack, there’re people living under here.” The identical point can be made concerning culture. Here too “political and philosophical conceits” have erected prefabricated and stereo- typed categories that transform complexity into banality. Thus the Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow can demonstrate the limits of his own education by issuing his ignorant—or arrogant—chal- lenge to those who would expand the corpus of the cultural curriculum: “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read them.” Thus Professor Bloom, who speaks so feelingly of “the community of those who seek the truth,” can harshly dismiss an entire genre of music as worth- less and harmful without giving us the slightest indication that he has made any serious effort to study or understand it.!9 In defining and redefining the contours of culture, we are not merely dealing with intellectual abstractions; we are dealing with lives and minds, we are dealing with people, and we owe them more than the hubris of narrow self-defense; we owe them no less than the adoption of an open search for and a careful un- derstanding of what culture has been in our past and can become in our future.