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I once believed that political solutions to problems are viable, and now I believe that they are not, and that you need cultural solutions first in order to meaningfully affect the political
I once believed literature mattered, but upon inspecting the type of people who are into literature versus who are not, I no longer believe it is valuable. “Literature” is surprisingly new to civilization anyway.
I love dogs, but dog culture should be ended, and anthropomorphism should be banned from kids entertainment. Kids should be learning to understand humans and their variegated expressions, so that they can understand themselves and adapt to the social world in front of them. They should not be bonding with animals to a significant degree.
I once thought IQ was the be-all-end-all but now I think there are other qualities which are as important but less easy to measure.
I believe literature serves the purpose of setting the standard for high culture much like classical music and good art. The point is to develop good taste in those things, understanding how they’re ideally structured, rather than just reading low end pulp books or listening to nothing but low end pop music. Good taste in art is a thing, and I think a lot of our culture is degraded with low grade art because most people never get exposed to good art.
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Could you give a couple of examples?
The one I can think of: regulating social media and news outlets is the political solution to a cultural problem.
That political solution will not occur unless there is already a cultural solution in place. In order to instantiate an effective regulatory body for social media, you need people to lobby for it; in order to get people to lobby for it, you need cultural organizations that create awareness. Next, you need to generate enough billions of dollars that your lobbying is greater than Meta et al. Why shouldn’t Meta, with a profit of $40b, spend all of that profit and more on lobbying against your solution? They will then selectively show you influencers who are against regulation on all your social media feeds.
Luckily there’s another way to regulate social media. Establish a tight-knit culture and create your own social media. Like how churches have always created their own media and social organizations against secular culture. It doesn’t have to be advanced. It would take a weekend to make an early MySpace clone. Now you have your own social media. Defectors who attempt to continue using mainstream social media are excommunicated and shunned.
This “out there” solution of crafting microcultures is the only way forward as capitalism becomes more and more intent on degrading human life quality. We will now always have gambling and loot crate mechanics because gambling companies are now able to lobby. We will always have marijuana because marijuana dispensaries can lobby. It is just going to get worse and worse. Nothing will be the same. You won’t be able to beat them in a lobby-off, but you will be able to beat them by banning them from your community, because at the end of the day there will always be reasonable people who listen to other reasonable people and are persuaded by reasonable arguments — and when these people form a community with rules then they will have a huge advantage over Consumer-Americans.
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As one of those "people who are into literature":
When I was younger, both I and my elder brother wanted to be writers, but we disagreed strongly on what made good writing. Probably the simplest way to describe it was that he liked art and I liked entertainment. We've never really resolved the disagreement, but I've spent a long time contemplating why I enjoy what I enjoy, and most of it seems to come down to one of two things; either the piece encapsulates a feeling, or it encapsulates an idea. Either way, these encapsulations are valuable in that they give one significant control over one's own mental state, and that is both pleasurable and useful in many ways.
I think a lot of my own bogglement with the general category of "literature" is that so much of the time, there doesn't seem to be anything useful being encapsulated. I can imagine that the encapsulations are in some incompatible format, but the general impression left is still...
Is that from Blindsight? Looks familiar.
Anyway, I see what you (and @coffee_enjoyer) are getting at, but as a book nerd (and also a wannabe-never-was writer) I think the great Literature vs. Entertainment debate is a false dichotomy. Literature, I submit, does do more than entertain. But good literature is entertaining. Conversely, you can enjoy being entertained by something that you recognize is objectively not good literature.
I love me some Dickens (as my post above should make clear). He was a massively popular author in his time. He is still read today because he was a good writer, but also because he gives us insights into his world that are valuable and useful. People have criticisms of his politics and proto-socialism; fair enough. I believe it was Oscar Wilde who called him maudlin and melodramatic. But we still read stories about a time and place that is utterly foreign to most people today because it's still recognizable on a human level, they are human stories told by someone who had a way with words. To me, Dickens is "useful," though I know there are those who do not like him. (Peasants!)
Now, Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert was assigned to me in high school. I found it utterly boring. Gustave Flaubert was an early "realist" writer. It's useful today to know how he fit into the evolution of literary schools, but you could say he's kind of like JRR Tolkien, in that someone reading him today might wonder what the big deal is because we've seen hundreds, thousands of books since that look just like this - not realizing that they are copying his beat.
I reread Madame Bovary a few years ago, and still didn't love it, but... I liked it and understood it a lot more. Because it's about a French housewife who is unhappy and bored with her marriage. It's about middle aged people being unsatisfied and disappointed with how their lives turned out, and how clinging to your juvenile fantasies as an adult is pathetic and a path to ruin. Of course I found it boring and pointless as a teenager, I couldn't relate! As a much older person, I suddenly found myself appreciating what Flaubert was trying to illustrate.
