The Good Old Days

Once upon a time, Man created Art, Literature, Philosophy and Criticism. These were wonderfully precious gifts and they remained the province of the few with the wit or talent to appreciate them. Most people were born and lived and died without Literature, Philosophy and Criticism. Most people couldn't read, and although they had some crafts and storys they created for their communities, the world of "higher" ideas was forever closed off to them.

Then an inventor and printer named Gutenburg commited an evil travesty. He invented a device that allowed dozens of copies of books to be printed and spread among the peoples of the world. Those noble protectors of literature and "higher" thought, the upper classes, did their best to prevent these words from drifting out into the society at large. Unfortunately, they failed. It turned out that people had a desire for information and ideas and stories that books could fulfill. And with the invention of the Printing Press, and the invisible hand of capitalism, many printers began printing books for the masses to read.

Oh what a hew and cry went up among the "cultured" classes. Reading in The Century, December 1885, one finds this passage, directed to Sunday School Librarians.

"If the books which they find in these libraries are, as a rule, silly and shallow fictions, their intellectual tastes may be so depraved by their reading, that they will become visionary and restless creatures, wholly unfit for the serious business of life. That a book should be hurtful to young readers, it is not necessary that it should teach bad morals; the mischief is done quite as effectually by an overwrought sentimentalism as by a lax morality. . . . The trashy fiction still disseminated through them is sufficient to addle unnumbered brains and injure unnumbered lives."

But America didn't heed this warning or the countless others like it--bringing us down to the present day, a truely deplorably time when there are dozens of "popular" mediums, dedicated to finding as many participants as possible. These include Movies, Music, Books, Television, the Internet, and so on. Unlike in the golden ages of mankind, there isn't a specific class of people who decides what is proper and what is improper for viewing or reading. The critics still exist, but they largely serve no purpose. If only they still served their valuable purpose of telling people what to think. If there was a class of people set aside that could read the literature and news and ideas and tell us what was good and what was bad and what was true and what was false, well think how wonderful life would be.

Norman Solomon, a critic who has had the misfortune to be born in modern times makes a simlar lament in his latest column, a review of the year 2002. He comments, "A culture accustomed to finding substantial meaning in TV commercials and an array of phony prime-time shows is unlikely to rouse itself to human connection and moral action when the nation's powers-that-be decide on yet another war."

All joking aside, Solomon does make the standard and correct point that it's troubling to have so much of our media controlled by large corporate oligarchies--but I still remain convinced that the truth is available to all who want to see it. And that in a free society, you are going to find people who look at exactly the same information as you do and come up with different conclusions.