Beyond Philistinism: America Takes The Cultural Low Road

Way back in March 1992, writing in The New York Times, James Atlas wondered if intellectuals and other people of culture would prosper should a Democrat be elected president.

Atlas recalled the Kennedy era, when the likes of Robert Lowell and Hannah Arendt haunted the White House parlors. Republicans, he wrote, "have always been defiant philistines. The golf course is their chosen turf."

Scurry 10 months forward. On the eve of the inauguration, New Republic cultural editor Leon Wieseltier beheld Kenny G and Maya Angelou and was displeased.

"It turns out that philistinism is a bipartisan phenomenon," he wrote peevishly in the magazine's special inaugural issue.

The philistine thing again. Oddly enough, it's a word in declining use, the victim of multiple forces, as we will see.

Atlas used it in its more familiar sense. Philistines are generally understood to be resistant to ideas, disdainful of provocative or high-minded art and preoccupied with money, flash and other things crass.

Wieseltier seemed to use the word the way most critics would use "middlebrow" - a catchall for tasteful but ultimately flaccid culture. "Masterpiece Theatre" is middlebrow. The Bud Bowl is philistine.

Some culture critics now contend, in effect, that the struggle against philistinism is lost. Will the very term be in topical use 10 years from now?

No, says Paul Fussell, author of the 1992 book "BAD - Or, the Dumbing of America" (Summit Books).

"The word is five syllables long, after all," he says dryly. "It's rapidly out of reach of most Americans."

"The whole concept has evaporated, because it's the norm," agrees James B. Twitchell, author of the 1992 "Carnival Culture - The Trashing of Taste in America" (Columbia University Press).

Books observing the death of American artistic and intellectual life are very nearly a literary subspecies nowadays. Close on the heels of the books by Twitchell and Fussell comes another jeremiad, excoriating American culture and declaring a philistine victory. This one, "Culture of Complaint - The Fraying of America" is by Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes and will be published in April by Oxford University Press.

Hughes' book argues that the battle between education and television "has been won by television, a medium now more debased in America than ever before," and that even mass culture seems to have grown weaker and less substantial, from Duke Ellington and Muddy Waters to Michael Jackson, from George Gershwin and Cole Porter to "illiterate spectaculars about cats or the fall of Saigon."

In an essentially philistine culture, can anything really stand out as philistinism?

"There is not a single figure that I can think of in American mass entertainment that I regard as other than philistine," says Jonathan Yardley, critic at large.

"There is so little agreed-upon high culture, as opposed to the old days, that it's hard to spot anything that is egregiously low," says Fussell.

In March, Atlas worried about Clinton's fondness for golf (as philistine an activity now as javelin-throwing was then) and his love for mysteries (Paretsky, Ludlum, etc.).

"He's not like Gov. Mario Cuomo, quoting Teilhard de Chardin to every Albany beat reporter who wanders into his office," Atlas wrote.

So is Wieseltier right? Have we exchanged one sort of philistine for another?

"It seems to me that Washington is an almost obdurately philistine city," says Yardley. "Washington has never seen high - or even upper-middlebrow - culture as anything except a political convenience or social adornment."

And don't be fooled, he says, by the coterie of writers, cellists, etc. who wandered the halls of the Kennedy White House.

"John F. Kennedy was quite philistine, despite his talk of wedding poetry and power," says Yardley.

Everybody knows about the Philistines. Their giants had glass jaws, and their women gave lousy haircuts. In the Bible, they are always the bad guys, brutish attackers of the Israelites.

The image endured. In their 1992 book, "People of the Sea" (Macmillan), Israeli archaeologists Trude and Moshe Dothan cite - as one of the first generic applications of the term - a 17th-century sermon by a German chaplain who branded the roughnecks of his town "Philistines" after a rumble between university students and townies.

In English, however, it was Matthew Arnold, a poet, critic and sort of the Fussell-Hughes-Twitchell of the Victorian era, who used the term frequently. Arnold described philistinism as a resistance to ideas.

But the Philistines of yore are benefiting from some timely archaeology and perhaps the current wave of multicultural scholarship. The Dothans and other archaeologists are now claiming that the Philistines were victims of the old principle: Winners write the histories.

Recent excavations, coupled with research that has been around for two centuries, indicate the Philistines had a relatively sophisticated culture, beautiful pottery, advanced technology, impressive architecture, all the trappings of civilization.

If that don't beat all, they were probably emigrants from Greece, possibly even displaced by the Trojan War. There seem to be cultural links - ranging from legends to styles of pottery - to Mycenae and Crete. The Dothans and other scholars believe the Philistines may have first immigrated to an area near Egypt in the 12th century B.C., where they were known as the "Sea People." Their subsequent wanderings brought them into conflict with the Israelites.

The Philistines don't appear to deserve to be synonymous with cultural churlishness. (Next, we'll probably find out that the Vandals were intensely respectful of property rights.)

In any case, says Twitchell, the word has been slowly wearing out its welcome since Arnold's time.

"It was sort of a ludicrous term, even in the '50s," he says.

One reason, says Twitchell, that philistinism is fading as a concept is that there's no one around to decry it.

"It depends on having a group of people who take it as their occupation and passion to point their fingers and say: P.U., that stinks," he says.

That used to be the job of the press and academics, he says, but the former has pretty much given up, and the latter is loosening its grip. (Indeed, Hughes observes in his forthcoming book that Madonna, the singer-actress, is taken so seriously by academia that there are Lacanian, Marxist, Foucaultian and Freudian schools of Madonna scholarship.)

Last August, New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani identified a new cultural movement, called "Cheese," in which the worst and stupidest elements of American culture - such as "The Brady Bunch," Schwarzenegger movies and disco - are celebrated and exalted, as kind of a helpless take on the hopelessness of modern culture.

One theater troupe, Kakutani wrote, even performed, live and verbatim, old "Brady Bunch" scripts.

Cheese is "a passive, reactive stance that, unlike the avant-garde movements that have sprung up in the past in reaction to a philistine status quo, generates no original art of its own; instead, it contents itself with putting down or making fun of the surrounding culture," Kakutani wrote.

"A lot of it could be defined as postmodernism," says Fussell, "by which you simply accept all the artistic horrors and decline to exercise any . . . judgment."

"Cheese is: `Hey, who cares?' " says Twitchell.

"You will get no argument from me on the proposition that standards are eroding," grumbles Yardley. "But it's very important to understand that they were never very high to begin with."

Culture used to be defined by an elite and is now defined by the mass, he says.

"It's one of the prices we pay for democracy," he says.