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Entry: The Haughty Polloi Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_haughty_polloi#8401 Post contents: The nouveau riches have always been borderline vulgar. Yet Arnold pointed out 150 years ago that the upper classes in the Anglophone world – be they grand bourgeois or nobility – have little interest in high culture, none in ideas, and none even in bella forma. Friends in Maine tell me that the children of the old rich show up in fine dining restaurants clad in jeans. In Gringoland, the situation is even worse, because to be well educated here is not a life goal of any Gringo, and well-educated is the sine non qua of cultivating High Culture (to say nothing of prospering in a high-tech and international marketplace). Add to this the New Englander’s Puritan dislike anything that can’t be turned into a moral witch-hunting crusade. For him, anything refined, elevated, intellectually engrossing, or beautiful is somehow lewd and wicked. The Dutch Calvinists produced much that was beautiful, as did Milton and Marvell. The Lutherans gave us Schutz and Bach. But the Gringo Calvinist knows nothing of the artistic and intellectual achievements of Calvinism. Mencken was right to call our Puritan universities slaughterhouses for ideas. They still are, be they Bob Jones Fundy or Colombia Cultural Marxist. Taki himself reflects how much better things are on the Continent, where I have found German businessmen who can talk intelligently about Thomas Mann, recognizing in his concept of the <i>Burger</i> an affinity, and where artist and professor are the most respected professions, not banker or bureaucrat. So bad is it in the Lincolnlands that those few of Gringo grand bourgeois who cultivated High Culture generally have adopted a strategy of escape: Henry Adams, Bernard Berenson, T.S. Eliot, and Percival Lowell come immediately to mind. The first escaped into the Gothic Age, the second into the Florentine Quattrocento, the third into the Baroque, and the last into Outer Space (heard of the Lowell Observatory?). Sent at: 2008 07 09