I am finding myself nodding in agreement with many of your points. They brought to mind the alarming emergence of "adulting" as a verb, where things like paying your bills and taxes, or even cleaning your living space, are viewed by younger adults as some kind of novelty, rather than shouldering the responsibilities of maturity.
This — Substack — is the high point of contemporary culture as far as I’m concerned. I generally go back at least a decade, more often many decades, when looking for books, movies, and music to enjoy.
Though the seeming dearth of quality cultural output in the present era is at least partially to be blamed on the consumer. We can no longer rely on the large entertainment industry institutions to bring the best of books, music, art, and movies to our attention. Quite the opposite. As you note, they bring us slopification and infantilization.
But the good stuff is surely out there. We just have to put a lot more effort into seeking it out for ourselves.
The quality of essays around Substack, for instance, is nothing to sneeze at. I’ve read stuff from online anons here that can rightfully be compared with significant writing from decades and centuries past.
As far as books, movies, and music, I for one admit to being lazy about finding good contemporary stuff. Given the abject failure of the entertainment industry (we need a shorthand like “BigEnt” or something) to bring quality to our attention, I rely on the Lindy rule to sort the wheat from the chaff. If it’s old and still relevant, it’s more likely to be worthwhile. But unfortunately this means I’m not supporting contemporary high art, wherever it is, besides some Substack writing.
Haven't listened to the OG podcast but him bringing up music is a bad example. By the 00s music was already slop and the new wave of indie/online music has made the scene more competitive. Slopification is definitely a thing and it's basically hit every culture, including video games, movies, television, and even anime.
Music is more or less the easiest artform to quantify. There are analyses of chart topping songs going back 100 years showing that hit singles are converging on a particular archetype. It's like that image of basketball shots comparing 2000 to 2020 where the whole thing has been refined so much that it's had the real life squeezed out of it.
The problem is demographics, it is women. Western media isn't made by white men for white men anymore, it is made by women and minorities for the "modern audiences" (women, lgbt, and foreigners). Constantin is entirely out of touch as to what is actually happening. But yes, I do also think a serious spiritual deficiency is at fault.
While I find both articles to be very good, and true in their own respect, I think the scope of Constatin's article is narrower than yours. Replacing slopification with infantilization just limits the scope of time to the last 100 years, give or take. I would argue that infantilization is the natural outcome of spiritual unmooring, especially when you factor in the effects of mass media and market pressures.
Constatin is incorrect in his assertion that childrens stories and fairy tales are merely introductions for more sophisticated taste. No one reads Alice in Wonderland and thinks, "wow, what great mashed peas!" They are more like foundation stones than stepping stones, micro stories of the macro narrative.
I think most pop cultural critique falls in the category of category error, as was mentioned. People who lament the latest video game slop being woke or having bad gameplay misunderstand the role of the video game. Entertainment has been elevated to near spiritual importance but it's too much effort for most to escape its appeal. It is the water in which we swim. We should then be humble and not arrogant that we are somehow enlightened by our noticing.
This is a major theme of my writing, that our civilization is disconnected from its roots and can only make increasingly faded copies of things that once had real spiritual and emotional resonance. My project as an educator is to encourage a return to the well, with the Bible and myth as the foundation of a new renaissance. It’s what happened before and it can happen again.
Could it be that our will to author a totalizing theory explaining everything overshadows the nuggets of wisdom we can instead identify and get right?
Slopification and Infantalization obviously have different meanings, but they have overlapping qualities. It would be legitimate to argue both (and many more) have occurred: what worked on me might not work on you, etc, and everyone, including the dissidents, need to corraled, it's too risky to leave a patch of the population to its own evolution, unless you're Amish.
I think you're right about the post WW2 era (until '68) having the best of both worlds (historical morality in the social sphere coupled with improving living standards), which masked how technology was already undermining the fabric of Western society. Incidentally, our technology does not permit us to return to a 1950s or 1970s world; we're basically stuck within a reality construct where forward movement is a built-in underlying assumption, all we can throttle is the speed.
Oh, there's plenty of good music being made, but people then complain that "they just sound like (X)". Also, too many people really DON'T want to hear new music. I remember a local Classic Rock DJ explaining to people that yes, the early 80s are Classic Rock.....
Exactly. On the part of music in particular, there is also the constant accusation of "selling out" that was already all-too-common in the 90s and early 2000s.
Speaking of an age of illiteracy the leading edge example of such is of course Donald Trump.
Such was also dramatized in the movie Beavis & Butthead Do America.
During his election campaign the Orange Oaf deliberately pitched his appeal to the Beavis & Butthead brigade at his Madison Square Gardens Rally. He even featured himself in the company of some worse-than-awful young men, some of whom were and are criminals.
It seems to me that one of the best descriptions of the infantilization of US culture, including much or most of what is promoted as religion is given by Robert Bly in his two books Iron John - A Book About Men, and The Sibling Society.
At another level the common "creator-God" paradigm is a naive childish even infantile concept/paradigm and at root Godless too. Also it does not even begin to take into account the existential fact that Death Is the Constant Message of Life.
Reminds me of something a friend of mine suggested: that in the 19th century, "toys" like wooden horses or wooden train carriages etc. would actually have been for adults to play with!
