Among the best children’s literature are the books that present simple but powerful meta-narratives about the purpose of literature itself. Leo Lionni’s 1967 book Frederick is a classic example. Told in Lionni’s characteristic simple style and illustrated with torn paper collage, Frederick tells the story of a family of field mice who chide their brother Frederick for slacking while the rest of them gather food for the winter. Frederick defends himself by explaining that he is gathering more important stores: the rays of the sun, the colors of the field, and, most importantly, words for the long winter, when the mice will “run out of things to say.”
When winter comes and the food supplies have dwindled, the mouse colony sinks into lassitude and depression, which is Frederick’s cue to produce and share the supplies he has gathered for just this purpose. He brings out the memories of springtime’s warmth and summer’s colors, and recites a poem about the beauties of the natural world. The mouse society is able to take heart from the invocation of the memory of beauty, and we know that, nourished by beauty, they will survive to see the spring.
In my years of teaching, I witnessed a kind of steady cultural slippage in my students. From one year to the next, the student population appeared dramatically less anchored to cultural memory. When I taught Black music history, for instance, there was a steady decline from semester to semester of students who had been “churched,” and thus aware of the foundational importance of African American Christianity to Black music across genres. The Biblical narratives woven into the repertoire of spirituals were unknown to them, so they couldn’t grasp the crucial self-identification of American slaves with the Hebrew captives in Egypt — a self-identification which was both the source of much of the great music of slavery times, and of the coded metaphorical appeal to “let my people go.”
Having lost knowledge of the Bible, my students could not fully appreciate the impact of the slaves’ metaphorical use of language, nor the brilliance of their creation of a new culture. Even as a people who had lost everything — on whom cultural amnesia had been forced — American slaves were nevertheless able to map out their own story over the palimpsest of Judeo-Christian thought, and to create a vibrant new aesthetics that would go on to conquer the entire world. This is the power of cultural knowledge: even when the masters bowdlerized the Bible, editing out every reference to freedom, enslaved people recognized the “Bible within the Bible,” and knew that the message of the Gospel was entirely liberatory.
Unlike that of enslaved African Americans, our current cultural amnesia hasn’t been forced on us. We’ve freely chosen it. Of course, the widely-disseminated encouragement to question and reject all forms of received knowledge has contributed greatly. There’s an unspoken understanding among Millennials and Gen Z that being on the right side of history means confessing that Christianity is evil, that Jews are avatars of white supremacy, that one’s skin tone and hair texture confer varying degrees of individual moral authority, that heteronormativity is a perversely destructive force, and that children should be dispatched if they get in the way of one’s personal liberatory agenda.
This freely-adopted cultural amnesia goes hand-in-hand with the rise of a simplistic way of sorting the world into oppressed vs. oppressor. When I taught, some of my students were dismayed to learn that their enslaved forebears had self-identified with the Jews of old, since they themselves hated Jews. Students would bring up the Illuminati and Elijah Muhammad, suggest that the Jews were never slaves in Egypt but rather were enslavers, claim that opera originated in East Africa instead of 17th-century Florence, and more. I would ask them to provide evidence for these claims while simultaneously attempting to deflect classroom anti-Semitism. But since we appear to be in a moment when historical evidence is less important than passionate intensity, they never did.
With the anti-Semitic protests now taking place across college campuses and such bizarre social practices as tearing down posters of Hamas’s hostages, we are now seeing the effects of this mass forgetting. The young are unmoored from history, and thus fail to understand the moral imperatives of the present. Human instinct, which spurs us to protect the vulnerable, demands that we regard babies stolen from their raped and murdered mothers as objects of sympathy rather than of hatred and derision. So the spectacle of highly-privileged young people gleefully obliterating their memory is shocking because it goes against nature.
I believe that this unmooring started when we began to diminish the importance of the arts and their crucial role in reminding us that we are human.
The classical arts are now viewed with suspicion by most socially-concerned progressives — including those who have devoted their entire careers to the classical arts. We have seen this most recently in the jettisoning of the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center in favor of popular genres perceived as “more welcoming”: Lincoln Center’s new director, Henry Timms, explains that “we can afford to loosen up a little,” as he repurposes that storied space as a venue for “hip-hop, K-pop and an LGBTQ mariachi group.”
