'HIGH CULTURE VS POPULAR CULTURE..WHO WINS?'

Here’s my take: no one wins. They are essentially the same. They do the same work. They both provoke thought and argument. They both discuss ‘life’ for everyone—the masses and the toffs alike. When you drop your toast on the floor and it lands jam-side down, does it matter if you are wearing a dinner suit or a onesie? The only material difference, then, between high and popular culture is that one requires a dinner suit and the other doesn’t.

            Let’s take two famous quotes—one by a Greek philosopher from 500 BCE, and the other from popular culture:

“No man ever steps into the same river twice.” (Everything changes—today’s moral ambiguity is tomorrow’s moral certainty or uncertainty—moral truth is fit for purpose, fluid and not fixed.)

and

“Life is not black and white: it’s shades of grey. You have to decide how much of the grey you’re willing to live in.” (Moral ambiguity—there are no moral certainties, moral truth is fit for purpose, fluid and not fixed.)

Both discuss moral ambiguity. Both consider the effects of change on us, our view of ourselves, and our view of the world with which we must battle. And for my money, it’s a battle alright. Nothing’s easy; if it were easy, we wouldn’t need philosophy, nor high or low culture, to the degree that we do.

            As for the ‘trading up’ of pop culture and art into high culture—it’s a real thing. Shakespeare started off as pop culture: noisy, boisterous, outlandish entertainment for the masses, but is now taught as the pinnacle of high culture in schools and universities. Equally, opera started off as restricted high culture, progressed to popular culture, to entertain the masses, and then migrated back to high culture again. Like popular culture, it followed the money—as good a raison d’etre as any.

            High culture acts as—and in some cases is deliberately used as—a barrier to the common man. It excludes by costing a lot, by over-intellectualising, and by making you dress up uncomfortably to watch it. However, this does not mean that only high culture has important things to say. Pop culture isn’t far behind. In fact, it might even be superior: retaining the same intellectual and philosophical worth, but remaining infinitely more accessible.

The power of pop culture (often wrapped up in a post-modern trope, but that is a discussion for another time) is not to be underestimated; it promotes and interrogates ethics and philosophy just the same as high culture. Just because a moral message is accessible, clear, and simply stated, doesn’t mean it lacks philosophical merit. If the only people exposed to the interrogation of life and death, ethics and morality, are those with deep pockets, a dinner suit or a sparkly cocktail dress, then those messages will take a long time to reach the masses. That would not only be a pity, but dangerous.

High culture traditionally has acted as a barrier to the masses—intended for them to stay home watching soap operas, as opposed to attending actual operas. Wait...is there really much difference between the two? Not much. One has commercial breaks, and the other has sponsors. There’s probably just as much to be learnt or gained from television’s pulp fiction as there is from Shakespeare. After all, Shakespeare, as stated above, started off writing noisy, rambunctious, larger-than-life morality stories for the masses, before being lauded as high art.

The same could be said for Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Mary Shelley, and Stephen King, to name only a few, but all started out as magazine serialisations, or pulp fiction for the masses, only to be purloined by the highfalutin’ and redesignated as high culture—and as such, deemed ‘not for the likes of the rest of us.’ If you don’t know how to dress, drink champagne, and act like a toff, then you can’t come to the opera, watch serious live theatre, or read literature. That’s what baggy pants and too much makeup is for in Vaudeville—or in today’s parlance, musicals. But if anything becomes too successful, it will begin its migration to the rich and famous, destined to be declared part of the canon and, potentially, elitist.

So, which one of the opening quotes is from popular culture and which one is from a Greek philosopher? In regard to intellectual and philosophical value, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that both quotes discuss similar things, and both are of equal value to the question of moral ambiguity.

But for the sake of the facts: the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (who only ever had the one name—a bit like Madonna) wrote the first quote back in 500 BCE. Emily Ragsdale wrote the ‘grey’ description for a post-modern television show called Bosch: The Legend (Series 3, Episode 7). It may be apocryphal as to who influenced Emily. Heraclitus? Or even Ridley Scott, who in his own way mirrored this philosophical concept in his film oeuvre from Blade Runner to Prometheus—though not, in my opinion, as concisely as Emily. Like I say, who said it isn’t as important as the saying itself and the work it does to provoke discussions about how complex life can be.

Back to the opening question, ‘who wins between High and Low or popular culture?’ We all do if it brings us closer to understanding What Will Happen To You? while you are Doing Life In Paradise.

Thanks for reading

Gary