“That’s one of the things about this time that really hard on me because temperamentally I really only like the quotidian and the small and I really dislike History making events. I would have hated to have been alive during the French Revolution or the American Civil War. I am thankful I was only a baby in 1967 and 68.” Mitch Hampton
“Every conversation becomes the same conversation. Ideological differences were inflamed, but not because of intellectual separation. It was the narcissism of small differences amplified into differences that were no longer small. The phantasm that got shattered was the possibility of living an autonomous life, separate from the lives of others” Chuck Klosterman
“Humanists are often trying to hold onto the thread of a question that was asked a long time ago. That’s why we read old books. The question easily evades you and it is hard to stay on track. The best way to do so is to see a bunch of minds working through that very question over time - themselves being influenced by one another. And that’s why we read old books. None of the questions has ever been settled. It’s all still live. The tech people think the Humanities is just total bullshit. It never works the other way. The humanists never think that the tech stuff is bullshit because it’s evident that it works - the phones work. It’s evident that the tech people know stuff because the phones work. But you don’t have to participate in the tech for proof of its value and that it works. There’s an asymmetry as to whether you need to know the thing to reap the benefits from the thing. And the Humanities cannot give you that because you do have to participate in the Humanities to reap the benefits from it. You don’t have proof from a distance and the Humanities can’t give you that,” Agnes Callard
Agnes Callard is telling us that we have to, in a metaphoric phrase, “do the reading”, as it were, to see certain kinds of results in the world. And by doing the reading I don’t just mean books, old or new. I am including, as only one of several possibilities, my own experiences in attending all of those hundreds of productions I discussed in my previous post. These example immerse us in the thick of what is usually called education, one of the popular topics this time of year,
It is an empirical matter that when you have a lot of experiences you will simply be more knowledgeable: you might not have more wisdom but you will also have a good start towards even approaching wisdom or enlightenment, both of which are frankly far less important than cultural literacy or basic knowledge.
This might be the only reason why some of the types of episodes I do, like the book lunches or the aesthetics series might be more important than I had initially thought when embarking upon such episodes.
All of these matters, however are colored, and possibly even constructed by a constellation of various and disparate values that nevertheless come together, however contingently, to form what is best thought of as a sensibility.
As you can remember from my episode deep in the global environment of the Pandemic as quoted above, I will always deeply desire those cultural experiences that are quotidian, maybe even “small”, and experiences which tend not to made demands on humanity such that they “must rise to needs of the moment” or “take a stand” and other such bromides. As you can imagine this sensibility on my part is diametrically opposed to much of what is even possible at this moment, where, as Klosterman so perceptively puts it, “every conversation became the same conversation. The phantasm that got shattered was the possibility of living an autonomous life, separate from the lives of others.” Conformity is still a danger, perhaps a greater danger now than when society was in fact more uniform by habit.
One of the curious and, for me, unwelcome developments in our general culture is something that was first explained clearly to me by one of my favorite public intellectuals, Chuck Klosterman, when he said that “non-fiction” is the genre of our entire culture. Klosterman said, in one of the many interviews that accompanied his book The Nineties, that when he read bad fiction or a novel it was a “waste of his time” but at least a bad documentary would have some “information” for him from which to gleam and be either educated or (less probably) enlightened.
Now when I say that a non-fiction culture is a negative development I say that it is profoundly anti-aesthetic. It conceives of culture as some kind of instruction manual or delivery system for “content”. I hope I don’t need to state here in this context that what I am saying has anything to do with any documentary considered as a genre per se.
One of the greatest motion pictures ever made is one titled Domestic Violence, (by Frederick Wiseman) and in describing my praise of it that way I am saying it is a better film than, say, any of the dramatic and fictional streaming series of the past couple of decades, the ones so beloved by so many, and ones I have had the privilege of binge watching over the past few years or so. And to make matters still more complicated, I still prefer, say, Romy And Michelle's High School Reunion over any of these. (But not, of course, more than any Wiseman). That is, my quotidian sensibility is always anti-apocalyptic as well as non-conformist. It is no accident that I so often extol forms of comedy over any forms of drama, melodrama or tragedy.
According to this dominant view (really one sensibility but one that is dominant in our era) what matters ultimately is whether we are achieving one goal or another, specifically a single goal that is considered objective, rather than simply focusing on the sensations of our actual experiences and finding that sufficiently sustaining. Because it is only the sensory meaning and value that makes for the experience of an aesthetic object - and makes for our temporal, live consciousness as human beings.
These are all ultimately a question of values - not treating the word values as we too often do as a some kind of honorific, but as a partially relativistic way of classifying and describing all the many values that real individuals on the ground hold lightly or strongly. There is not a human being alive nor collectivity of persons nor intuition in existence without values; the values present might be downright evil, say, power over all others, or limitless ambition, but they are values nevertheless. Looked at in this way the very concept of nihilism might point to an illusion.
