Why Most Student Art Is Terrible

A painting by Bouguereau who mastered the artistic skills most art students are now taught to disdain.

I happened yesterday to stop into the art gallery of a local college. On display was work from a student that, like almost every student art show I have ever seen, evinced a desire on the part of the artist to be perceived as artistic, rather than to be artistic.

Pieces at shows like these routinely consist of found objects, assemblages of random junk, and “abstract” art that has no significance to anyone but to the student artist, and which seem significant to him only because they allow him to fulfill an assignment in under a quarter of an hour.

To judge by the quality of work I routinely see at these shows, it seems that the most popular sort of artist with college art departments is the con artist. Who else could bilk thousands from young adults in exchange for an education that fails to equip them with any of the critical skills that traditional art depended on?

All this came to mind upon reading this post by Douglas Wilson. Wilson says there are two approaches to art. The first, “the death trap” approach:

makes everything depend on the will of the artist. Art is defined as whatever an artist does. If an approved member of the guild produced it, then it is a work of art. Nothing determines what is or is not art apart from the intention of the artist. And however reluctant this community of artists might be to pour out accolades on others for this kind of thing, it is the price they have to pay in order to get theiraccolades when it is their turn.

And this is why the layman’s critique—“my five-year-old could do better than that”—falls on deaf ears. That five-year-old, whatever his other merits, is not a member of the guild. The layman is appealing to a standard that was abandoned by the illuminatiover a century ago. The standard is no longer how good you might be (for good is a meaningless term now), the standard is rather what group you belong to. Are you a member of the union?

Most student art, even at Christian schools, is terrible because these departments are preparing students for membership in this “death trap” union. One would expect that, at least at Christian schools, art departments would strive to keep alive the aesthetic tradition that emphasized values like rhythm, balance, order, unity, good composition and beauty. But, any department who attempted that would be branded as impossibly retrograde and probably have some hard questions to answer when accreditation time rolls around. It’s much easier instead to tell student artists whatever they make is art and that anyone who questions that is a Philistine whose presence and opinions are best avoided.

Don’t Send Your Child to Canopy Oaks– Or to Any Other Public School

The human being, it cannot be said enough in this age, longs for a home we can never quite attain. So, the human quest has always been to create for ourselves a shadow of that home we long for here in our families, in our communities, and in society at large.

Home is, among other things, a place of order. Home involves family and families involve sex. Thus is home always a place of sexual order. Since people, in the form of children, come from sex, and because children represent the extension of our home into the future, sexual order is paramount among the kinds of order a home requires. Yet, attacks on basic sexual order are unceasing now.

One such assault is happening in Tallahassee, Florida and a number of parents are rightly incensed.  New fifth grade teacher, Chloe Bressack recently

Chloe Bressack’s now infamous note

sent home a note saying students should address her as “Mx. Bressack” and use the pronouns “they, them and their” when referring to her. Students are apparently obligated to do all this because Chloe Bressack identifies as “gender neutral,” whatever that means.

These instructions seem not to have gone over well with some parents, though none of the stories give much detail.  Nevertheless, parental fury is the right response. The education of children is one means by which  human beings seek to build a tolerable home for ourselves.

Parents who have entrusted the job of educating their children to a state institution are routinely betrayed, as they have been in this instance. The entire point of the education they expected, whether they know it or not, was to prepare children to assume the responsibilities of home building and all that entails.

In Tallahassee, instead of executing that mission, the education establishment has lobbed another missile at the sexual order that makes home a possibility. Rage on the part of parents is justified, especially because the assault on the home becomes more vicious and pervasive every day. Public schools in Chicago recently announced they will punish students who refuse to pretend men are women and vice versa.

Bressack’s request that children refer to her as “they, them and their” is not accidental. Rather, it shows a bit of how the Left undermines education, families and the sense of home. Using “they, them and their” to refer to a single individual is grammatically and logically wrong. One would think a teacher’s job would be to correct such errors. Perhaps that was once the case, the teacher’s job now is to insist on them.

By requiring children daily to make such errors, the Left seeks to undermine their ability to use language correctly and thereby to undermine their ability to think clearly. Gender revolutionaries are right about one thing: pronouns are not trivial. They are a necessary means of seeing and naming reality rightly. Take away children’s ability to use  correct pronouns and you render them unable to name, and thus challenge, the conditions of Leftist oppression under which they live.

Bressack isn’t the only one at fault. Paul Lambert, the principal of the school, has defended her.  He claims Bressack has no agenda other than to teach math and science. Anyone paying attention recognizes this technique. Leftists routinely mouth such deceptions even when everyone can see them for the falsehoods they are. Of course, Bressack has an agenda. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be sending home requests that students pretend she’s not female. Insisting ten-year-olds participate in your precious self-delusion is an agenda. The point is that this thinking isn’t the quirk of a single teacher. The rot goes all they way up. The infection is spread far and wide.