This is setting a dangerous precedent — dangerous not only for the viability of the classical arts, but for the viability of humanity. The ability to recognize, learn, teach, replicate, create, and express beauty is central to any project that seeks to advance human culture. When we devalue beauty and elevate the crass and mundane, we may think we’re being cheeky and progressive, but we’re actually undermining the dignity of the human spirit. Cf. 2020’s number one single, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP” (“Wet-Ass Pussy”).
Kids no longer learn about the traditions of western classical music in school. The very reason I was asked to create my Black music history course — a course that I loved on a subject I hold in high regard — was students’ complaints that they had to learn about western classical music but not “their” music. I miss the days when an Afro-Caribbean student confessed to me that as a dj, he saw himself standing on the shoulders of Mozart and Haydn, or when a young Black man wrote a witty and elegant paper for class about program music being absolute music’s uncool younger brother. If the lowest common denominator of cultural expression is celebrated, where will this leave us when the lights go out, or the winter food supplies dwindle? Will we be heartened and cheered when we gather to hear our bards recite:
Yeah, you fucking with some wet ass pussy
Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet ass pussy
Give me everything you got for this wet ass pussy?
Nevertheless, the devaluing of classical music in favor of pop genres did not begin in the 21st century. The late, great Richard Taruskin, among others, traces this movement to the 1960s, that watershed moment of cultural iconoclasm, when the intelligentsia began to vocally reject classical music and prioritize pop genres:
Since the "British invasion," nearly half a century ago, it has been socially acceptable, even fashionable, for intellectuals to pay attention primarily to commercial music, and they often seem oblivious to the very existence of other genres. Of no other art medium is this true. Intellectuals in America distinguish between commercial and "literary" fiction, between commercial and "fine" art, between mass-market and "art" cinema. But the distinction in music is no longer drawn, except by professionals. Nowadays most educated persons maintain a lifelong fealty to the popular groups they embraced as adolescents, and generation gaps between parents and children now manifest themselves musically in contests between rock styles.
In other words, just as we did as teenagers, we use our adherence to pop artists as status markers and social signifiers. The online-ifying of social discourse has enabled this identification of virtue with musical taste. If you post on social media about your love for death metal, K-pop, or trap, it means something about you. If you post about your love for Jason Aldean or Oliver Anthony, it means something different. Music is no longer about universal values, but about personal flexing, jockeying for position, and knowing who your enemies are.
What’s worse, the suppression of classical music and the vaunting of pop by the intelligentsia is thought of as a salvo in the struggle of oppressor vs. oppressed. We are told that classical music is “white,” and hence morally suspect. We are instructed further that a billion-dollar taste- and money-making industry stands for truth and virtue as it promotes a musical monoculture throughout the world. As the great Sun Ra said in his unforgettable 1974 film Space is The Place, “The people have no music that matches their vibration.”
When the lights go out, we need to remember what makes us human, and it’s not “WAP.” Teach Like A Mother’s advice: touch grass. Play an instrument or sing. Read Frederick. Go and do likewise.
I love how you weave seemingly disparate things together as you do here! (Frederick & Sun Ra!)
I see a similar thing happening in the visual arts where I live. Beauty is no longer enough for acceptance. Art has been thoroughly replaced by Artivism (= Art + Activism). Unless one's art is a pointed sword to discomfit the comfortable, it is rejected. And the edge of that art-sword had better be pointed in the politically correct direction!
There are art exhibitions which used to accept my work, but no longer do, because my paintings do not make a political point.
I think this phenomenon has a good deal to do with the globalization of capitalism. Wealth becoming disconnected from locale-- that is, when the ownership of local business can be anywhere rather than probably someone who lives in the same fishpond and will have a care for its ecology-- is a considerable part of it. If we saw a movement away from that-- for example, to undo the Supreme Court decision that eviscerated state usury laws and made every credit card company move to the state(s) with the laxest ones-- power would be spread more evenly and taken out of the hands of the uber-wealthy whose values, disconnected from real-world considerations by that wealth, are, I would argue, what are driving this autoflagellistic culture. Don't get me wrong; I'm no communist. But you don't have to be to see the cultural distortions produced by the current supreme influence of Wall Street and its priorities.
I'm slightly amused that mice are the species of choice for the parable at the beginning, given how filthy they are usually seen to be. I read, "The mouse society is able to take heart from the invocation of the memory of beauty, and we know that, nourished by beauty, they will survive to see the spring." Then I thought, "And then they return to eating one another's feces". :-)