I am finding myself nodding in agreement with many of your points. They brought to mind the alarming emergence of "adulting" as a verb, where things like paying your bills and taxes, or even cleaning your living space, are viewed by younger adults as some kind of novelty, rather than shouldering the responsibilities of maturity.
This — Substack — is the high point of contemporary culture as far as I’m concerned. I generally go back at least a decade, more often many decades, when looking for books, movies, and music to enjoy.
Though the seeming dearth of quality cultural output in the present era is at least partially to be blamed on the consumer. We can no longer rely on the large entertainment industry institutions to bring the best of books, music, art, and movies to our attention. Quite the opposite. As you note, they bring us slopification and infantilization.
But the good stuff is surely out there. We just have to put a lot more effort into seeking it out for ourselves.
The quality of essays around Substack, for instance, is nothing to sneeze at. I’ve read stuff from online anons here that can rightfully be compared with significant writing from decades and centuries past.
As far as books, movies, and music, I for one admit to being lazy about finding good contemporary stuff. Given the abject failure of the entertainment industry (we need a shorthand like “BigEnt” or something) to bring quality to our attention, I rely on the Lindy rule to sort the wheat from the chaff. If it’s old and still relevant, it’s more likely to be worthwhile. But unfortunately this means I’m not supporting contemporary high art, wherever it is, besides some Substack writing.
Haven't listened to the OG podcast but him bringing up music is a bad example. By the 00s music was already slop and the new wave of indie/online music has made the scene more competitive. Slopification is definitely a thing and it's basically hit every culture, including video games, movies, television, and even anime.
Music is more or less the easiest artform to quantify. There are analyses of chart topping songs going back 100 years showing that hit singles are converging on a particular archetype. It's like that image of basketball shots comparing 2000 to 2020 where the whole thing has been refined so much that it's had the real life squeezed out of it.
The problem is demographics, it is women. Western media isn't made by white men for white men anymore, it is made by women and minorities for the "modern audiences" (women, lgbt, and foreigners). Constantin is entirely out of touch as to what is actually happening. But yes, I do also think a serious spiritual deficiency is at fault.
While I find both articles to be very good, and true in their own respect, I think the scope of Constatin's article is narrower than yours. Replacing slopification with infantilization just limits the scope of time to the last 100 years, give or take. I would argue that infantilization is the natural outcome of spiritual unmooring, especially when you factor in the effects of mass media and market pressures.
Constatin is incorrect in his assertion that childrens stories and fairy tales are merely introductions for more sophisticated taste. No one reads Alice in Wonderland and thinks, "wow, what great mashed peas!" They are more like foundation stones than stepping stones, micro stories of the macro narrative.
I think most pop cultural critique falls in the category of category error, as was mentioned. People who lament the latest video game slop being woke or having bad gameplay misunderstand the role of the video game. Entertainment has been elevated to near spiritual importance but it's too much effort for most to escape its appeal. It is the water in which we swim. We should then be humble and not arrogant that we are somehow enlightened by our noticing.
This is a major theme of my writing, that our civilization is disconnected from its roots and can only make increasingly faded copies of things that once had real spiritual and emotional resonance. My project as an educator is to encourage a return to the well, with the Bible and myth as the foundation of a new renaissance. It’s what happened before and it can happen again.
Could it be that our will to author a totalizing theory explaining everything overshadows the nuggets of wisdom we can instead identify and get right?
Slopification and Infantalization obviously have different meanings, but they have overlapping qualities. It would be legitimate to argue both (and many more) have occurred: what worked on me might not work on you, etc, and everyone, including the dissidents, need to corraled, it's too risky to leave a patch of the population to its own evolution, unless you're Amish.
I think you're right about the post WW2 era (until '68) having the best of both worlds (historical morality in the social sphere coupled with improving living standards), which masked how technology was already undermining the fabric of Western society. Incidentally, our technology does not permit us to return to a 1950s or 1970s world; we're basically stuck within a reality construct where forward movement is a built-in underlying assumption, all we can throttle is the speed.
Oh, there's plenty of good music being made, but people then complain that "they just sound like (X)". Also, too many people really DON'T want to hear new music. I remember a local Classic Rock DJ explaining to people that yes, the early 80s are Classic Rock.....
This was 2015 or so!
Exactly. On the part of music in particular, there is also the constant accusation of "selling out" that was already all-too-common in the 90s and early 2000s.
Speaking of an age of illiteracy the leading edge example of such is of course Donald Trump.
Such was also dramatized in the movie Beavis & Butthead Do America.
During his election campaign the Orange Oaf deliberately pitched his appeal to the Beavis & Butthead brigade at his Madison Square Gardens Rally. He even featured himself in the company of some worse-than-awful young men, some of whom were and are criminals.
It seems to me that one of the best descriptions of the infantilization of US culture, including much or most of what is promoted as religion is given by Robert Bly in his two books Iron John - A Book About Men, and The Sibling Society.
At another level the common "creator-God" paradigm is a naive childish even infantile concept/paradigm and at root Godless too. Also it does not even begin to take into account the existential fact that Death Is the Constant Message of Life.
Reminds me of something a friend of mine suggested: that in the 19th century, "toys" like wooden horses or wooden train carriages etc. would actually have been for adults to play with!