Too many parents comfort themselves thinking this sickness won’t touch them or their children. They lull themselves back to sleep by telling themselves this is a big city problem. It isn’t. It will come. Sooner or later every public school will start teaching children that being a man or woman is only a matter of preference.

The only rational response, the only possible means of safeguarding our home building is to remove children from the public schools immediately. Parents must accept that public schools are not our friends. We must acknowledge that the system’s role is not to educate children to accept the responsibilities of home, family and community.  Rather, their goal is to recruit children for an ongoing revolution bent on destroying Civilization as we have known it.

The loyalties of the public school leadership are clear. They have thrown in their lot with the worst elements of the modern world. They intend to do whatever is necessary to destroy the precious things of life. The only question that remains is whether we will allow it.

How The Left Ruins Education

One of the most important things I learned in graduate school is how many dumb people are in graduate school. More than once I was shocked by both the ignorance and the inability to follow a line of logic that many people, including members of the faculty, exhibited. Not every program is like this, but far more are like this than what most people expect.

Discipline makes a difference, no doubt. The average intelligence of a classroom of Ph.D. candidates in physics, for example, is bound to be higher than in a similar group of students in, say, education.

The reality I’m describing cuts against the mainstream understanding of higher education. Too many people believe that holding a graduate degree indicates advanced intelligence. This isn’t necessarily true. Far too many assume that holding a graduate degree indicates some special level of intelligence across the board. We tend to attribute to the opinions of those with the letters Ph.D. after their name greater credibility than they deserve. As a result, graduates of advanced programs in the humanities and social sciences are awarded far more cultural influence than they deserve.

When I say a lot of people in graduate school were dumb, I don’t mean merely that they lacked intelligence, though that was certainly the case for some. More often, graduate school was populated by people of average intelligence who worked diligently to achieve the goals of the program. The problem lies not in their lack of intelligence, as much as in their unquestioning trust of the establishment behind the claims and data they studied. So total was their trust that they were unaware even that there was an establishment behind what they were learning.

Here is how graduate school in the humanities and social sciences works: students learn to repeat the opinions and claims of others, usually of other scholars at more prestigious schools. They seem to believe that an opinion repeated frequently enough somehow becomes a fact.

“Wait a minute,” you might be asking, “I thought graduate school was all about learning to do original research and adding to the global body of knowledge. Surely, that research can’t be the result of opinion, can it?”

Pretty much, yes, it can. Research in the social sciences proceeds from assumptions, from certain postulates that are held to be unquestionably true. These unquestioned ideas serve as the basis out of which research questions are formulated and terms defined. The foundational notions of most contemporary social science are invariably Leftist. So, a typical research question might be, “How does the presence of a white male in the room change how women and other minorities perform on an exam?” The assumption is that the mere presence of a white male is negative and, indeed, powerfully negative to the point of influencing others’ performance.

You can see how this very research question draws from Leftist assumptions about the nature of power relationships. Questioning this basic assumption is forbidden. When the results of such a research study are published, they are taken as verified truth when, in fact, they are only an extension of the original formulator’s politically correct opinion. Nevertheless, some eager graduate student will take these results and repeat them endlessly, citing them in papers and presentations without once wondering if there might be something wrong with the whole scenario. This process is one means by which the Left reproduces itself. It is also one reason most social science research is wrong.

The Left’s ideological reproduction is amplified as graduates of these programs take their unquestioned assumptions into places of cultural influence. Graduates move on from these programs to work in think tanks, in politics, and above all into other institutions of higher education, mostly teaching undergraduates to parrot the same opinions they memorized as a graduate student.

The leftward hegemony this process has created in most of higher education recently prompted Kristen Hatten to ponder the tendency for some on the right to question the value of a college education. She concludes that these conservatives are wrong.

Hatten:

“The problem with conservatives eschewing college is we need conservatives in academia. The professors are already majority left-wing and, as a result, so are the students. It’s bad enough as it is; if we all leave, it gets worse. As Dr. Duke Pesta pointed out, mainstream culture is five or ten years behind the university. Campus culture is hugely influential on the culture at large, for obvious reasons: these people graduate and bring their thoroughly washed brains into the business world, into non-profits, corporations, journalism, media, and various industries; into homes and families and letters-to-the-editor and social media and public discourse at large.”

I can see her point, but something more is needed. Few people understand how deep Leftist indoctrination goes and how strong the Leftist frame really is. I certainly don’t think we on the right should abandon learning; indeed, we should champion it.

