Augustine vs. Eminem: The Current Cultural Impasse

I recently came across two blog posts on The Atlantic that represent the current cultural distance between conservatives and liberals. The first post criticized conservatives for being uncreative reactionaries who sound like idiots when they condemn popular culture. The second post was by a liberal who is proud to be an ignoramus about basic things that an educated person should know. Read together, both pieces show how the two sides don’t talk to each other.

The first piece, “When Conservatives Try to Talk about Rap,” is by Conor Friedersdorf. Friedersdorf reiterates what I and others have been saying for years: conservatives no longer create art (or when they try to it isn’t funded). They simply react to it. Friedersdorf says:

When prominent conservatives like Andrew Breitbart avow that culture matters more than politics, what they end up producing and publishing isn’t original cultural material–it’s derivative political criticism of the cultural products that liberals make.

And when they do react to it, it is usually, well, reactionary and ill-informed. Friedersdorf cites a National Review symposium where Mark Steyn, Mona Charen, and Jay Nordlinger tsk-tsked about how rap music is without feeling and musical quality. Steyn huffs and puffs, bombarding his target with his impressive vocabulary, but never mentions any rap songs by name. That, of course, would mean he had actually listened to some examples from the genre he was criticizing. And for too many conservatives, there’s no get-off-my-lawn charge in actually doing research.

The second blog post that is relevant to this was by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is also a writer for The Atlantic. In it, Coates celebrates his ignorance. In a previous post he had mentioned that he had no idea who St. Augustine was. To most people, this kind of ignorance would be a source of shame. Not Coates:

I believe in a great canon, but as a writer, I don’t much care. The artist’s canon must be personal. My canon happens to include Clifton, Neal, Rakim, Raekwon etc. and Fitzgerald, McPherson, Hurston, Melville, Wharton, Doctorow, Hurston and so on. Perhaps one day it will include Augustine. But there’s a lot of great stuff I haven’t read. I’ve never made it through a Hemingway novel. I have not read a single story of Mark Twain’s. I read Plato in college, which is to say I didn’t read it all. I loved Foucault but didn’t finish. I have not read Nietzsche. I have not read Henry James, Cervantes, Willa Cather, John Edgar Wideman, Wallace Stegner, Joseph Heller or J.D. Salinger.

Wow. In other words, Coates’s canon consists entirely of liberal writers who reflect his worldview. In this sense, he is no different from the reactionary conservatives that his colleague Conor Friedersdorf condemns.

For several years I have been arguing that American art suffers because conservatives don’t understand pop culture (and its often conservative messaging–see The Dark Knight Rises), and liberals have hostility to God. Both sides don’t see how understanding of what the other side is doing can enrich their artistic experience and give them greater understanding into what it means to be human. Let me explain it this way. One of the pivotal moments of my life was in the late 1970s when I saw The Who in concert for the first time. Here on the stage was the angst, despair, joy and longing I had in my heart as an adolescent–and it was delivered with a powerful current of grace and delightful sense of play. I had read Hemingway and The Catcher in the Rye, and The Who quickly became part of my pantheon of artistic alienation.

Yet I also had adults, including several teachers, who insisted that I mold that energy into something deeper and that I confront books whose ideas I may not agree with. That I gain greater understanding over my passions. I read Shakespeare, Dante, Christopher Lasch, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and, yes, Augustine. These writers not only helped me deal with the alienation that is part of the human condition, they led me to change my position on some issues. In short, they gave me a little bit of wisdom.

Conservatives and liberals both seem proud to be ignorant about culture and literature that is not directly in their wheelhouse of their Weltanschauung. We thus get the classic canon without room for new things, or pop culture without the creative, clarifying, and enriching life of God.