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Entry: Unnatural Arts and Sports Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/unnatural_arts_and_sports#8354 Post contents: The best explanation I know for the survival of literature and the arts in the former Soviet Union was given by Andrei Navrozov in his book "the Gingerbread Race." He points out that Russia under the czars was the last society in Europe that had a purely aristocratic high culture - by 1917, the rest of the civilized world had subordinated culture to commerce. After the Bolshevik revolution, the new rulers of Russia did not really know what to do with the arts. To their modest credit, they preserved them even though they had nothing to do with creating them. It's also to be noted that the old-fashioned sort of socialist - both in the Soviet Union and outside it - did not hate Western civilization. Furthermore, such people still subscribed to the notion that their great desideratum of social and economic equality had in part to be achieved by elevating the proletariat, rather than solely by cutting down the gentry and bourgeoisie. This goal of uplifting the working class was to be accomplished by making high culture available to them. At least that was the theory, though the practice was another matter. Then along came the Frankfurt school, Frantz Fanon, and people like Susan Sontag, who proclaimed her enmity to the "Matthew Arnold idea of culture" and averred that the white race was a cancer on the world. The determination of the modern left to destroy the institutions of Western civilization, to deprecate its high culture as the product of "DWEMs" (dead white European males) is the product of these folk. Again, to their modest credit, the old Bolshevik commissars never proposed such nonsense. I'll point out to those who have disparaged American culture in this thread that there was once a widespread "middlebrow" culture in this country that respected literature and the arts and sought to make them available to a broad public through such institutions as public libraries, Chautauqua lectures, and in larger cities, art museums and symphony orchestras. There were, obviously, many people who had no interest in any of these things, who were content with "lowbrow" entertainments, and the "highbrows" often sneered at the efforts of the less educated and less wealthy to improve themselves - but these institutions persisted in American society until the 'sixties, when the academic/intellectual world that had hitherto been the stewards of high culture turned against it. We know the rest of the story, because we've lived through it. The American culture that so many here and abroad disparage is the result of exalting the most vulgar aspects of lowbrow pop culture and appealing to the basest instincts of human nature. What is amazing is the strange alliance that has created this circumstance - on one hand, the anti-Western ideologues of the far left, on the other, entrepreneurs in the entertainment and fashion industries who have seen it as their opportunity to make their fortunes. Sent at: 2008 07 24