But, doing so and reclaiming ground in higher education means smashing the Leftist frame completely by refusing to accept as true its most basic assumptions. Rather, these must be replaced, and that means generating a whole new story about how reality works.

Of course, that is easier to do from positions of cultural influence, and on that point Hatten is correct. Like it or not, attaining those positions means playing as well as possible by the enemy’s rules for the time being. For some, it means navigating the rough waters of graduate school, which really isn’t as tough as it sounds–if for no other reason than that people there aren’t always as smart as they seem.

 

The Beginning of Conservatism Is to Love

W.G. Hoskins staring loving at, no doubt, a bit of English landscape.

To be human is to be lost. Whether we admit it or insist on pretending otherwise makes no difference. At the core of our nature is an undeniable alienation from the world in which we find ourselves. Even when we try to deny the poor fit between the world we inhabit and the world we long for, the gap comes bounding out of the shadows, demanding a confrontation: the room is too cold, the tomatoes won’t grow, our beloved dog runs away, wars devastate millions. The real world is always at odds with the way we intuit it ought to be. When peace and rest do come, they rarely last. We are, none of us, long at ease; rather, we are all, in myriad ways and at all times, quite dis-eased.

We can respond to our situation in one of two ways. We can look for and cultivate those things which root us and console us by hinting at some other, finer world beyond; or we can determine to create for ourselves here and now a world in which our existential quandary can be resolved in a haze of technocratic bliss.

The first of these is the conservative path. Rooted in the Christian apprehension of the world’s fallen nature, a true conservative accepts that no amount of tinkering with markets, or transistors, or DNA will ever solve a problem so basic to our existence. Instead, the conservative seeks to preserve those aspects of our lives that shore us up, strengthen our resolve, and bid us be patient laboring in our hope.

Chief among the things a conservative must conserve is tradition, which means not merely “the way people used to do things,” but rather “those things handed down.” Tradition is the accumulated wisdom gathered through the ages for how best to live in a world that falls far from our intuited ideals.

A large part of this inherited wisdom involves loving real things as they really are. The great freedom of the conservative lies in not having to subject all that exists to a program of improvement in the service of some imagined future utopia. Admittedly, this definition of conservatism is at odds with much American Republicanism of the last four decades. The party’s ideology, with its free market fanaticism and its laissez-faire approach to moral and social issues, has often been subject to a utopianism of its own.

Finding examples of the conservatism I am describing in the American political landscape is nigh impossible. Perhaps this is true because this sort of conservatism stems from a general posture toward life that American culture discourages. This is a conservatism is a mood more than a platform, with ideology and policy prescriptions playing, at best, a secondary role.

Not long ago, I finished watching a series of old films. In each, British historian W.G. Hoskins walks about remarking on the various landscapes of the English countryside. This is my favorite:

Each of these films captures what I am trying to describe. Their quiet nature, the observation of the world from the distance of one not totally at home in it, and Hoskins’ absolute delight in the landscape as a given, all these capture the essence of what I am calling the conservative disposition. (If you enjoy these films, by the way, you might enjoy the work of Hoskins’ heir apparent, Richard Vobes.)

The delight Hoskins feels in the landscape is a direct result of his love of it. This should not be astonishing. Central to the conservative mind is the affirmation that the world, in spite of its many failings, contains much worth loving, defending, and preserving, much that speaks to a future in which our alienation might be overcome.

This is the point Felix Miller made recently in his article, “The Right Needs Joy.” Miller is concerned with the anger among young reactionaries. Much of that anger, Miller acknowledges, is justified.

From the article:

It is understandable that so many young conservatives and reactionaries are resentful. In many cases, they have been raised in a world that in fundamentally at odds with reality and human flourishing. They have been taught from childhood that happiness is to be found in debauchery, selfishness, and relativism. Coming from broken homes, attending broken schools, and being fed by a broken media, they have come to traditionalism not through natural, lived practices, but instead through disillusionment with progressivism. They have been tormented by the living hell that progressivism, feminism, multiculturalism, cultural Marxism, and all other forms of modernism have created in their perverse image and likeness.

Justified though it is, this anger is not enough to sustain a movement. For that, we must instead cultivate a love for reality as palpable as Hoskins’. Miller holds out Chesteron as an example of a joyous conservative. I offer you Hoskins who, whatever his politics, produced work that typified the joy at the heart of conservatism, the joy that delights in the world in spite of our alienation from it.

Trolling Leftists into online fights they will lose and watching them cry when vanquished no doubt has its appeal, but its appeal is the joy of destruction, not of creation. In the long run, cultural tides are turned by what is built more than by what is torn asunder. Even if we manage to destroy the infrastructure of the occupiers, we will only be living in a wasteland, without undertaking to build something in its place.

