Candace de Russy begins her article on popular culture's degenerate state this way:
The American public square has been blitzed with what Gawker.com, a gossip website, calls “revulse-amusement” and misused for what columnist Andrea Peyser terms a “raunch-fest” — revelry calculated, according to the New York Times, to churn up waves of “ethical nausea.”
She points out that the academic elite precipitate and justify the culture-smashing filth.
The role played by leftist cultural revolutionaries in the contemporary academy, who have propagated the belief
in outmoded decency and in fact championed its rejection (as well as that of all manner of other traditional standards of human behavior) has been seminal. As Doherty points out, “The turn-of-the-millennium academic buzz word for all this is ‘transgressive,’ an honorific assigned to any assault on refined sensibilities that lays bare the repression at the heart of bourgeois civilization.”
The gross-out rage shows the extreme degree to which the transgression virus incubated by the intellectuals has entered into the public bloodstream. The lengths to which publicity-mongers must go to shock, and the public’s near inability to be shocked, are indications of what Roger Kimball (writing about transgressive art and sexual liberation in The Survival of Culture) calls “widespread moral anaesthesia”:
The fulfillment…of the radical emancipatory vision enunciated in the 1960s by such gurus as Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown…When Tocqueville warned about the peculiar form of despotism that threatened democracy, he noted that instead of tyrannizing men, as past despotisms had done, it tended to infantilize them…What Tocqueville warned about, Marcuse celebrated, extolling the benefits of returning to a state of “primary narcissism”…in other words,…solipsism…as a moral indulgence, a way of life. (pp. 236-237)
If civilization is to be salvaged, we must transcend transgression — “regress,” as it were, to an understanding of culture as famously defined by Matthew Arnold, culture as the repository of humanity’s highest spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic aspirations, or “the best that has been thought and said in the world.”
There is no denying that it will be a long climb up from the current day depredation of gross-out culture and its like. But climb we must or sink in grossness, and thus be infantilized and ultimately rendered powerless in face of barbarism.