Thirteen ways of looking at Philoktêtês

Over at The Economist Debates, they are debating the notion of whether “in its appetite for culture, the world is wising up more than it is dumbing down.”

If “intelligence” can mean many things, so, too, can “culture,” I suppose. Fiammetta Rocco, The Economist’s Books & Arts Editor and moderator for the debate, seems to have a very distinct idea of culture in mind, as she summarized the “wising up” side of the debate by saying that “all over the country, more people are going to museums, visiting literary festivals and listening to classical music than ever before. If that isn’t wising up, it is hard to know what is.”

Well, it isn’t, necessarily, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Tim de Lisle, editor of The Economist’s sister publication Intelligent Life, represents the “wising up” side of the debate. In his opening remarks, he expands upon Ms. Rocco’s summary, namely, that museum, art festival, and classical music attendance is a barometer for gauging “mass intelligence” levels. Read a little further, however, and you discover a weird populism about Mr. de Lisle’s perspective. He seems overly concerned with “stuffiness,” and his argument is really more an appreciation of how low-brow folks are increasingly (supposedly) consuming high-brow art.

Susan Jacoby speaks for the opposition. In her opening remarks, she contends that culture and intelligence are being dumbed down, citing reading proficiency and reading habits as proof and leaning heavily upon the now infamous 2007 National Endowment for the Arts report that catalogued the decline of reading in the US. Ms. Jacoby’s key passage – and one I’d like to focus on – is her contention that “isolated information is useless unless it is understood within a larger framework of knowledge.”

I agree with this, as I understand it.

Let me give you a quick example of what I think Ms. Jacoby is suggesting vis-à-vis “isolated information” and “a larger framework of knowledge.” Yesterday, I wrote that my good friend, the poet and critic Ernest Hilbert, had a poem posted on an anthology website. I duly posted the link. In it, he refers to a character in Greek mythology, Philoctetes. Suffice it to say, most folks don’t know who Philoctetes is; therefore, understanding Ernie’s poem would be a little difficult for the great majority of people. No worries, you might say, there’s always Wikipedia. There you would learn that Philoctetes was from Thessaly, was involved in the Trojan War, was abandoned – you would pick up all manner of “isolated information.” You would read a short synopsis of Philoctetes stories as gathered from myth, but again, unless you know a smattering of myth, it’s all bound to sound, well, Greek to you.

I can well imagine one of Mr. de Lisle’s literary festival goers who hears Ernie’s poem at the festival having no idea what he just heard…something about “cups of puss” and “tragic strophes.” The next month, while on vacation in Copenhagen, between mochas in the morning, shopping in the afternoon, and flirting with the slim, pretty, small-breasted girls at the discothèque in the evening, our festival goer might even step into Denmark’s national gallery, the Statens Museum for Kunst, whereupon he might see the painting below, Nicolai Abildgaard’s The Wounded Philoctetes. Surely, he’ll be struck by the huge ass, the rippling legs and back. Does he pause long enough to note the clutched foot? Does he read the museum guide, if there is one? In short, does he even understand what he’s looking at?



The next year, while vacationing in Greece, he might see a revival of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. He knows very little about Sophocles, can’t understand Greek, and leaves the theater little edified. But he’s got his dose of culture.

You see, our imaginary culture consumer has been literally surrounded by Philoctetes his entire life, but alas, can appreciate neither the original myth nor the notable cultural artifacts based on the myth with which he comes into contact. In short, he views the world with his eyes half-shut because he lacks what Ms. Jacoby calls a “larger framework for knowledge.” All of the bits and pieces are “isolated,” fragmented, shorn of meaning.

The dynamic captured above occurs countless times everyday for the majority of so-called educated people in English-speaking countries. Cultural literacy – that is, conversance with the myths, symbols, and stories of common cultural inheritance – is quite low. The number of people who produce and/or genuinely appreciate cultural artifacts is very low and getting smaller, simply because we don’t insist upon it as a condition of “being educated.”

It is an interesting aside that, disagree though they do about the trends of mass intelligence, neither Mr. de Lisle nor Ms. Jacoby mention poetry in their accounting of culture. Perhaps it is a signpost of how far poetry has fallen in esteem or relevance, but Ms. Jacoby especially would have been well-served by connecting the general lack of literacy, both actual and cultural, to the specific lack of interest we seem to have in poetry. Poetry, after all, depends precisely upon Ms. Jacoby’s “larger framework of knowledge.”

Instead, she mounts an assault against the notion that reading fiction “is a superfluous elitist pastime.” In one of life’s little ironies, it actually is a “superfluous elitist pastime,” not elitist in a culture-snob kind of way, but rather an affluent, middle-class, bourgeois kind of way. Few things were so reviled among stuffy 19th century culture warriors as the little gang of ladies reclining in their parlors reading novels. And, surely, most of what they read was dreck. So it is a little humorous, in that context, to now suggest that the ability to recall one’s Stendhal or Thackeray – or in today’s terms, one’s Dan Brown and J. K. Rowling – is a marker of intelligence.

At any rate, I think there is no better proof for the “dumbing down” side of the equation than our current efforts to get folks to read…anything…period. In such a circumstance it seems almost petulant to suggest that we’re reading the wrong stuff.

We might also better see the dumbing-down dynamic more clearly if we were to widen the terms of the debate. Why must mass intelligence or culture be tilted toward the literary, musical, and visual arts? Shouldn’t numeracy count for as much as literacy? But I digress.