If conservatism has any chance of building something worthwhile from the ruins of modernity, we must begin not with politics so much as with loving those things right in front of us. We must take as our models no longer the Sean Hannitys of the world, let alone the legion of Kek-worshipping anons on Twitter. Rather, we must devote ourselves, like Hoskins, to love of the particular: a particular spouse, a particular child, a particular vocation exercised faithfully in a particular locale. Only by doing so can we build a movement of people with the vision to look up someday toward the landscape and to know, at last, where they are.

A Meditation on the Liking of Boobs

America is suicidal culture. Our cultural elite burn with hatred against everything traditional and natural, everything that sustains us and makes the continued existence of Civilization possible. Their hostility to whatever stands in the way of their imagined utopia is bottomless.

The blow up over Clay Travis’ going on CNN and saying the two things he believes in absolutely are the first amendment and boobs confirms my thesis. Admittedly, his comment was coarse, puerile even.  From all appearances, he’s an obnoxious lout.

But, that’s not why anyone objected. We gave up those sorts of objections in the ’90’s. Howard Stern killed them with his bare hands.

Instead, the Left went apoplectic for more fashionable reasons. The ostensible reason for their outrage was Travis’ purported “sexism.” Here are some examples from twitter.

I’m avid sports fan & a woman. Clay Travis’s sexist, demeaning comments are unacceptable. It’s past time for .@FOXSports to #FireClayTravis

— Elle Belle (@redpoca) September 15, 2017

 

Clay Travis is a racist, sexist clown, but why does CNN keep inviting these awful people on their network? Why give them visibility?

— Charles Clymer🏳️‍🌈 (@cmclymer) September 15, 2017

 

Don’t watch Clay Travis say sexist crap. Watch Brooke Baldwin shut it down. pic.twitter.com/mNoodf7NqV

— Eric Morrow (@ericmorrow11) September 15, 2017

Though the outrage and cries of sexism seem trivial to the point of stupidity, they reveal a couple of important things.

What really incensed these people is not “sexism,” but the fact that a man would admit publicly and with not trace of shame that he finds women’s bodies sexually attractive. By doing so, he signals other men that they can admit such things as well. This is a problem for the Left because it has campaigned hard to demonize and shame such behavior. In recent decades, the Left has been quite successful in convincing both men and women that male sexuality, especially male sexual desire, is always dangerous. Men’s sexual desire for women, they’ve told us, is inherently exploitative, abusive, and damaging.

Male sexual desire is now only suitable for public display when it is aimed at the bodies of other men.  If a man desires the bodies of other men, he is an elevated creature from another, better realm. Men who desire women are despicable.

To prove he is not one of the ogres who likes women’s bodies, the typical man now goes to great lengths to pretend he does not notice them. He lives out his days as an essentially sexless creature hemmed in by professional and social cultures that cast even the mildest indications of sexual awareness as harassment. Admitting you noticed Helen looks nice in blue is a punishable offense. Admitting you like boobs is suicidal.

As terrible as this reality is, the Clay Travis incident reveals something still worse. The Left doesn’t hate male sexual desire only. They also hate its results. Male sexuality, if it takes its normal and healthy course, leads to particularization rather than to equality and to the creation of family.

Not all men are equally drawn to all female bodies. In fact, for most men a time comes when he focuses the bulk of his desire on one female body. He ceases to pursue women generally and dedicates himself to one, forsaking all others. Nothing is more unequal than that. It is this inequality the Left resents.

The second outcome of male sexual desire is even more threatening to the Left. See, a man desires women because their bodies speak to him, in a mysterious way, of comfort, of belonging, of home. When a man says he likes boobs, he is saying he likes a lot more than just boobs.

Those on the Left seek to shame this affection for the female body because all real comfort, all real belonging, all real love of home interfere with their plans for a perfect society. Nothing disrupts the plan for a society free of sexual distinction and the connections it fosters like falling in love. Orwell and Huxley knew as much almost a century ago.

And, the fact is that it is his fondness for a woman’s boobs (and all her other parts) that leads a man, if he is good and if he is mature, to fatherhood, to the starting of a family, to the founding of a little platoon. Such little platoons easily become fiefdoms outside the control of our cultural elites, incubators of resistance and old, but true, ideas. And thus, does the Left lust violently to shut down the wild, dirty, and glorious process by which they are born.

Michelle Jones, Child Murder and the Dynamics of American Status

Michelle Jones photo via The New York Times

You know what would guarantee that an applicant would be rejected from any of America’s elite graduate schools including the one at New York University? If he admitted on the application that he had worked for the Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization devoted to defending victims of the pogrom against evangelical Christians. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a radical Leftist institution which the mainstream media continually cast as “non-partisan”, recently branded the ADF as a hate group. You can see why putting an association with such an organization on a resume would close off access to Harvard’s hallowed halls.

