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You can lead a mind to a diploma but you can’t make it think. In the past 50 years, the percentage of Western adults with a university degree has risen from about 10% to over 30%. The Western world has never been so educated.
And so very, very stupid.
The most notable feature, in fact, of the youngest crop of university graduates, is just how dumb they are. This is not my I-just-reckon grousing. The “dumbing-down” of university content has long been agreed upon by academics and employers alike. One need only watch a qualified legal professional complain that Donald Trump is wrong about “coyotes” smuggling children across the US border because the animals are too small to carry a human child all that way, to realise just what kind of stunted intellects are being farmed out of what are now little better than diploma mills.
Worse, given that by far the greatest number of degrees are in the Arts and Humanities, modern graduates are singularly dull and lacking in creativity. When was the last time that a wokester created any work that was truly memorable and timeless? Their idea of “originality” is to appropriate the great works of the past and shoe-horn in their preferred victim group. This sorry trend began with taradiddle like The Wide Sargasso Sea, and continues with excruciatingly “edgy” garbage such as a Pakistani David Copperfield, or a black, female Curly in Oklahoma!.
What they can’t appropriate, the wokesters merely denigrate.
There is a vicious element in our culture, which, unable to add any matter of worth to the world, and lacking even the ambition to do so, vents its sorry envy and anger at high culture via the cant of progressive ideology and identity politics to denigrate and dismiss the finest works of the creative human mind.
It’s mud or the stars, folks. And they’re cheering for the mud.
As Dame Nellie Melba would snort, muck is all they understand. Like Mayella Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird, they cannot understand what is better than they, so they lash out in fury and resentment.
Show them the Pietà and they will complain Christ is “foregrounded.” The Sistine Chapel and they would smear witless graffiti over it. They narrow all to personal politics. They squeeze the world into their cloistered ideological preconceptions. And should art not speak to their preoccupations, or mirror their tiny fascinations, why then it’s racist or colonialist or phobic or marginalizing. It is always something other than what it really is[…]
The left wants to shrink life to its own obsessions. It wants to constrict human experience and human response to set slogans and narrow obsessions. It cannot listen to great music because its ears only hear what it seeks. It doesn’t seek pure music. It wants grad studies politics.
It would be bad enough if that was all they could understand, but it’s far worse. All they’re capable of is witlessly parroting rote-learned slogans such as “cultural appropriation”. Luckily, there are still cultures outside the West who value the West’s greatness and are happy to appropriate it.
Western classical music has travelled far and found great interpreters and appreciative audiences in countries and cultures, and over generations, far, far from its source. There’s probably more Beethoven being performed in Japan right now than in Germany and no one sane is arguing cultural appropriation.
It is a marvellously degrading facility this, to bring the world of art and literature and music down to the level of the daily protest march and niche grievance. A kind of anti-genius is at play. Politics of the current cultural kind squeezes the glory and the beauty out of things. It shrivels experience and narrows the understanding.
And that’s the whole point. The left, who have long ago conquered the academy, don’t want understanding, they want apparatchiks. They don’t want glory or beauty, they want conformity.
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