I am not sure if you are complaining about "literature" that seems pointlessly navel-gazing with no real message to it, just exercises in masturbatory wordsmithing, or literature that you think has a bad message (i.e., a weapon in the culture war). Both those things exist. But appreciation for literature doesn't necessarily mean being a Barnard English major sniffing one's own farts.
I also like Stephen King and Brandon Sanderson and JK Rowling and Ian Fleming and Robert Heinlein, and I could go on. All of whom have their own virtues and flaws as writers. I've even read some litrpg and fanfiction and the like, though I find 99% of it unreadable drek. So it's not about having snooty reading tastes.
Pinging @Hoffmeister25, since he seemed interested as well.
Yup!
To be clear, I entirely agree! One of the things I learned as I got older and a bit wiser was that entertainment for its own sake is, ultimately, empty, and not even particularly entertaining. You can't extrude it by the hundredweight according to a set formula without losing the special something that makes the best of it so delightfully seductive in the first place, and part of that special something seems to be insight, something that echoes and accretes in the inner self, that leaves an impression where lesser matter washes in and away without consequence.
Both, certainly. Some of it definitely feels either pointless or juvenile, in a Wow-I-Am-Very-Deep sense. On the bad message side... I'd be hard-pressed to find an author with worse messages than Peter Watts, but he's still a treasure to me because even if I fundamentally disagree with his worldview, I still come away feeling like my perspective has been sharpened thanks to the clarity with which he communicates it. To quote another favorite, "here comes, thank heaven, another enemy". And it's not even about naïve enjoyment, either; his Rifter trilogy was horrifying in the most literal sense, did permanent psychic damage to me, and I don't think I ever will want to read them again... but boy, did they leave an impression!
But there's a lot of other stuff that's just sort of unreflectively, unrefinedly bad. On the recommendation of a Mottian, I read Middlegame. There was a lot I really liked about the plot and the characters and the style, and I really wanted to enjoy it. but ultimately, the villains were one-note caricatures of misogyny, and eventually they stopped being monsters to me, and just became cartoons. They weren't doing what they were doing for sensical reasons, but rather because it was Very Important that I Update My Opions About Misogyny Now. And it killed the narrative for me, not because I think misogyny is super cool and don't like seeing it attacked, but because trite sermons from someone else's religion are really boring.
...Your point about Madame Bovary is well taken. Here's the thing, though: why was it assigned to you in high school?
Suppose that there's this idea that books and humans interact deterministically. People observe that good books leave an impression on the reader, and that the best books leave an impression on most or even all readers, and they think hey, we can shape people into the sort of people we want by having them read the right Good Books in the right sequence. Only, it doesn't actually work like that for a whole host of reasons, not least because people are different, and what they're ready for and what's relevant to them is different, and we lie to ourselves or are mistaken about what actually leaves an impression and which impressions are valuable... and so the end result is this big, unpleasant, brutalist machine covered in grime and bloodstains with a sign on it that reads "happy fun good-things dispenser."
There's a wealth of wonderful creations out there, no doubt. But there's this mass in the middle of it, with an ossified narrative maintained by a sort of pseudo-priesthood, and I'm deeply skeptical of the whole edifice. I would rather talk about "I liked this because I got such-and-such" out of it, and they seem to think they're doing something much more involved and much more serious than that.
Does that make more sense?
Madame Bovary was probably assigned to me in high school because my high school English teacher had to read it in college...
But seriously, Flaubert is important (at least, knowing how he influenced literature) and Madame Bovary has something to say, it's just maybe not a message that a teenager will be receptive to. My personal reading list for high school students might be very different, but I'd still make them read some "difficult" and "old" books, and if they ask "Why should I care about Dickens or Tolstoy or Flaubert?" I'd say "Because these are a few of the small stones in the foundations on which your culture was built. And you should also have some understanding of history, not just seen through history books."
Yeah, I understand the skepticism towards the "literary establishment" and teachers who decide on the curriculum for high school English students. But what I got from you and coffee was a general disdain for literature as something worth studying, or even appreciating beyond the enjoyment you get from any given story. And I think literature is worth studying and appreciating, for its cultural relevance, for its insight, for its facility with language and showing us what can be done with words in the hands of a master.
Fiction can teach a lot about history and psychology and human relationships. (Obviously it can teach incorrect things and even bad things, but then, how much do you trust any given supposedly non-fiction book?)
If we're complaining about whoever the NYT or the London Review of Books has anointed as the latest Important Writer To Read, sure, a lot of the literary establishment does seem like a self-regarding, incestuous coterie. But, ya know, just like Hollywood. Or Wall Street. Or Washington. There is still (arguably) something being produced there that is of value.