You know what doesn’t keep you out of America’s top graduate programs? Killing your kid.  According to this article, Michelle Jones, who was recently released from prison for murdering her four-year-old son, has been accepted as a Ph.D. student in American Studies at New York University. Some controversy has accompanied the move after she was rejected by Harvard when some professors and administrators there objected.

The objections weren’t, apparently, rooted in the horror of her crime, but rather in a fear of Sean Hannity. From the article:

We didn’t have some preconceived idea about crucifying Michelle,” said John Stauffer, one of the two American studies professors (who objected). “But frankly, we knew that anyone could just punch her crime into Google, and Fox News would probably say that P.C. liberal Harvard gave 200 grand of funding to a child murderer, who also happened to be a minority. I mean, c’mon.”

This situation is complicated because it is undeniable that Jones has done some good things. She obviously chose to make the best of her time in prison and seems to be focused on creating a positive future for herself.

The story quotes her as saying of herself and her son:

“I have made a commitment to myself and him that with the time I have left, I will live a redeemed life, one of service and value to others.”

All this is good. I hope she fulfills her commitment.

At one level, this looks like a straightforward story about someone who committed a terrible crime, but who, in the intervening years, has worked hard to create a life of value. To the degree this is true, Jones should be applauded. But, it is also clear that her story has helped her earn a place within the machine creating the most influential members of our society. In a few years, Jones will likely be shaping minds as a faculty member at some elite institution earning far above the average income of the average, hardworking non-child-killing American.

To understand why requires understanding how social status in America is achieved within the dominant Leftist frame. In modern America, social status is achieved and maintained by demonstrating one’s willingness to defame anything traditional, especially anything associated with traditional Christian belief or morality, and by one’s ability to silence the natural revulsion we feel when we contemplate evil.

Michelle Jones serves as a means for those in powerful positions to engage in just these sorts of status enhancing behaviors. Jones’ activities in prison and her subsequent application to these elite graduate schools allow those making admissions decisions to see themselves as “good people”, people whose horror at the murder of a four-year-old child is not so strong that they would reject his murderer. By publicly showing their ability to overlook Jones’ crime, they have the opportunity to reinforce their own status.

The conflict between those at NYU who accepted her and those at Harvard who rejected her is really a debate among elite leftists over whether there should be any limits on who can join their ranks, specifically about whether murdering one’s own child should be an impediment to ascending to the heights of leftist society. The answer, apparently, is “no.”

Poor John Stauffer. As one of the professors whose flagging of Jones’ application eventually led to her rejection, he clearly didn’t apprehend the status implications of the situation. That’s why he’s now trying to deflect the blame onto Fox News and the millions of Midwestern dolts who love them.

Had Michelle Jones not murdered her child, she would not be in the privileged position she now enjoys. Because her crime allows elite Leftists to increase their status by helping her, doors have opened to Michelle Jones that would never open to most Americans. Those doors certainly would never open to anyone foolish enough to admit, for example, associating with the Alliance Defending Freedom or other conservative groups.  In elite America, child-murder can be forgiven. Being conservative is unpardonable.

Forgiveness, even for terrible crimes, ought to be part of the way society deals with transgressions. What we have in this situation, however, is not a forgiving society, but one that sees the dismissing of serious evil as a path to self-promotion. For this reason, Jones’ story is not primarily about the redemption of Michelle Jones, but about an elite establishment that, through its blindness and arrogance, makes its own redemption impossible.

Further Notes on “Depression”

The conversation sparked by Andrew Tate’s claim on twitter that “depression” isn’t real continues. In this video, he is interviewed on the subject by Paul Joseph Watson. Tate’s attack on the myth of the “disease of depression” rattled more than few cages. A few days ago, I weighed in with this post.  As I have reflected more on the subject, several thoughts have surfaced. Here they are in no particular order.

One: Sadness exists. Extended periods of sadness and inner misery may characterize life for some people. I don’t think Andrew is questioning these obvious realities. I certainly am not. Rather, we must draw a distinction between the symptoms of what we call depression– a persistent feeling of sadness, lack of interest in and energy for life, feelings of low self-worth– and the idea of “depression” as a disease.

The fact that people struggle with some or all of those symptoms does not mean “depression”  exists as a disease. No one is questioning whether those qualities we think of as symptoms of “depression” exist. What we question is the biomedical model of “depression”, the notion that “depression” is a disease like malaria that instead of creating a high fever in its victims creates an imbalance of neurochemicals.

