OP in the comments: "A part of why I love this article is this great sample questionnaire to determine how fit you are to be making big decisions about the country:
What is your favorite book? (Cannot answer “The Bible.”)
How many languages do you speak? (Let’s be wary of numbers lower than 3.)
What’s your favorite opera? Ballet? (How can we expect arts funding from people who don’t appreciate the arts?)
When did you last use your passport? Where did you go? (If you don’t have a passport, maybe you shouldn’t be anywhere near foreign policy. Ditto if your travels have only ever taken you to Mexico and Canada.)
Who is your favorite political philosopher? Have you read Burke? Paine? (Any good music teacher will tell you, theory first!)
Obviously it’s more of a thought experiment than a serious proposal, but imagine if the people making decisions actually appreciated art and travel and culture. It actually sounds like a constituency you’d find in a major European city, with no Billy Bobs in trailer parks to hold us back culturally."
Hmm, I wonder why exactly rural people hate liberals? :thinkin-lenin: Obviously they are just good for nothing disgusting poors. Back to brunch!
What is your favorite book?
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Who is your favorite political philosopher?
Vladimir Lenin
The case they make for people to only make universally binding decisions within their particular competency is a very valid one, after all as Mao put it: “no investigation, no right to speak”.
What they very conveniently omit though is WHY “Billy Bob from the trailer park” doesn’t speak 3 languages, doesn’t go to the opera, is discouraged from reading more than the occasional technical manual and doesn’t leisurely traverse the world. The reason being that the exploitative nature of our society NEEDS a broad underclass, is completely dependent on it. For the “cultured” people to partake in high culture this monstrous system relies on the vast swathes of the working class to just keep their head down and grind and anything that distracts them from it, anything that is not conductive to making profits for the affluent, and everything that could potentially get the minds of those masses of workers to wonder why things are the way they are is to be trimmed away. So the ability of the person making the statements above rests directly on keeping Billy Bob in ignorance, in perpetual mute senselessness of existence, akin to cattle.
Contrast this with the actually existing socialist societies of old (and the handful still present) that immediately not only opened access to the arts and all sorts of recreational and scientific endeavours to the emancipated masses but actually encouraged their citizens to educate and enlighten themselves, to broaden their horizons as far as possible.
So yes, it would be lovely for everyone to enjoy all of the above and the main thing wrong with “bourgeois” high art is that it has historically been gatekept, the fruits of human creativity and ingenuity denied to the very same base that makes it all possible in the first place. Under the system the person above is safeguarding it will remain so forever.
This makes a lot of sense to me! I didn’t want to type out the same thing twice, so I replied to the comment below yours with a very similar train of thought. Do you remember the name of the Austrian guy?
Do have to also not fetishize folk tradition though, that’s how you end up with “proletarian science” and Lysenko and genetics banned as bourgeois.
Yeah, this was also partially my point in the comment above. Communists tend to fetishize “proletarian culture” as opposed to “bourgeois culture” but this smacks for me too much of what Nietzsche aptly called “resentment mentality”. What many mean by “proletarian culture” is not so much a culture in the sense of something meticulously cultivated from humble beginnings but rather crumbs from the master’s table (just like all the other life’s comforts), phrased provocatively an absence of culture even, a deliberate truncation of human potential. The reason for this is because it serves a fundamentally different purpose than so-called high culture. The main purpose of the culture for the masses in bourgeois states is as “the opium of the people”, cheap slop to sedate the toiling masses, whereas high culture is an arms race of sorts of “refinement”, of how more elaborate you can make things and thus by its very nature to be enjoyed exclusively by the elites.
Previous attempts at moving away from this foul dichotomy in socialist states and statelets produced what can be called a neo-proletarian culture. In the RSFSR an early organisation and movement promoting this (unfortunately disbanded later on, as censorship, a return to conservative views on art and the wish to completely monopolise all the culture making by the party set in) was aptly called Proletcult. The idea was to not only bring the previously stowed away high culture to the masses but more importantly have the proletarian masses actively create new, explicitly “high” culture all by themselves, thus superseding stale bourgeois gating of culture making . Which fitted in very well with the general communist definition of a human (which after the Russian Revolution was called “The New Soviet Man”) as an inherently creative being, the creative process being at the very core, the defining feature of what it means to be human. This is why when the Warsaw Pact states were dismantled the people living there, for example, statistically constituted on average the most “well read” population globally. Today this naturally has seen a massive decline as well.
EDIT: there is something mitigating this to an extent though even today (though with the looming ecological and thus societal collapse no one knows for how long), namely the democratisation of art making through more ubiquitously accessible technology. It’s easier than ever before to compose music, paint, shoot films, code video games, write prose and poetry and publish it online, watch and present to the whole world dazzling choreography, etc.
“Men who refer to themselves as ‘moderate’ or ‘centrist’ score basically the same on values and opinions as people who identify themselves as ‘conservative’”
How is anyone surprised that ‘fuck these guys’ is a viable policy platform?
What’s your favorite opera? Ballet? (How can we expect arts funding from people who don’t appreciate the arts?)
Love to limit whose able to do a politics on if you live in one of a handful of places with an active opera and ballet scene.
What an incredibly narrow and small-minded definition of what “the arts” is.
… and as defined by an incredibly narrow segment of the population at that. This whole thing is just “access to politics should be based on taste.”
Opera was originally entertainment for the proles because they were generally open to the public. It became too popular and the bourgeoisie got their fingers in it like they do everything.
But yes I love how “European high art” translates to arts funding. Historically when public arts funding was at it’s highest during the New Deal, it went to Death of a Saleman and other proletarian art.
