news that stays news

Spencer Kornhaber:

What’s so jarring about these declarations of malaise is that we should, logically, be in a renaissance. The internet has caused a Cambrian explosion of creative expression by allowing artists to execute and distribute their visions with unprecedented ease. More than 500 scripted TV shows get made every year; streaming services reportedly add about 100,000 songs every day. We have podcasts that cater to every niche passion and video games of novelistic sophistication. Technology companies like to say that they’ve democratized the arts, enabling exciting collisions of ideas from unlikely talents. Yet no one seems very happy about the results.

The argument here seems to be that, “logically,” quantity of production should translate to excellence. But what if the ceaseless and overwhelming flow of “content” is an impediment to excellence, not the facilitator of it? See my thoughts from a couple of years back on the virtues of resistance.

But I do wonder whether we spend too much time worrying about whether this moment is one characterized by creativity or stagnation. It is not as though the New is all that matters. One of the things that’s great about being the kind of teacher I am is that you spend your life introducing new people to old things: when my students fall in love with Bonhoeffer or Simone Weil or John Donne or Pascal — things that happened this very term — it’s all new to them. Thus Ezra Pound:

After talking with Ted Gioia — who is, for what it’s worth, probably right when he argues that our algorithmic media ecosystem is enforcing creative stagnation — Kornhaber is slightly “stung” when he realizes that “The Police broke up before I was born, yet I’ve been humming their songs my whole life.” But why be stung? The Police made some great songs. It’s cool when someone born in 2005 discovers the Beatles, just as it’s cool when they discover Dante or George Eliot.

The proper worry, I think, is this: What if we’re making generations of people who can’t genuinely discover the Beatles or Dante? If they can’t read anything longer than a tweet, if they can’t grok music that doesn’t start with its chorus and last 90 seconds max? If we can form young people in such a way that they’re capable of apprehending the non-algorithmic, non-digital world of art and culture, then the problem of stagnation will eventually resolve itself. But if we can’t … well, then, we can focus on helping those adults who come to doubt the wisdom and good will of their algorithmic overlords. There will be plenty such; never a majority, of course, but plenty. As Larkin says, “someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious.”

That’s what this blog is about, in large part, and when I retire from teaching college students it will become my chief mission. Thus good old Wordsworth: “What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how.”