Someone on twitter asked me, in an obvious attempt to discredit my observations on this topic, if I were a neuroscientist. I am not, but I am a person who knows how to use Google. Had my critic taken the time to perform a few simple Google searches, she’d have seen that many experts are questioning the biomedical/ disease model of “depression.” Here is an article about the topic from Scientific American. Here is a relevant post from a psychologist at Psychology Today.

Once we separate the cluster of symptoms of “depression” from the notion of “disease”, we can easily see that the notion of depression as a disease of neurochemistry is only a kind of folk tale. Like a lot of folk tales,this one too doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Also like most folk tales, this one gets traction in our culture not because it’s true, but for other more dubious reasons.

Two: The fact that “depression” does not exist as a disease of neurochemistry doesn’t mean that there is no connection between what we call “depression” and the brain. Yes, sometimes people who are “depressed” have a lack of serotonin or some other brain chemical. Other brain conditions might be correlated with what we call “depression”. But, correlation is not causation.

That the brain changes in response to our repeated patterns of thought and action is well established.  Just think about learning to play the piano. Learning to play the piano is not just a matter of learning to move one’s fingers. It is also a matter of changing one’s brain.

The neurological conditions we associate with “depression” then, can just as easily be a result as a cause. After a long period of sadness, for example, it may be that the brain changes in a way that makes ceasing to be sad more difficult than it would otherwise be. Perhaps, then, it would be better to talk about depression not so much as the kind of thing one “has”, but as the kind of thing one “practices.”

Since the brain conditions correlated with “depression” can just as easily be a result as a cause, we must ask why so much of our culture insists, without grounds, that they are causes. There are two reasons.

First, our materialistic culture privileges the material. The bias of our scientistic approach to life simply assumes that the causes of problems are physical. We assume that whatever our machines can detect and measure must be the basis of whatever problem we are trying to solve.

Still, a deeper motive applies: our cultural dream of amorality. The modern world is obsessed with the fantasy that all human actions, except for those that are “discriminatory”, are morally neutral. The argument that brain conditions alone are behind the “disease of depression” eliminates the possibility that the consequences of immoral, unwise actions might be loneliness, sadness and low self-esteem–exactly that group of symptoms we call “depression.” Casting “depression” as a matter of impersonal chemistry, shields people from the thought that actions have moral consequences and thus allows the daydream of amorality to continue.

Three: The biomedical model of depression ignores and thus protects from criticism a cultural context in which all unhappiness is pathologized.  Modern people generally operate on the notion that happiness is the default mode of living. When people experience something else, they assume it’s a deviation from the norm.

Honest and reflective adults, few of whom, admittedly, are walking around these days, know this is not the case. For most people, emotional life involves a constant thread of sadness and anxiety. These strains of sadness and anxiety grow stronger at some times and at others fade into the background. But, they are always there. Certainly, it may be the case that for some people the role sadness and anxiety play in their emotional lives is more pronounced. The distribution of such things probably falls on a bell curve with a few people who experience little sadness or anxiety on one end and people for whom these things are debilitating on the other. Most of us fall in between.

Yet, we ignores this reality. Our materialistic, atheistic values tell us that this life is all there is. If we believe that, we are inclined to think suffering of any type is a problem to be avoided since it compromises our only chance at fulfillment. And thus, we are eager to cast internal suffering as a “disease” to which we can apply a technological cure.

Four: Our society wants to call “depression” a disease in order to avoid changing. We live in a society that inflicts trauma. Through our casual attitudes about divorce and sex, as well as our worship of wealth, career and pleasure we do untold damage. This is our open secret, what everyone knows that no one is supposed to say. I mean, when you are told that your dad can stop being your dad and instead become a second mom, and that your duty is to be nothing but affirming when he does, that’s traumatic.

To protect our moral-free-for-all of a culture, we cast “depression” as an individual, psychological problem rather than as the predictable consequence of moral and social decay. All the energy that goes into seeking treatment for “depression” could just as easily go into, say, reforming divorce laws to prevent the trauma and the subsequent “depression”  divorce brings about in its victims. The “depressed’ are a huge group who, should they ever see their “disease” as stemming from the structure of our society, would be politically unstoppable. In short, we cast “depression” as an individual problem to avoid a revolution.

All these observations point to the same conclusion: that “depression”, at least as a simple biochemical “disease”, does not exist. Curing it is not a simple matter of correcting the chemistry at play in the brain. Most people who react strongly to these ideas do so either because they are suffering, or because they fear increasing the suffering of others. No good person wants intentionally to increase the suffering of others.

But, the truth hurts. Fortunately though, unlike the falsehoods our society pedals, it doesn’t hurt forever. Rather, when the initial sting passes, it heals like no medicine ever can.

More on the Demise of Country Music

A reader left the following insightful comment yesterday on this post.  I thought it was valuable enough that you ought not miss it.  I present it here with minimal editing.

