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Rock, hip hop, country, rap, slang, gangster culture, tattoos, piercings, and mannerisms that dominate entertainment and social society have all come from the lower rungs of society.
The upper class appropriate this behavior for themselves with upper class children going to hippie festivals, following the same trends that street kids do, etc.
I'm not part of the upper class but I did go to an event in a golf club filled with well to do old people. I had expected this well educated crowd to be stuck up, but they would talk like a country folk, laughing at crude humor among other such behaviors.
Economically we are more divided than ever by class, but socially we are more united than ever before.
Rich folk love going to coachella and doing what others in their peer group do, just with more material comfort.
They like money but they don't have a sense of noblesse oblige, or see them selves as representatives of their society, nor as role models.
Hollywood culture has been deviant, but never before has their been more cult worship for celebrities who act poor (in terms of mannerism) or behave without dignity. Good skills like charisma or bravery are replaced by openness, vulnerability, and behavior that makes a celebrity seem like another one of their fans.
Personally I hate mass media and how it has homogenized cultural consumption for everyone across this vast country, and I hate celebrity worship. But more than that I believe it is the job of the rich to build monuments of design, art, and pleasure, and set the standards the rest of us aspire to.
That doesn't mean everyone acting rich or entitled, but it does mean giving commoners a regional or local figurehead that inspires them rather than copy them.
Today the elite entertainers copy the trends from the bottom of society and try to market their own participation. On one hand that gives trashy celebrities less influence, but on the other hand it consumes the rest of the elite class in mimicking sad and undignified behavior.
I would rather them have less wealth and power over our society, but more social prestige that donates monuments and cultural joys that build a sense of community.
Without hereditary wealth we would have no temples, palaces, or statues that have remained through history giving each region of the world a distinct style and character.
Now we have a globalized culture that comes from the bottom rungs of society homogenizing our entertainment consumption while inadvertently funneling more capital and power into the richest members of society.
It's silly, in bad taste, and a betrayal of what should be a good moral society.
Who’s the bottom? The idea you think they are the bottom is reprehensible in itself!
Location: New Albany, Indiana (Greater Louisville)
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Starting in the 1950s birth rates among middle and upper class people plummeted but remained higher (though still falling) for poor people. This is true across all races. So more of the youth in for Millennial and Gen Z come from the lower classes, myself included. I'd guess with student loan debt so high the fertility rate among college grads might go below 1.0, which is 50% of replacement rate.
He's saying that we don't have any class anymore. We are not humble, we do not care about each other, we don't care what we destroy in our obsession to buy the newest shiny object. We're not a community, we're just a bunch of scallywags, and we look ridiculous.
Many of our "arts" are trash - music, movies, and whatever some people call "art" these days (A blank white canvas - "It's ART, it has such a deep meaning, and it took the artist over a year to come up with the concept." Crowd oohs and ahs, and someone buys it for $35,000.)
All of that I agree with.
I do not, however, agree that the elite should be the ones creating art. They already are, and it's trash. Every individual can create art. And what we do have that looks decent is being torn down by a bunch of panti fa whiners - so there goes even more of our art.
I also don't agree that there's no culture - there is. I've lived in many different areas in this country, and every time I move to a new state, it almost feels like moving to a new country. However, that is starting to slowly slide away as people across this country are losing the culture that was in their area.
Nonetheless, it's certainly not on the level of "culture" that you'll find in other parts of this world.
I think we began to lose any sense of community and culture after the 2nd World War. Suburbs were created, and that should have been a "community" but it is definitely different than when I was a kid. Everyone on that block "parented" a kid, no matter whose family they were from.
Now we have people who can't even handle hearing that their kid did anything wrong. (Ask a teacher, ask a cop....if there's any left.)
What I see is that the more we try to mingle with each other, different types of people, the less community we have. And that has me wondering if we are pushing something that doesn't work, after all? I thought it did, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it doesn't.
I spent a lot of my life around very creative people, sadly although I had no talent but i did love the atmosphere. And not a one of them was very good at doing what our society values most, that is making and accumulating wealth. Now those at the very pinnacle of creativity are so admired they can become wealthy and keep that wealth but its a rare thing. If you look at what we considered Classic Culture take into consideration that back in the day wealthy Patrons would support the artists who created this "classic culture" and without that support perhaps we would be saying that culture also came from the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. 200 years from now hip-hop and rap may be considered the "classics' right along with Mork and Mindy.
Many of our "arts" are trash - music, movies, and whatever some people call "art" these days (A blank white canvas - "It's ART, it has such a deep meaning, and it took the artist over a year to come up with the concept." Crowd oohs and ahs, and someone buys it for $35,000.)
That right there is the wealthy elite imposing its taste. Never been much of a one for concept art - tends to be too much concept, too little art - but let's face it, there is still art that isn't easily approachable, and that has its own built-in filter, it becomes elitist just by existing.
To jump to medium with a more manageable price range, Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon have written books that can't be fully appreciated unless you're familiar with a whole lot of classics and with the literary conventions that they're providing a sort of meta-commentary on, that doesn't make them better books than those written by people who just convey an approachable understanding of the world. But they do address a more narrow audience.
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I also don't agree that there's no culture - there is. I've lived in many different areas in this country, and every time I move to a new state, it almost feels like moving to a new country. However, that is starting to slowly slide away as people across this country are losing the culture that was in their area.
People are more mobile, too. OTOH, no one said that culture has to be geographical. Mass media and the Internet have made subgenres available everywhere, and if people find a cultural identity that way, who's to say it's wrong?
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What I see is that the more we try to mingle with each other, different types of people, the less community we have. And that has me wondering if we are pushing something that doesn't work, after all? I thought it did, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it doesn't.
Not sure I agree. I live in a small and very intermingled CA beach community - every color, plenty of nationalities, most every political stripe, more faiths and lack of than you can shake a stick at. Yet there is a fair degree of agreement on what we want for our little town - I will call that culture, although it's not well-defined - and we have had some very broad-spectered collaboration, politically, when outside money (wealthy elites, if you will) showed up to change things.
I spent a lot of my life around very creative people, sadly although I had no talent but i did love the atmosphere. And not a one of them was very good at doing what our society values most, that is making and accumulating wealth. Now those at the very pinnacle of creativity are so admired they can become wealthy and keep that wealth but its a rare thing. If you look at what we considered Classic Culture take into consideration that back in the day wealthy Patrons would support the artists who created this "classic culture" and without that support perhaps we would be saying that culture also came from the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. 200 years from now hip-hop and rap may be considered the "classics' right along with Mork and Mindy.
Sturgeon's Law - "90% of everything is crud" - remains in force.
One of the Georges wanted some nice music for an afternoon concert on the Thames and he happened to have Handel on retainer, so "Water Music" came into being. We don't hear about all the other little pieces written by lesser composers hired by other courts, because Handel was a genius and his art stood the test of time. Same with contemporary art. Some of it will speak to generations centuries removed, most will end up on history's dirtpile.
Start a thread with a very narrow definition of culture and then beat it to submission...
Don't know if we should hate the lower rungs of society for contributing or if we should hate the uppers rungs of society for not contributing to this narrow view of culture.
Start a thread with a very narrow definition of culture and then beat it to submission...
Don't know if we should hate the lower rungs of society for contributing or if we should hate the uppers rungs of society for not contributing to this narrow view of culture.
Communists never like the poor, but they surely hate the rich.
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