I've read some Pulitzer and Man Booker Prize winners that had me going "Why?" But when I reflected honestly, they were actually well written and had something to say - it just wasn't for me.
I think we maybe don't disagree that much, I just dislike seeing people dismiss Literature as if it's all something invented by hoity leftist college professors.
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What are some specific examples of literary works which you consider to contain nothing but “useless” content? And do you believe that such content is not useful to anyone? Or merely not to you?
Douglas Coupland. I love his prose, it goes down your throat like a perfect dessert, he would be a perfect dinner guest, but there's no message, just /r/til/top.
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I'm not overflowing with examples because I actively avoid most of the stuff, but I can offer a few, direct and indirect.
Bless Me Ultima, a babbies first lit book assigned in an institution of higher learning.
Indirectly, Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy. A friend was enthusiastic about the book, and neither they, the wikipedia article, nor reading a few passages myself revealed why.
Bonus: the poetry of Sylvia Plath.
Theoretically, these texts fit the particular shapes of some particular population's mind, sure. But when I try to engage with the people actually claiming to find value on what value they find, I am left mystified or alienated.
All of "literature" ostensibly states it's trying to find "deeper truths to the human condition" or something. I think, at its best, literature is a kind of compliment to moral philosophy. It wrestles with the Big Questions - Why are we here? What does it mean?
The reality is that 80% of literature is just aesthetic mood affiliation and fashion. Over at Scott's Blog, they just had some millenial (!) post a review of David Foster Wallace's last book. David Foster Wallace was probably a genius, and he used that genius to write thousands of pages of Gen-X nonsense .... and Gen-x (and I guess millienials now) love him for it. He was very, very, very cool.
Charles Bukowski wasn't very cool when he was alive (except in Germany for some reason). At the end of his life and after he died, he became cool in (another) post-ironic "dirtbags are cool" way. He started popping up in literature classes at Bard and Oberlin. That was a real shame. The hipsters turn him into this "poet of the streets" when, in reality, Charles Bukowski wrote about real truth in life - a lot of it is desperate, gross, weak characters mutually exploiting one another to get through the day. Forget the intellectual goofyness of "making the profane divine" ... Sometimes life is just cheap whiskey and run down whores in East L.A.
I don't think literature is important because I don't think there's enough of it that can be generalized. Use my DFW example - there are people who love him dearly. I appreciate their love for him, but I never will. "Well, you don't have to love him, but can't you learn something from him?" No. No I can't. It's all too personal, too mood affiliation, too "what's your aesthetic?"
I'll quibble with DFW's work being nonsense.
It's dizzying, which is not the same thing. It's trying to capture the feeling of the modern world in all of its immense alienating complexity down to the mundane.
If you wanted to explain the feeling of living in our era to someone from 100 years ago, Infinite Jest would be more helpful than a history book in the same way that reading Burroughs is more helpful to understand the feeling of living 100 years ago.
There's lots of people you can accuse of being rote postmodernists with no ideas but the butchering of what is, they run most of entertainment right now. David Foster Wallace is not one of them.
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Hard agree on this. I recently learned that the President of South Korea has no children, but several dogs. And he is a conservative who actually wants to increase the birth rate. Lol.
Based on no data whatsoever, I will propose that if a woman ever gets a dog before having kids, the chance of kids goes down by a lot. I have friends who have dogs that they treat like children, and I have to admit it bothers me a lot.
Arguably literature mattered a lot from like 1800–1970 give or take. Supposedly, people would mob the docks to get the latest Charles Dickens serial. Harriet Beecher Stowe practically caused the Civil War by writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Even as recently as the 1960s, writers like Norman Mailer were actually well-known and widely read.
Today, of course, the entire industry should just be drowned in a bathtub. It is so ideologically captured as to be worthless. I don't care if I ever read another book of "literature" written after the year 1980.
I think you have an overly narrow view of what the "industry" is. The publishing industry, certainly is staffed mainly by 30 and 40 something white women trying to appeal to the same. But the superset-- the literature industry-- is much larger, still relevant, and wholly unkillable. We think of "literature" as being "classical books about people being depressed in russian" and "modern books about suburban moms leaving their husbands" because that's what we learned about in school and that's what makes it onto the talk shows. And so because nobody reads those books and actually changes what they believe, we think literature is a dead, academic pursuit. But in reality, I think it's stuff like dark romantasy smut and isekai webnovels that are having the greatest net effect on philosophical and moral development. (Which is a terrifying thought, but I digress.) You can find any number of people talking about how, for example, Mushoku Tensei changed their lives.
/u/coffee_enjoyer this is also relevant to your comment.
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Some books are fun. The key is ignoring people who say you have to spend all your time reading neurotic navel-gazing about the Female Experience if you want to be a good person. If something is annoying or boring... You just drop it.
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