You’re right to point out how juvenile our culture has become. Nuance, blue-collar authenticity and self-reflection are ideas that no longer sell. Country music was the last bastion of heritage American music until the 90s ended. I read that after Pete Fisher took over the Grand Ole Opry in 1999, the institution started cutting back on the elder country singer bookings at the venue, in attempt to winnow out the old and bring in the new. The long-time loyalty of old country stars such as Charlie Louvin, Del Reeves and Stonewall Jackson was discarded. Link to the news article on Stonewall Jackson’s lawsuit against the Grand Ole Opry is here.

“Jackson claims his appearances on the show declined after Fisher was hired in 1998. Jackson said he approached Fisher on several occasions and was told, “I don’t want any gray hairs on that stage or in the audience, and before I’m done there won’t be any,” and, “You’re too old and too country.”

Fisher is gone as of Jan. 2017 but you see the damage this heartless, corporate mentality has inflicted on an American institution the past 20 years. Want to watch the American Country Music Awards? You have to sit through Beyonce, Justin Timberlake and Rihanna pretending to be country music. Of course, the millennial “stars” in the audience egg it on because they’ve been brainwashed to hate their own culture and never sweated or got dirty working outdoors themselves, so who are they to judge? Taylor Swift’s banker daddy got her into a studio to pretend she was country when starting only to use the genre as a platform for her modern feminist garbage. I visited the childhood home of Loretta Lynn in eastern Kentucky and I can tell you, Swift will never understand the emotion and hurt behind the coal miner’s daughters vocals.

I saw the writing on the wall years ago, which is why I’ve made an effort to see as many of the real country stars as I could before they passed, since I’m a young man. I got to see Merle Haggard twice, in the past 6 years–the first time at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Also got to see George Strait on his farewell tour a couple years ago. Vince Gill is also a talented performer who covers all angles of the emotional spectrum.

Don Williams was part of a good batch of songwriters from the 70s that sang about real life. Like Gordon Lightfoot, Jim Croce, The Carpenters, Glen Campbell, etc. A time long gone but not forgotten if I can help it.

I had not known about the age discrimination suit against the Opry, but if the charges are true, they make clear that the kind of changes I’m decrying don’t happen by accident. Cultural changes that start as philosophical agendas pick up steam as they are transformed into products, like country pop, that sell, and as they take over and corrupt institutions, even ones as venerable, apparently, as the Opry.

Let the Sad Songs Play: On Losing Don Williams

The Great Don Williams Performing Early in His Career

American culture has grown, in some respects, much cheerier in the last few decades. Movies today are all about the super good guy vanquishing an equally super bad guy, or about a few perky women singing their hearts out while on a journey to blissful self-acceptance.  Pop music is equally happy. Upbeat songs, sometimes about finding love and always about finding sex, rule the airwaves. Anthem after anthem assures us of the power of the liberated individual to overcome all limitations. We are all tigers now. You’re gonna hear us roar.

The passing of country music legend Don Williams last week seems to cement the change. Williams and other traditional country stars, most notably Johnny Cash, represented a time in America when it was OK to be sad. Their music, even at its most upbeat, was tinged with a streak of the tragic, just like real life.

Though not alone in this tradition, Williams spoke uniquely to me. His sonorous crooning about the trials of life worked to soothe the soul by reflecting back its struggles. My dad loved Don Williams too. I remember him listening to Williams, probably on eight-track tapes, when I was still too small to know anything about heartbreak and the power of good music to dull it.

I took my mother and father to see Williams perform about twenty years ago. At one point in the show, Williams paused in obvious surprise when everyone in the room began singing aloud the chorus to “You’re My Best Friend.” It was hallowed moment. I looked over at my father to see tears running down his face.

That kind of thing that was allowed to happen in the Old America. People then could have a full range of emotions and our popular art reflected that. Now, of course, we live in a carnival culture where the only moral obligation is to make every moment a party, the more raucous the better.

Even mainstream country music has been swept up in the happy craze. Much has been said about the transformation of country music from deep, serious music for grown ups to just more hedonistic, low IQ pop for a low IQ population. The only difference between pop and country these days is that when country does pop, it wears a cowboy hat.

Compare this Don Williams classic:

with this recent country hit.

The difference is, I think, obvious. The first is a serious, reflection on place, childhood and the power of memory. The second is a trashy ode to materialism and fun so ridiculous it seems to have the power, in just three short minutes, to make anyone stupid enough to listen even stupider.

These two songs mirror the great cultural shift toward forced cheerfulness. It is no accident that such a shift has occurred at a time when actual life in America has become more unhappy. Wages have been stagnate  for decades. Marriage has been destroyed. Family is seen more as an impediment to an active life in a materialistic world rather than as a refuge from it. We have lost all sense of a unified culture.