All of us have feelings like these over cultural products like books or movies, that I am categorizing as works of art. Not only do we have intense favoritism over this or that object these feelings, if that is what they are, are intimately intertwined with hard to articulate yet very relatable things like values and sensibility.
In Ethics And The Limits Of Philosophy Bernard Williams goes to some great length to discuss how ideas or ideals of right or wrong are inextricable from entire lifestyles and traditions, in short, distinct time periods and eras, Each of these eras is separated by temporal and geographical distance. It is possible that any ideal or ethic might simply be unavailable to a people or an era, even if said ethic or idea is “objectively” correct in some way. I don’t feel I need to say that this corrective cuts against the way even the most learned among us thinks of matters like these - as simply objective facts to be learned or discovered.
“Consider once more the hyper traditional society, and suppose that it does have some rules expressed in terms of something like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. When it is first exposed to another culture and invited to reflect, it cannot suddenly discover that is an implicit relativization hidden in its language. It will always be, so to speak, too early or too late for that. It is too early when they have never reflected or thought of an alternative to ‘us’. It is too late, when they confront the new situation; that requires them to see beyond their existing rules and practices.”
And later on,
“Many outlooks that human beings have had are not real options for us now. The life of a Bronze Age chief or a medieval samurai are not real options for us now; there is no way of living them.”
It might be important to consider that Williams wrote this roughly in the early to mid 1980s but I am not so sure since his example were of ancient periods then as now.
One of the illusions that our Internet Age promulgates is that, with the simultaneity of documents or records of all past, differing eras, there is always the possibility and temptation to literally recreate on a mass scale any previous era that appears appealing. Practically all of right wing politics is simply about such a project, which of course its exponents depict as objective Truth and never as a subjective preference. Another equal illusion is the selective representation of previous eras and individual human beings so that it all appears one grand, wicked mistake from which we need to be relentlessly vigilant in protecting ourselves.
One of the realities of our Internet Age is the real availability and possibility of diversity in artistic styles, perhaps more than in previous eras when a style might not have been in currency or circulation or a style might have been seen as the sole standard. We are not in a situation in which the age dictates that a novel be a nineteenth century one, with lots of characters. (Contrary to appearances, not even streaming television has to be like that, it’s simply that audiences and creators alike feel it is some kind of necessity).
Music doesn’t have to only sound like Mozart or The Ramones; both are alive possibilities but only if musicians are so moved to emulate either.
I elaborate on all of this to say that as of late this educational dimension of our podcast has become increasingly important to me, even, possibly, urgent, and that this kind of edification is actually helped by the Internet itself and I say this with a full and abiding conclusion on my part that the Internet is always already a force more for bad than good, on whatever measure that could be on offer.
Yet when one thinks of the enormous oppressiveness and simply bad ethics of those “hyper traditional societies” in Williams’ formulation, one realizes that the cliche, “it was always thus”, is ever true. And of course many hundred of millions of people will look upon such examples as something to be desired and followed, and ultimately forced upon the rest of us, by bullet if not by ballot. All aesthetic experiences are attempts to understand - this is the reflective part of looking back unto ourselves and who or what we have been. There is not a single guest, too, on our show who is not consistently bringing their values into the episode, even if this means the value of learning to recreate the mechanism or craft of learning how to make something.
One of the original missions of the podcast was to create a place for a guest that was undisturbed by any impediments to the expressions of the guest’s values and even whole sensibilities. Only over time and into season six have I more seriously considered the educational ethic of introducing all of these to a general audience. The dual purposes sustain each other: it is only the free expression of a human being of what they have learned or achieved that can best communicate what something is.
Thomas Moore reminded me when I read his Care Of The Soul that “education means to ‘lead out’.” Recently as a guest on the podcast he stated that every single human being could be truly educated. Those words have stayed with me since that episode - I am tempted to say haunted - both for what feels to me to be their utopian impossibility as much as for the possible indispensability of such a project. The more I think about Moore’s words, the more I can say that something of this exists as an attitude powering the journey of an aesthete.
A sensibility is one of the most difficult things to evoke. You can gleam something of my own sensibility from the signed portrait of Bobby Short painted by Richard Merkin which frames my living room. There are a great many things in culture that are so completely at odds with both the musician and painter as to be from what could feel like a different planet or galaxy. Some of these, perhaps surprisingly, I am also interested in, more understandably, many I am not.
More than one sensibility has been exhibited on this podcast and hopefully there can be as much opportunity to lead others out of their ordinary knowledge as well as to deepen the knowledge that they might already possess.
Thank you Mitch!