And yet, our mainstream popular culture more and more excludes talk of the difficulties of life and their accompanying dissatisfactions. As our actual culture becomes an ever greater disaster, our popular culture seeks to distract us by building a gigantic wall of fakery. Media outlets, corporations, and government bureaucracies all benefit when our vision is blocked. Keeping the population from noticing the moral hellscape where they dwell goes a long way toward keeping things quiet.

When popular culture constantly sends the message that the right kind of person is the one who is always ready to party, people hide their “non-party” feelings. Not feeling “high class” becomes the only sin that brings shame. Eventually, millions of people begin to divorce their bad feelings from the terrible things our culture has inflicted on them. Rather than seeing their feelings as a natural outcome of living in a “progressive” environment, they blame themselves.

Should any brave soul risk speaking up we have ways of dealing with him. Entire industries exist to convince him that he is “depressed.”  Even more powerful industries exist to distract him back into his stupor via video games, porn, and junk food. If all else fails, we’ll put him on disability payments and ask him to stay at home and cause no trouble.

The revival of our culture will require making public space for negative feelings to come once again to the light. We need Don Williams more than ever. In the meantime, we must all undertake whatever acts of resistance we may. Homeschool your children if you can. Turn off the television. Read old books. And sometimes, whenever you dare, just turn out the lights and let the sad songs play.

The Sacrifice of Matthew Halls

Matthews Halls, being totally not racist.

The increasing instability of our society gives rise to an increasing number of unstable people inhabiting it. Their instability, especially about the grounds of their identities, makes them susceptible to all manner of weird beliefs and behavior. By far, the most pervasive source of identity now for people severed from the normal means of knowing who they are –family, tradition, faith– is the activist Left.  By declaring their allegiance to the Left, unmoored people can locate themselves. Immediately upon enlisting in the social justice army, they are equipped with a narrative that, though simplistic, tells them they are one of the good guys in the ongoing struggle against the dark forces of ignorance, superstition, and oppression.

No doubt, the woman who recently overheard conductor Matthew Halls ask a friend in a

Reginald Mobley

mock Southern accent whether he wanted some grits was one of these people. Halls was in Oregon working on the Oregon Bach Festival when he made the remark. As all good social justice warriors do, the eavesdropping woman knew minding one’s own business is a tremendous moral failing, and so alerted the relevant authorities that Halls had made a “racist” joke.

University officials responded to her accusation by firing Halls.  The woman who reported Halls is likely white. The university staff who made the decision to fire him are probably mostly, if not exclusively, white. Adding to the ridiculousness is the fact that the friend to whom Halls made the supposedly racist remark, singer Reginald Mobley, is black. Mobley is now speaking out against the injustice done to his friend.

So, we now have a situation in which a bunch of white people are rushing to prove how “not racist” they are by discounting and dismissing the words of a black man.

The absurdity of such situations belies these people’s claims to care about justice. Such behavior is obviously not about justice. It is about identity. The woman who created this  bizarre situation probably thinks of this as a defining moment of her life, the time she stood up to the evil racists. Reporting Halls to the authorities was, for her, most likely, a means of asserting personal power in an increasingly impersonal society.  Getting Halls canned might have been one of the few times in her life where she felt real efficacy.

Of course, that’s all speculation. She could just as easily be a person who has done this sort of thing repeatedly, a person addicted to the frisson of righteous indignation springing from accusing the guilty and seeing them punished. For all we know, this woman is a decorated veteran in the war to stamp out dangerous jokes.

The important point here is not so much this woman’s history, but the larger narrative that motivated her behavior. A person who reports an overheard joke as “racist” to authorities whom she knows are eager to punish lives inside a story that tells her such behavior is appropriate. The same story tells her that exposing a perceived violation of her moral code, no matter how slight, is what good people do. She, no doubt, longs to prove she is one of the “good people.”

The madness we are witnessing here is what happens when you combine millions of needy, rootless people with a cultural narrative that tells them Nazis are lurking behind every bush. Eager for approval and affirmation, some of these needy people will spot Nazis even where they quite evidently don’t exist. When those in power impose unjust consequences in the name of justice based on such flimsy testimony, they only amplify and confirm the original delusion. The case of Matthew Halls will lead to others who are unjustly punished. We have seen such cases before.

At bottom here is a cultural narrative concocted by the radical, activist Left that has now become dominant. The Left has cultural frame. Lonely, alienated people will act to relieve their suffering. But, when they act inside a frame as pernicious as the currently ascendant one, we enter into a culture-wide war, not against injustice, but against reality itself. Like all wars, this one too inflicts death and destruction on the expendable innocent. Matthew Halls is just today’s collateral damage.